Upgrade - 616: Outmoded But Not Vintage

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

From Relay, this is Upgrade, episode 616, the Marvel Universe, for May 18th, 2026. I am your host, Jason Snell. Mike Hurley is on assignment. This episode is still brought to you, though, even though Mike is on assignment by Delete Me Squarespace, Claude and Steam Clock. And joining me, filling in for Mike, is his fellow Relay co-founder, Mr. Stephen Hackett. Hi, Stephen. Hey, Jason, thanks for having me.

Thanks for being here. Thanks for helping out. with Mike gone. I do not want this show to be a monologue because that would be super boring. No, no one is that. Let's not do that. Nobody wants it.

I don't want it. And I would be the one monologuing and I don't want it. So I don't want to inflict that on anybody else. Yeah. Look, we've said this before. You and I don't get to talk about tech very much in public. And so when we do, it's always a treat. Yeah.

So I'm always happy to jump in on it. We talk about it a lot, but not together. Right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, together in public. We're also talking behind the scenes all the time. All the time. We're on a podcast together talking about tech. And even though I am the guest, you are the host. Yes. I don't have time for this, Stephen, because I think we've got a Snell Talk question from you. From me. From me. That's what I was trying to get there. I saw you. I thought you might need a little helping hand. Just helping you out. Jason, I know that you have been slowly collecting more Apple Gear and viewers of Upgrades see it, right? Because it's behind you. Yes.

What are some recent additions? And I'd love to know also what's on your short list. What would you love to have added? So one of the dangerous things about making old computers behind me part of my video setup is that it gives me an excuse to buy old computers. Yeah. Although I haven't done a lot of that I actually haven't bought a lot of stuff recently I did buy a

trash can Mac Pro because we and that got that bounced around a few different podcasts. I felt like we were at the low point where it was no longer useful as a computer but no longer vintage enough to rise in price. Yes.

And I saw you could get one for like 180 bucks and I'm like they are the perfect price right now. Yeah. Because it looks great. theoretically it works. I just, I haven't set it up. Theoretically it works.

But for now, I have to find a, the right display adapter, which I probably have. I just haven't bothered to do it to get it to a more modern display. But otherwise, it probably works.

I assume it works. So there's that. It has, I know it has HTML out. Mine is behind me, but you can't see it. It's not in frame. It's got HTML,

but I guess it also has Thunderbolt 2. I can just pop it to a TV in my, in my house. That would work. That's what you want is I can make up my new um, Plex server is uh, no. Uh, so I've got that. But the big things came last week. I got two more, I got two more items that were on my list. One of them was high on my list and one of them was just kind of, I thought it might be. So there's a, I'm not going to say it's a tragic story. It's a sad human story. I used to work a Mac user back in the 90s. Um, and I, showed up as a summer intern

a couple weeks after the editor-in-chief of Mac User left for another job. And that guy, his name was John Zilber. And as a result, all the people I work with at Mac user back then knew John. I never knew John, but they all knew John. And John passed away a few weeks ago. And my friend Jim, who I worked with at Mac User back in the day,

said, the family is having some trouble figuring out what's on old Macs, figuring out if they're functional or not. And he was wondering if I could help them. And especially one of the tasks, and you'll appreciate this, is they couldn't actually use some of them because they didn't have an ADB keyboard or mouse. Right.

Yeah, it may start up, but then you can't interact with it. What do you do? Because these are pre-IMac, and therefore they don't have, they have the old Apple desktop bus. So, and he sent me a picture. And that was, I mean, I, gee, you knew what he was doing. He sent me a picture. And I looked at the picture and I was like, is that an emate?

Yes. Is that an original G3 Ibook? Yes. And so I said, you know, I said, get them in touch with me and I will help them. And I went down there, they're just south of San Francisco. And I went down there and I brought with me Apple extended keyboard or Apple keyboard. I didn't bring the big one. I have a smaller one that, you know, why bring the big one?

You don't drive that big of a car. I mean, you need to run a U-Haul to use the X-N-A-2. And I was worried, do I have ADB mice? And I do. I had two. So I brought an ADB mouse. And I brought the blue scuzzy, which is, for those who don't know, it's basically like a raspberry pie that is attached to a scuzzy port.

And it reads off of SD cards. It reads disc images. So you can pop in a. an SD card and basically I was worried that they wanted to get some personal stuff off of them which they didn't actually want. These were systems that were very, very old

obviously and they weren't worried about that. They actually just wanted to determine would they boot. And so there were three systems there that they were wondering about. One of them was a beige G3 and what did we figure out?

I figured, I powered it on and I could hear the hard drive going cluck clunk cluck clunk clunk clunk clunk and I said I said that'll be easy to take the hard drive out of because it's a it's a big tower also that hard drive is dead so don't worry about it yeah there was a power mac 7200 or something so a desktop power mac those back in those days those were also actually pretty easy to open and that one I said we couldn't get video out that was it turns out the big challenge was mac video to a modern monitor is very hard it's hard

It's really hard. Because MacVit, you end up with an adapter, which he had on both of these systems, an adapter with a bunch of dip switches on it. Yep. That goes to VGA, and we plugged in a VGA monitor, and none of them lit up. And so we really don't know, like, was it trying to boot? That one made a little more positive hard drive noises. And I said, you should probably just get in there and rip it out because they're worried about

personal stuff on it. Yeah, just remove it. Yeah. And I said, you should be able to do that. Oh, they had a G4 cube. which booted sometimes, but never to a screen that actually loaded the OS.

And I said, that one you're going to have to look, that's more modern. So you're going to have to look online about how to remove the hard drive. I opened it up and I said, that's the hard drive. But you're going to have to take

some pieces apart in order to get it out of there. Yeah. See, the difference is I would have gone with a full tool set and I would have like just strip those babies down. Beyond my interest or capability. So I did not do that. That was,

I was strictly, the blue scudsy was as far as it went. And there was a Mac SE And the funny thing is it was an S.E. Not an S.E.30. And I was like, and it wouldn't boot. And I realized actually that the hard drive was

blinking SOS in Morse code. Yeah. Which is a funny thing that hard drives did back then. It was actually blinking, you know, long, long, long, short, short. But that one, I was able to download System 608 onto Blue Scuzzy as an image and pop it on the back and turn it on and it booted.

And so I said, so this one you can sell. because they're just going to sell this stuff on eBay. I said, you could sell this as boots, but the hard, you know, boots from external, but the hard drive internally is dead. Right. Which is very common when you're shopping for this stuff.

Like, I mean, really at this point, if I get anything, I kind of just assume that age, I just kind of assume the internal storage is dead because if it's not, it will be soon. It will be soon, exactly. But I wanted to reassure them. So that one,

blinking SOS. I said it's a goner. I said, if he was like a former head of state or something, I would recommend you absolutely remove all these drives and sledgehammer them. But he's not. And so nobody is going to ever attempt to do forensics on that drive to pull off the platters to find out what was on a MacS. In 1993.

You'd be surprised, though, how many times over the years I've gotten something, either purchased or, you know, sent from a listener or a reader. And it just is full of stuff. I have like, I have a power book. My power book won. 70 or 180, whatever it is that I got for the 20 max or 2020 series. That's just got somebody's stuff on it. Right down to the Connectix Powerbook Utilities is like,

every time I opened it on that thing, it's got his name. It's like registered to this guy. And I'm like, I don't know who that guy is, but this was his computer. That's a little weird. Yeah,

it's when you're decommissioning a computer, ideally you should wipe it. And after the fact, yeah, it can be weird. So anyway, I walked away with, an emate.

That's awesome. And does it work? They say it works, but they kept the power plug because I said I could get another power plug, although my Newton power adapter doesn't have enough power, so I had to order a power adapter for it. Yeah, it's a different wattage, I think. Yeah. So I, but I think what they said is that it was, it was, it had a login code.

So I was, I'm going to have to reset it, which is fine. You just wipe it and reset it and then you can get in. But I've got that. That's fun. I spent like 15 minutes with one in the 90s and never again. So I'm excited to have that. One of the unique, I told them the story about how Johnny Ive in that period was just trying to make things with translucent plastic and nobody would listen. And since there was a beige G3 there, I was able to point at the little plastic button on the side and say, see, this is this is him crying to be let out.

Mm-hmm. And I got, I got a, it's a graphite. G3 Powerbook, which... Very nice. I didn't especially need it, but it's fully functional. I mean, the battery's dead, but it runs. And my mom used that.

That was her first... When my parents moved into their motorhome and were full-time motorhomers, we got her an orange eyebook. And she could take it... Because in those days, there wasn't even Wi-Fi at the park. So she would take it up to the front office where there was a modem plug. You could plug your phone line into your computer and dial in to get your email.

And that's what they did. And so I have sort of fond memories of that. And so I got that one too. Also, it's such a unique looking laptop. So that's what I got now. I got an email. So it's fun. I don't.

What's on my short list? Honestly, there's very little on my short list at this point. I don't because so many of these things are like I kind of like being able to take pictures of them or have them in the background and all that I'm mostly just interested in how they look

I will say honestly Stephen the modern Mac Pro is on my list for when it falls in price to the point where it doesn't cost anything anymore like the trash can and I will get that because I've got I've got a G4 here I've got a couple Power Mac G4s here

I don't have a G5 I mean maybe but like they're just interesting to me and that one looks particularly interesting so maybe but like I'm not I'm not feeling like there's a white whale out there for me do you have anything left that I mean I feel like you've got

everything now is there anything out there that you're I've got a lot pondering I would love Elisa that is my that may be the only thing on my list now. Oh, yeah.

Because I've got the, like, my setup's obviously different than it used to be, but I can see sort of over the camera, an IMac G4, a 20th anniversary Mac, and a Mac portable. Yeah, but I would get a 20th anniversary Mac, but they're so expensive that I never will. And I got mine 10 years ago,

and the prices have only gone up. Yeah. Right. Well, there's a you, like you mentioned, right? It's outmoded, but not vintage. Yep. The 2019 Mac Pro will hit that, and when it does, I will get one too. Because I loved mine.

But I sold it because it was in the beginning of that curve. I was like, the business owned it, right? Like, I need the value out of it to buy the next computer. And so, but no, I enjoy this. I'm glad you're getting into it. Yeah. And I will say also, for those who are, you can't see it as well on Upgrade on Backbreak weekly.

I'm shot straight on on the video version, and you can see it. And the thing I'm most proud of about my setup, which has got these nice IKEA shelves that I got, which is entirely inspired by the old pod cabin. Yeah. Which had these same shelves, and I really liked it. And so I got them.

So everything that's back there that you see on MacBrick Weekly anyway, all boots, all of it. The G4 cube, the 128, or I guess it's a 512, the Apple 2C, like all the stuff back there,

boots, which is, they're not just, there for sure. The only thing that I have that's totally non-functional is the Mac portable. And again, it's kind of not worth it to me to even make the effort to make it functional. I just, it looks so weird and I was able to get one cheap because it didn't run that I got it, but it's dead. Yeah, I have, I don't have a battery. You can get a battery, but I have the actual the parts to bring mine back to life and I've just never bothered. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, podcastathon.

Let's bring, let's bring back the, okay, the Mac port. What we learned with a podcastathon last year is that what you really want is an extra guest who's not responsible for podcastathon things to do work off on the side and you check in with them. Because if you're actually trying to entertain people and fix a computer, it does not work. It doesn't work. It's not good. Let's do some follow-up. Okay. Before we get into the rest of the show, we had a lot of talk with Mike about visual intelligence and AirPods and AirPods with cameras and what that was all going to be about.

And I think I probably said that I thought visual intelligence was kind of useless. And we heard from Logan who said, I'll be the second person to defend visual intelligence. It's good. There's two of you. You can start a club now. Yeah. It's all takes. I use it to identify plants and insects often, but it's best for vintage shopping.

I love mid-century modern decor. It not only access as Google images, but also eBay, Etsy, and Pinterest. It makes it easy to find an item and purchase it. The real issue is there's no visual intelligence of the Photos app. If I screenshot something to say for later, I have to take another screenshot to use visual. That's not good, visual intelligence. Hopefully that will change in iOS 27.

Yeah, more integration. It doesn't feel very well integrated. That's part of the problem. That's one of the problems with it. It really feels tacked on to the camera and really the camera control experience. But it is cool that apps can access it. I forget if it's Home Depot or Lowe's.

I've got both on my phone because... Oh, man, suburban dad. Wow. Suburban dad. But one of those apps also supports it. And like, it is cool. And I like that it exists. But I kind of land where you land. Like, I don't personally have a use case for it. I hadn't even thought or come across it like this not in the photos app. That seems like a big oversight to me, especially when you look at what Google

does in Android and what they've been doing for a long time. But then the new stuff they announced last week, very much like contextual intelligence. Like, I have this photo in my photo library. what is in it, right? And there's some of that stuff. It knows about pets and plants, but it's not the same system as like the full-blown visual intelligence. It's like an older system in photos.

They built visual intelligence into the screenshot interface, which when you're just trying to take a screenshot, is very annoying. It is. But they built it there, and it's not in photos. And I think there's a technical reason why you understand why it's like that. But if you're a user, you're like, why am I having to do this?

Why do I have to take a screenshot of a screenshot? So thank you to Logan. Jimmy wrote in and said, regarding the AirPods with camera rumor, do you think it's about the tech or about the messaging? If it's announced as AirPods with environmental sensors or something, does that change the perception? Consumers won't expect to take pictures

and the public won't assume it's a camera. This product would be a boon to accessibility, reading signs, door detection, other things the magnifier app already does. If Apple advertises it as phone stuff without the phone, does that change things? And I will just say, I heard from some people who said, like, if this is like an infrared camera or it's got,

it's an unusual thing, and they don't sell it as a camera, but as a, as a visual sensor or something that is, it's not about taking pictures because I don't believe it will be about taking pictures. I believe it'll be about sensing things. Maybe that makes a difference.

I don't know. Yeah, the door detection stuff is really cool when they roll that out, I think a couple years ago now. And yeah, clearly cameras that are sort of, well, sort of inherently eye level are really useful from an accessibility standpoint. But I think the broader conversation of does Apple call it a camera,

is it perceived as a camera? That's really complicated. I think there's enough pushback on things like this. Like there are lots of people like the meta-brae bands and like the other things, but there's a lot of people who really don't like them and don't want to be around them or have them in their house. Like, I think no matter how Apple sells it, unless it really is not a camera,

if it's really like this is, you know, LiDar sensors or something, then there's a risk of it kind of going sideways on it. I think it can get away with it if they said something like it's an infrared, uh, fish eye camera that's intended to see what's happening around you,

but it's not for taking pictures or videos or something like that where they, and like, it's a weird camera is basically what they would be saying. They'd use technical things to make them seem impressive, but I think that's what it would be in the bottom. line. It's like, oh, it's kind of a weird camera. Don't worry about it. It's not for that. We're not taking pictures. We're not spying on you. We're just seeing what's in your environment and using it for helpful things. Yeah. I think the other thing that is, I think is key on things

like the meta products is like some indication to the other person they're being recorded. And I don't know how you do that if this is more of like an environmental sort of ambient sensor setup. But I do think that helps people a little bit be at more ease with these things. This made me think of something that I haven't had a place to say it, so I'm going to have it here. Like, I think it's easy to look at products like the meta stuff or even something like this, AirPods

with cameras, and immediately go to the Google Glasses situation. But that was a long, long time ago. When Google Glasses came out, it was unusual for cameras to be everywhere. A bunch of people already had smartphones, but I think comparing this directly to like the glass hole situation is not really right or fair. But at the same time, there are people who are going to have strong feelings about this and not be excited about it. But yeah, it's all in the messaging. and I think if Apple can talk about it and the use cases really are

accessibility, visual intelligence, you know, I as a user can't even see what the cameras see. Like maybe this is all kind of going into these apps and things. There's got to be really clear about that. And I think be able to explain it in a way that is reassuring, but also not condescending to people who are concerned about this stuff.

Right. Right. It's going to be interesting. I still am trying to imagine how they sell this product, but I guess we'll find out if it ever exists. So another bit of follow-up is about binning and the MacBook Neo. We talked about that a lot. I got one piece of weird feedback who said,

Jason doesn't understand how binning works. He said that binning is what you try to do, and I'm like, I never said that, but I appreciate the feedback, I guess. Benning just happens. By the way, if you were wondering why binning happens, the Wall Street Journal, I find this funny, because this is one of those things where it's like,

it's a cool angle for the Wall Street Journal, and for tech people, it's kind of a known issue. But to the non-tech readers, it's a cool business story. So they did a story called Apple is making hit products and high profits from imperfect chips. And the headline is more suspicious than the story, which is just an explainer about how Benning works, where you've got a wafer,

and some of the chips work great, and some of the chips don't work at all, and some of the chips are in between, and that Apple has gotten very good at using some of the, you know, fail, but not too much and using them in other products, which we've been talking about. That's what Benning is. But thanks to the Wall Street Journal for explaining it to their audience.

So Mango wrote in and said, I have, this is great, this is a great letter. This is a great letter. Mango, coming from the conspiracy theory bureau, I have some wild questions on Binning. I know journalists have standards, but it's also fair to question the basic premise of a Binned A18 Pro. Do we know there are bum cores? What if, regardless of the system on a chip's test performance, the Neo uses too much power or makes too much heat with all cores turned on?

The A5X for iPad 3 was the first A-series chip with extra GPU cords, because retina, and the back of that iPad got really hot. I remember it well. Worst, worst iPad ever. Thanks for bringing that up. And replaced it in like six months. It was so, yeah. Mango, I appreciate the conspiracy theory.

Maybe they deactivated the course for other reasons. I think that what we know is that these are binned. The thing is, if it's not binned, if it's just a full price chip, they would have had to buy it for full price. And I'm not saying that there aren't some Neo-A18 pros that are deactivated. That may be. They may have had excess of the perfectly good ones that pass the test. and they deactivated those already

just because they have no use for the 6 GPU version. It's possible. But, you know, as we found out, because they're going to do a hot lot and they're going to get more of these, Apple's not, you know, ordering up broken chips, which means the ones that come out fully functional with 6 GPU cores that they have to disable,

they're going to pay full price for those. And they'll pay the bin price, the partially broken price, price for the ones that are partially broken, but they will also be paying full price. So that's why they wouldn't do that, is that they have to pay TSMC full price is my understanding for the ones that work. Yeah, because if you say that you go in order from TSMC, oh, I want what I used to have at one less core.

Well, one, that's like more time to spin this back up. And you're going to have bend processors out of that collection. Exactly. Yeah, you want to try to make it with six. Yeah. Because a certain percentage of them will have a single fail. and those are all usable, and the ones that have no failures are all usable.

Yeah. So you want to shoot for the... Plus, it's your design. Your design is six. Right. And either they turned that off in the Neo, or maybe like, was theorized a couple weeks ago,

maybe the higher-end Neo gets one extra core at some point. I don't think it really matters. I mean, it's interesting from like the business perspective, and like Apple doesn't end up in these situations very often. But like the product of the Neo, like the story of the Neo is so much more than how the number of GPU cores it has. Like it's a delightful computer. I just set one up yesterday for one of my kids and it's going through it.

It's the citrus one. And they're super excited. And like it's like, yeah, it's like a fun laptop that's inexpensive, but full featured. And like, you know, my kid's not going to care about how many GPU cores are in it. I don't really care. It's just, it's the behind the scene stuff that makes us interesting. It doesn't make or break the product if one core is turned on. I'm more concerned about the price of it than anything else.

I think the most important feature of the Neo is what it costs, right? And why there's not an orange one? We'll give a time. Get a time, they'll get there. Lemon Lime got to jump it in the queue, I guess. Sure. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Delete Me. Delete Me makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data

online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. Delete Me does the hard work of wiping you and your family's personal information from data broker websites. The Wirecutter, one of my favorite websites, named Delete Me their top pick for data removal services. Now, normally when Mike's here, he will tell you about why he and Adina use Delete Me. They really like the idea of getting junk about themselves off the internet so that they can lead better lives and not and like have the confidence to know that that stuff is not out there that it doesn't have to be out there. You don't have to accept that all of that stuff is going to be floating out there. And you can be like them.

You can take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me at a special discount for upgrade listeners. 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to join DeleteMe.com slash upgrade 20 and use promo code upgrade 20 at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to J-O-I-N-D-E-T-E-M-E.com slash upgrade 20 and enter code upgrade 20 at checkout. Join delete me.com slash upgrade 20 code upgrade 20. Thank you to delete me for supporting upgrade and relay. Rumor round up time, Stephen. Yeah. Thank you.

Thank you. I appreciate. I knew you were going to do that one right. Mark German, the sheriff. is Mosian into town to talk about Siri on iOS 27. He wrote about this in his newsletter. He wrote a piece about this. He's reiterating, you know, he's,

he reports about this all year long. So as we get closer to WWDC, some of what he has to do is sort of like put in the context of the things he's already reporting. So he's already said, I think that there's a standalone Siri app for chatting. He said users are going to be able to pop into the chat experience via Siri or entering a new,

search or ask mode by swiping down from the center. There's a lot of stuff happening when you swipe down from the top of the screen. But one of them will be basically it's like spotlight, but it's it's Siri. It's search or ask. Unifying that, which I think is a good idea. And then in terms of privacy, Mark reports that Siri will have a smaller context memory. It will remember previous chat and other details. It'll be set to auto delete, although you can change how long conversations stick

around and that what he's really saying is Apple, Apple has to lean into privacy here, but they need to not let their standards get in the way, which has been kind of a bugbear for Mark German's kind of analysis of his reporting for a while now, as he feels like Apple is struggling with the idea that it's got a privacy brand and that this stuff all kind of like is not great for privacy. And how does it square that? Yeah, and I don't think he's wrong to touch on that. I think he hangs a lot of hats. on it. But the, I think at the end

of the day, like, people who want an AI product from Apple, like those, those people care about privacy. That may even be a primary reason they choose it over something like chat GPT or Claude or God forbid

GROC. But at the same time, if it means the product doesn't work or is like frustrating to use, I guess it feels like a very thin landing strip for this to come down on. And yeah, I don't, I just don't know how they, how they manage that. I mean, the Google relationship, and this is something that German points out is,

Apple has this private cloud compute branding, and they talk about having things go to the private cloud. It doesn't preclude them from using Google because Google also has a private tier now where where things get locked up in very much a way inspired, it seems, by what Apple is doing. And so it's possible that what they're going to say, and we'll have to watch for this at WWDC, right, is they may not describe it, they may not brand it as Apple's servers.

They may, I mean, it depends on how they want to define what private cloud compute is and whether it's Apple servers or whether Google servers that do the same thing are counted. But it's quite possible

that that's what's going on, is that they're actually, you know, this is not necessarily running on Apple servers. It may be running on Google servers that are using the same security models, the same idea, that they can't see it, they can't do anything with it,

and that they'll make those claims. But I do think they are going to do that. I think that that's one of the things Apple really has invested in here is the idea that you can use these services and none of these people know. Like all that data is anonymous, essentially and unviewable by the hosts of the servers that you're using. Right. I mean, Google made an announcement back in November

that they had built effectively, what private cloud compute is and does. Right. Maybe that was part of their deal with Apple. I remember that was a conversation when the Jim and I thing was announced. It was like, is this a factor here that they were able to do this

or willing to do it? I think it's also interesting that Apple, if they play their cards right, they kind of get the best of both worlds. They get access to models that were trained without a lot of privacy rules in place necessarily. But the product they get,

get to build out of that is or does have those higher privacy walls in place. That I think is going to be as interesting to hear from them as what the features are. Because in a way, we know what the features are going to be. They're building a chatbot. We know what those things do. They've already tipped their hand in other areas of the OS that AI can interact with, like image generation and visual intelligence and these other things. is like, we know what their product is going to be.

Well, what we don't know is how it's going to work. And they have a story to tell there. Yeah. It's going to be a challenge. And this is when we're going to parse the details, I feel like, is it really is going to come down to how do they pitch this? Because I do believe that the goal of this is still going to be to maximize privacy. I think they can't get away from that and they don't want to. But it is, it is an issue.

A piece of feedback I got that I don't think we're going to get to in this episode, but it was asking about the idea of the semantic index, but you've got multiple devices, and are you syncing data across devices? And a lot of times what Apple does is, you know, you're running a model for photos on device, which is why the photo stuff doesn't like, it reruns on every device you've got.

And one of the reasons is it's just a machine learning thing. Like they're not passing metadata around. They're using their ML model to generate what those, all of those keywords are on your photos. So that's the danger with something like personal context is like you could pass it around, but now you're passing around personal data and it's leaving your phone. And I still feel like if they do something like personal context, which was a 24 feature, so who knows if they're going to ever go back there.

But if they do go back there, it's very hard to make the claim that you're passing it around, but it's okay versus it never leaves your device. So I feel like they're going to be left with it's going to stay on your device. But that might put them, if it puts them at a disadvantage compared to what their competitors are doing, they have to make a choice. And that's, I think, what German's really getting at with a lot of what he says is, is Apple going to put itself behind or is it going to break some of its promises in order to, stay relevant. And I don't know if it'll come up or not, but it's certainly a possibility. This very well may not be a keynote type thing. This may be a state of the union. It may be a, it's buried down in a session somewhere of like, you know, get to know the new Apple intelligence,

right? And there's a section in there about this, about these things. Because it does also affect developers, right? If a developer is going to tap into Apple intelligence and the Gemini model behind it through API usage, that developer may have limitations based on how Apple builds this and how they structure it. So I suspect we'll hear something, even if it's not the headline. Yeah, they got to say something. It's just the question of what is it? What is it? Also, there was another Mark German story that I was debating whether I wanted to give this any oxygen or not, but I want to at least mention it, which is, a very, I think, a very weird story about the headline is Apple OpenAI Alliance phrase setting up possible legal fight.

And it's a very weird story because, you know, most of Mark German's stories are based on his sources at Apple. And this, there's no question of who his source is because there's an unnamed Open AI executive giving him quotes. Mm-hmm. And it's not an anonymous. I mean, they are unnamed. Mark German, like, they can't, I assume they came to him and said,

we would like to give you some juicy stuff, but you can't name who said it. Which feels to me like this is an authorized by open AI communication. And the communication itself, it's really weird. It's basically a giant corporation worth lots and lots of money goes to the media to say, we feel like Apple's treated us bad about our AI partnership

and we're talking to lawyers about whether we should sue them. It's like the, it's the most abstract saber rattling I've seen in a while where it's like they're not actually threatening to sue them. They're sort of threatening to talk to people about suing them. It's like a tiny balloon on top of your trial balloon. You know, it's like, Yeah, let's see how this feels. Yeah, before we release the trial balloon, we'll put this little, little party balloon up and see what happens to it.

Yeah, it's just, it's very weird. Also, I'm not a lawyer. You can sue for anything. But I have a hard time seeing exactly what their case is, which is probably why they're only talking to lawyers and not flying a lawsuit. Because they feel like, it's sort of like Apple didn't try hard enough with this. And not enough people are using it. and other stuff like that. It just seems very weird to me,

kind of sour grapes. And I think Gruber pointed out last week that it's not like Open AI's app isn't very successful in the app store. So what exactly are they complaining about? And maybe are they complaining about the reports that in iOS 27, they're going to be peers to other AI providers and they're no longer going to be exclusive and they feel like their exclusivity window didn't really benefit them because I mean, look, chalk it up to WWDC24, but like, there's a lot of stuff going on about AI that just didn't work out. And you were one of them.

I mean, like, yeah. And it didn't hurt you appreciably because the platform has still got lots of open AI users on it. So I find it, I just, it's a weird story. Like, they want somebody at Open AI got bent out of shape about the Apple relationship and just wanted to like really just fire off a flare saying. This will get their attention that we're unhappy. And probably my guess is they were just hoping to get, you know, somebody to return their calls about this, get some executive to call them and say, okay, let's move this over.

We're sorry you're unhappy. It's going to be okay. But that, I don't know. It was one of the more baffling stories ever because there's no, there's nothing behind it. I mean, I'm not saying it didn't happen. It did happen. I'm just saying there's not even open AI can muster very much in

this leak that they're doing to Mark German. Yeah. If Apple had gone to them and promised, hey, you're going to see X amount of usage. And if you don't, we'll pay you for the difference or, you know, something like that. Then they should pay them. Then they should pay them. Yeah.

But if that was what Open AI had on their side, wouldn't that be their statement and not whatever this thing is? I agree with you. It's weird. It feels wishy-washy. you know, no doubt this didn't go

the way either company thought it would go. Sure, but that's true of literally everything they announced at that event. The whole WBC 24 story.

It's not you, it's us. That's right. But is that justification for this? Like, unless there's some big thing here, we just don't know,

I kind of agree with you. I don't really see it, but, but, you know, also is an opportunity to use one of my favorite photos of the last

however many years of tech, journalism of Eddie Q speaking to Sam Altman and it looks like he's grounding him for staying out too late. Yeah, you're you're you got detention. You got to go to the the dean's office. One other item, this just broke this morning. I received this, this link from my gate correspondent, Stephen Hackett. They'll link me that. A mac, he's behind the green gate right now. just sticking his head over the green gate saying hinge gate is it going to happen uh it's another

uh waybo leaker this is instant digital and mac rumors has got the the details of what they're saying and it's funny because actually what they're saying is apple apple's factories are currently struggling with the hinge of the foldable iPhone in its it looks like in it's repeated you know we've seen those videos right where you you open and close a thing a bunch of times on a machine in order to kind of like model what the wear is. And what this report says is that the hinges consistently failing to meet the quality control standards under conditions of prolonged high frequency opening and closing. So one of those machines, almost certainly.

However, the report also says it's unlikely to push back the device's expected release window somewhat, what, noting that there is still ample time remaining. So I guess what they're saying here is this stuff happens. And if they fix it, it's not going to delay the product. But right now, at least as of this report, Apple has run in. I mean, this is clearly somebody in the factory saying to somebody, leaking to somebody, oh, yeah, it just failed a test. And so it becomes this story.

But it's a hard problem, right? This is part of new stuff for Apple to handle that they've never handled before, something like this. And they want to get it right. They don't want to have an iPhone come out that's got a bad. hinge that that moves badly or causes a big screen fold because it's moving wrong or or whatever is going on. Yeah, I mean, the hinge and the crease are like the whole game here, right? And and so many early folding phones failed because of debris in the hinge or things like that. So,

they're enclosed now. And, you know, I'm sure they'll figure it out. I also think that if the foldable, even if they split the iPhone line where they, the next, the 18 and maybe the air two or in the spring. So the fall is just the pro, pro max and foldable. I think the foldable could also come a little bit later if they need another few weeks. But I would suspect at this point you would hope that this would not be a showstopper. Yeah. I mean, they did have that issue with the, what I think was basically the camera control button,

which they turned into the action button late in the game because they were having issues with the camera control style non, you know, not quite physical button and so they replaced it with an actual physical button. So, you know, the product hasn't been announced. If they can't make it work reliably, they can just kick it to the spring. Yeah.

Or kick it to the following year. And they don't want to do that. They could do that. My understanding is the way this works is that, you know, when you're manufacturing the year, you make the small lots and you test them. But eventually you have to put it on the factory line and then you test those, right?

You're testing, you're testing batches as you go to make sure that it all is going to work okay. But you, you know, when you go up to the next level of production, I think you need to test it again. And they have names for every level of this, you know, DVT, BVT, PVT, QVC, I don't know. They've got all those levels. Yeah, they do.

And you need to test them at all those levels. And so this sounds to me like they brought it up to another level and did a bunch of this testing. They're not happy with the results. And what that suggests to me is that it probably is that something in the way they're assembled at this level is not how they're assembled at the previous level. And they got to debug it. And this stuff probably happens. If you know, send an anonymous comment about this. But my guess is this stuff happens all the time.

This is part of the process. of putting an iPhone on the factory is you've got to go through these cycles where you're like, that didn't work. Where is the problem? Why is this hinge now not working when it was working before? And then you solve it. So we'll see. But they do have the freedom.

I mean, they don't have the freedom to not ship the next iPhone pro. But they do have the freedom to not ship this if they really have a problem with it. They got all the latitude in the world with this product because it doesn't exist. It hasn't been announced. We all know that it's coming, but like they can delay it. and it's just not going to be the end of the world

because it's not an existing product that they're updating. All right, that is, that is the end of, of a rumor roundup. We're going to go to a new thing coming up in our next segment, which is going to be an interview. I got to talk to Jeffrey Kane, who wrote the book, Steve Jobs in Exile, which is coming out tomorrow as we record this, May 19th, about the book. And Stephen, you heard the interview because you're a time traveler from the future.

Yes. And I think it's really good. I think it's a lot of fun talking about Steve Jobs and Next and what Steve Jobs learned by failing it next. Yeah. Which is what the book is all about. It's a fascinating conversation. It's an area that has not been covered super well. Like there's some books about Next out there.

But I've not read the book right now. Yeah. I have. I have. And I know, I know. And it's the top of my list. But yeah, I think people are going to really like this. But before that, this episode is brought to you by Squarespace.

Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online, whether you're just starting out, or scaling your business. Squarespace gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your offerings with a professional website, grow your brand, and get paid all-in-one place. Stephen Hackett. Hello. You use Squarespace. Do you not? I do. I've been building a Squarespace forever. or Davis Smith's three apps,

which is Smith, Panorama plus plus and Sleep Plus, those sites. I built all on Squarespace. And look, I know what I'm doing. I could build something like super by hand, but why would I?

Because Squarespace makes it easy to build something beautiful. It works really well. And my favorite thing about it is that, you know, maybe you don't need everything on day one. Like maybe you launch a website and you don't need a blog

or like a video gallery on day one. But you do down the road. super easy to add it. And you're not like rebuilding your whole website from scratch. You just add those components and the navigation knows what to do and the site search knows what to do. It all knows about each other. And it means you can build something over time, which is also really cool and gives

you a lot of flexibility. So among the things you can do with Squarespace, you can get discovered fast. They have integrated SEO tools. You don't need to be a search engine expert. You know, you also don't want to build a website that nobody sees. That's why every Squarespace website is optimized to be indexed with meta descriptions, auto-generated site map and all sorts of other stuff so people can find your site and search engines will see it.

And you can make smarter business decisions with their analytics. You keep track of the stats that matter. Squarespace has intuitive built-in analytics tools. It makes it super easy for you to review website traffic. Learn where to focus engagement and track revenue from bookings, invoices, or product sales. head over to Squarespace.com slash upgrade for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code upgrade, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

That's Squarespace.com slash upgrade, offer code upgrade to get 10% off your first purchase and show your support for upgrade. Thank you to Squarespace for supporting this show and all of Relay. All right, now I want to introduce my special guest for this episode. It's Jeffrey Cain, author of Steve Jobs in Exile, which is coming out as we release this episode tomorrow, May 19th, Jeffrey, welcome to upgrade. Great to be here, Jason. I really enjoyed this book a lot.

I think people who are interested in Apple history and Steve Jobs history will get a lot out of it. It's funny. So you sent me an email about this, about the same time that I was writing my review of David Pogue's book. And it's such a great combination, actually. because David's book is so focused on being a biography of Apple that when Steve goes to next, he basically leaves the book

and then re-enters when Gilamilio is shopping for an operating system. And your book is, you know, it's got details of what sort of led to Steve leaving Apple. But like, your book is what happened to Steve

while he was gone, which is very dramatic in an amazing number of ways. Well, yeah, well, writing it, I could see the drama. It was something that popped out right at me. But yeah, David Pogue's book, excellent book. I have a copy on my desk and he goes so in depth and he's just so exhaustive. So we were joking together that our book should be sold as a set. You know, mine is like the middle years when Steve disappears from his book and then here's the story of how Steve got through those tough years at Next Computer. But yeah, it's, this, you know, this, you know, this, this. story, you know, I've written tech biographies before, written about companies. And what always popped out at me was the sheer amount of drama at Next Computer as Steve Jobs was leaving as he was descending into the wilderness and trying to find his way through these repeat failures. You know, almost everything he did from the time he left Apple in 1985 until about 1995, about 10 years later,

was a failure. Almost everything. The hardware that he made, the key. Cube, which is one of the famous items. And it's just, I was mind-blown by the sheer amount of financial terror and, you know, the personal bankruptcy that he would have faced if things continued in this direction just a few more years. That's what his colleagues told me. And I was thinking, wow, you know, like, if Steve Jobs is a guy who, you know, goes through this, then, you know, whatever problems I have in life or what other people might have, Maybe they're not actually that bad. If Steve Jobs can survive like total failure in bankruptcy and, you know, the hardware division of next computer falling apart, you know, maybe there's a lesson in here for all of us.

I had, I was telling somebody about having read this book and I said, I was like, how do I characterize it? And I thought, it's kind of tough. I mean, it is, it's a good book, but like this is not one of these heartwarming stories where Steve Jobs steps off stage at Apple and he goes into kind of like learns some important. important lessons in a heartwarming way and turns it all around. Like, it's a, it's not even a disaster. It's like a series of bad decisions and missteps and question marks. And like it, it, it really, you can see that this is, this is a guy who is being humbled by the world, at a time when he probably needs to be. But like, he is absolutely being humbled when he's on to next. Right. And that's the thrust of the story. We have this story. We have this narrative

that's often told that there was Apple version one and Steve left and then he returned 12 years later and he saved Apple and that became Apple version two, the iPod, the iPhone, the masterpiece age. I think that's a good term for it. But that's just our bias. That's what we want to see. Because when we're looking at great visionaries like Steve Jobs, who is one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our era, we look at the stuff that we want to see. We want to look at the successes. We want that guy in the turtleneck up there doing the brilliant keynote. He always says one more time. He holds up his little square rectangle and he can convince you that that's the future. Like, you know, almost nobody else can do that, the power that Steve Jobs had. But the story that

we often don't look at is what does it take to achieve that? It's not like Steve just showed up and had a brilliant idea for the iPhone and released it and then released iOS with it too. What really happened was the crucible. I mean, it was the wilderness. It was the suffering and the pain and the tragedy that he had to go through before he could get to that stage. It was years and years, more than a decade of building, you know, not just thinking of the idea, but building the execution. So, you know, building the company, the right team, the people, learning to lead them,

learning to not alienate them. And Steve Jobs, as we all know, was quite a difficult personality. So he had to learn that one the hard way. But my book is about the story before all that. What does it take to lead Apple? What does it take to get to that stage where you can actually be Steve Jobs? And to become Steve Jobs, you've got to go through that hardship first. Yeah.

So Steve famously, I think, and David Pogue's book is very good about explaining this. and you talk about it too, didn't quit, or he didn't get fired, but he quit because he kind of was getting sidelined and forced out. And he finally decided he was going to go. But in doing so, not only was that dramatic because he wanted to take a bunch of key people with them, but a thing that you detail in the book is his inspiration, right?

He had this moment where he was thinking about a computer that nobody was building primarily for higher education, which I had no idea about that. There was this idea that there was a computer that needed to be sufficiently powerful and affordable enough, but a workstation, a higher-in system than a general purpose personal computer. And that that was kind of the genesis of Next was we've got a, you know, Steve Jobs said, I think I've got a market that I could fulfill with something. Right, absolutely.

In the early years at Apple, Steve created the Macintosh, which was a historic moment. It's one of the iconic products of history. We all know the 1984 commercial, but one of the stories that's often overlooked is that, you know, when Steve would bring that around to serious laboratories, universities, you know, classrooms, he wanted the Macintosh installed in all these places. And one of the pieces of feedback that he got from so many leading, you know, we're talking Nobel Prize winning computer scientists, physicists, physicists, they would say, look, Steve. So, you know, you have a really cool little computer there.

It's fun for writing and it's fun for drawing. But take a look at all these big giant supercomputers in my laboratory right here. I'm pretty sure this little Macintosh with the smiley face is not really going to stand up to what I need here. That was the kind of feedback he would get. So one of the dreams that he had over time, it didn't occur to him right away. It was kind of something that happened over a few years. He realized that the next stage after the Macintosh was going to be what's called a 3M computer. and this is a super advanced for the time, for the mid to late 1980s, a very advanced computer

that can do the latest modeling calculations, has some potential for artificial intelligence, one of the other lesser-known stories about Steve Jobs, he really wanted AI on this thing in the late 80s. And he realized that, you know, for him to really make his mark on history, because that's what Steve always wanted. He wanted to be a figure who, you know, wasn't just creating cool things, but was pushing forward the trajectory of where humankind was going, he realized that he needs to develop something that scientists can use and university researchers and even intelligence agencies at one point. And this was the genesis of Next Computer.

He said, I'm going to take what I've been doing at Apple and I'm going to step it up a level. I'm going to leave. I'm going to start my own company. And with this new even cooler computer than the Macintosh, I'm going to change the world. Yeah. Yeah, and with his people that he assured John Scully were not major people,

but were actually major people at Apple that he was just going to take along for the ride. But you mentioned, so there is this 3M computer. That's the goal. But I don't know. I mean, one of the lessons I guess Steve Jobs did have to learn is his priorities were kind of all over the place, right? I mean, he famously wanted a beautiful factory. They spent a lot of money on their facilities. And also, even when it came to computer specs, right, they, the computer they ended up with, after all of this time going around and having not just him, but the other people who worked with universities, I think Danil Lewin, who is a key figure in the book and a key figure it next, like they, I get the impression from your book that they put in a lot of time to understand the market and understand what this computer needed to be.

but as Steve kind of like prioritized it, the computer they ended up with did not fulfill the priorities of their customers. Like it was, that was the whole premise of the company. And when it got to the point where that product came, it was not a product that they wanted. No, absolutely. It was not what they wanted.

And yeah, Steve, Steve, and next computer, they kept making wild promises that they couldn't keep to their customers. But here's what was happening. And this was the psychology of Steve Jobs at the time. So, you know, he was pushed out of Apple. He was resentful. He was so deeply angry at John Scully, who was the CEO.

And a lot of what he did was to get back at Apple and get back at John Scully. I mean, you know, like, I can't personally imagine just the deep pain of, you know, having spent my entire 20s building one of the most successful computer companies ever. And then having that torn away from me and being pushed out and told that, I'm no longer needed because, you know, Steve had his problems and, you know, he was difficult, but he was really sidelined in those years in 85 and, you know, was pushed out. So, you know, what Steve was doing, he wasn't thinking clearly about what the market needed from him. He wasn't thinking about what the world truly wanted from him.

What people actually wanted it, and this is what they told him, is that, you know, we want a machine that can solve our problems, which means, you know, we want something that we can use for an advanced physics, experiment. You know, we want, you know, like the CIA would approach him and they would say we want something we can use for satellite imagery very advanced at the time. But Steve wasn't thinking in terms of what his customers wanted. He was thinking in terms of what he could show people that was so brilliant that it would blow them away. They would knock down this door to his headquarters and they would just want to buy up the farm and take all the next computers they could. He even had a dream during these years. He really wanted to build, so this factory, he set up a factory,

a manufacturing plant in Fremont, California, across the bay from the next headquarters. And his dream was that people would fly in from all over the world and they would have their next computer, which is a perfect, beautiful cube made of this, this beautiful magnesium metal that was so exotic. You know, they would stand there at the factory line and see the motherboard being created, and he only used robotic arms, you know, and this is back in the 80s. You know, we're not talking like tech today. So advanced for its time, and they would make the motherboard, and then somebody would put it in the cube, and the cube would come off the assembly line, and then they would get to, you know,

pick it up and take it home and, you know, have their brilliant new computer. Of course, you know, if that had actually happened, then we would all be using next computers today. So obviously it didn't succeed by any measure. And this was his greatest flaw during these years. It was the mismatch between what he thought was his brilliant vision and what the people around him, the actual businessmen and business executives and women were telling him, like, you know, the world doesn't want a computer just because it's a cube. They want something that will allow them to use powerful software that has specific, you know, purposes. And he just wouldn't listen.

Yeah, it's fascinating because you can see within him in your, your book, the brilliance, right? Like, he had some really brilliant ideas, but they were uncoupled from any kind of responsibility about what the, what the business needed, right? The business, I almost get the sense, and I don't know if you spell it out, but I almost get the sense that, you know, the business was there as a pretense for him to do the cool stuff that he wanted to do, and that it was like the business had a premise that then he just ignored because he wanted the magnesium case and like all of this impracticality that that that was cool. Like there's no doubt about it.

It was cool. But like it didn't lead in a way that's weird if you remember Steve Jobs when he returned to Apple where there was much more pragmatism about it. It was cool. But also he was often very pragmatic. In the next era, it's like, I mean, maybe does it come down to that there was nobody there to tell him he was wrong or at least nobody he would listen to? Well, he did listen to people. So, you know, he would listen,

but he had this thing called the hero head roller coaster, which was this kind of psychological effect he had on people. So, you know, if you work for Steve Jobs, one day you're a hero with the most brilliant ideas ever and he loves you.

And then the next day you're a head and everything you're doing is just crap. He would call it literally and he would say, redo this, do the software again. This was, you know, both the strength of his, but it was also a weakness,

and it depended on, you know, like what he was working on. It was a strength because he was so talented at spotting great people and getting what he needed out of them. He could, this is what every single next computer employee told me that the place was just, of any place that they had worked in their entire careers in Silicon Valley, it was the most creative, the most pressure cooker, the most visionary, smartest place they've ever worked. And that's because Steve Jobs was just so

tough on what he demanded from them. He really knew how to bring the best out of them. But then the flip side of that is that he could quickly turn cruel. I mean, he was so demanding and so perfectionist that his teams would present him with really good ideas. And they would say, this is what the market wants right now. They would, for example, they would set up a massive distribution network, one of the stories in the book. So Dan O'Lewan, his second in command during these years, was setting up an IBM partnership, and they were going to license the next step.

So the operating system through IBM. IBM was the leading computer company of the day. That's an example of something that could have actually changed the course of technology because then today, yeah, any PC, you know, we might have the Windows option, but then next computers, next step might actually be the operating system that we use today.

But Steve, you know, he decided, I don't like IBM. You know, this idea is and I'm going to blow up this relationship. So the IBM deal just died off in the end. And he self-sabotaged. I mean, it really is a tragedy in a way because he was given everything he needed by some of the top people in technology at the time. And he dismissed them and blew it off. And he sewed the, he sewed the, he sewed the, uh, the foundations of his own coming demise, his brief demise before he could recover.

So you mentioned it there. One of the things that really has lingered from reading your book is I didn't quite realize just how big the missed opportunities were. And what you just said is one of the key points in the book, I think, which is there's a moment where Microsoft is not yet a colossus. Microsoft has not yet kind of cracked with Windows becoming the de facto standard for computers. And there is a moment where next,

which has a lot of technical advantages in terms of its software and in terms of app building, just it's really interesting technically, and they get this deal with IBM. And the case you make in the book is there is a scenario there where if Steve Jobs goes down that path, next step becomes windows instead of windows. And like you said, Steve just says, I don't want to do that.

And that's it. Like enormous business opportunity just blown out the window. Right. Well, when I was researching the book, I had trouble figuring out, you know, what the heck was going on in his head during these moments. And I had to do a lot of really deep research, just understanding from the people around him. What he was saying and what he, you know, what was he, I would ask them, like, what was he writing on the whiteboard? What, I mean, why does any, you know, supposedly a brilliant visionary

like Steve Jobs line up a deal with IBM and then just blow it up because he just doesn't want to work with them? Well, one of the things that came down to was his need for control. And this was something that he had to temper during these years. So we all know, I mean, this is a well-known part of him. Steve Jobs was a control freak. And that's why, you know, he built the walled garden at Apple that he's so famous for. He really wanted hardware and software to be unified and work together. And that's one of the reasons why he succeeded. That's why Apple is still, you know, a massive company today. But in these years, so this was at Steve Jobs in his early 30s, he understood the need for control. And he even structured Next Computer around keeping

it a private company so he would not have to go public and lose control again. Like what happened to him at Apple. So the entire system was, highly tightly controlled, also very secretive. He said, and I looked at a lot of this footage of him that hasn't been broadcast before, and he would be giving talks and conference rooms to the employees, and he would say, I want this to be a very secretive company. Do not, the only thing you can say is I work at Next Computer. Nobody knows what we're working on. This all comes down to his need to make sure that control is his. And even if, you know, a great deal comes along the way, if that deal is going to rest control away from Steve Jobs in any way,

then he's going to blow it up and he's going to walk away. And that's what IBM he feared was doing. The IBM deal was great. I mean, the operating system that Steve was making was going to be on every single, well, every single IBM workstation at least out there. And then Steve just said to heck with it because he didn't want to lose control of the hardware and software bundle, the next cube bundle with next step. He was fearing that IBM was going to,

you know, take that away from him by putting it on their computers. So that's just one example. I mean, you know, another good example, Ross Perrault, the presidential candidate, you know, for, I'm old enough to remember him, and I'm sure a lot of people can. He was a major investor in Next Computer, but Steve also blew up that relationship because Ross, who was a military government contractor, was going to line up technology contracts with the intelligence agencies. And, you know, Steve Jobs, being the hippie at heart, who he is, decided that he didn't want that. He wanted that control over his image, and he wanted a computer that would democratize things instead of be handed off to a government.

So another lost opportunity. Imagine if today that had worked out, Steve Jobs might be the world's biggest intelligence agency. He might be like Hugh from James Bond, the character with all the gadgets. I'm glad you mentioned that because I was going to mention that. that is the next enormous missed opportunity, business opportunity anyway, which is thanks to Ross Perrault. And also thanks to the fact that the next computer ended up being kind of overspecked, but also overpriced for the target market.

It turns out it fell into the perfect market for the intelligence community to analyze those satellite photos and all of that. And I can hear him because I do remember Ross Perrault quite well. I can hear him reasoning with Steve Jobs. So it's like, you know, he's invested a lot of money in Next at this point. He's like, look, we can sell a lot of next cubes to the NSA and the CIA. And like, it will be a fat government contract, which, you know, they don't care how much our computers cost. And they will buy a lot of them and we will make a lot of money, which allows the company to continue to progress.

And the way you put it in the book is Steve basically is like, nah, I don't want to take money from the government. And that's it. And like, that's it. Like, he just, it's, I mean, on one level, I guess I admire it, but it does, it, on a business level, he is for a company that we know it's fate. And we know that it basically is going to fall on very hard times. It's really staggering to read these stories where these doors are open for him. And he just says, I'm not interested and refuses to walk through. Right.

It was shocking. I mean, when I was learning about these stories, I was just thinking like, come on, man, Steve, like, everybody knows what's going to happen here. It's so obvious where this is going to end, and you keep making the worst possible decision. So, yeah, I mean, it's, I still crack up when I think about some of these stories. And, you know, the people who lived it still look back on it and think that was so irrational and so bizarre. Like, I don't know why I put myself through that at an X computer. But, you know, it's a story that, you know, they carry with them. The thing about, you know, so like this rejecting government contracts, rejecting IBM,

there's something really fundamental here that's going on. And it's the problems that Steve is having, realizing what it actually takes to build a business versus just being the artist. So, you know, we see during this period Steve, the artist, and he's a brilliant artist. He can spot a beautiful design, his cube, was a... inspired by, you know, Zen philosophy and architecture, and, you know, he hires the best German designer to come out and make it for him. He knows what he needs aesthetically, and he knows that the future is going to look something like this, that, you know, we're going to have an operating system with

these drag and drop icons. That's what he was developing as early as the 80s, which is just incredible when you think about the vision. But Steve even reflected on this at one point. in an interview. He said that, you know, vision is not enough. One of the lessons he learned in this period is that the execution is really the key. And, you know, what is execution? If you're building a business, it's, you know, you need the distribution network. You need the reliable supply chain. You need a team who you can call on and trust. You know, you need reliable contracts. And, you know, especially if you're in advanced tech, those are corporate and federal government contracts. What Steve had failed to see early in these years is that, you know, you know,

building a business, you know, it's unfortunate. Like, you know, you can take your principles as far as you want, but ultimately you have to build the business, which means you have to sell. And if you're selling a computer to one market, in this case, university researchers and they're not buying it, then you have to find another market. Once you grow, you know, so fine, sell to the federal government, sell to the big corporations that Steve hated. But once you grow, then you're in a position to have the scale and the profitability where you can make the decisions you want. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Claude from Anthropic. I have been using Claude for a lot of like little technical code problems, like not even code CSS. I had a

CSS issue on six colors the other week because I have Glenn writing for me now, Glenn Fleischman. And Glenn is, I don't want to say Glenn's making trouble because that's not accurate. I've internalized all of the weird quirks of our CSS and know like not to do certain things because the CSS isn't right. And Glenn doesn't have those limitations. He just writes what he think is the best way to do his format. And what I discovered was that he was bumping into areas where our CSS was just lacking. So like he was putting images in a bulleted list. And the way it works with our markdown, the bulleted list is indented because that's what bulleted lists are. But the images are outside of the bulleted list and therefore aren't indented. And I said to him, Glenn, you can't put

images in a bulleted list because then they look like they're outside it and they break the level. If there's another bullet afterward, it looks all wrong. Well, I just, I showed Claude my site CSS and I explained this problem. And I said, what I'd like is another ID for our figure class in our HTML that doesn't indent like a bulleted list so that I can solve this problem. them for Glenn. And, you know, it didn't take Claude more than a very short amount of time to say, I have two different options for you, which is better for your site. I was able to take that code, run it on my development site, test it, make sure that it was right, made a few tweaks to make myself happy with it, and I was able to deploy that. And I did that twice for two different CSS issues

brought about by Glenn being more clever than our CSS. And I was able to fix them, directly without going to the designer who did the CSS who hasn't worked on it in 10 years or another designer who hasn't worked on it in two or three years. I was able to get Claude to help me with it and then test it and then deploy it in a matter in a very short amount of time. So just so useful for stuff like that or for adapting one of my newsletter script that I have for Six Colors members to do an audio version of our newsletter for members now, which is a podcast that reads it aloud. And I took the one script that I wrote. And then I had Claude code work on it with me to generate a podcast that I was happy with,

which required huge amounts of iteration. But I'm very proud of the result. So, you know, just problems big and small that I've run into. And Cloud has been there for me. It's really great. It is the AI for minds that don't stop it good enough. It's the collaborator that understands your workflow and we'll think with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight, strategizing a business move.

Claude can extend your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. If you're a developer spending half your day on task, you wish you could hand off. Cloud code runs in your terminal. It reads your code base. And it can take on things like writing tests, refactoring, or debugging without you handholding it through every single step. Cloud code is at the frontier of agentic coding. It's not just another coding assistant. It will handle project-wide refactors for you while preserving your coding style and showing its work, very important.

And you stay in full control. Like I said, I got to use Claude Code on my newsletter project. and in fact, the way I chose to deploy it is it was rewriting a file on my disk, but the official version of that script was on my server, and that meant that every time I wanted to import Claude's changes, I would open them and BB edit, do a diff, compare the two versions, approve every change. And you don't have to do that, but I did that, and it made me feel like I had taken more ownership over knowing what code I was running. and I still got all of the benefits of Claude code.

If you're considering adding a new tool to your setup, you want to know you're in good company. Companies like Stripe, Shopify, and Pfizer, trust Anthropic with a rollout of AI in their businesses. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude today at clod.aI-slash upgrade. That's c-l-a-u-d-E-D-A-I-slash upgrade. And check out Claude Pro,

which includes access to all the features mentioned in this ad. Claude.AI slash upgrade. Thank you to Claude for supporting this show and all of Relay. As a side project working on a bunch of stuff around Apple at 50, and one of the things that I did a bit of a dive into was that early dynamic between Jobs and Wozniak. And what struck me about the Apple One and especially the Apple II story. is I think Steve Jobs had a very particular vision. His vision was always about taking high technology

and making products that felt like consumer products, that felt like appliances. And the Apple 2 was the first iteration of that. The Mac was the next iteration of that. And I think ultimately we saw his vision play out with the iPod and the iPhone, and the iMac and the iPad, right? But reading your book, what it also made me think is,

he was just not an enterprise guy. Like, he kept, I think his vision was really about people in their homes. And then you're like, IBM, what could be more monolithic and corporate? Or the federal government, and especially the CIA or the NSA, these are, and yeah, I think some of it was his kind of hippie background. But I also think he was just so focused on kind of empowering the individual with technology. And I just don't think he got any joy out of the idea of empowering the, you know, giant

institutions with computer technology. And that's the best read I've got on why he ran away from IBM and the government, is that, like, it's just not what he was trying to do with his life. Well, I don't think he wanted to do that with his life either. I agree completely. And I think that he was, you know, he was just feeling, it felt like a betrayal of his own values, a betrayal, you know, he, this is the guy who had the famous photograph and he was flipping the bird to IBM. So the IBM building. Yeah, yeah.

In New York, you know, that's who he was. It was so core to his identity that he could not imagine himself going to an, you know, enterprise software contractor and selling a zillion software packages to compact for. example. That was just not his thing. And he even said that. He remarked on this to a lot of the people around him. He would say, you know, I just don't like this. This is not enjoyable. It's just not who I am. But, you know, it's a company that I can run. And, you know, that journey, you know, I had a really interesting conversation with one of the key software developers at Next computer, one of the, one of the indie software developers who developed for Next. And he said something really interesting that stuck with me, that, you know, this was a very dark period for Steve because

he kept trying to get access to markets that were not opening to him. You know, one of those markets, students in their dorm rooms. Okay, well, his computer is way overpriced. He's charging them basically a year's tuition to give them a computer in their dorm room. And he's telling them, you should cure cancer with this. That's literally a quote of Steve's. You know, these markets are not opening, but that's really who he wants to be. And the dark. that kind of took over him in this period was because he found himself making these compromises. But this one developer he remarked, and he knew Steve well, he said that this was an unusual stage that he needed to go through because if Steve had not been put through that furnace,

like that blast of, you know, here's what it takes to build an actual corporation that can sell to other corporations, he would have become, you know, this guy wandering. in the desert with, you know, spring, sprung hair and, you know, a giant beard, you know, just kind of talking nonsense to people. He almost thought that this was a kind of refinement. And, you know, it's like a lot of great leaders out there. And it's not just Steve. A lot of, I've studied a lot of presidential biographies. A lot of leaders who can communicate have gone through this. And it's a furnace blast that forces you to take one good, hard look. Is your idea really a great idea, or are you just so absorbed in what it is that you want to do that you just can't,

you can't become like that diamond in the rough. You can't be crushed a bit by your environment and see what the environment around you actually needs from you. In thinking about your book, one of the things that I was realizing is Steve kind of, I mean, Apple was targeting a customer base that is sort of was harmonious with what Steve Jobs kind of wanted to do. And when he left, he kind of needed right, there were lawsuits and threatened lawsuits and all sorts of other things. He kind of needed to run away from Apple and in fact promised not to compete with them.

And in hindsight, that feels like, not that they didn't have those opportunities, but if Steve wanted to do what he wanted to do, that was the root of it. The fatal mistake was right at the beginning, which was he was running away from Apple because he had to,

but Apple was the place that could address bringing technology to the masses rather than, like, I mean, because the tragedy, of this is that Steve Jobs did not want to be an enterprise software and hardware entrepreneur, and he founded an enterprise hardware and software company. So it's like, it was just a mismatch. So is one of the things he learned that when he went back to Apple, he learned that this was what he wanted to do and this is, this is who he wanted to be? Because, I mean, Next was fortunate

to get a phone call from Ellen Hancock and Gil Amelio and get bought by Apple. so that they could sell and be done. But, like, was, I guess what I'm really asking here is the big question, which is, what did Steve Jobs learn from the next experience? Because it doesn't read, like, somebody who got it at next. I feel like he never got it at next, got thrown a lifeline, and then was able to bring those experiences back to Apple where he could put it all together. I don't unless correct me if I'm wrong.

I didn't really read that there was ever a moment when he was at next where suddenly everything clicked and he became the Steve Jobs we would come to know. Yeah. So there was no moment. You're right. There was no single moment. Maybe the closest thing to that moment would be the collapse of the next hardware division when they had to throw out the cubes. And one guy literally tried to burn a cube. It wouldn't burn because it was made with the super, you know, the super exotic alloy that like you couldn't find anywhere.

and it was hyper resistance to flammability. So just like a funny story about how ridiculously perfectionist next was. Like you literally cannot, you know, point a torch at it and make it burn. And that's what Steve wanted. He wanted the perfect cube. I think that, you know, so it was a series of lessons over time. And no, Steve did not learn all of them. And he actually did make some of the mistakes again.

But, you know, over time, he was corrected. So it was by no means like, you know, like a here, today, Steve is doing something bad and tomorrow he's doing something good. It was a very tough and winding road and the lessons were often taught to him in sequences and it would happen more than once. And then finally, you know, after the fifth time of something going wrong, Steve has to step out of his reality distortion field and has to take a hard look at what he's doing. So I think that, you know, if there's one big lesson that he did learn, it's how to channel the reality distortion properly. That's what he was so famous for, right? I mean, that's what, like,

even from his youngest days at Apple, he could hold up that motherboard, you know, at the homebrew computing club, and, you know, he could just sell it to people. And, you know, he got the check from Mike Markula, um, started Apple. I mean, not, you know, back then that was really unusual. I know today that's fairly common getting a major paycheck for a startup, but he was the pioneer for this kind of thing. Um, but, you know, during the middle years at Next Computer, this is when reality distortion hit its limit. And then reality started distorting back at Steve. And reality started telling him, like, this can't work anymore. You know, you succeeded because you were 22 and you were cool and smart. But, you know, when you're 32, that's not going to work because, you know,

people see you now as growing, more mature. You have to start behaving as a businessman will. And you can't behave, you know, like a young guy, young rebellious guy with cool ideas. It just doesn't fly anymore. So that's, you know, if there's one transformation that Steve went through, it's that transformation. It's, you know, realizing that you have to step out of the reality distortion field. And, you know, you have to take a good look at things like balance sheets and distribution networks and, you know, all the foundational software, the enterprise software, the whole grid that exists underneath that one beautiful product that Steve was always chasing. And it's, Ironically, once he started focusing on all the nooks and crannies and started thinking about, you know, this coding element, this, you know, this web object software that makes web pages.

He even admitted in an interview at one point. He said this technology, so tech does not change the world. A very unsteve thing to say, it does not change the world, but it makes certain things easier. And he said, I'll make software that can make it easier to sell things online. And this became the basis for a lot of the, you know, Dell computer and its success on. on the internet back in the 90s. Once he realized that, you know, once he realized, like, you don't need the big world-changing idea. You need the infrastructure around it first. Then, ironically, he was able to return to Apple and recover and rebuild Apple.

And, you know, because of that infrastructure that he built at Next, he was able to make iOS and, you know, the iPhone and so forth possible. Yeah, I mean, good, his recruitment of Avi Tavian and basing next on Unix. And, you know, that is a thing that not only got Next bought by Apple,

but every Apple product now basically runs a variant of what was Next Step, which is kind of amazing when you think about it. So there was some good technical backing there. I will also point out, like, when Steve came back to Apple, it's so everybody wants to mythologize this guy, and I understand why. And your book does a really good job of de-mistone. defying the Steve Jobs story and showing you the flaws because they are a super important part of who this person was.

But like, he made a lot of bad decisions at Apple in the early days, too. Nobody wants to talk about them. We only want to talk about the good ones. Nobody really wants to talk about why the G4Cube happened and why it was a complete misfire. Nobody wants to talk about XERV, which was, again, an attempt to kind of like reach an enterprise market and it was a failure too. like there were a bunch of things that Apple tried in the earliest days of Steve Jobs' return that were also failures. But he was, I do believe, having read your book, that he learned through failure, he was humbled a little bit, realized he needed to step outside himself.

I think you said that really well. And also was finally put back in charge of a brand in Apple that was trying to reach the people he always wanted to reach, you know, because he never wanted it to be a product for IBM or for the Defense Department. He wanted to reach people in their homes. And once he was back at Apple, ha ha, he could finally do that. And that was where he found his most success. So, but boy, you're, again, I just want to endorse your book again. Steve Jobs in exile, Jeffrey Kane. It's out tomorrow, basically, May 19th. It is, it's an important pathway to understanding all of Steve Jobs, I think, or at least all of Steve Jobs as a business person, because you can see the brilliance and you can see the flaws.

And there's really, I think it's a great era of his life where it's all going on, right? And it has a happy ending, but boy, he went through a lot of suffering, much of itself inflicted, but still a lot of suffering after having such great success at Apple. And I think about that sometimes reading the book. It's like, first John Scully sidelines you and you leave the company you founded. And then everything happens at next. I mean, like, the fact that he kept going is kind of amazing. Yeah. It is amazing. And a lot of people would have given up. And one of the things I found so fascinating about this story is all the different touch points, the narrative touch points, if Steve had made a different decision, even just a slightly different decision,

at any of these many dozens of points in the story, he would have failed. He would have probably been written out of history. And then Apple would have probably gone out of business because he would not have returned. So, you know, next is the pivotal, these are the pivotal years of the biography of Steve Jobs, because if Next had never happened, then Apple, as we know it, I would argue, would have never happened. And, you know, we might all be using, I don't know, compact PCs with Next Step load on them or something. I don't know. Something different.

Although if he had made better decisions, we'd all be using PCs running Next Step. So. Right. There we go. There we go. Maybe IBM still. Who knows. Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, it is, I agree with David Pogue and you. I think this is a great part of the 50th anniversary of Apple is to consider this part of the story where one of the founders goes away. And then he comes back and famously saves the company. What happened when he was off stage in David Pogue's book? The answer is read Steve Jobs in Exile by Jeffrey Kaine. Jeffrey, thank you so much for being on Upgrade and for talking to me about this.

I really enjoyed the book. Like I said, there are moments where I'm just shaking my head. But it is so fascinating and there's so much in there that I had never heard before. You have so many great sources for people who worked at Next. So I really highly recommend the book, and thank you so much for talking to me about it. Great to be here, Jason. This episode of Upgrade is also brought to you by Steam Clock. A lot of mobile apps aren't great.

They're just mediocre. They're fine. They're fine. They're not broken, but they're fine. But you notice the difference the moment you use something good. Steam Clock software builds good mobile apps for companies that care about taste and making good apps that are not just fine. They're a design and development studio based in Vancouver, Canada, right by the Steam Clock. There's a Steam Clock.

If you've been to Vancouver, you know. And they've been shipping iOS and Android apps for over 15 years. Their clients are growing tech companies that care about mobile, but don't have the in-house team to build something great. Steam Clock works with companies to level up their app so they can go from it's holding us back to it's pulling its weight. Some of their clients have discovered the hard way that vibe coding your way to the App Store, not a great product strategy. What makes Steam Clock worth calling is that is not just that their execution is good. It's that they will help you figure out what the right approach is. They have made so many apps.

They are so good at this. They will help you figure out the right approach, give you an honest read on your situation before you commit to anything. Their client apps have been downloaded over 10 million times. They've helped five of their clients through acquisitions. If you're building something and need a mobile team that cares as much as you do, Steam Clock is where to start. And while you could go to Vancouver, stand at the steam clock, spin around three times and find SteamClock software, I recommend something else, which is to go to Steamcloc.com slash upgrade and get in touch.

That's SteamClock.com slash upgrade. Thank you to SteamClock for all the great work they do building good apps for supporting upgrade and all of Relay. Time now for AskUpgrade. Okay. I'm not good at it. I don't do it every week. I know. You're warming up.

The lasers are warming up. It's fine. Thomas writes in, given Apple's desire to do things on device, here we go. We got it. I'm curious how you would see personal context going when having more than one device. You've spoken about using third-party email clients on your Mac.

So won't all your email be missing from context there? Would any difference in apps between devices yield a different context on each? Covered this briefly earlier, Thomas. Yes, this is a concern. I don't use Apple Mail on my devices. I use Mimstream. Yep. So there's a few options here.

Like first off, I don't think they're going to sync. Like I said before, I don't think they're going to sink across devices. I think it's going to be like photos. That means that, yes, there will be a different context on each. The question is, does Apple do something like, say, you know, certain kinds of apps, calendar apps, client apps or whatever, calendars or emails or whatever can opt in to being indexed? And then they're in the system.

Donate their content to the index. Yeah. You could do it that way. Now, Apple tends to roll things out just for first party clients and then at third party support later, but they change stuff. Maybe they'll change that. The other way this could go, and I don't love it, but it could go this way. I have my calendar in calendar with everything turned off because there are certain contexts where you have to add an item to the calendar. and it wants to do it in the system calendar and not fantastical.

And so I just have to keep that on in parallel. And I do see a scenario where you might have to actually put your email in mail and then not use mail, which is stupid, but it's possible that that would be the way. I don't like it. I think this is why you need to support third parties

if you're Apple so that you can get the best experience. But Apple, I mean, Apple doesn't, Apple does this all the time where they're like, we got a great new feature, requires use of all of our apps. Right. And then in year two or three, it comes around to others. You know,

maybe we already are in year two or three because they talked about all this stuff in 24. It is a very interesting question. And I hope that at least for some sorts of apps, they can donate their data. You know, in terms of like the differences between your devices, that's how a lot of stuff is, right?

Like the core stuff, like calendars and notes and things, you know, kind of everywhere, but I don't know if you don't get the exact same result on your MacBook Air and then you walk down the hall with your iPhone in your hand and do it again. Like, is that the end of the world? Like, I think, most people think about this is a phone feature, right?

And maybe that's, all it is. We don't know that. But I don't think it's going to be that big of a deal. I hope. And they may not, I mean, they may not do it. That's the other thing that I'm, I'm open to the idea that this personal context concept is just going to get thrown away. Yeah. It's definitely possible. Yeah. Yeah. Or they, they, they, they refactor it to something that's a little bit different and uses ICloud. And I, I mean, I honestly don't know what they're going to do. Um, but it is one of the technical challenges that we've, We've been talking about really for two years now. Ever since they announced it,

there were a lot of questions about personal context that would only be answered in the fall of 2024 when we... Oh, still asking them. Bob wrote in and said, Jason, have you checked out the MLB app on Vision Pro lately? I got all the baseball questions in here for you, Stephen. Great.

I really like the 3D game tracking during the live playing of the video. I don't think they had that enabled the last time I checked it out. I was on an episode of the Vision Pro's podcast, April 30th, episode 65. And we talked about the MLB app. The new, this season's MLB app for Vision Pro is fantastic because they have, they're

now using basically like video game player models. And the way MLB system works, they're tracking in real time all player movement on the field, the ball and the player and the bat. And they've turned it into like, it looks like a video game. You're in a 3D space. And like, you see the batter swing the bat and you see the ball go where it's going. and you see all the outfielders move. And previously on Vision Pro,

this was, they were all like dots. You were watching dots move around. But now it's, it's like animated versions of players, like video game versions of players. And it's really impressive. My experience has been that they've got it working perfectly,

syncing it with the audio of the radio. And this is what I heard from somebody who wrote in and said that they had, they loved it because they had a game that they couldn't watch because it was blacked out. and they put the radio on and watched the 3D version in the Vision Pro and they said it was a pretty good experience.

And I agree. I thought it was a pretty good experience. I have yet to get the video to sync up with the action. I don't know what the difference is there. But what you really want is the stat cast data that's powering it to be in sync with what you're watching.

Otherwise, like it's no fun to have the pitch come in and then 10 seconds pass. and then the pitch comes in on the video or the opposite. Either way, it's not fun. You really want it to be in sync. Whereas the audio version,

yeah, it's kind of magical, actually. You're listening to a radio description of a baseball game while you're watching this video game version of the baseball game. It's pretty fun, and you can change where you are. So they've done some work there. I lament the standard MLB app they updated. MLB, that app, MLB at Bat is what it used to be called.

We gave it so many different awards at Macworld back in the day. Because it was a cutting-edge iPhone app. So good. And I got to be honest, the current version of the MLB app is garbage. It's just terrible. Disappointing.

Like, I used to be able to check really easily like what the scores were. Now the scores are all like big and you have to scroll a lot and it's hard to scan it and the iPad version is bad. The phone version is bad. It's just a mess. And there are

You know, there are so many better ways of doing a baseball app than what the current official MLB app is doing. It's just very disappointing. So I hope, I don't know what's going on over there. It feels very much to me like they brought in a new team of people who are like, given the instruction to make it identical on all platforms. And it does feel like as an iPhone user, I don't know how bad or good the Android version was.

Maybe it was good. And now it's bad too. But it feels to me like somebody rolled in and said, we need a consistent experience everywhere and the new consistent experience is bad. Yeah, you know, so much software is made that way now and I think it's such a mistake

because how many people in the world are going to use MLB on their iPhone in their left pocket and their pixel phone and their right pocket, right? It's easier for them. It's, you know, they can have one design team, probably still going to have different development teams to target the different platforms,

but it's such a mistake so much of the time, I think, to do that. Because what you end up doing is your app on all platforms is worse, right? It's not just that the iPhone app gets a little more like Android. It's that the Android app is also not as good as it could be. Or, you know, if it's on the desktop and you end up using Electron or something, well, then the Mac app's not as good as it could be. It's just, it's so frustrating to see. Yeah, it's not good.

And it is kind of a trend. So I hope they get it together. But right now it's just, it's bad. But the Vision Pro, to go back to that, the Vision Pro app actually got a lot better. And it's very interesting. It's still weird and experimental, but everything on the Vision Pro is weird and experimental. But adding the animated players makes it so much more fun. So if you've got a Vision Pro and you like baseball, it's worth a checkout.

Matthias writes, I have been wondering if focusing on services is the original sin for Apple that poisoned everything. If this was the case, would separating Apple and Google from their stores fix it? Original sin, I mean, I would say

making more money than they ever really intended to on the app store and on Google Safari referrals was the original sin, generated enormous amounts of revenue. I think, what we at least popularly think of services is more like

I-wash to fit the services narrative by giving it some main characters because we all know that like Apple TV is not driving the services revenue. It's the app store and its Safari, you know, Google search. And those other things are good and they may drive some growth and that's good. But like even there, I would say AppleCare is more of a driver it's not the stuff that gets all the attention in services. It's AppleCare revenue and ICloud revenue and Safari search revenue and App Store cut revenue and App Store subscription revenue. Like that's what drives it.

So I think you have to look there. And so if Matthias is saying, you know, separating the App Store, you know, would that fix it? I mean, App Store exists for a reason. and I think that it's probably a good reason, but it has led them down this path. But I don't think, it's just think about what the services revenue is because Apple spending money on TV shows

is not what got Apple here. No, it's so small compared to the rest of it. You know, back in, I guess this was in 2021, during Epic versus Apple, a Phil Schiller email came out during Discovery. And this is quoting from that email. We'll put a link in the show notes. do we think our 7030 split will last forever?

I'm a staunch supporter of the 7030 split and keeping it simple and consistent across our stores. I don't think that 7030 will last unchanged forever. I think someday we will see enough challenge from another platform or web-based solution to want to adjust our model. I think the question moves from if to when and how. And then he actually goes on to talking about,

like he lays out an example. Again, quoting from the email, I'm sorry, this is a long quote, but I think it's important. Just as one thought, we are making over $1 billion a year in profit from the App Store. Is that enough to then think about a model where we ratchet down from 7030 to 75, 25, 25, or even 8020? If we can maintain a $1 billion a year run rate, I know that's controversial, but I just tee it up as another way to look at the size of the business, what we want to achieve, and how we stay competitive. I think Schiller had it right in that email which he sent

So the discovery was in 2021 Do you know when he sent that email? 2013 2011. 2011, yeah. Yeah. Come on. Yeah.

Yeah, they made a choice and this is something that I know people have talked about on other podcasts about the Tim Cook era, but like this is a great example of that. Whether was Tim Cook driving it or whether it was the CFO driving it or whatever,

is that under Tim Cook's watch, they made a decision, even though Phil Schiller was like, the app store was never meant to be this huge of a revenue generator. And we are, it is such an asset to the iPhone. And it'll get us in trouble. And they said, we are willing to do all of that because we are making, we're just rolling in it. That's what they decided. And, you know, I know we talk about this a lot, this idea that, um, Apple acts like the underdog even, and doesn't understand that they're the bully now. But this is a great example of that where Apple, Apple saying we're never going to give an inch and we need to take every dollar

is an understandable behavior from when Steve Jobs came back to Apple. And it doesn't really fly anymore with anybody. And I think it endangers. I mean, when Matthias asked this, he's saying separating Apple from the app store. It's like, that would be very bad for Apple. I think that would be bad for users. But like, do you want to risk that? Like, in order to take every dollar off the table instead of only some of the dollars.

Plus, you would have to forgive me, because I've ran it about this on upgrade before. But like, the classic one is, I don't think because of Apple's status as a platform owner, that they would do badly in a more competitive situation. I think they have so many other advantages that they would continue to do well. And I think in the EU, we're seeing that. with all the changes the EU has made, I don't think it's appreciably affected Apple's business at all. However, Apple seems to be just afraid of competition. Not that they couldn't compete,

but as I've said before, what's better than competition is not having competition. And if you can just not force everybody to do what you want, then that's great because you can charge what you want and make a lot of money. But I think that they could compete and compete well. And I think it, yes, it's hard not to look at that Phil Schiller email and think of the road not taken there. Yeah, for sure.

But yes, original, if you're looking for original sins, there's one. Last question, Joey says randomly, does the upgrade intro song have a little bit of mic or someone's voice mixed into it? I feel like I can hear a very quiet man's voice, but I'm not really sure. So it doesn't. It doesn't. There does sound like there's somebody in there at the very beginning going like in the background. I think it's something that's from a loop.

I don't have the original like multi set up version, but those two files that we play for upgrade, there's the like the synth version and then there's the electric guitar version. I asked for one after we got the other. And there's the one that I use. I sneak into the show sometimes and then the one that Mike uses. And now Jim uses that one. don't get to sneak anything into the show anymore.

But those all come from before the show started, and they're all from the hard drive of Chris Breen, who generated the theme song. And I think it's just an artifact of like a loop that he's using there. But I don't know. If it's anybody's voice, it's Chris Breen's, but I think it's probably if it's actually just something that's from one of the loops he used in building the upgrade theme song.

So I think of it, I think it's there every time too, Joey. But it's not us. I'll put it that way. You want to hear me on a theme song. I'm on half the robot or not theme songs, but that's about it. Me and John, we're on those.

And that brings us to the end. Stephen, thank you so much for sitting in for Mike. I appreciate it. It's good to have a, it's good, again, to talk about technology on a podcast with you because we just normally don't do this in public.

So it's fun. Yeah, thank you for having me. and people should go check out that book. It's going to be awesome. Yeah, yeah. Steve Jobs in exile. It's, I mean, boy, there's a lot of bad decisions being made in there. You just got to go in knowing this is going to not be a story of Steve Jobs leaving Apple and triumphing.

It is the opposite. He leaves Apple and it's bad. And then he comes back to Apple and it's okay again. So people should check that out. People should check out what Stephen is doing, 512 pixels.net. And the connected podcast here on Relay, where you and a couple other gentlemen chat about tech topics and do silly fun things.

Yeah. There's JAPS. JAPS all the time. All the time. And yeah, we like Upgrade, we're gearing up for our WBC games. You all have your draft. We'll have the Rikis. Yep.

It's, uh, you know, I've seen Indiana Jones where he's running away from the big rock? That's kind of how I feel right now about WBDC. Like it's just, it's coming for us. Yeah, it's true. It's true. It's true. It's going to crush us if we don't keep moving. Everybody out there, thank you for listing.

Send us your feedback, follow up and questions at Upgradefeedback.com. Thanks to our members who support us and let us keep doing this with Upgrade Plus this week. Stephen and I are going to talk a little bit about some Mac OS security. GetUpgradeplus.com. You can find us on YouTube by searching for Upgrade podcast. Thanks to our sponsors this week. We had Delete Me, Squarespace, Claude, and Steam Clock. And thanks again to all of you for listening.

Mike will be back next week. Thank you to Stephen one last time. Until next time, Stephen Hackett, say goodbye. Bye, y'all.