Upgrade - 572: Grand modèle de langage

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

From Relay, this is Upgrade, episode 572 for July 14th, 2025. This episode is brought to you by FitBot, ExpressVPN, and Factor. My name is Mike Hurley and I'm joined by Jason Snow. Hi Jason. Hi Mike. It's good to be here. Good to see you. You're recording in an undisclosed location right? Yes I'm at a friend's house in the great Midwest. Summer of fun Jason. Summer of fun. Indeed. I have a snow talk question for you. It comes from Jack who wants to know as someone in the half of the world that's currently

experiencing the winter of fun I would like to ask whether Jason has lived in a half of the world that's currently experiencing the winter of fun, I would like to ask whether Jason has lived in a house of a fireplace. You know some of these Snelltalk questions I could never have predicted. No. Yes, we had a big old fireplace where I grew up out in the middle of nowhere in an old house. We had a big old fireplace and, um, with a hearth and, uh, and yeah, we had that. And then when I was a little kid, I saw a scar right between my eyes from where I bashed my head against a fireplace hearth when I was two years old. Um, and, uh, or one year old, something like that.

So, uh, yeah, I, I have absolutely many, mostly. I mean, there are a lot of places that have fireplaces. Our house had a fireplace. And then we took it out because we wanted the room. Who needs it? And in fact, my garage where I usually do the podcasts, a lot of that space behind me was taken up by the backside of the fireplace.

So we took it out and we got a whole wall, we could put furniture on in the living room, and it turns out we got way more space for my office in the garage. So fireplaces are fun and we never used it and it's unnecessary and we took it out. So have you ever had a fireplace house? Yeah we had a fireplace that was kind of filled in when I was a kid and someone put an electric fire in front of it when we moved in but they didn't close off the chimney and a pigeon got in there once. Oh no. That was really bad.

That was really bad. But we don't need to get into that story. I mostly wanted to include this question because I feel like it's obligatory every year to reference the fact that we erased the Southern Hemisphere during the summer of fun. We are not in the Southern Hemisphere. If both of us, if I was in Australia

and you were in New Zealand, we would do the summer of fun the other part of the year, but we're not, we're not. Or if like one of us was in the Southern Hemisphere, we probably wouldn't do the summer of fun at all. Probably not. So we both experience summer at the same time, which I think at the moment, our summers,

heat wise, very similar. We're roasting over it, Jason Snow. Let me tell you. Oh, are you? Yeah. It's been bad. Last few weeks been bad. We've had a very, see we're talking about weather now, which is dangerous, but we've actually had a very foggy period in California, but right now I'm in the Midwest where it's humid and warm and it's kind of nice to experience a real summer. You'll have to see it. If you'd like to send in a snow talk question of your own to help us open a future episode

of the show, I do require or requests, I should say, summery questions during the summer of fun would be lovely. Please send them in. Or wintery questions, I guess. Or wintery questions. Yeah, good point. Good point. Good point.

Seasonal. We'll call it seasonal questions. Go to, you know, if it's winter for you, this is, would be kind of a fun summer, wouldn't it be like, Oh, how weird summer is cold. That's pretty fun. Uh, just go to upgradefeedback.com and you can send in your questions. Thank you to Jack for doing that. A couple of items of follow-up. Uh, the A18 MacBook rumor has energized the upgradience. They won't stop talking about it, which is great. I actually do think it's, it's intellectually an interesting thing to think about and also

just an interesting product, but like it just... Even though most of them will never buy it and are not interested in it in any way. But that doesn't matter, right? Sometimes these things are just not... But we've got an anonymous person who wrote in and said, regarding the A18 Pro to go in a MacBook, no product that Apple sells seems to currently use binned A18 Pro chips. And if the rumors that Apple only pays suppliers for fully functioning chips, TSMC would be motivated to offer Apple a stack of cheap binned A18 Pros. Now I'll say, I haven't done any research on this claim, maybe there are binned A18

Pros in something, but if this is the case there are binned A18 Pros in something. But if this is the case, I just thought that was an interesting idea. Didn't we think the A18 might be a binned A18 Pro? I thought we thought that. Maybe but we don't know. Right? Where I feel like that would be less clear. Where usually we can see Apple show us the clarity of that, right? Here's what I would say about this. I don't think this makes sense because the last thing you want in a Mac is an even slower chip than the one that's in the iPhone.

I don't think that's the way this is gonna go. Okay, good call. What if graphics? I think the Mac needs, I mean, you could take it down because it's obviously faster than the M1, but it's, I don't think that's a game you wanna play. Or it's, down because it's obviously faster than the M1, but it's... I don't think that's a game you want to play.

Or, no, it's actually about... It's only the single core performance that's above the M1. The rest of them are sort of even with the M1. So degrading below the 18 Pro, I don't think is a game that Apple should play, and I don't think they will. I think the 18 Pro is probably the least you could ever give a Mac at this point. Right. Yeah, I think you're right.

Anyway, Fraser writes in and says, Mac OS 26 Tahoe Beta 3 now features a mode where Rosetta can be entirely disabled. This could be useful for testing, but also a precursor to a Rosetta-free Mac model. That was interesting. I guess. I mean, we know that Rosetta is going away in a couple years, right? So this is really for developers to test their stuff. And yeah, exactly. This reminds me, I told this story recently, so I probably shouldn't tell it again, but I'm going to, I

think I told it on Connected. Years and years ago, like nearly 20 years ago now when I wanted to be a Mac blogger before I found the one that's a podcast thing. I had a website where I would try and write my opinions and see if I could try and dig out anything. And there was a time when Apple didn't update the iTunes music store on like the Tuesday. They usually do. And I surmised that this meant something was going to be released and they like revised an iPod or something And it came a couple of days later this kind of thing reminds me of that kind of thing where you're like Here is this piece of information that I could tangentially relate to something else, but who could actually tell? exactly

Let's do the details Jason snow I think this is a good spot for in today's episode because we had beta Three come out last week, I think while we were recording and the preceding, no, following, however you'd say week has been full of discussion about liquid glass because in iOS 26 liquid glass has now become, and I'll steal this from what David Smith, frosted glass. They've really taken down the transparency and quite significantly changed the overall look of iOS. What are your thoughts on this? I think the question is what they're doing, right? Like, are they experimenting or are they freaking out? I, yeah, I saw somebody who said, Oh, I guess social media is designing iOS now. And Mark Gurman said that. Yeah. Oh, that was right. It was Mark Gurman. He's like, I guess X and X is the design team,

which I did think was a fun. That was a fun headline. It was a fun headline. I think it's funny. Um, and I agree with Mark. So, you know, Mark as a pundit, you know, is kind of, sometimes I agree and sometimes I don't because it's just his opinions. And that's punditry. That is punditry. That's the best punditry in fact. So I would say I like that take,

which is I sure hope that Apple didn't have all this time to do this design. And then after a couple of betas, when people complained about some stuff, they just caved and said, oh, forget it, right? Like, and this is where we should probably say, and I get to promote your podcast here, I thought last week's episode of Connected,

the segment about liquid glass and design was excellent. It's the best. I texted you during the show when I said that was the best conversation about that topic I've heard because not only did you discuss the issues, it's complicated, right? Like the design issues of, you know, do you want to push it? You want to listen to criticism, but you also want to stand by your principles because everything is going to get criticized at some point. You've got to be thinking about the, the, what you want it to be and take, take from the criticism, what is necessary, but not overreact from it. And then the point that really I love, because we've talked about this, the

scale of Apple sometimes being beyond what we think and impacting every decision they make that they literally can't make a product and only ship a thousand of them. Every product they make has to have this huge volume and they have to buy all the parts in volume and Federico made this point which is Apple's so big. Well I think what happened is Steven said knowing what he knows especially about like Wichita Smith and all of that, that the install base is huge. And the point was, if even a small percentage of the install base hates something, it's a huge number of people.

And what Federico said was, is it possible for Apple to do something adventurous and opinionated in an era where the volume of the install base is so huge that literally anything is going to disaffect millions and millions of users. And the answer in the past has been yes, they're still willing to do that, but like this is the question we have to ask about something like making changes to liquid glass. Are you experimenting? And we've talked a lot about how initial designs push things too far.

Well, you could say, well, let's pull it back and see how that works. And then maybe the reaction is, oh, that's too far the other way. And let's tune it in. And if that's the case, that's great. You should be experimenting. It's the beta. However, if this is just them caving because somebody said something mean about liquid glass

when there might be a better thing, then I don't know, then that's disappointing. Yeah. Yeah, that's, disappointing is the word I've used in a bunch of places that like, if they cave on this, if this is a situation where they have caved on this, that is very disappointing and it's wasted. The effort was wasted, the time was wasted. Why even bother doing it? And like you surely,

surely understood that people weren't going to like it. Like it's not, aren't going to like it. It's not... It's obvious, right? That there are readability issues. You should know this in your testing. This isn't the first time you've seen it. My hope is and the expectation is that they had a plan and whatever reason it hadn't been fully implemented, who knows? But if they've ended up in this spot where now they pull it back again, it's like, so what was the point of all of it? Like, why go for the glassy look? Why not just go for a more fluid look to the operating system? So I hope that they're kind of playing around.

And my expectation is that actually sits and lands somewhere in the middle between what we've seen in like beta one and two and beta three, which I think was the realistic expectation anyway. Like what they shipped in beta one and beta two couldn't have been the final thing. Cause like some stuff, not even from like, you know, I know that there's a lot of really good conversations about accessibility and stuff like that, but there are just certain things that no one

would be able to read. Like no one, like not just like all if you if you're sensitive to this or not sensitive to that. Like my notifications you can't I mean you still can't read them even on beta 3. Like you can't read notifications if you have anything other than like essentially a solid color wallpaper. Right? Like they're just so I think they're still playing. I want them to play and I want them to land somewhere. And it would be, I would be really disappointed if they just are like, Oh, they're mad on social media. We've got to pull this one back. Cause that just, I just think that you've got to be more sure of yourself than

that. If you're Apple, you can't, it's not about listening and reacting to feedback. It's like listening and reacting to that kind of feedback would be a problem for me. Because it really is like a lot of people who want to be design thought leaders, right? Like sharing their screenshots. Like it's just like a lot of that. And depending on what social network you're hanging out on, a lot of people are just doing it to rile people. I don't know. Who knows? But I just want to say I don't want them to go down the route that they're currently going down

because then I will kind of I would be disheartened by it a little bit because it would show that they didn't actually plan this out properly and that would be really frustrating to me. Yeah so a few things going on here. First off, I know if you dislike the design, there's a comment in our Discord about, well, if they're caving but they're wrong, then isn't that right? And the answer is no, that's not right. Because if they've got a design process,

then they should feel like they know where they're going, and they should be able to address problems and fix them. And if what happens is they go through this whole process, and then after some mean words on Twitter, they just give up and turn it off, their process is broken. Even if the result is one that you prefer, their process is broken at that point.

Because the fact is every design is gonna have its critics and what you gotta do is sift through it and then make changes that are in alignment with what you're trying to do with your design, not just back off because you're afraid that mean people are saying mean things. Especially since again, literally that will always happen. The best design, the worst design,

there will be people out there who will say mean things about it. So you gotta think big picture, you gotta take from it what you will. I'll point out by the way, everybody is focused on like the frosting on the glass, on the opacity of the glass But the fact is they're doing other things in the background one thing that I think Dan Warren pointed out is

They used to do in like the first beta way back in the first beta a thing where if you scrolled Dark content behind something that had dark text on it in like Safari, it would flip over so that that text was light content for context, but it happened late. So you'd start the scroll and nothing would happen. It'd be unreadable. And then as you kept scrolling, then it would turn and it was this delay and it felt really awkward. And one of the things that they tweaked in the betas is in beta three, I believe what happens is it's actually based on the speed that you're scrolling. And if you're scrolling something dark past and it's just going to kind of like blow past it, it doesn't try to change it.

And if it's slow, it will try to change it. It's actually trying to figure out like, I want to make this change if this is not a transient change. It's actually trying to figure out like, I want to make this change if this is not a transient change. I've also noticed places where it's doing very subtle selective dimming or lightening of content in the background based on the content that's being filtered to increase contrast. Like there's a bunch of stuff going on here. Beyond just we made the stuff less frosted. So I don't know. I also saw a screenshot the other day of somebody who said, if you look at the WWDC images

and then you look at what's implemented right now on like the Mac, like it's not even close. Like there's still not, which is probably an indication that they're still also implementing this design. And what we saw at WWDC was what they want the design to be at its best, and they're still fixing the code to make it be able to do that. So there's a lot going on here.

But again, I'll just say, don't think about the result for a minute. If you've got a design team that's been putting together a design for a long time, and then, and also by the way, betas are not instant turnaround. Betas take weeks to turn around. So when you see a new beta, that beta actually came out two or three weeks, or was built two weeks before,

I don't know, a period of time before. And then they get criticism for their design. And then the next time out, they've just pulled the plug on large portions of it. How broken is that organization if that's the case? So I sure hope that's not the case. And I actually doubt that it is. I think that this is a much more complex issue.

I also wonder if they're worried a little bit about getting it right or righter for the public beta because there's some level of management that you can go wild with this stuff on the developer betas, but maybe there's a little fear that if it's too extreme at the public beta stage, then they're opening themselves up to another wave of criticism. Yeah, they may be pulling it all the way back and then staging it back in again for that period of time. Maybe.

I would love to know how many people would sell the public beta compared to the developer beta. I would love to know the answer to that. We'll never find it out. If anyone ever has that information and wants to share it with me, I would love to know it because I just think that would be that would tell a lot but yeah. This episode is brought to you by FitBod. If you're looking to change your fitness level getting started it can feel like an uphill battle. That's why I'm pleased

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25% of your membership when you go to fitbob.me slash upgrade. Thanks to Fitbob for their support of this show and Relay. Room around up time. According to thank you thank you thank you thank you. According to Peter Kafka at Business Insider, Apple is in pole position to get the US rights to Formula One to the actual sport, not the movie. All right. Here's your context. Cause I thought you're saying F1 a lot and it means the movie, but actually we're talking about the sport. Um, only Apple and ESPN are bidding for the rights from the 2026 season, so for next year. ESPN is the current rights holder and I think has been paying in the

region of like 80 to 90 million a year or something for F1. Apple is offering 150 million and ESPN has said that they will not be increasing their bid to match Apple's. So now Liberty Media, which is the company that owns Formula One, has to decide whether they want the money or the exposure and dare I say legitimacy that ESPN provides for the sport. These rights would be US only. F1 sells their rights in individual packages all over the world. So here's an interesting wrinkle for you for people that want a bit of context. This is the part that's most interesting to me. So Sky TV, which is owned by Comcast, I'm going to say now, but they were an independent. It's essentially what you would consider cable here, but it's actually satellite TV, but

just think of it as cable. They have the rights in the UK to Formula One and other territories that they operate in all the way out until 2030. Now, that is interesting for a few things. Obviously, Europe is the market that you are going to see, I think, the biggest viewership of Formula One. So they are where the best rights are. But Sky, the Sky broadcast that in the UK, provide the broadcast stream worldwide, including commentary and analysis. So if you watch any SPN, you get Sky advertising their services. This is like a weird quirk of F1. So like Sky has an app and they have interactive services, right? So when you're watching, you can press a button on your Sky remote and you can watch driver positions

from different, like you can go in and be like, I want to watch Lewis Hamilton's like actual in-car. You can watch that. It's all on like the Sky interface. If you're watching an ESPN in America, you hear this promotion. It's a weird quirk of F1 that is like a joke in the F1 community outside of America, because they say like press the right button now and your SkyQ remote as Zoe has put in the Discord. This is like a meme. Like I can do it, but if you're not in the UK, you can't do this. So it will be really interesting to me to see what Apple does here. Like are they going to take the Sky feed and just show it? Or are they going to build their own infrastructure around it?

Now there's a couple of, there's another quirk here. It's good I'm here, Jason. You're not going to get this on any other Apple podcast. Maybe. All right. This is the, this is where supreme F1 drill down here. Sky do the commentary and analysis of the races, like the commentary when they're going on, but the actual video feed is provided by F1.

So F1 have their own team that provide the video to Sky. Sky comment on it and provide that out. Right? So Apple could take the feed from F1. They don't need to build their own broadcasting infrastructure like they did with MLS. And they actually can't because F1 control that. I don't know why, but they do.

This is actually exactly like, I think World Cup and the Olympics where there is a pooled broadcast center that is producing. So if you watch the World Cup, you see the graphics of the World Cup or the Olympics. You see their graphics. And there are different feeds where you can take the graphics and you cannot take the graphics. You get the audio. And then depending on your level of interest in customizing, you can show your announcers.

But the bulk of it is done by an international pooled, it's the international broadcast. And F1 apparently is like this too. So they have that because they have, because what you're describing is ESPN has chosen its investment in Sky or in F1 is limited. They just take the Sky feed because that's an English language feed.

Yep. You know, there's a German feed and they're using the same shots of the track, but they are having their own announcers and they use that. And then there's a, you know, and that's the, right? So that, it makes sense. In a giant international sporting event, they're not gonna have a different set of cameras everywhere

for every language or for every broadcaster. That's not how it works. So it's a really good question to say, does Apple spend all that money and say, well, we're gonna build our own. I have a hard time imagining they money and say, well, we're going to build our own. I have a hard time imagining they wouldn't say we will build our own U.S. broadcast out of the international feed and not use the sky feed because this is Apple. I really wonder in that scenario how it is taken by the audience. Like, I don't know how the audience at large

in America feels about the commentators. What I will say is, in general, everybody outside of Britain doesn't like what is perceived as British bias. Right. I will just say that there are, that the dominant country in F1 for drivers is Britain right now. So like, it's kind of like, it's hard. In America, I would say, cause again, Americans are used to their sports

being number one in the world. Yes. And then there are the sports that aren't. And I will say this, there is an aspect of this. I find it extremely jarring. And the World Cup is different. But like the Premier League, even even the NBC commenters for the Premier League are British. And and the reason is it would be very jarring.

It is very jarring when you hear an American voice doing a commentary about a non, you know, a foreign sporting event. And I view F1 that way. I wonder if you're Apple and you build this, who do you hire? You might hire British announcers. You might hire European announcers of some sort. Fox is the one broadcaster in the US that's like, nope, it's all Americans.

And it's like, okay, that's another way to go. But I'm not sure if you think about this as a bit of entertainment, for me, F1, you kind of, one of the reasons you're into it is kind of that exotic feeling of it's not, even though there are some races in America, it's not our sport, it's something different. So it would be, and also keep in mind,

you mentioned the interactive that Sky does, Apple could do that too, right? Apple could take those driver fees. Oh, absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah. And do their, you know, swipe up on your Apple TV remote or press a button on your remote to do that. What are we gonna get?

Like instead of quad box, we need 20 boxes. What would you call that? So, so Mike, here though, I'm gonna bring it all the way around. Yeah. All right, you ready? Uh-huh. I think F1 shouldn't absolutely not make a deal with Apple.

I agree. It's a terrible idea. And here's why. First off, you can already buy an F1 subscription in America, right? It's called F1 TV. So even though ESPN show it, you can go directly over the top of F1.

They have their own announcement team, which people like those. You can actually choose the Sky announcers or the F1 TV announcers, and it's a full subscription service. You can watch every race live. They do the whole thing. So why would you make that available in the U S and then also have a second subscription service that made it available when the whole purpose other than money, right? Other than money. But I, I feel, my gut feeling is Apple is a stocking horse to get ESPN to pay

more, but that they're gonna go with ESPN and that they should go with ESPN because having the two services doesn't make any sense because what you want is the visibility of ESPN. They're about to launch their streaming platform. You get coverage on ESPN. Your sport doesn't exist if it isn't on ESPN. This is what I think Major League Baseball is struggling with is that they're currently walking away from their deal with ESPN next year.

And it's going to be really bad for baseball because what will happen is baseball conversation will disappear from ESPN because if they don't have their rights, they basically think your sport doesn't exist and that's not great, but that's just how it is. So I will throw a wrench in here, which is what if F1 TV got Apple as a partner in some way? What if that became like a partnership where Apple sold F1 TV or Apple co-branded F1 TV?

Or if Apple just got the streaming rights? Like, they don't get the TV rights, they get the streaming rights. Or if F1 TV, yeah, right. Well, I mean, I'm saying on one level, what if Apple took over F1 TV and did it that way? Or yes, what if they did? ESPN is going to want the streaming rights too, though. And again, it's duplicative. if Apple took over F1 TV and did it that way, or yes, what if they did?

ESPN is gonna want the streaming rights too though. And again, it's duplicative. It's so weird, like there is F1 TV. So if F1 TV didn't exist, I would be more into the idea that Apple could do this. But if F1 TV exists, then ESPN is the logical option because then you've got your broad reach deal

as well as your direct for the hardcore fans deal. I will say this, Apple likes to talk. We know this. Apple likes to shop. A lot of times they do not buy because they're careful with how they spend their money. It's interesting that they're offering so much more than the competition in this case, but that doesn't necessarily mean,

I mean, strategically it would be bad. They'd really be doing it because they want a little more money out. And I think it would be harmful to the sport if they did it. I think a bunch of things is great perspective. I think it would surprise me for Apple to pick up rights in just one market, even though it's America, for anything. Also that. So my other theory, which

forgive me if I've given this before, but I'll throw it out there again. My other theory is the reason Apple would bid for the US rights to F1 now is eyeing Yes when other territories become available because if Apple can produce an excellent F1 program in the US and Is a good partner for F1 which they already are with the movie and they're a good partner for F1 the next step is to then in 2030 say we want it all and If they're not a good partner or they don't like the results or whatever, then they walk away. But I think honestly, I actually think that Apple doing this is so illogical that if this happens,

it's less likely that it's Liberty media just grabbing the money and more likely that both sides are wondering if this could be a long-term partnership worldwide. It has to be that because I don't understand why you would do it otherwise. Like F1 is a growing sport, right? Everybody knows this. So being available to people is helpful, right? And the ESPN in the States is much more available.

The other thing about the being a growing sport, it feels like every week, F1, the company, the actual company that owns the sport, is announcing a new brand deal. It's obscene right now in the last year. There are so many massive brands that are partnering with F1 now. They surely don't need the extra 70 million that Apple is giving them right there's not enough money so if they do this for the money that to me is just insane like the only reason to do this is that you you believe or Apple has been able to sell

you on these are the ways in which we will be a long-term 20-year partner for you. And over that period of time, we're going to do this and this and this and this to improve the sport. Um, I will say, I think it was, I wrote, I think it was in the puck piece. Like they, they spoke about like, you know, Apple putting, uh, cameras on the cars for vision pro. No, ignore that. Right.

We've had the taste of that. And I'll tell you, you don't want that. It's fun for one lap, but you don't want to sit with Charlotte Claire and go around the track of him. It's too intense. Um, but like there is stuff that they could do together that would be interesting. But to me, it's like the, I don't understand the money part. There are too many weird ways in which F1 works and it's only one market and you remove it from television and you make it harder for everybody who's currently watching it to watch. And I know that that is a typical thing about rights moving, right? I hear it all the time in US sports, moving from place to place, it makes the sport harder to watch. But I'm not sure that F1 has got a large enough ingrained audience that will move no matter

what. I think they're still building that. I think it's a lot like MLS where you really want growth and the long term, the growth is going to mean more to you. So yes, I agree. I think the only way this deal happens is if there is a bigger vision behind it than what we're seeing now. Because if it's just straight up US broadcast rights and you've already got your subscription service in the US, and again, maybe that's a part of this and maybe Apple would take that over and that's what they're talking about and that's why it's more money, who

knows what that is, then it would make a little more sense. But even then I would say, why would you do that? You've got your own subscription service, it's going great. Get your visibility on ESPN and done, right? Be done with it. That's a good deal because it gives you what most sports are trying for now, which is you want to be able to sell and make a lot of money, but you also want visibility so people can find your marquee matchups. Yep. Moving on, Mark Gurman is reporting

that Apple is going to be updating the Vision Pro this year. It will feature an M4 processor to better run Apple Intelligence, and a new head strap will be made available to make the headset more comfortable over extended periods. Additionally, work continues on a bigger refresh in 2027 that would see a much lighter version of the Vision Pro. My bet on this strap, Jason, is that it is the one we used, a version of the one that we used during the demos. Like it's the... Oh, it's the Belkan.

The Belkan. Yeah. So it's Apple's own version of a solo top with a part with a, like a strap along the top. But we'll see. Yeah. I mean, the, the solo top had the, had the knitted strap. I think this is going to be like the Belkin one, which is cheaper. I think they'll only put that one in the box. It felt very much like that product might have been designed by Apple. So I would not be surprised.

And it's good. And it's really good. That's what I use now a hundred percent of the And it's good, and it's really good. That's what I use now 100% of the time with Vision Pro. It's really good. And otherwise, this is not a new Vision Pro, right? This is literally, I think, we don't want to put, let's just swap the M4 in for the M2 and keep making the one that we've got because they're running out of M2s or whatever, right?

And then they can reduce the contents of you know, the the the the contents of the box by putting in a better strap because neither strap that's in the box is really that great. And I find that Belkin one to be the perfect balance and and then meanwhile, you know, meanwhile, keep pushing toward the the cheaper lighter product for 27. As somebody who bought a Vision Pro for retail price at the beginning of 2024, I endorse not revising it significantly until 2027. Agreed.

100% agree. That would make me feel better. That would make me feel better. Speaking of Mark Gurman and product roadmaps, he has done the thing that he does where he has published a roadmap of stuff that we can expect from Apple over the next year. Um, we've broken this down. Jason rearranged the document this morning, very thankfully for everybody, uh, to, uh, to put this into

years. So let's just run through this real quick. So in 2025, we know we're going to be getting the iPhone 17 line, which would be the 17, the 17 pro, the 17 air, uh, an M five chip in the iPad pro will get your Apple watches 11 and ultra three that vision pro update and potentially the cheap MacBook from previous rumors. Mark did not mention this at all, which I found curious. Yeah, I did too. Also, um, just a data point. This means that the new chip is is gonna debut in the iPad again. Oh yeah. Right? Yeah.

Maybe this is what happened with the M4, right? Is the iPad Pro came out before the MacBook Pro and it looks like that's going to happen again because you'll notice this whole foreshadowing for 2026 that what Mark Gurman is saying right now is the MacBook Pros with M5 will not probably, he's, we'll get there, come out this fall but instead early next year and if that's the case then the M5 iPad Pro which would be about 18 months after the M4 iPad Pro would once again be

the debut of that chip. Moving to 26, there will be iPad and iPad Air both getting processor bumps but that's probably about it. The iPhone 17e is expected to be revised to the A19 in 2026. So Mark says that from what he understands, this would now suggest this is an annual revision product, which is fascinating. Yeah, isn't that interesting? Yeah. I mean maybe it's, I mean I think that's why they designed it that way, is that they can just use it as the spring and bump it to the processor that came out in the fall. Yeah.

There will be a new display for the Mac, but no details on it. Is it a studio display? Is it a studio display pro? Is it a pro display XT? I don't know if Mark knows. He's done some reporting in the past about displays, but gave no information here about what this display may actually feature. That may actually be interesting considering this MacBook Pro stuff. So I'll jump to that real quick. So the MacBook Pro

that we would think would be this year's refresh may not actually come until the beginning of next year No reason given Just a longer cycle maybe yeah, and and he says timing remains fluid which the way it's written in his story it reads to me like in his story, it reads to me like, maybe not next year, maybe this year, but probably next year. Like he's even got conflicting maybe reports because he says it looks like it's gonna be next year

tentatively, but he says timing remains fluid, which means, you know, maybe it is an October, November ship or maybe I just, it's that's all we got timing remains fluid but I think it's interesting because he slots it in 26 and he's got some intelligence that says it's gonna be in 26 but not with a lot of confidence that fascinating fascinating And that these MacBook pros would be the last that look like this. Um, that there would be a refresh.

I, I, you would say it would be in 26, but now I'm not sure. Right. Like, will they do it in the same year? Would they push these to early 27? They have done that in the same year before, so they could do that again. Yeah. I just, I have no idea, right. Because this is weird. So like, what would they do here? But it's next next it's late late 26 early 27 or even mid 27 who knows? Yeah, but that's the brand new one that he's been talking about. That's the OLED display actually new design And that that would be for the m6 probably yeah This makes me wonder going back to the display what the panel is made of. I can't

imagine they would ship an OLED, but maybe it's mini LED. I really desperately want the studio display to be the quality of the current MacBook Pro, right? So promotion, mini LED. It's sad. Me and Stephen were talking about this the other day. He's like saying that how like, you know, he, it makes him sad when he sees his MacBook Pro display open next to his studio display. It's like they're both showing something black and it doesn't look like that.

You know? So my rule is I just never do that. When I, right now I am looking at my MacBook Pro display and it is beautiful. And then I'll go home and I'll run it lid closed and I'll look at my studio display and it'll be fine. And I'm not going to think about it and I'm not going to worry about it because I think the studio display is fine. But yes, they need to do a new display that looks better. It's old technology. It's literally, it's literally, I mean, it's not exactly the same

panel because they changed the color range on it. But essentially Apple's beyond the Pro Display XDR, which is a real outlier, Apple's like 27 inch 5k panel story is not appreciably different since 2014. Yeah. That's... It started with the iMac Pro, right? And then it moved to the other iMacs. No, it was just the Retina iMac, the 5K Retina iMac before the iMac Pro. Yeah, the first Retina iMac, the first Retina iMac, they didn't have the color gamut, the P3 color that they did in the second one, and then it went to the iMac Pro. But no, the first 5K iMac, which was, I believe, the fall of 14. Geez. 5k iMac which was I believe the fall of 14. I mean personally I would have no

problem with them keeping the current studio display maybe make it a little bit cheaper and then make it cheaper and keep it probably because I know it sounds bad when you talk about how old it is and the specs but that is a it's a great display I use one every day and I love it. I'd never look at it and I'm like, this is bad. I just want something more because I know that they have, even they have the capability in Mac OS to support more. But I want promotion on my display. I want it to be high quality.

So we'll see what we get there. And branding it out, the MacBook Air will go from the M4 to the M5 in 2026. And the Home Hub is currently set for the first half of 2026. It'd be two years after it was expected to be out. I feel really bad for that team. Yeah.

I wonder who runs that team, but like, you know, this is the, I'm sure that Mike Rockwell is like, yep, yep, yep, been there, had a product left down by Siri, but the home hub is a product that was built around future OS features that the OS group couldn't deliver. And I just, honestly, Jason, I am worried about this product even then, because is that still depending on App Intense shipping? Right. Like, yeah. So App Intense shipping, right?

Like you think so. So App Intense stuff is getting there, right? App Intense is not gonna be the problem because I feel like, I mean, cause Spotlight, the new Spotlight stuff in Tahoe is all based on App Intense as well. Like I feel like App Intense is coming along, but you also need, you know, you need an assistant.

So they, I think will they have LLM Siri by the first half of 26? I think they will. I think they feel like they have to. And so, but again, also I would say it feels a little like the home pod in the sense that it's, you know, we're talking about a product conceived how many years ago now and basically finalized two years ago or a year ago now. And, you know, two years when it it ships like is that the right product anymore is that product worth shipping or should they look at it again and say well no this is actually wrong for today I don't know I don't know speaking of that actually in his power on newsletter mark when talking about something completely

different drops the tidbit that Apple is seriously considering buying the AI company Mistral. I think this is the French based. Yeah let's get some let's get some French AI in there. French AI inside. Mistral seems like a candidate in that they're not huge. You know like and they actually have models you know we're talking about them potentially looking at buying perplexity But the issue with that is perplexity is not an LLM model maker and that's actually what Apple needs And so this might get them somewhere We'll talk a little bit later on in the episode today about AI talent and the miss trial therein dance la palm

Thank you very much. What is that? Leran. Dans la pomme. Thank you very much. What is that? Mistolini apple. Mistolini apple. Because we're going to get the French AI flavor. And I mean, imagine that.

Imagine Apple finally comes up with its own AI and it's French. What? Who could have predicted such a thing? I'm going to Google Translate right now. I'm typing in large language model. And we're going to put that into French, and we'll see put that into French and we'll see what we end up with.

Okay, great. This is taking longer than I thought to use Google Translate. Grand model de langage. There we go. Okay, sure. They're looking for that. That's fine.

Eddie Q is walking around some valley saying, grand model! And then someone's gonna come. You see the picture of him with his Apple iCalb all printed out? Did you see that? Printed out, yeah, that's right. Uncle Eddie needs to get his paper calendar. Never change, you know?

Like... I get it, he's going from meeting to meeting or whatever. I get it. You know, he's going from meeting to meeting out there and he's got a paper thing with notes on it, all the printing out the big long blocks of time and stuff from, what is that about? Let me tell you why I think it's funny. I also agree.

Maybe also at Sun Valley, you probably aren't keeping your devices out like I'm expecting. Sun Valley is the big CEOs will get together and talk thing. And I expect there are a lot of scenarios at Sun Valley where maybe you leave your phone outside the room. Like it's one of those kinds of things. Sure. So having your calendar on paper. Here's the issue.

Don't raise it to the world. Is that right? Don't ever, ever, ever, if you have something even slightly confidential, literally raise it above your head and show it to the paparazzi, which is what he did, which is one of my favorite photos of Eddie Q

of all time now Actually never do this unless you're Eddie Q if you're Eddie Q you can literally do whatever you want Like I guess that's true never change Eddie Q Yeah, this is a lesson of the of what is it the Trump administration where people are like Walking with papers and people could read confidential things on the papers. Yeah, don it put in a folder folks. Keep it in the folder. Especially at something like Sun Valley. Especially. Absolutely. This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN. You probably wouldn't take a call in a public

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will be retiring from Apple later this year. Sabi Khan will be taking the post of COO this month, and Williams will be wrapping up his other work with the design team, health, and Apple watch later this year. Khan has been SVP of operations, effectively Williams is number two. Khan is already on the leadership page as SVP of operations and has been with Apple since 1995. So seems like the exact person who would take this role, right? Like it fits the bill completely This is the exact way these things should go that your boss moves up and leaves and then you take their place

Like this is this is exactly it. So Williams now joins Phil Schiller Dan Riccio and Luca Maestri a senior executives at Apple that have Left their posts in varying ways in the last few years. Like people from the Apple leadership page who have saw what's been there forever moved on. What is your initial thought on this before we dig in a little bit deeper? What was your thought when you saw the news? Well I thought about the fact that we've gotten you know Luca Maestri and Phil Schiller recently too. I thought about the fact that we've gotten, you know, Luca Maestri and Phil Schiller recently to,

I thought about the fact that a lot of these guys are in their sixties. They made a lot of money, millions and millions and millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars at Apple. And, uh, and then I was talking to Steven Hackett about this because he was noting the textual differences between the farewells, right? And that like Phil Schiller became an Apple fellow and we know is still like in charge of events and the App Store. And Luca Maestri kept like operate some like

very weird collection of things that he's still in charge of. And he's still on the page. He's just not the CFO anymore. He's kicking around. He's kicking around. He's doing some some He's doing some, some like back office stuff, but not an Apple fellow, even though it seems from the face of it, that essentially him and Phil are doing the exact same thing, which is just like whatever they want.

Yeah. Well, it's like a, yeah, portfolio, small portfolio, a bit reduced from when they were, you know, a big shot. Jeff Williams announcement is he's retiring and he's handing over CEO job right now to Sabi Khan. And by the end of the year, he'll be handing over his design reports to Tim. And then he's presumably done. And so that's interesting

because this feels like a retirement. The comment I made to Stephen was I think a lot of these executives are just real type A workaholics and they have probably neglected everything in their lives outside of Apple for years. And there's two ways to go. One way is, why would I stop? And the other is, oh, I'm in my sixties. I have more money than I know what to do with. And I've not been able to spend as much time with my family as I would like and live my life as I would like.

And so I am going to step off the treadmill and the grind of working at Apple. And it's gotta be a huge grind if you're a senior executive at Apple, it's gotta be a huge part of your life. And maybe the grind has only become more and more intense. Exactly. And right now it's really intense.

And like, I don't need this. I am too old for this stuff as the saying isn't. And so that is Reading between the lines of the Jeff Williams announcement. I'm just on a human scale I'm struck with the fact that maybe Jeff Williams is like Seeing the world clearly because it actually says like I want to spend time with my kids and my grandkids I'm like, yeah, dude you're in your 60s and you've got hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank

and you don't need to do this anymore. You should go have a great, maybe, you know, whatever, 20, 25 years of hopefully health to spend with your family. Yeah, I think maybe you should do that. And I think the question that most of us as human beings should ask is, why aren't the rest of them doing that? Because at some point, not only should they probably do that, but I'll just say for a company that is trying to always be kind of cool and reach the next generation of technology users, having a bunch of decision, I'm sorry, no matter how cool you are, if you're a decision maker

in your sixties, you have lost touch with a lot. Or even if you've just been doing it for so long, like even if you're in your 40s, but somehow you've been doing it for 20 years, maybe there's a fresh perspective available to you. Right. You were formed a lot of your perspectives 30 years ago and that is a change. And I'm not saying, look, as somebody in their mid-50s, I'm not saying that people who are older do not have wisdom and a lot of intelligence of processing of history

and understanding how it works. That's all true. But I will say that if your company is like largely made up of decision makers at that point in their careers, you could potentially be missing signals of things. And I, you know, I don't know if LLMs is an example of that, but like missing signals of how the world has changed that you're not necessarily getting

because the echo chamber at the top is full of people who are multiple generations removed from that. And so it's just, as a company, you wanna have a healthy, I would say you wanna have a healthy mix. And we have had an era where the Steve Jobs lieutenants have mostly been doing this. So I think, yeah, on a human scale,

I wonder why they're still there other than that this is all they've got, right? Which is, I mean, I think that personally is kind of sad that it's like, is this all you got? I mean, you- Yeah, but it's a pretty great thing to have. I mean, maybe I'm just closer to that type of person. If you found the balance, and I guess that's the thing,

is if you found a balance that works for you. Like Phil Schiller clearly doesn't need to do this anymore. My guess is that Phil Schiller, okay, I apologize for the pop psychology here, because I don't know these guys, and I don't know what they think. But talking about Phil, who I've been interviewing on and off for ages and have talked to a bunch over the years, mostly early on, not so much

lately. But he strikes me as maybe being the kind of person who he's got more varied interests than you might think. He's a donor to his alma mater and has buildings named after him. He's on boards. There's other things he's doing. I think him stepping away from the worldwide VP of comms role and just doing the app store and events is like, I just want to do those because I love them. And it dramatically reduced his workload. And it's, I think the counter argument to these guys retiring is you hear those stories of the people who like retire and then they just die because the thing

they were doing at their work was the thing that motivated them in life and that playing golf and spending time with their grandkids does not fulfill them. And if that's the case, Apple allowing them to stick around and be fulfilled in a lesser role is great. And if you're Jeff Williams and you're like, no, I don't need that. I, I'm, you know, also we've seen, we've seen people leave and then come back where they're like, yeah, yeah, you know, Bob Mansfield was like, I could come back. John Rubenstein was like, yeah, I could go to another company and build hardware for a little while.

It does happen that way too. So I think it's fascinating. But on an Apple scale, I would say, and Mark Gurman wrote about this a bit on Sunday, I think you do want to start the process of saying, what is the next generation leadership team at Apple look like? Because regardless of their desires,

you have so many people in their, in their, um, like late fifties and early sixties who as good as they might be, they can't stick around forever. They really can't. And you need to start moving them along. I actually really love the fact that Apple lets some of their senior executives hang around because they have so much wisdom. Like Phil Schiller has seen it all, right? So keeping him around is great. Like it would be, Apple would be a lesser company if Phil Schiller had said later and gone off, you know, to drive a sports car and, you know, and sit on the beach, right? Like this is way better, but you can't have,

you know, you can't have it be 2030 and it's still a bunch of people in their late 60s, early 70s, and that's your entire team. Because the problem is, you know, with all the will in the world, you can't do that job forever. You just can't. We're all aging humans and you do need part of your job is to bring the next generation along. And I'll point out Sabi Khan has been there forever and is not that much younger than Jeff Williams, right? Like this is an ongoing challenge that Apple has that they had a great team that they assembled a long time ago. If you really want people with a lot of experience, guess what? They get older, right? Like that's

just kind of how it works. Yeah. A couple things I want to say. I am one of those people, right? Like, like a filchillary type in like, I don't think I could ever stop working. I think if I stopped working, I would freeze. Like I just, I can't imagine I would ever fully retire. It's the kind of person I am. Um, if I enjoy my work, I like to do it. Like, and I think there are a lot of people who even in that scenario would be like, Oh, I would like to go it. Like, and I think there are a lot of people who even in that scenario would be like, Oh, I would like to go retire on a beach somewhere. I would lose my mind. Like, this is not how I work. The other thing I wanted to mention, it's uncouth, but no

one's really said it. So I just want to say it as a, okay, be uncouth Mike. Did he get told he wasn't going to be the CEO? Okay, so I have two thoughts about this. One is yes, it's possible, but I don't think that's it. I'm not saying that is it, but it's a possibility, right? I just don't really think I'm seeing many people explore very much. I would view this from the other direction, which is if I'm Jeff Williams and I know I am the, in case of glass or in case of emergency break glass guy. I said, no thanks. If I know I'm that guy, in case of glass, by the way, we had liquid glass, oh no, glass,

we were at the glass case now. So if I'm the emergency CEO, if something happens to Tim and you think about like, okay, then I'm taking over a CEO and I have to do that for a certain amount of time. I wonder if Jeff Williams came to the point where he was like, you know what? I am no longer willing to be that guy because I'm not going to stick around for five years and be the CEO. I would rather retire.

Yeah, because you can't, you can't be in the succession plan and be like, yeah, but I'm only going to last for like a year. So I know that's not how it's going to be. Exactly. So it's possible that Jeff Williams actually said, you know what, I can't be part of the succession plan anymore, I've reached the point where I'm getting toward the end of my tenure, and maybe this is all wrapped up together.

Where he's like, look, here's the deal, I can't be in the succession plan anymore, so let's set some dates, I'll start handing things off, and I'll retire. Because, you know, and it's possible that it was the other way, where it was like, at this point, Jeff, we don't want you to be that guy, but it's possible.

I kind of have a hard time seeing that because he's been, I mean, he is the perfect like emergency swap, hot swap for Tim. I think he really is, but he's about, also about the same age as Tim. This is the problem. So I think some version of that may have been part of this, which is like, essentially, like if you're him

and you're starting to think about retirement, you don't wanna be the hot swap for Tim because you don't wanna be, like, cause they're gonna want you to stay, right? You're gonna need to stabilize things and then, and find somebody to be the successor. And if you don't wanna be there for more than a few years, I mean, the last thing,

if I was thinking I'm about ready to retire and I got my money from all that Apple stock and I'm gonna spend time with my grandkids, and then Tim Cook gets hit by a bus and they're like, okay, five more years of the grind of being CEO of Apple during trying times. You're like, nope, not interested. Because I wouldn't be surprised to like on that, that if you are, if you agree to be in the

succession plan in that scenario, there is surely a minimum time that you have to commit to. Yeah. And you, and you need to communicate it and be a responsible person and say, I'm no longer willing to commit to being a bridge CEO for five years or whatever. It's like, I'm out the door, so let's end this. And I think, you know, whether that was him initiated or it was just practical or whatever it was, I think it's more likely that that's the case. It is possible that they're like, all right, we're updating the succession plan now. But I mean, the way the way German describes it, and he clearly, because of his various org

charts and things that he's done over the years, he clearly has some, some, uh, view into what's going on here. It's not like a crystal clear view, but he has some view into it. He said, now the, in case of emergency break glass is a group. Yeah. Right. Now it's going to be break glass is a group. Yeah. Right. Now it's going to be a bunch of people. It's going to be, um, jaws and it's going to be, uh, um, Deirdre. Yep. And it would now be sub-A too. Yeah. And they would be like a, a management team as somebody who's had their CEO fired and had no replacement,

that's what we had to do is we had a little management team and they kind of like kept it going. Was there a point person? Of course, there's gonna be somebody who talks to the board, but you might not even have an interim CEO. You might have like an interim management team that would do that in the meantime. And that's just in case.

Now, the next question is, okay, what's the succession plan longterm now? And I think we don't have a lot of vision into this other than the fact that Mark Gurman keeps saying that John Turnis is thought of as being the best candidate here. I think it's interesting that, you know, ultimately the board decides that.

But what I would say is, I feel like the board is, we talked about this last week a little bit. I feel like the board is, we talked about this last week a little bit. I feel like the board is a, they're an independent board, but they're not really. They get it, they wanna do what Tim wants to do. They're in synergy, they're not in opposition to each other. I have a hard time imagining that the way, unless it's unwilling because of health or whatever,

I feel like it's Tim becomes executive chairman of the board and the board names a replacement and it's going to be part of the plan. And it's, it's not going to be like, Oh, the board doesn't like John Ternes. That's not how it's going to work. No, that essentially like, like whoever Tim says, I recommend such and such person. I recommend John Ternes to become my replacement. The board would go, yes, right.

Like they're not going to say, no, we're going to hire, we're going to hire somebody from, you know, over there. We're going to hire a vice president from Microsoft instead. Like unless things dramatically change in the next few years, that's not going to happen. So going back to the impact of Williams departure, there are the teams that he is going to continue to manage, which as of right now, we do not have that much visibility into what's going to happen, right? We know what's happening to the COO role because that's happening basically imminently.

It's basically happened already. But we have a question about the design team though. We'll come back to that But we, but yeah, I have a question about the design team though. We'll come back to that. But it's in the, but it's in the press release. The rest of it is not in the press. It says the design team will report to Tim Cook directly, but like, what does that mean? We don't know. Right? So Mark Gohmann points out that currently you would con it would be considered to be Alan Dye and Molly Anderson reporting directly to Tim essentially in the post I've no actually in the Johnny I've structure of there being the chief design officer and then we have head of hardware head of software reporting to Johnny

reporting to Tim you now remove Johnny from that part because what German says is that currently it is not like this where it's two people reporting into Williams there are a bunch of people that were brought into Williams They do not they they they undid that work of like we have head of Even though they still exist, but it was like it became a point where everything flowed into those two and then up. So that's untenable. Obviously. Yeah. Um, they need some design leadership. They, they know, like,

there may be reasons why having to design leaders doesn't make sense because there are parts of it that, uh, that, uh, you know, Alan Dye shouldn't be in charge of for whatever reason. There's also a personality issue, right? Like if you value somebody, but by moving them under somebody else, they're gonna feel like they got a demotion

and you wanna keep them. Maybe you say, you know, well, Alan Dye reports to Tim, but functionally, there's a dotted line to Craig, for example, right? And what Molly Anderson reports to Tim, but there's a dotted line to John Ternes, right? And you do that for a while. It's hard to pick this apart from the outside because it has to do with personalities and how it's structured functionally. But this has been an issue where they don't, they do not have a design leader.

I would argue that they don't necessarily need a single design leader because you could argue that the merging of all the design under Johnny Ive was actually kind of an act of desperation and that they don't need to do it that way necessarily. But what about the rest? What about the rest of stuff that he's doing?

I will just say, I do think it's wild that nobody from design is considered a leadership in a leadership role. That should change for apple specifically i'm not saying it could be one person it could be both of them but the fact that there's nobody in hardware or software design on the leadership page the word design does not exist on the leadership page makes no sense to me it doesn't make any sense at all considering even before john Johnny became chief designer for say he was always on this page, always as like SVP or whatever his role was. He was always on this page and Apple is a design company like essentially at their core and

like it's very strange that they don't have this. This would be the perfect time to do this. Whether they bring someone else in who becomes the interface to Tim, or they promote people to, to, you know, or whatever. I think they should absolutely do this. This is the right time to do this. But then we have watch and health. Um, yeah, I, I don't know. I mean, it's likely that they split them, I guess. What German said is watch is already essentially under John Ternes. Yep. And they said health will probably go to the, I think they said like to,

to Eddie for health for fitness plus, and like, you could see where they're going to go. And the, I mean, this is one of those interesting challenges where you have these areas that are squired by particular executives, because they're like up and coming new, weird, and an executive is like, I'll take it. And that's, that's what Jeff Williams did. And now they've got to give those to other people, but they're also more mature now. So like, if fitness plus doesn't already belong to Eddie, of course it should belong to Eddie.

And if Apple Watch doesn't already belong to John Ternes, of course it should belong to John Ternes. So, okay. Right? Like they'll, they'll scatter it out. I do. I have a hard time with, do you say that the health team that is led by that doctor who we always see that she's going to report to Eddie? Is that true? Cause like that's a, that's an odd couple waiting to have Eddie and the doctor. Someone's got to report to someone, right? That's how it has to be. Yeah, unless she's recording, unless she's reporting to Tim. But this is what I find strange, right? Like if it was working so well with Jeff, like why are we why are we like infinity stone splitting this up in this way?

They don't want to load Subi, well two reasons. They don't want to load SubiCon up with this stuff. It's the same reason that they didn't load the new CFO up with all of Lucas responsibilities. And the other thing is just functionally, they weren't roles of the COO. They were roles that Jeff Williams took on in addition to his COO role, because like I said,

it was an up and coming thing. Somebody needed to shepherd it along and Jeff was like, I'm interested in that or they saddled him with it depending on how you want to read it. You're stuck with the watch, Jeff. All right, fine. Whatever it is, probably not that, but you never know. So I think that's what's going on is it's actually a logical understanding that a brand new CFO COO doesn't need to be loaded down with everything and by doing these slow transitions you get to Let the existing person help the new person with their job when necessary have the institutional knowledge

Also, then on their way out the door if they're going out the door get the rest of it handed off in ways that make sense to other places because again you know I think the stuff that wasn't COO job that Jeff Williams was doing you know the right way to think of that is those were also jobs Jeff Williams did not that those were the jobs of the COO. Dr. Sumbul Desai. Yeah, yeah. Well, if she reports to Eddie, that will be a sitcom waiting to happen. She essentially runs the hell, you see it, right?

Like it's easy to see who runs the team, it's just who presents, right? And so that you see this in the keynotes, especially in the iPhone keynote, and they'll be able to see it to an extent too, you see the management structure, like it's on display, right? Tim hands to Jeff, Jeff hands to Dr. Desai, right?

Like it's happening in front of your eyes, right? Like it's how it goes. But we're gonna go to Eddie now. Eddie hands over to John, Turnus, Turnus hands over to Federighi. Federighi goes back to Tim. We get Alan Dye pops out of a bush. Like what's going on over there?

Like I really, I know that this has been a thing forever. Right? Like the way that Apple kind of functions and structures its management teams. I think that, I think they need a bit of help because it seems like at the moment, just everything goes to either John or Federighi. This is probably part of what German is saying,

which is they need a reset. They need to structure this in a way that makes more sense because I do get the sense that over the years they're rolling, they're making lots of money, nobody's going to question it. And you have, look, I've been there, you may have seen this too. You have an org chart, but then you know who in the org chart is great at X. And honestly, good companies don't give X

to somebody who is bad at it, if there's somebody else in the organization who's good at it. A good company is like, I'm gonna have you do this, cause you're really good at it. And maybe the other person, I'm gonna have you do this because you're really good at it. And maybe the other person is like, well, shouldn't that be mine?

It's like, you gotta be like, no, this is the right person to do that. You keep doing what you're good at and we're not gonna give this to you. And that can rub people the wrong way, but I think it's a healthy thing to identify the people who are the right people to do the job. And, but the more you do that,

the more weird and broken your order chart gets, right, where you've got dotted lines and things that are like, it's over here, but it's over there. And it's like, why is, you know, why does Phil, Phil Schiller's in charge of the app store, for example. And the answer is cause Eddie kind of didn't care about the app store and developer relations and it was a mess. And they were like, and Phil was like, okay, I'll fix it.

And he went in there. Like it was no logical reason for him to do it. It was just like, Phil should probably do it. And now that he's not the SVP of comms, he's still doing that job because he cares about it and he's good at it. So the challenge is that that organizational rot happens and it's, look, rot is probably too pejorative.

That organizational complexity happens for good reasons. But it does mean that especially as people leave, you look, it's like a design. It's like what I said about any design. Designs start out really sensible and logical. And then over the course of years, you keep patching them. And then you look at it 10 years on and you're like, what are we even doing here?

And you have to throw it away. And that I think is where they are headed with their org chart is. kind of got to throw it away and figure out a new way to go. That makes sense. Cause you got new people coming in doing different jobs with different skill sets. And, and that goes right up to the top. Like ultimately, if somebody like John Ternes, who is more product from a product background, instead of an ops background takes over as CEO, like I read ops background, takes over his CEO. Like I read somebody said, it might've been German,

like there's a concern of like, oh, but you know, if he's CEO, then he's gonna have to rely on somebody else for all the ops stuff. It's like, well, of course, Tim Cook has to rely on people for the product stuff, because it's not his thing. But what that means is the CEO defines the CEO job in a way, and that changes the roles of everybody else.

So if you're if you're going to be moving to a CEO transition and you've got a bunch of other new people coming in, it's a good time for a little bit of a reset because new CEO might need much more specific work from the CEO. The Tim, for example, doesn't need because Tim kind of gets it. And that and like and then the product group becomes a little bit different if it's a more product oriented CEO, we'll see. But yeah, it does feel like that.

But that is why I continue to raise so many questions about the design part. Tim didn't wanna do that, right? He did not wanna oversee design. So it got moved around. To Jeff, right? It was Johnny, right? And then moved to Jeff. Well, So it got moved around to Jeff, right? The way it was Johnny, right? And then move to that wasn't, that wasn't cause Tim didn't want to do it. That was because they needed to have Johnny

a fly. What I mean is it was, it was not his thing. It was never his thing clearly, right? Like they, they elevated Johnny, I think to the point where it was like, well, now we're just equals in this room, right? Cause like, I don't want to oversee you. And then Jeff oversaw the design team. So like now it's going back to Tim, but like, I don't think that's what I'm not. That's why I questioned it's a hot potato. Whether it is as simple as it, as it appears on paper. And I would say, yeah, I would say it may be happening because of personalities.

You know, if Alan Dye says, I'm not reporting to Tim, to, to Craig Federighi, I want to report to Tim. Yeah. And they want to keep Alan Dye. That's when you're like, okay, you report to Tim, but there's a dotted line to Craig and you got to talk to Craig. And he's like, okay, I'll do that. But it's like, some people are like that.

I'm not saying he's like that. I don't know him, but like some people are like that where it's like, I don't, I never really understood this, but like it's the, I care more about the appearance than about the actuality. It's like, I want to be seen as reporting to Tim. It gives me, you know, a lot of, you know, reputation that I gain. And yeah, I know day to day I'm working for Craig, but I report to Tim.

And like some people, that stuff matters. It never mattered to me, but I realized, I learned as a manager that for some people the optics and the like That a lot of their self-worth maybe or how they cared about how others viewed them They would do stuff like that. So some of that may be going on, but I agree with you like in the long run if you don't have a Company design chief which I I don't think they've got one. Like, right? Even Johnny Ive, you could have argued,

probably shouldn't have been in charge of all of it. But I think they certainly don't have anybody like that now. Then what you really ultimately need to do is come up with some design leadership and have them report to more relevant parts. Or you name a couple of them SVPs and have them report to Tim. That's the other way you could go.

But really like something needs to happen there. And it's again, just to bring this all back around, it smells to me like this is a structure that has been, that is organically evolved based on the people involved. And it doesn't really make a lot of sense in some cases, but then once you pull people out, you end up asking the question like, well, now what? Because now the structure doesn't make sense at all. And they seem to be going through some of that right now.

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at the moment, but Meta is doing it to staff up by things with their super intelligence division. They have hired Ruoming Pang away from Apple. Pang was in charge of developing Apple's foundation models for Apple Intelligence and has apparently been offered a compensation package worth more than $200 million to go to Meta. According to Mark Gurman, Pang ran a team of 100 people

that have been working on Apple Intelligence models that power the features that are currently working on devices and was also working on a new version of Siri, the one that Apple is currently unsure as to what direction they will go with, whether they use that or will they get another model from somewhere else. I wonder if Pang saw the writing on the wall or was just annoyed or wanted $200 million. Yeah. I mean, everybody's talking about the 200 million, but like it's over time and it's in stock and it's, you've got to stay in meta and it's got to be successful and all that, but still it's a lot of money.

But if you only get like 10% of 200 million, you're fine as well. You know what? So a couple of things here. German reports that Pang was frustrated by Apple and some of the decisions they made, including their decisions about privacy, which I think is very funny, right? Maybe meta is a better fit because they don't care about privacy. I think Apple not, look, okay.

Apple didn't counter here. And that part of me thinks Apple didn't didn't counter here and that part of me thinks Apple doesn't believe like because Apple's got the money but on one hand Apple may be like that is not how we pay people because Apple is sometimes very cheap with who they pay and how they pay them or maybe Apple thought you know that they didn't actually like this guy. Right? You can't say. I mean, nobody's going to say, but like, sometimes you let people leave. Because it's not working out.

I mean, and there is some evidence that would suggest that, right? Like... I mean, yeah, the way, the way German puts it, and I almost want to say spins it because I wonder if this is stuff that's coming from people who are on Pang's side here. It's more like a story that that him and his poor team were kind of not really treated well by Apple and didn't let them do all the wonderful things they were going to do and so it makes sense that he would leave and he'll probably take people on his team with him. Okay, maybe, but we also know what Apple has done with their models. And it's not a great story. And so making it that it's a policy decision or it's about Apple's commitment to privacy,

like that may be true or it may be a story you tell as you are exiting to go take a big payday somewhere else. And my point is just if the team was not perceived as doing a good job and he was not perceived as being worth spending an enormous amount of money to keep and beyond what you pay him because then you need to pay everybody else more too probably right it would raise the compensation for everybody. You know you could letting them walk could mean you you have a dysfunctional AI organization that doesn't value the people who are building the next generation of models or it could mean that you're not particularly impressed with your AI group that is generating models right like it could mean either of those things. I don't know.

I wonder as well, you know, saying about the team, was this the team that was denied graphics cards? You know? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe so. Maybe so. I mean, I think it's perfectly understandable that a team focused on this stuff might feel not made important at Apple. Obviously, we know the history that Apple kind of like poo-pooed a lot of, especially LLMs early on, and then they were scrambling to catch up. And so maybe they didn't feel valued at Apple.

Maybe Apple's culture is a bad fit for this sort of approach. And I mean, I just don't know. I just don't know. I more and more I think about it. I think that there are that Apple's approach to AI research is different than the people who are like on the super cutting edge of wanting to build LLMs, because I feel like Apple focusing a

little more on on-device models and making those as good as possible and then going out to those cloud models is probably, it's a way forward. Also if Apple's thinking that they're just gonna buy an AI company then they've sort of written off like we're gonna spend money on some on Mistral or something and so we don't, you know, this group is gonna just kind of fade away they've sort of written off, like, we're going to spend money on some, on, on Mistral or something. And so we don't, you know, this group is going to just kind of fade away or get integrated. Then you would also let them leave. So, I mean, something is going on here for sure. But I just, I want to point out, cause it's so easy to portray this as being a loss for Apple.

And it might be, it might be, although I would say if he feels unappreciated and not listened to, then they're not using him anyway. And also that they let him go says something because if he's really incredibly vital, they could have matched them or maybe he's so frustrated that they couldn't have matched him. I don't know. I just don't know. But it could be either one. No matter what the scenario is, I think this is bad for Apple.

Like, if this person was really good, it's bad that you've lost the talent. If they weren't really good, why were they leading the team? Right. So like, I don't see a scenario really where this can be spun as a, as a, as a good thing. Well, no, I would say if they weren't really good and, and this goes all the way up to John Gianna Andrea, you hire them because you thought they were good. And then you look at what they produced and you think we're not impressed. And that might be fair or unfair, but that happens all the time. This person's in a position of people in in position of leadership aren't always good.

You find out that they're not good and then maybe you get rid of them. Apples are often very bad at that. Or maybe you just let them leave. I've definitely had situations where I've had employees that were like, okay, but not that great. And they're like, oh, I got another job offer and it's good luck to you, good luck.

And you don't like, we're not gonna try to keep you. You should go somewhere else. So, but I agree. I think that either way it shows some dysfunction, a level of dysfunction at Apple. And if Apple is trying to hold on to talent to build new models that are better, and this was talent that they wanted to hold on to,

it's a bad sign because he'll take people with him. He'll take people with him and they'll lose those people. Especially, Meta is trying to build a new team. And I can I do imagine too that like whoever hired this person at Meta is not stupid. Like there's a reason that you would pay this amount of money for this person. That would just be my assumption. Not because they were leading Apple, but like for another reason. Like that they are a mind, which is good stuff.

Yeah, oh yeah. And then other people are going to come along with, although boy, that line about frustrated by Apple's commitment to privacy, I think it's fascinating where it's like, you know, that's a good question. Like, are you going to be able to get the best AI researchers if you've got Apple's commitment to privacy? At the same time, does Apple want models that are built by people who don't care about privacy? I don't, I'm not sure they do, but that's a boy. It's tough. It's tough.

This is, this is why Jeff Williams is polishing up his golf clubs. Let's finish up with some, ask up great questions today. Craig Wright Center says, Mike, I know that you went with the standard Pro phone instead of the Pro Max this year a lot of it was baby related but I'm curious how it's worked out for you do you miss the larger phone while not holding the baby do you regret not going Pro Max? No I absolutely made the right decision moving to the Pro I think at the exact right time as the Pro got a little bit bigger so I didn't lose as much. The only thing I

will say is that I noticed the battery life more now than I did when I was using the Pro Max. I cannot get through a day of usual use without charging at some point, so that's that is the only thing that I've noticed, but it's very achievable for me in my life to be able to get the charge that I need at some point during the day. But I am very, very happy with the ProPhone and I would not want to go to a larger screen again. We'll, you know, with question mark of

don't know how big the iPhone Air is gonna be and or I don't know if that's the phone I'm gonna want, but I can't imagine wanting to go back to the biggest phone again. All right. Tom writes in and says, I've been wearing an Apple watch since day one, but I am increasingly frustrated

by the lack of watch face options. I recently enabled live activities on my watch and found that the swipe up slash live activity screen, this is the smart stack is what Tom's referring to, is a great layout for me, but it's one you cannot replicate of any watch face. Anyway, are they ever gonna fix the watch face situation on watch OS at Apple?

I don't know, I don't know. I thought it would be further along 10 years in, honestly. I like the smart stack, I do, I really do like it. And I have watch faces that I like too. I liked the Siri watch face when that came out, right? Like that's kind of what this is. Which was basically what the smart stack is. Yeah.

My feeling on it is I'm not confident that Apple will make the decisions that they should be making with watch faces. It feels like they are unwilling to put in the big efforts that are needed to make watch faces better and more adaptable. I mean, we go back to what you were complaining about when the new watches came out, right? That we have these always on displays that can show a second hand moving consistently, but they didn't update any of the previous watch faces to do that. I don't know if they've done this in watchOS 26. I'm assuming that they haven't. If anybody knows that that is the case please let me know but I doubt it. The watchOS 26 ticks every second. On all of them? That's my understanding, yes. So they did fix it. Yeah. Why have you not been

shouting about this? Because I have not installed the beta on my watch. It's the one place where I don't have a beta and I'm not going to do it until I see it for my own self. Breaking news, they fixed Jason's problem. So there you go. I'm pleased that they did that. They are willing to do that. Fantastic. It just took an entire year for them to update their faces. But they did it.

So they showed me a level of willingness, which I'm happy. So Smart Stack, Smart Stack, if you've got a, you can set it so that when a live activity is active, your Smart Stack comes up instead of the watch face. And that feels to me like almost what Tom is saying here, which is you almost want to get in a scenario where you should just say, don't even bother showing me a watch face. Just show me the smart stack. Cause there's a clock in the smart stack. Right? Um, wouldn't surprise me if that's

an option at some point, but you can get it some of the time, at least I like having a nice watch face and I scroll for the smart stack all the time now. It's nice. I like it. I pretty much only use that my Apple Watch. I very seldom would go to the apps screen because I also have like one widget which is like the three apps that I use the most. So if I want to get to messages I just like scroll all the way down and I can open messages. Um, I think though, in general, everybody should just use the photos face. If you've not used the photos face that they introduced last year, um, you should

try it if you've used the photos face in the past, it was like, I don't want that. Trust me that it's so much better. Like the system that they have of using the photo shuffle mechanic to load images on a long term follow up. My baby now shows up very frequently on all my devices, which I'm very happy about. So that it took like three months, but she now is very present on my watch faces. Everybody should use the photos face. You should just try it if you haven't, like just let the system do its thing. It makes the Apple watch look really beautiful

and you can get two complications there, which for me is more than enough, like for just like looking at my watch, most of the time I even wanna know what is the time, the date and for me, the weather. And I get all of that. So, but yeah, I cannot believe they haven't turned this over to developers. They should turn this over to developers because

even if Apple puts some level of investment in it, it's not enough. But I don't think they're going to do it in the same way that I don't imagine that they would ever turn over lock screen design to third parties, right? That's what Apple thinks the watch face is. They want to control that experience. I don't imagine them doing it at this point, but I still would like them to. It would be nice.

And Camille says, I finally started watching Taskmaster with the latest series, series 19, and it's been brilliant so far. Now I want to go back and watch the rest of the show. Would you recommend starting all the way back with series one or should I go through the show backwards? You should start with the beginning.

I agree. Not to be John Syracuse on you, but like the show is the show, but the show dynamic evolves and I think it's fun to watch it as it evolves. Also, by doing it that way, there are sometimes references to previous things. Obviously, they do every five seasons, they do the champion of champions where the five champions of the previous five seasons then battle against each other to see who is the champion of champions. Backwards, you would spoil every five seasons for yourself because you'd know who won them, Right? Exactly. So, so I think, you know, you could watch them in any order, but if

they're all there, you should just start from the beginning because the show is the show. Like the show doesn't change a lot. You'll get to see, you know, Greg and Alex's relationship kind of change over time as they figure out sort of like the right way to do it. But I would, I think you should just go back from the beginning. They're all great. We rewatched a bunch of them recently. They're all great. You should totally do that.

And then also I will say Taskmaster New Zealand is really good. And if you get through all the UK taskmasters, check out Taskmaster New Zealand. The Australian one is not bad, but the New Zealand one is really good. And the assistant on New Zealand is, I would say, just as good as Alex. So yeah, yeah, yeah, it's really good.

I think like the first 10 seasons, especially just just incredible. It lost me a little bit in the last few seasons, but we just started watching season 19 because I've only heard incredible things. And it is. Incredible, like we're like only heard incredible things and it is incredible. Like we're like three episodes in and it's like, Oh, this is an all-timer. It's a great season. There were some of the more recent seasons for whatever reason, they just haven't done it for me. Season 16 has Sam Campbell in it. One of my all time favorite contestants. It's such a great season. And season 18 has Andy Zaltzman

who is also hilarious and weird. Oh I watched season 16. I loved season 16. But yeah I haven't watched all of them but yeah I watched this one. Sam Campbell was absolutely incredible. One of my favorite contestants of all time there There was no fielding because yeah, yeah. His, his athleticism was, was surprising. Surprising. Yes. Exactly. There's some, you should go back and watch it all. It's very available no matter where you're on the world, right? Like if you're in the UK, you can watch it all on 4OD, which is an ad supported free streaming service, but you can remove ads. Yeah. In the U, in the US, you can watch it on YouTube

and anywhere in the world you can watch, I think it's called Taskmaster Supermax Plus. They put all the names in it, where you can just, you can give them some money and watch the show. It's a very, very fun, very, very fun show. We were talking about it last night, we were watching an episode, I was just like,

this show is so cheap to produce. They've really lucked out. Like they found an incredible format that is very repeatable. They obviously own that property, right? And like they invested in buying that little house somewhere. God knows where. It's in Chiswick. It's, um, by a golf course. And they didn't, they didn't buy it. And that means that they really,

this came up when they were, I think they were on Seth Meyers because Seth Meyers is a fan. And they said, no, they don't own it. And once Taskmaster became a hit, the rent went up and they're spending a huge amount of money to rent that place because they know that they can't let it go. Oh, that's,

that's not smart, but I guess they didn't know it was going to be a success. They didn't know. And now they can't let it go. And if you're wondering where it is, by the way, if you go to Google maps and search for task master house, you will find it. It's literally in there. They need to buy it. Like, I know it's not necessarily an easy thing, but like, maybe they maybe they have offered now or maybe they are buying it or something like that but it's apparently been a Thing of contention where they feel like they're kind of trapped and they have to keep using it but it is such a great location and they they make the most of it and

And yeah, you should go by there sometime Well, they could they could do the pure Hollywood thing and hire a soundstage and build a set that looks just like it. I have had the thought where it's like, you could really kind of go out into the countryside somewhere and just build the Taskmaster cottage again. That would also be expensive, but maybe you do it.

Anyway, it's a great show. It's one of my favorite shows of all time, honestly. It's pure entertainment. I just watched Amazon tried to replicate it with their LOL last one, Laughing. They use that format, but it's literally a bunch of Taskmaster contestants. That show was fine.

It was kind of funny. And many of those UK panel shows are fine and kind of funny, but not like Taskmaster. They're Taskmaster contestants in that they are British comedians. And eventually every British comedian becomes a Taskmaster contestant. It's true.

Although we got Jason Manzoukas this time, which was kind of fun. But no, like literally eight or nine of the 10 contestants in that show are Taskmaster contestants. So they were, but this is, you're right. This is when we were doing Relay 10 and the Hackney Empire Theater. This is when we were doing relay 10 and the Hackney empire theater. And we looked at what else was playing at the Hackney empire theater. And it was,

it was British comedians, but it was also pretty much just taskmaster contestants because again, that then diagram it's it's, there's a lot of overlap there. So anyway, I've watched that last one laughing. I wasn't really that interested in it because I really don't like Jimmy Carr. Like he's just not my kind of comedian. I don't like him either. I wasn't really that interested in it because I really don't like Jimmy Carr. Like he's just not my kind of comedian. I don't like him either, but some of those contests.

It was on at home. I didn't know he was watching it while she was pregnant, I think. Or maybe the baby at home, I can't remember. It is a genius. But it was, you know, it's one of those shows I'd see it on and be like, oh, this is actually pretty funny, right?

Like I would see parts and be like, oh yeah, this is pretty good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it is, it's one of those shows I'd see it on and be like, Oh, this is actually pretty funny, right? Like I would see parts of it and be like, Oh yeah, this is, this is pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is. That's on prime video.

Yeah. I do know I was watching this when the baby was here and um, the thing about it though, which I thought, which I completely agreed with is why does it look like this? Like the production design was wrong. Like it looked like lovers blind is what it looked like. It's a, it's cause it's a Japanese game show format that they just replicated everywhere else. And I think they just make it look like that.

The visual, the furniture design. I know. I know. I don't know. Maybe they used, maybe they used a set from some other show. It just didn't look right. Like no matter what the reason is, I think visually they messed up with the way that that show looked. It just didn't look right.

I didn't know it was Japanese, but that's not surprising to me. No, it feels very much like it. Because you've got the like people watching the thing, talking about the thing. That reminds me of some other stuff I've seen. Yeah. And everybody, it's been replicated in almost every country that Amazon wants to replicate it

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