YouSaid · the spoken record

John Gruber

lines on the record: 97
first: 2025-05-12
most recent: 2025-05-12
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

“Innovation, Eli. The innovation Things are changing. No, and I think in person. So, from our perspective in the media, they have done their job of making this year's WWDC something that seems like it's going to be dramatic.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get book button. The innovation is what they would say the problem with the monopolies are. But John, you're going to have to come back. I'm dying to see what happens to the developers. I'm dying to see what happens to WWC. And it seems like, like I said at the top, whatever we think of these big companies right now, the status quo is not holding. Things are changing. And I think in particular for Apple, the soul of the company is either going to persist and win or something else is going.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Will tell you, having talked to a number of antitrust regulators in the show, the idea that we would take tax policy and apply it to a company is the problem that they see, right? They're like Apple's a state. Apple has government problems. Apple has tax policy problems. The market should be setting the rate, right? Apple should say our developers are leaving and going to develop for Microsoft or Google or whoever, and that is bringing the rate down, not us, the regulator. This is now we've just entered. They're adding the buttons, right? They're adding the buttons to take people to the web, but Apple's appealed that ruling. There's this weird AB test that is about to happen.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there has to be a magic number in between 0 and 100 that is about the optimal amount of money that people are inspired to work the most and then the government makes the most money because the economy is growing. The number for Apple has to be different than 70-30. But they've somehow gotten into it of why would we lower it at all, we'll lose money. But they're clearly, they've lost so much money because people aren't building for the platform and they don't see it. It's bananas”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And acting like they invented it, yeah, but that's Apple, and that would be the Apple. They could do it. There's nothing that's stopping them from doing it. And I do think just one quick point. There's, I'm sure you remember this guy, Arthur Laffer. He's still around, but he's the guy from the laugher curve that fueled the whole supply side economics idea. And the idea is that if the government charged lower tax rates, they'd make more money because the economy would grow. At a certain level, and Republicans sort of took it to an absurd degree, but at a certain level, it is true. It has to be true because if the government taxed your income 100%, well, nobody would work. Why would you work if they're taking 100% of your money? And if the government taxed you at 0%, the government would make no money.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The app store to 8515 from we just it just popped into our head and we thought you know and some kind of Apple explanation for why now's the time to do it without acknowledging that they lost a court case without acknowledging any regulatory pressure from other countries around the world just act like it popped into their head and it'll make a certain segment of the internet's heads explode because they're pretending that they just came up with this original amazing idea”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think that they could. I think, and you know, and it's a very Apple way. Steve Jobs was the master of this, of saying, you know, they'd say, hey, do you think anybody ever wants to watch video on an iPod? And he'd say, no, that's the stupidest idea I've ever heard in my life. And then the next year the video iPod plays video. And come out and say, hey, hey, we had this great idea. How about we cut the rate of...”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, maybe on the developer terms, and I don't have any insight information about it, and if it is going to happen, I'll bet that there are, I'll bet you could fit them in a mid-sized crossover SUV. The number of actual people involved who know what Apple's going to announce would fit in a Mazda CR, whatever.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And to have it be. Yeah. Or it's something we can go tell our customers about that we can only do on the Mac, right? Or only do on the iPhone, which at this point is pretty limited, which I'm going to wrap this up. First of all, I just want to say one thing. Every time I think about the Apple car, I think about the fact that the most popular cars in America are mid-sized crossovers in imagining Johnny Ive trying to design a mid-sized crossover is just the funniest... It's just like no wonder that project failed. What Johnny, I was going to compete with the Mazda CX file. Like, get out of here. Like, it's just not happening. But that piece about developers is really important. And I'm just curious. I mean, we're coming up on WWC. Do you think they're going to acknowledge these missteps and apologize and try to reset these relationships?”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If every single thing you tried to do, you succeed at, then you're not trying hard enough. You need, I don't know what the right batting average is, but you need to have a couple, you need to be pushing so close to the edge of what's possible that sometimes it's not going to pan out. And Apple should get back to that. But promising things that you aren't within months of shipping shouldn't ever be part of the recipe. And I don't think it's going to be a long time before they recover from that. And any other thing they should be thinking about, recovering, is getting developers outside Apple to want to make software for Apple devices, to be dying, to be begging their boss. Like, let us make a native app for this, whatever, whether it's the iPhone, the Mac, or a new device or something. And having the boss say, well, what's in it for the company and say, oh, it's a great deal. And have it actually seem like a great deal, you know? Yeah.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's where Apple should just have the quiet confidence and to start noodling on those ideas of what can we build, what can we build a robot that can go up and downstairs? What else can we do? Can we do something? There's so many different ideas that are possible. And I think we'll start seeing them soon. But Apple should be thinking that, like, what are the physical devices that are informed by this and how can we build them as quickly as possible? I mean, that's probably why they had that experiment with the car. The car was, you know, and by all descriptions of Apple's car project was sort of, you know, some people within Apple apparently only wanted to do it if it could be entirely self-driving, right? That it was an AI product in a certain sense. And I don't even know that it was wasted money. I think you have to, you know, if you don't have failures, you're not trying hard enough.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that's where that entire class of devices came from, right? People thought, okay, voice is the dominant interface. If I redesign the phone to be voiced first, maybe I'm going to throw the screen away and pin it to your chest.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that the real play is going to come when AI informs the fundamental physical nature of certain devices, right? It's not going to be these slabs of glass, the phones and the tablets. It's not going to be laptops. We have the interfaces for them. And now they're all decades old. There will be new physical devices that you buy that are AI first. And again, they're not going to be pins that you wear on. But I mean, but that's where that is.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's limiting. There are going to be interfaces that are to chat to interface with AI, what graphical user interface apps are to command line apps. I don't know what they are yet. Nobody does. I don't think we've seen them. I think the one that's obvious people talk about it. I don't know why people laugh. It is obviously going to happen. We want robots. We want C3PO and R2D2 style robots in our life who can walk around our house and go get us drinks from the refrigerator and go answer the doorbell because I'm expecting a FedEx package and the robot will go down there and answer. We want these things. And what's the interview? We're going to talk to them. Apple can make physical devices better than anybody, right? That's part of the play, right? Like that, so to me, the thing that I don't see why Apple's pan.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“ChatGPT is like that. It's not going anywhere. We'll have it forever for doing the things where you actually chat to somebody. Chat turns out to be a great interface. Right? It's a great interface. It is.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so why announce them? And I feel like it's so early days for AI. I know that it's so exciting and these models keep improving and there's so much going on. But I think when you zoom out and look at how is it really, what are the products that are driven by this? We don't see them yet. It may just be a handful of years, but the product is not going to be the chat GPT app. ChatGPT app isn't going where. That's like the terminal. So running programs in a terminal app is still a thing today, even exactly, you know, would be very similar to somebody from 1973 at Xerox Park. You know, they could sit down in front of the terminal app and be like, oh, yeah, still got VI and lots of stuff is similar. It's like, oh, wow, look how much faster this is.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think they can. I think though that it's very odd to me that they seemed, and I'm sure every single person involved, if they jumped into this podcast with us, would say we didn't panic at all. We weren't panicked. But it looks to me like last year's WWDC was a panicked announcement of we keep hearing AI, AI, AI. We're going to announce that we can do all these amazing things that nobody else can. And it turns out nobody can do that, including Apple.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it hasn't taken off because you can't see how that thing improves in a relentless linear way to the actual goal. And I'm just wondering if you think, you know, the Tim Cook apple, all this relentless optimization, all this relentless increase of revenue, whether you think culturally it can make a big disruptive change like that.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Relentless improvement. Every year it's a little bit better. And if you can start somewhere and you can get to the finish line, Apple's going to get to that finish line. And it seems like what they've missed is any disruptive change, right? And I think to whatever extent AI is a disruptive change, it's a disruptive change to the interface of computers. You can just talk to the computer and then the computer will tell you to leave your wife. And that is going to change how you think about computers. I don't know that they're alive or cautious or whether they're going to AGI, but the idea that you can just like have a conversation with a computer or maybe it's going to do some stuff, that's the change. And here, Apple, instead of understanding the technology, announced what it might do instead of saying, okay, here's how we can get from A to B and from B to C, I think you can see it with the Vision Pro too, right? They wanted to build true AR glasses and they couldn't. They didn't have the capability of this technology in there, so they built this big VR headset.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it does seem much harder than it looks. But, you know, what I would connect this to, and I think we should end here. This is like, where does Apple go, right? Here's all of this pressure on manufacturing, on supply chains, on revenue, right? The only growing line of revenue. Like you said, it's just a linear lineup, 20 billion, 25 billion is going away. Maybe we prompt the whales to come to the private rooms and take a little bit of that money away too. That's a lot of pressure, but it seems like where Apple has been good for years, decades now, is relentless linear improvement. You run through a very famous press called This How They Roll, right? And they just...”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know if you know. I will point out that a lot of people have announced Agentic AI systems that can like clicker on websites and do it for you. None of them work to any great effect. Amazon announced Alexa Plus. Approximately zero people have it. They launched it. They said it was out from what we can tell 100,000 no ones have it. Like there's some number of people who have it, but it's no one that anyone knows.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there were people inside the company who were effectively willing to bet their careers but we can make this work. So like with these advanced Siri features why in the world in June last year when they clearly at this point we now know they weren't even within a year of being able to ship. So I don't know what their most optimistic scenario was then but why wasn't the internal discussion well let's table this for now and maybe if over the summer we get closer maybe we can announce this at the iPhone event in September. I don't know if you know a lot of people pay attention to”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some number of people believed it was going to ship, but there also had to be other voices in the company saying, I don't know if we're going to be able to ship this in the next year, or I don't think we're going to be able to ship this in the next year. And at the very least, I don't think we should tell people in June of 2024 that we're going to ship it in the next year. Let's get closer to shipping it before we announce it. Like we don't have to wait till it's ready, but we should be a lot closer to ready before we tell people this. I don't know. I think that maybe, you know, I know it's an overused phrase, but that they're sort of high on their own supply where for so many years they've said, you know, and when they've gotten a little bit out over their skis of this isn't quite ready.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About it, that this was fraudulent. And I didn't mean to imply that. And I don't quite see, like, I guess I didn't explicitly state that they weren't lying about thinking they could ship it because it seems so obvious to me that, of course, they weren't lying. Of course, some number of people there thought they were going to ship that within the next eight months because it would look terrible if they didn't. And then they didn't, and it looks terrible. So of course they didn't. And famously, Apple's leadership is extremely stable. Everybody there has been there for a long time. It's not like it's a fly-by-night job where there were people pushing for, yeah, let's lie and save Siri. We'll do X, Y, and Z by next year because I won't even be here by next year. I'll cash out in April and go work at Meta or Google or No, they're all still there. So of course.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I still don't know, you know, and there's been so much reporting that's come out in the last, I guess it's about two months now, but Wayne Maugh at the Information had a bunch of good stuff. Mark German always has, you know, lots of little nuggets here and there in his reporting at Bloomberg. I still don't know what they were thinking in June when they announced it. In the back of my head, I kind of feel like it's another case where, and again, I'm not saying that the guy should be fired for it Tim Cook, but I kind of feel like the buck stops there. And somebody obviously some number of people at Apple are like, yes, we can build this Siri features and ship them by next year, right? It would be insane. And some of the pushback I got to my piece, something's rotten in the state of Coopertino, was on the grounds of insinuating that they were dishonest.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, and I think they kind of are, but in a very Tim Cook, quietish way, he does not like, I don't think external drama. I don't think Steve Jobs did either, but I don't think Steve Jobs cared. And I think when he got emotional, he just got emotional.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I say it's recoverable, there's the is it recoverable? Can you make an interesting platform? Can you attract the trust of developers? Then there's the deliver on what you say you're going to deliver. And to me, that comes back to hubris, right? That's the concept video at WWC sewing off a series that I think even the Siri team had not known was going to show off.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes or no? And if you do, then it's like, oh, and now you can just type commands, How do I make this script do X and ChatGPT can do that? You can't do that through the web connected to a native Mac app and it knows about all the other popular text editors on the Mac too”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are very consistent with the platform. It's the Mac that's lost that to a large degree. And you still, you know, there are a lot of native third-party apps, but it isn't a growing market. And Apple should see that as a five-alarm fire, in my opinion. Not because the Mac is that particularly big compared to iOS, but because it is the platform that makes the platforms, right? It's all iOS apps are made on a Mac. It doesn't seem to be of concern to Apple, right? And to me, it is unusual. It's why I love ChatGPT, because the ChatGPT Mac app is actually a really good and clever Mac app that does really interesting Mac things. Like it knows about BB edit. And so if you're using BB Edit while you use ChatGPT, they're like, hey, do you want me to hook up to this script that you're writing in that front BB edit window?”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of get apps that all look, oh, yeah, that's an iOS app. And you see that more now. I think there's a lot more, oh, this, you know, you still see some apps that don't look iOS-y at all. But for the most part, most apps on iOS”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I would say I do think it's recoverable, but I think it should have become a red flag issue at least five plus years ago within Apple. Like we need to turn this around and make it more of a thing. And you can kind of see it on iOS, and this would be my existence proof that it's recoverable. And say what you want about the aesthetics of the iOS 7 flattened redesign from now, I guess what, about 10 years ago, 11 years ago. But part of that wasn't just Johnny Ive wanting to get rid of those quote unquote skewomorphic leather and texture and brushed metal and 3D buttons and stuff. But part of it was a concerted effort to get apps to stop making apps that the entire brand of the app looked like the brand of the company.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it took him years to recover from this self imposed stain of like ugly interface elements. All of that's gone, right? The culture around Mac development and Apple development used to be this is the best. We're going to make something at Apple's level of quality. And what you're pointing out is it shifted really far. There isn't. I mean, there is a small community of Apple indie developers, which are amazing, but it's still shifted really far. Yeah, I would say coverable.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Apps for this platform. We're really happy to be here, and we feel like we're getting a great deal from them. That's the part that's dismissing now. What company thinks they're getting a great financial deal from Apple right now with the App Store as it stands? I don't know of anybody. Maybe some games, right? Because games is, you know, the game industry is sort of 70-30 everywhere. Maybe.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“apple food you know like apple pay oh you laugh but i mean who would have thought 15 years ago that they would have a credit card it's not that crazy to think that there could be an apple food And do you want to support a thing where they might become your rival, right? And I guess that's really it. That's where, and I think that's what Schiller sees, is that for almost all of these companies, like Spotify's an obvious counterexample because they're up directly against Apple music. But almost every other developer on the platform, the zillions of apps in the App Store should not in theory see Apple as their competitor. They should see Apple as their partner. And they should be like, yeah, this is a partner we really like working with. They should be saying, I'm not saying they are, but they have great software development tools. We really like their APIs, our engineers who work on these platforms are really happy to be doing it. You know, it's really hard to hire engineers for this because it's so competitive and that the talented engineers for the platform can go work anywhere they want. Users really value the native.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's so in terms of the size of the audience, that's still there, right? There still are a billion, very desirable or over a billion very desirable iOS users out there. But then I think this is what you were hinting at. There's the trust issue of, hey, they seem pretty greedy. How much information that we consider competitive? And I don't think they're lying about the private nature of this, of app and tents and that Apple would be seeing and hoovering up the collective data so that Apple can analyze it. But in the aggregate, it doesn't really matter. If Apple can see that this is popular, they don't need to take the private information from people's door dash orders and analyze it, but they could see that maybe, you know, maybe Apple should get into the food delivery business.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and it comes back to. Some of those things that I think Phil Schiller is keenly aware of of getting developer buy-in for things that are specific to your platform and these app intense APIs are very specific to Apple's platforms. I was going to say iOS are probably on the same APIs on macOS too, but let's just say for the Apple platforms, these app intense APIs. And it doesn't mean that if your company, Uber Eats or whoever, or DoorDash buys into it and supports these APIs, all of them as best they can and puts all of the stuff that they could do through app intents and supports them. It doesn't mean that their Android app or their web version loses anything.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is really far in the future. And the reason I want to make this connection is one just hubris is this all just hubris. But secondly, to make that series work, they need a lot of goodwill from app developers. Because what they're promising essentially is you will talk to your phone and then Siri will go use a bunch of your apps for you. And I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why developers who are this frustrated with Apple will let that happen. Like beyond the technical difficulty of this, there's just a, hey, DoorDash, will you let Siri just like order a sandwich on your platform without anyone ever opening your app? And I don't, there's not enough goodwill to broker that negotiation. And so it just seems to me like, yeah, there's hubris. This is a company that thinks people have no choice, as you've been saying. And then there's, well, is anyone going to let this happen?”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm here. Right, right. And that is a real feather in the company's cap that these devices last long and the performance is great like that. But how do you keep making the overall number keep going up? And the answer has been services. And that has twisted the company's priorities. Clearly, they won't admit it. I think you could hook Tim Cook up to a lie detector and he could pass it as saying, no, our number one priority is not making services go up. But look at their actions and I think it is.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that doesn't nobody at Apple thinks that way because they know that if you get irritated like, hey, I used to own my iPhones for like four years and they worked great, four or five years and they were still great just a little slow and then I'd get a new one. It's like, wow, the camera's better. It's a lot faster. And now I bought this phone two years ago and it's falling apart. That makes people think maybe I should try a different brand, right? Apple knows that. So they're not going to do that. But with these long lasting iPhones and with diminishing returns on chip performance at this point, and we see it with Apple Silicon in particular, right? The whole M1 series of Macs that started coming out at the end of 2020. They're still great computers there.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we're going to get you to give us money every month. But he was telling Wall Street we're going to build this business. And there were a lot of people, you know, and I had an open mind about it, but there were a lot of people who were extremely skeptical about the idea that Apple could do services, that they had any proficiency to build any kind of service, whether it was media services like selling Apple TV, which wasn't a thing yet, or the music or whatever, or charging people for iCloud and email and stuff like that. But lo and behold, over the last 10 plus years, they have built, and Snell's been documenting it every single quarter, and that is a graph that does not fluctuate. It doesn't go up and down. Sales go up and down based on things like, you know, when COVID happened and there were supply chains shortages over the years, sales of iPhones and other hardware.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's going to happen to you know the same thing happened to the Mac versus the PCs happening with the iPhone I think it was the same year where the Mac Pro came out and Phil Schiller said on stage you know can't innervate anymore my ass which was that they were irritated by what people were saying about them and that's when Tim Cook started promoting this idea that we're going”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And my big point earlier was about the scale of the iPhone success and how distorting that unfathomable success must be even to a company that I think was naturally resistant to that sort of the perverse effects of that sort of profitability that they really were fundamentally driven by just making the coolest things not by making the most money but when you do make the most money it just shifts your priorities but the other factor was that point about 10 years ago where you know I think it was around 2013 famously where Samsung was having a couple of good years Steve Jobs had died like two years prior and people were starting you know starting to call out the CEC they can't do it without Steve Jobs and and yeah look”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I'm just saying I look at this line from Jason, who's been signing this alarm for years, right? Your dependency on a services line of business makes you a toll collector, right? You're the tax man now. And maybe the phones are great, but your priority is collecting the tax. And then you look at this court case. And I can't help but say, oh, they became the tax collector. If they lose this, then maybe the whole game is up and they can't keep funding the great customer service in the retail stores. By the way, I think some people might disagree with you. My wife would disagree with you. But whatever. They can't keep funding their huge retail presence in all of their real estate investments. They can't keep funding LARCs like the Vision Pro. The game is in this tax. This is the money because the iPhone isn't growing and there might never be another product that scales like the iPhone.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a report that there were only 37 developers. I don't know if this is true or not, but a report the other day, I think, Mac Rumors had it. Somebody's filed a lawsuit that only 34 developers actually used those links. Out of like hundreds of thousands of developers. I've never encountered one in the wild. Have you? I use a lot of apps. The nature of my gig is I try new apps. I have never seen an app in the United States that uses one of these link out things. Right.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To perjure himself in front of a judge about where the fake 27% came from and got caught. And that person has now been referred to the DOJ for criminal prosecution. Apple invented this 27% rationale, this fake compliance, maybe not malicious compliance, but fake certainly fake compliance. Apple looked at a court order that said you will not restrict buttons and links and came up with the most restrictive policy over what those buttons and links could look like such that no one could ever possibly comply with them in a way that was good.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And to do this, they have great customer service still in the retail stores. They do all these things that other companies don't do that cost money, clearly cost money, and do it because of the idea that, well, if we keep doing things as well as we can to make people happy, this will all work out in the end. And it seems, you know, like we're making enough money. But here on this App Store thing, they just want all the money. And there's no other way to look at it.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whole flywheel is broken. And I think Schiller sees that you don't have to squeeze every penny out of it, right? And Apple, this is what's so crazy about this. The people who are really angriest at Tim Cook over all of this think that because he comes from operations and has his mind on the finance and he's not a product person and has never to his credit has never pretended to be a product person that he's a penny pincher right now Luca Maistri, the ex-CFO, he might be a penny pincher by all accounts but Tim Cook isn't, right? And Apple doesn't pinch pennies in so many other ways. You know, you could tell that they'll go through dozens and dozens of hardware revisions to get the corner radius on the phone just right. They have metal engineers to create new custom versions of titanium to make the sides of the iPhone look the way they want using titanium.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Resentment has entire fields of developers thinking, how do we get out of this? How do we not pay Apple this exorbitant 30% cut? And how do we scheme? Maybe what we do is we'll build instead of building native Mac apps for the desktop, we're just going to go all in on the web and have people go through a browser. And now they're not building anything that is exclusive to your platform. And you can use any computer with a version of Chrome or Firefox or any leading browser and get the same experience for it. And if your top three or four apps that you use all work exactly the same no matter which brand computer you're using”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They just have a different mindset of the only way we're going to win is by making great stuff that people want to buy and that developers want to use. And I think that two decades of this iPhone success has filled Apple's ranks at a certain level with people who really just feel we can do this because what are they going to do? Not make an iPhone app. You know, we don't have to compete. And I'm sure they don't.”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that it's a couple of reasons, but I think that because Schiller was there for so long, he's the only executive who was there when Steve Jobs and the next reunification, he was already there when they came back and obviously thrived. It was like, oh, he got along with Steve. But therefore remembers vividly what it was like when Apple was an underdog. And, you know, so many other people, Jaws has been there for just as long. I think Jaws has been there for like 35, 40 years. So it's like Jaws remembers it. But Jaws doesn't seem to be a character in this story, right? Jaws is whatever, you know, he's as senior vice president of product marketing. He's obviously very influential at Apple, but it doesn't seem like he's got anything to do with this app store stuff. There are a lot of people who were there then, but when the people remember being an underdog, I think they...”
2025-05-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Did Apple get too big for its own good? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT