YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Barton

lines on the record: 17
first: 2021-10-07
most recent: 2021-10-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It's inconvenient sometimes, but like honestly, I don't think about it that much. I don't feel like all the time, like, oh, there's another thing you needed a smartphone for you just adjust to it pretty quickly. I just think that having a flip phone has helped me just be a lot more intentional about my time.”
2021-10-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: This Changes Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've been out with friends and wanted to get an Uber home and just have to ask someone else to get it for me and then pay them back, which is not a big deal, but you are relying on other people and having to sort of ask them for favors, which, depending on the person, you know, might not be that fun.”
2021-10-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: This Changes Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Vegetarian myself, so I know what it's like to make a lifestyle choice that requires a little extra work, but I got to be honest ditching my iPhone seems impossible. There's a constant navigation of logistics.”
2021-10-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: This Changes Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would just find myself opening my phone and not even having anything interesting to look at, just spending a lot of time on it. And I was like, I'm not even doing anything. Needs to be done on a phone. Maybe I'll just try it out and sort of like reset my brain's addiction to my phone. But now that I have a flip phone, I really can't imagine going back to the iPhone life”
2021-10-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: This Changes Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, about nine months ago, she Of her iPhone Why? Because she felt like her phone and all the apps were making her unhappy. Quit social media a few years ago and she still felt like that just wasn't enough.”
2021-10-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: This Changes Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Before that, we had been looking at sort of very small numbers of users, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of users, and then with the hockey stick growth curve of smartphones and the app stores, we quickly went into the next years of seeing millions of users and tens of millions of users.”
2021-10-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: This Changes Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chris Barton, though, the App Store wasn't a way to make a quick buck, it was a way to jumpstart a real business that actually solved a problem. Barton co-founded Shazam. This is an app that was like having a personal music nerd in your pocket. Let's say you walk into Target, you love the song that's being piped in while you're buying your 12-pack of socks, you hold your phone up, and like magic, Shazam tells you what's playing. Shazam existed before the iPhone and the App Store, but it was a pain in the ass to use. You had to call a number and hold up your phone, and then Shazam would record a bit of the song and analyze it, and then a little later it would text you the name of the song. Then came the app store which instantly let Shazam do two things. It let Barton and his company build an app that could access the iPhone's powerful software and sensors so it could do all that looking up and analyzing right away. With a couple clicks.”
2021-10-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: This Changes Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess it was quickly discovered that the interactions were fairly demoralizing for the engineers. And so the institute kind of like a protection layer where there was one person who was designated to go take the quote unquote feedback and abuse or whatever and then massage that into like, well, Steve didn't like this. And he thinks you should do this differently.”
2021-10-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: This Changes Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And once Job signed off on you, the scope and ambition of the project became pretty clear. There was a lot of discussion about, you know, this is the most important product that Apple is going to ship. It was on his mind that this was a very important product to get right. And so the pressure was ratcheted up because of that. Jobs have been a famously harsh critic of his employee's work in his early days, and 30 years after starting Apple, he remained intense. Francisco Tomolski remembers that Steve Jobs would check in on the team's progress every couple weeks.”
2021-10-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: This Changes Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I first joined, it happened to be that Steve was on vacation and he needs to like personally approve everyone like the day they started. And so they were just like, well, Steve's on vacation. So you're on vacation”
2021-10-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: This Changes Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Put all of us working on the touchscreen stuff in one office area, which was quite new. And I got a nice window office overlooking the interior courtyard of the Infinite Loop campus. And then like three days later, they come in and they frost my windows. My nice view out in the courtyard was then blocked, and so no one could see into my office.”
2021-10-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: This Changes Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Apple knew it wanted to build a phone and that it would be starting from scratch. It rounds up a team to build something new. An Apple, which is famously secretive at all times, got even more clamped down this time around. Nitten Ginatra was on the original iPhone engineering team, and part of his job was to recruit other Apple employees under the project. I would go into somebody's office, somebody who we identified as we should really have this person on the team, and I would walk in and say, hey, I can't tell you what we're working on. I can't mention anything about the product itself. I can't give you any details about what you're going to do. All I can say is that you're going to work your ass off. Do you want to come and do it? And most of the time the answer was yes. Mark Hamlin worked on the original iPhone product team, focused on the touch screen”
2021-10-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: This Changes Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Steve Jobs was one of the people that realized that the iPod and the phone were going to merge. So Apple needed to be the one that figured out how to merge them before someone else did. One big problem for Apple, it had never made a phone before. It had been making computers since nineteen seventy six and iPods for the last few years, but cell phones were a whole different beast. But one big advantage for Apple, it had never made a phone before, which means it didn't have ideas set in stone about what phones should be. The company wasn't trying to make small updates to existing phones that sucked, and it wasn't trying to jam its own PC software into phones. Former Apple executive Tony Fidel helped build the iPod and then the iPhone. Why is it Apple that built the iPhone, not Microsoft, not Sony, not Blackberry for that matter?”
2021-10-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: This Changes Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think about the stack of things I carried around my pockets in 2006. You had your wallet, your keys, you had your cell phone, and then you almost always also had an iPod. The iPod was a far superior device, Tennysulf. People preferred using them to their phones. And it just seemed obvious, I think, to everyone at every layer, whether you Titan of industry, or whether you're just a person carrying on two devices, that these two things should be the same thing.”
2021-10-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: This Changes Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello, Moto. Everyone wanted the razor phone. That was around that time. And that was like a status symbol. And then you had like another class of devices, which are really the BlackBerry or Pocket PC, which were like get, I can't curse on this podcast, right? Yeah, it was get shit done phones. Connect to everything you love in life with BlackBerry. Type on this keyboard, send email. You could also text. You could also do phone calls.”
2021-10-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: This Changes Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, quick survey. What kind of phone do you have? You're in America and you're listening to this podcast, you've got an iPhone. What's that? You got something else? You got an Android? Okay, it's possible. And truth, and because my editors want me to spell this out, iPhones only account for about half the smartphone market in the US. But even so, that still means you're using a phone that looks and behaves just like an iPhone. Because after the iPhone came out, there was no going back. It became the template. Question. Do you remember what phone you had before you got an iPhone? And more important, do you remember what life was like before the iPhone?”
2021-10-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: This Changes Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was the iPhone changed phones forever, but it also changed personal computing, it changed business, it changed Apple, and it changed us. Welcome to Land of the Giants, the Apple Revolution. I'm Peter Kafka. I cover technology for Vox and Recode. We spend a lot of time in previous seasons talking about powerful tech companies, Google, Amazon, Netflix, but this is the first time we're talking about a powerful tech company that makes tech products for a living, products you touch, products you hold in your hand or wear on your body. Apple started out as an innovative but niche personal computer company. Now it's the world's most important consumer electronics company. Even if you don't use its products, you live in a world Apple has completely reshaped. It's created entirely new industries, wiped out giant competitors, and it's changed the way all of us live. And all of that's because of a single product, the iPhone.”
2021-10-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: This Changes Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT