transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Mayo, I don't think this news necessarily caught me by surprise, but I think the timing of it caught me by surprise. So, Monday, about 4.30 Eastern Time, my time, Apple publishes two press releases. One is saying that Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down, and he is becoming executive chairman, and John Ternus is set to take over as part of a transition that will culminate on September 1st. Then a second, ancillary press release that we'll talk about in a bit, about Johnny Suruji becoming Apple's Chief Hardware Officer. From a meta perspective, I think this newsroom story is interesting, because at first, when you just see the top headline, it is just Tim Cook to become executive chairman, and your first reaction is, okay, step one in the process is kicking into gear, but they're not actually announcing a CEO transition, but the subheading is John Ternus to become Apple CEO. It's the most cookie-in way to say, I'm not dead yet, Wall Street, don't freak out. I'm still here, but also I'm elevating this new guy.

Speaker 2:
[00:59] It's funny, by the way, the Apple Newsroom does have a dedicated subheading component in its normal formatting, but for this one, they didn't use it, I think, because they wanted to give both equal weighting. So the second line is just the title with a paragraph spacing in it. So it's the same label, but with a new line inserted into it. So both the Ternus and the Tim Cook have equal font, equal sizing, which is quite funny. Yeah, this is incredibly well choreographed, right?

Speaker 1:
[01:27] Like perfection, I think. Like the culmination of the Tim Cook era is him just, at least so far, just nailing the exit plan. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[01:35] I mean, this has been in the works for a while, clearly, right? Like, oh, and it really goes back to that podcast interview he did with what Dua Lipa, where he was like, do you see yourself after 10 years? He's like, 10 years is a long time. So no, like he choreographed it all the way back then. I don't know if back then he knew exactly that he was going to retire on like the 20th of April, 2026, but the cogs were in motion, the prominence of Ternus in media, in public eye, over, you know, Mark Graham's reported recently that he took full control over even more divisions of the company, right, in the last six months or so. So they've been leading up to this. And it's so poetic that like Tim Cook's going to retire almost exactly at age 65. And it's almost exactly 15 years of his tenure time frame because he started in around August 2011. And it's going to be like September 2026 when he steps down. So it kind of worked out perfectly in the end. I'm sure the dates weren't that set in stone. The 10 year time frame was like, I'm going sometime this decade and we're going to wait for the right moment, I think, to kind of pull it off. And is it any surprise that it's Ternus? Not really. You know, German's had this on tap for literally years. I was going back on some of his old press release, some of his old newsroom newsletters, and he's like floating Ternus as the next CEO, as a proposition back in like 2021, when he's starting to talk about like succession and the future. And then as soon as Jeff Williams retired, or about a year ago now, that was like the last knock. There's nobody else on the leadership page who fits the mold of CEO and also is younger. Like you could probably argue that, you know, Q Federighi and Josriak are like capable, but they're just too old. Like there's no point moving the reins over to them when they're only like three or four years younger. Ternus is like around 50 years old, like dead on 50, maybe 51 this year. He's like perfect run for another 15 years, right? And then he could retire at 65 and there'd be another clean 15 year run as CEO. There's nobody else on that page who's going to step up to the mark. They were never going to hire from outside.

Speaker 1:
[03:40] They were never going to bring in Tony Fidel. I mean, Tony Fidel tweeted that he'd wanted the job, so I thought that might be possible.

Speaker 2:
[03:47] I don't think they're going to like, they have enough issues bringing in people from the outside as like VPs and SVPs, right? In terms of staying with the company and turning over and culture clash, they're not going to do that for CEO. I don't know when exactly Ternus knew that he was going to get the job, but it must have been what five years ago, like for, you know, at least he was in high consideration many, many years ago. I mean, look, just look back at the history of how prominent he's been in keynotes and stuff. I mean, I think one of his big breakout roles was the Mac Roundtable around like 2017. That's when he really started having a prominence. And I'm sure back in 2017, he wasn't set up to be the CEO. But, you know, by 2020, 2021, he's increasingly there at product launches. He's presenting things. The most recent event they had with the MacBook Neo, obviously it was like a video event, but he was presenting and leading all of it. Like they were leading up to this. There is no surprises here. Investors reacted about, as you'd expect, which was like nonplussed, it ticks over. I think the exact timing is interesting because the Financial Times, what, like near the end of last year, said that Apple was setting up for an announcement, like a succession was intensifying, succession planning was intensifying, and they could see an announcement basically around January, February time after the next round of earnings calls in, sorry, after the holiday earnings call in January. And that came and went and that didn't happen. And enough time passed that it was like just on the cusp of, oh, well, maybe the Financial Times is just talking rubbish and they don't know what they're on about. Like it was like just far enough away from that. And then boom, here it is. Here's the announcement. What is it? It's a clean two weeks basically from the next earnings call where for the next quarter of the earnings results, it's just gone the holiday quarter that they announced is like a record for the company. So the business is firing on cylinders. There's no currently, you know, touchwood, there's no fires for them to put out. There's no big tariff war going on. You know, the interrelations, there's a lot of world wars going on, but none of them really impact Apple at the moment. You know, like the China situation is calm at the current time. All of the business divisions are doing well. If you do it now, you can kind of set up for, you know, I think it's interesting whether Tim Cook will have a major role at WWDC in terms of presenting.

Speaker 1:
[05:56] I mean, he hasn't in years, though. That's the thing is he'll do the intro. He'll do the intro.

Speaker 2:
[06:01] Yeah. Will he even do the intro at June? Or will this already be part of the transition? They'll just have Ternus do it all. But clearly, by September, he's moving in September the 1st, the iPhone event is not going to have Tim Cook presence on screen at all. He will be there, right? And he'll do the hands-on and he'll be in the crowd. And maybe even do some press where he's talking about how Apple is going to set himself up with Ternus and whatever. But the primary focus will be on the iPhone. They're going to launch the iPhone Fold in the next big product category. They're also going to launch iOS 27, which will hopefully resolve at least some of the AI doubt with Siri. And that will let Ternus have a great start off the blocks. They're going to launch a new product category in the Fold, and they're going to revamp Siri. So it sets them up for a good time. And I also think the Suruji point is a factor here. So maybe Cook wanted to leave closer to the end of the decade rather than the middle of it, but Suruji was getting restless, essentially. And there was a report again last year that Suruji had spoken to Cook about maybe retiring or leaving Apple of going for a different role. Goermann says that he'd communicated that he was feeling a bit burnt out and he wanted to change. And he's one of the head honchos of the senior executive team. So many of their products depend on Apple Silicon being strong. And he is essentially the father of Apple Silicon and their own custom chip designs. And he deserves much credit because his work and his team's work has basically given the iPhone an industry-leading advantage for a good decade. Ever since they started doing the A7, which was the first 64-bit chip, they wowed the industry with that. And then every year, year-on-year, massive improvements, they've had the fastest single-core performance for what feels like forever now, but it's probably at least five years in a row. And obviously, then they translated that success to the Mac, to the iPad, and now they're even doing modems. The modem division, they've launched their own in-house modems for the iPhone to basically no drama at all, right? Which has got to be a big praise. And the modems they'll launch this fall should basically compete with the higher spec of the Qualcomm modems. So Suruji is in a great place. Maybe he was just fed up or bored or whatever, but Cook clearly wanted to retain him. And this machination has allowed it to happen because if Cook announces retirement now, that gives Ternus the move to CEO, and then the hardware engineering role is left vacant. Suruji has now got himself in a place where he has a new title, but he has control over hardware technologies and hardware engineering. It is new chief C-suite role. So I think the Suruji element of this is actually quite, I mean, we'll never know for sure exactly why, why was April the 20th to 2026 versus any other time. But I kind of feel like at a high level, Cook saw a stability in the business. It was a period of calm for Apple, and the Suruji element was like, maybe I was going to wait a little bit longer, but I see a way to keep Suruji around, and this is how we're going to do it. So that kind of is why it happened in that way. And they probably just waited like, we'll let the Apple 50 celebrations calm down, and then we'll drop it just before investor calls, so they can chill out a bit. I'm sure Tim Cook will be on that call, maybe Ternus too, to have a little chit chat, and like welcome in the new era. And then by September, when the iPhones are out, it can be a clean break with Ternus leading the charge.

Speaker 1:
[09:19] I think the Suruji part of the announcement is really interesting, because as far as I know or I can remember, this is the first time there's ever been a Chief Hardware Officer role at Apple, right? Like we had Chief Design Officer with Johnny Ives, but elevating a hardware guy to the CEO position, and then another hardware guy to a C-suite level position. That's a pretty strong indication of what, presumably what Ternus thinks the focus of the company is going forward, right? Because him and Suruji have been leading separate teams, hardware technologies and hardware engineering, but they've been working super closely. Like Ternus himself was like credited with shepherding in the Apple Silicon rollout, which products, which chips go in, like he played a key role in that, even though it was Suruji's team actually making the chips.

Speaker 2:
[10:03] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[10:03] So to put two hardware guys in the C-suite level now, for people who want Apple to be led by product people, then this is as good of an indication as any that you can get.

Speaker 2:
[10:13] Yeah, I don't think they've given them a chief title previously, but if you go back all the way to like the Bob Mansfield era, which is going back a long way, like 2012, 2013, at that time, Apple only had like one SVP of hardware.

Speaker 1:
[10:28] There's technologies, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[10:29] Yeah, and that basically encompass both Suruji and Ternus' role today, if you see what I mean. So like kind of the chief hardware role was what Bob Mansfield used to do, but then as they were like, pushing more into custom silicon and stuff, they split the roles out a bit. And I don't know, like clearly having a chief nomenclature in your title must matter, because otherwise they wouldn't bother doing it and Suruji didn't like it. But basically what it means is Suruji now has control of hardware engineering, hardware technologies under a big umbrella. I do question, if it is true that he was feeling a bit burned out, how much runway does this really give you? What's the commitment? Surely Cook wouldn't have done this switch around if Suruji hadn't said, well, I'm going to sign on for another good few years or something. But Suruji is approaching his retirement age, and he's done a solid 15 years at the company as well. If not longer, he joined in 2008 when they acquired his startup. So that's getting on. So I don't know how stable that is. It gives Ternus a good start, and it stops it being a situation where like, let's say Suruji didn't get a new title, like the new CEO comes in and Suruji immediately leaves. It's not a great look, right? So I presume they've cleared the decks now, and nobody on the top section of the Apple leadership page is going anywhere immediately. But one of the big issues with anyone taking over the company, is the talent situation at the top, because CEO choices were sparse, but also executive VP choices are sparse. Because anyone they bring in from the outside doesn't stay very long, and all the people they've currently got the top, Goermen keeps using this phrase, it's run like a family business. The family is getting old, and people are going to move away. I don't think it's, you've got what maybe five years, in five years, I would not be surprised if Suruji, Q and Federico are gone, right?

Speaker 1:
[12:16] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[12:17] It's heading in that direction, just as a function of age. And so that would be something for Ternus to tackle, obviously, as he settles in. But I think short term, as in like the next one or two years, I presume Cook's done the groundwork to give him a stable foundation.

Speaker 1:
[12:30] Because when there's a leadership change of any kind, and especially a leadership change of this magnitude, there's a lot of internal reshuffling that we might not even know about, or we might not even think about where. So Johnny Suruji gets promoted, somebody gets, Tom Marab is his name, I think. He was VP of Product Integrity, but he's now becoming Apple's Hardware Engineering Chief who will report to Ternus. So there are multiple people vying for that promotion. Those people now probably feel slighted. There's all kinds of just inner level, inner office dynamics that come into play when something like this happens, right? Like there's infighting both in a bad way, but also just a level of competitiveness where everybody wants to get promoted. Everybody thinks they deserve the next job up, not the person next to them.

Speaker 2:
[13:13] Yeah, and team dynamics change and sway changes. I mean, if you want to give an example from the last era, the Scott Forstall nonsense is a perfect case, right? Under Jobs, Scott Forstall was his same personality, but he could be controlled and managed. And then when Jobs was no longer here, his ego got the better of him and there was big fallouts. And it only seems to have come down to an I versus Forstall fight, and Tim Cook chose Ive and Forstall got pushed out. That might happen here, but I do think that part of the thing that Tim Cook's aiming for is the smoothest transition possible. And so you would assume that Q, Federeghi and the rest of them have been well aware that it's going to be Ternus taking over. And so if there was a time to drop out, I think they might have already gone for it. That's how I feel like Cook would set this up. And for instance, the Jeff Williams departure, right? Make sure he's retired on good terms for all intents and purposes, but you don't want it to time such that Ternus takes over, then Williams retires in the January. That's just not a good look. So with all the executive changeover that's been announced in recent months, we had Lisa Jackson step down not so long ago. I hope that they're in a position now where nobody's going anytime soon. I mean, you can always have a surprise out on the field, but I think that's how it's been set up. Steve Jobs had this quote where I think this is in the Isaacson biography, that obviously at the time when he was around, there had never been a graceful transition of Apple CEO. Because the checkered history of the company at that time was, obviously, Jobs got pushed out, people got fired, the company was floundering. It was just like when Jobs came back, he wasn't even meant to be the CEO. That's why he was called the interim CEO and it just fell into him being the job so they couldn't find anybody else. Then obviously, he took the company to new heights. He set it up that Tim Cook would take over gracefully. In 2011, unfortunately, ill health scuppered some of those plans and the transition period where Jobs would be executive chairman and Cook would be CEO was a lot shorter than obviously he wanted it to be. Jobs passed away, Tim Cook had to get some stuff happening. I think one of the goals clearly by how this has been orchestrated is that the graceful transition of CEO should now actually happen for Apple for the first time ever.

Speaker 1:
[15:30] Cook is giving Ternus what he never had, which is that exact graceful transition, that exact still having somebody to turn to when you need guidance or you have a question or you don't know what to do. And in Cook's role as executive chairman, Apple's press release straight up mentions that Cook will continue handling, working with policy makers and with governments around the world. And I think what's interesting about that is that it's what we all expected, but then Cook is still there to insulate Ternus from the worst parts of the job.

Speaker 2:
[16:00] Yeah, he's a buffer, right?

Speaker 1:
[16:01] And it'll be interesting, like what I'm most interested to see is how perception of Ternus changes, because he'll be insulated from that side of the business for a while, as long as Cook wants to remain executive chairman, which seems like he wants to be in that role for many years to come. But right now, he doesn't get any criticism from anybody because he leads hardware. And everybody loves Apple's hardware. Apple's hardware is the best it's ever been. But once you become CEO, other parts of the company start reflecting on you.

Speaker 2:
[16:28] You're taking responsibility for all of the ugly things too.

Speaker 1:
[16:32] Yes. I think there's a naive belief among some people that Ternus is going to step in the CEO role, and then Apple's going to open the app store up, they're going to drop all this litigation, they're going to stop fighting the EU, and things are going to change. That won't happen. And then all of that starts reflecting on Ternus. Is he now the quote unquote bean counter, stifling app development, stifling the app economy? Is he now the reason Apple is behind on AI? Is he the reason the company is still cozying up to Donald Trump? Like, it thrust him into a position where everything reflects on him. And it's something that I know I've said throughout the Tim Cook era, where the buck stops and stopped with Tim Cook. But not everything is a decision that he made, if that makes sense. It's not you can't place singular blame on the CEO for everything.

Speaker 2:
[17:18] Yeah, especially when Cook is known for being like a man of consensus, right? And getting opinions and having like, you know, a meeting a committee of decision making beneath him. Like he is not the Steve Jobs character who, you know, when Steve Jobs run the company, even the most minute decisions about how like icons looked and laid out were like taken up to the top and you know, like the the multitasker and transition. This is a great story in the King Kshender book, Creative Selection, where he was working on, on like remember when the iPad first came out, it was like the home button was the only way to navigate. And they were trying to upgrade it and improve the productivity. So it was like iOS 4.3, I think. It added the kind of four-finger multi-touch gestures, where you could like swipe between apps by swiping with four fingers. And like he, in that era of Apple around like the 2010, 2011, the interaction, the animation of those gestures was not getting signed off until you had the demo with at the top. And like he got the demo with Jobs, and then it was like Jobs is too able to actually do this anymore. Or like, you know, he did it for the multitasking gestures. And when it was next time to do it again for the next feature, no longer did it go all the way to top because Jobs was too old and he couldn't do it. That era of Apple, it died with Jobs. Like Cook took over, he became much more delegating. The people below him took charge. He believed, obviously he contributed opinions and ran the company and forced some things through that he specifically believed in. But other parts of the company, he was very concessionary or let people run the company. And he was less meagre maniac founder energy. With Ternus in charge, I hope the company is returning to some of that top level decision making. Because Ternus is a product engineer at the end of the day. Parts of the iPhone 17 Pro characteristics feature set, its choices are because Ternus wanted them to happen. He's not the only voice, but he was a voice. And I think he's much more of a product voice than Cook ever was. And so it will be great to be back in a situation where responsibility for the products actually does land at the top job. Because I think Apple worked great under Jobs, and you're never going to recreate Steve Jobs, but you can at least be more in a product role if you have a product CEO, which I think Cook would admit he never was. Right? And so I'm looking forward to that era, but that doesn't mean the entire structure and makeup of everything Apple has handled itself is going to change with Ternus in charge. Does he agree with everything that Apple does? Well, probably not. But the vast balance of it, he must be on board with, right? At a company, the size of Apple is not changing some of those values or roles or decisions because the CEO changes. Ternus will be on board with the broad swath of the current portfolio of hardware, software and services. He will have his ideas and his own priorities that he will push for, and it will be interesting to see how that rolls out. But if you're expecting the policy of the app store to completely be just dropped on the floor, come September the 1st, it's just not going to happen. It's just not going to happen. The app store makes Apple too much money, they can't drop it now even if they wanted to. Let's say Ternus really hated the app store, and he really hates the model of the 30 percent commission, he wants to make it free and open for everybody. If he did that, he would be ousted as CEO the next weekend. It doesn't matter that Tim Cook stood around, the board would kick you out at that point because you'd be dropping $100 billion of free money on the floor. It's just not going to happen. It guides the future and future direction, and there's been plenty of reporting how Ternus wasn't really keen on the car project, and he wasn't really keen on the headset project. Maybe if Ternus had been CEO 10 years ago, those things wouldn't have happened and Apple would have invested that money in other things. It's not like the person at the top doesn't have any power, but it's like the contours of the edges rather than the core.

Speaker 1:
[21:02] I think that having an operations expert as CEO obviously has a ton of benefits. Tim Cook has been able to navigate Apple through pandemics and world dynamics and supply shortages and scale the iPhone to just a massive level. People don't realize just how much in terms of unit sales, the iPhone has grown under Tim Cook's leadership. That's great for business, but he also perfectly executed all of the supply chain aspect of that. My thinking is that will there become a time when John Ternus is the CEO, where they hit a roadblock or they stumble or they make a mistake. That might make us take a step back and say, huh, that was one of the nice things about having somebody like Tim Cook in charge.

Speaker 2:
[21:46] I mean, you have to hope that the underlings in the operation division are equally capable, right?

Speaker 1:
[21:50] Right. But right now you have Cook and Sabi Khan as COO.

Speaker 2:
[21:55] I just Googled it by the way.

Speaker 1:
[21:57] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[21:58] In 2010, right? How many iPhones did Apple sell in a year? Rough guess. That was the iPhone 4 year.

Speaker 1:
[22:05] Seven, eight million?

Speaker 2:
[22:07] Forty million the entire year.

Speaker 1:
[22:08] Oh, Jesus.

Speaker 2:
[22:09] Okay. 2011, 72 million, right?

Speaker 1:
[22:13] Yep.

Speaker 2:
[22:13] Fast forward to today, they do like 90 million in one quarter, right? It's like the scale of the iPhone business, you needed someone like they were, Apple almost had the perfect person in charge to navigate that and make that happen.

Speaker 1:
[22:26] Yep.

Speaker 2:
[22:26] Fast forward to today, maybe the future product direction would benefit from somebody else having the top. Maybe you want to return to a bit more of the inspiration or the invention at the top and operations could be handled further down because the supply chain is sorted out. Obviously, it evolves and the China dependency is a problem and they are diversifying, but that stuff takes time, but they've kind of nailed that. It's kind of nice for me that there isn't continuity in the exact makeup of the person in charge. Even, and I love how even Tim Cook acknowledges this in the letter that he published to everybody. He's like, a new person will be stepping in, that lead is John Ternus, a brilliant engineer and thinker. Like, Cook would never describe himself as a brilliant engineer and thinker. It just shows that there is change. For as much as they orchestrated this to try and keep it, you know, quote unquote boring, even to the point of like the headline photo in the newsroom being Tim Cook and John Ternus looking at each other in very similar clothes.

Speaker 1:
[23:23] It's the same person in different fonts.

Speaker 2:
[23:25] Yeah, exactly. There is change at the top. So I'm excited to see the impact of that and the ramifications, but I think that will be a very gradual, very slow, less exciting than some people think it's going to be processed.

Speaker 1:
[23:38] The last thing I'll say is that in Tim Cook's letter, I think it's the most open and honest and personable we've seen him in a long time. I'm struggling to think of a moment where he kind of wrote from this really heartfelt first-person perspective to the public.

Speaker 2:
[23:55] When he came out in the 2014. Yeah, that was similar. But he's rare because he purposely kept a very private personality.

Speaker 1:
[24:05] But I think we do give some credit for Tim Cook for choosing now to step down. He's 65 years old, but in a lot of companies, you get ego at the top and that person wants to stay CEO and stay in charge until the very bitter end of their life. Tim Cook could have done that. And some of the reaction I've seen from people just in the real world to this news, is surprised that he's stepping down at quote unquote, only 65. I think he could have gotten away with being CEO for another decade if he really wanted to.

Speaker 2:
[24:34] But he's stepping down from a position of strength, not weakness. Yes. I don't care what anybody says, the AI situation is nowhere near enough to destabilize confidence in him as leader. The company has exploded. Everyone loves to quote from 350 billion in market gap to 4 trillion. All the tech companies have exploded in the last decade. So it's beyond that. But the handling and the aptitude at which Cook ran the company is almost unparalleled. Was he perfect? Did he make some mistakes? Did they invest in some things that didn't pan out? Of course, he did. You'd be crazy if you never made a mistake. But overall, he really, really did well. People said the exact same thing when Jobs died. It was like, well, Apple's done for. They're never going to do anything new or cool, or they're going to become irrelevant. Back in those days, it was Android's going to eat iPhone's lunch. That was the narrative of the time. It didn't happen. The iPhone got better and better. They expanded the iPhone as inevitably they were going to have to to different markets, different price points, appeal to people. I think there's definitely a future where if Jobs is still at the same company, he would have made products that he liked and nothing else. And then stuff like the iPhone 6 would never have happened and the iPhone would have exploded in the way that it did. There's so many counterfactuals to this idea that like, oh, Tim Cook 6 is time to go because Apple doesn't have a compelling Aero story right now. It's just a terrible situation. It's just a terrible read on the reality of it.

Speaker 1:
[26:05] I'm excited to cover the John Ternus era. I'm excited to see, even though not a lot is going to change, like you said, right off the bat, but it's one of the biggest stories in Apple's history, the transition, the first ever smooth coordinated transition for a $4 trillion company that we get to talk about. I'm excited just for something different.

Speaker 2:
[26:25] Do you think he's going to bring back in-person events?

Speaker 1:
[26:27] No, I don't think so. I want them to, but I just don't think, the thing you could point out as maybe a sign is what they did for the MacBook Neo where us members of the press in New York City did get a five, six-minute spiel from John Ternus about the MacBook Neo, introducing it. He said the name before they played any sort of video.

Speaker 2:
[26:46] I kind of feel that was his putting his mark on it.

Speaker 1:
[26:49] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[26:50] That gave me confidence. Before that event in March, I was like, it's never happening. And then that happened.

Speaker 1:
[26:54] I'm like, hmm.

Speaker 2:
[26:56] Now he's CEO. You can tell with Jos, we had to shut up and we're doing an in-person event here.

Speaker 1:
[27:01] He just doesn't strike me as having the showmanship that, I don't know, like Steve Jobs would have. We don't know a lot about the guy like.

Speaker 2:
[27:08] Yeah, but you can still like hand off to different people.

Speaker 1:
[27:10] Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 2:
[27:12] And I don't even think it has to be like, the whole event doesn't have to be live and in-person, but like you could have like a live intro. And you know, the kind of six, seven minutes start, they did on that and then move to the video to tell you more. Or like, you know, have an in-person, like go to the Steve Jobs Theater where you bring all the press in, like you always do in September. Start it for real, like, you know, make a first impression live and then go, and here's the iPhone and tell you more, it's blah. Like, do you know what I mean? Like, I think there's ways they can bring it back in. It doesn't have to be a complete end-to-end video, but would I bet on it happening? No. But if there's a time for it to happen, it's now. Like, wouldn't that be such a cool statement if, like, Ternus becomes CEO on September the 1st and, like, the iPhone events on, what, like, the 12th, and then, bang, you see him live on stream? Like, I think that would be pretty huge. There's so many possible implications, and I'm sure over the course of the next six months, we'll hear a lot more about the machinations and how stuff's getting moved around, and I'm looking forward to it.

Speaker 1:
[28:03] We've talked about it in Plus Some, Mayo, and I've been in the process of turning my new house into a proper smart home. So, lights, locks, Lutrons, Akara smart locks, just all of the stuff you can imagine. And I've found that throughout this process, a lot of the home hardware is better than it's ever been. Like, the products from Lutron are still great. Products from Akara are really surprising me. But the limitations of HomeKit itself still linger and still kind of hold things back. But over the weekend, last weekend, you referenced something called a HomeKit zone.

Speaker 2:
[28:38] I blew your mind.

Speaker 1:
[28:39] And I was like, do you just mean like a room in HomeKit? And you said, no, HomeKit zones are different. So why don't you explain how you use them?

Speaker 2:
[28:47] Yeah, so you have access. The HomeKit model is you have accessories, accessories are grouped into rooms, and rooms are grouped into a home, right? And you can have multiple homes, you get multiple rooms, you can model accessories. But, and that's what's very clearly presented to you in the home app, right? You have like a menu where you can choose what room you're in, and then you can clearly see the accessories that are in it, and you can switch home if you happen to be rich enough to have like a vacation home and a real home. But generally people have one home and they have multiple rooms. But there's actually a concept called zones that HomeKit supports. Ever since the beginning, it's just not very well presented.

Speaker 1:
[29:21] I had no idea.

Speaker 2:
[29:22] And what a zone is, is it's a collection of rooms. So in a kind of way how a scene is like a collection of accessory states, a zone is just a collection of rooms. And that means that you can group rooms together into kind of like subgroups, rather than just having to address your whole home in one go. So what I use zones for, and I think was their intent, was for like floors of your house. So you can have like upstairs and downstairs. So I have my downstairs rooms, like my kitchen or my living room, or my hallway, they're grouped into a zone called downstairs. And likewise, for the upstairs accessories, they get upstairs. And so what that means is, if you just want to address all of your downstairs lights, you don't have to go one by one through every room. You just say, turn off all my lights downstairs. And it knows and it figures it out. It works out the label and it matches. And it lets you do really natural language voice queries to your assistant. And it just gets what you mean. You can only put like, there are limitations, obviously. It doesn't like, you have to be a bit careful with what you call these things. Because if you call them too vague a noun, Siri will get confused and it won't understand. But for things like upstairs and downstairs, it seems to work very reliably. I've done this for absolutely years. And it's so good when I'm like going to bed. As I'm walking upstairs, I literally say turn off everything downstairs. All my lights turned off. It turns off the TV and the Apple TV in one go. It will turn off the thermostats for you if you want as well. Like if you just want to heat upstairs or downstairs, you can address that individually and only target the thermostats in that zone. You don't have to say in the zone called Blart. You can just say the name of the label, and it just lets it flow very fluidly. It's a great feature, very buried in the Home app. You struggle to find it. You have to click Edit Room, and then one of the options in the Room panel is what zone it's in. By default, it's in no zone, so people just scroll past it. But you have to click in there, you can make a new zone, and you can add on things to it at the same time. But if you never used it before, you should really check out because it just takes the Smart Home stuff to another level with HomeKit, because it just gives you another access to address stuff by. And you don't have to fiddle around setting up scenes and stuff. So a lot of people get around this. If they don't know zones exist, they'll make a scene to turn all their downstairs lights on or off, and they'll call the scene downstairs lights or whatever. And it does work, but it's a bit uglier and you have to be more careful in saying the exact name of the scene. There's less scope for you to say a whole different formulations of the same query. The scene is a bit more prescriptive in what you have to say. And you then have to make scenes for every different accessory types you've got made. Downstairs lights, downstairs TV, downstairs thermostats. If you do it in a zone, all of that stuff comes for free because it just works. A zone is almost like a synthetic room that just includes all the accessories from multiple rooms in one go. And that's how you can address it in HomeKit. So all of the commands that you can do to the voice assistant that are like, do this in this room, they also apply to do this in this zone. So it just unlocks a lot of power for you. If you find the right menu in the HomeKit set up, then you do it once and you never have to touch it again.

Speaker 1:
[32:30] I'm not new to HomeKit. This house isn't the first time I've used HomeKit. I've used HomeKit for probably like a decade at this point. And I had no idea zones were a thing. So you really did blow my mind. And I was thinking through ways that I can use this throughout my house. And I think the one that comes to mind right away is inside and outside lights. So create a zone of all the lights outside so I can say, turn off the outside lights or turn on the inside lights, you know? Because it's like, again, you can do it all with scenes, but this is so much more natural because there's so many times I'm like sitting on the couch and I just want to turn all of the lights inside off. I don't want to know what's, try to remember what scene does what. I want all the lights inside off, but I want like the lights on the front porch and the garage to stay on. So inside outside, perfect zones. This is just a classic example of the home app being bad. I think so much of the home app has gotten better. I think the main view where you can control and favorite accessories and see your rooms, that's pretty good. You can generally get what you want to get done without too much trouble. But when you want to do more, when you want to create the interface for creating scenes is still wonky, I think, especially when you mix and match between different types of accessories, creating automations and how automations can also interact with shortcuts. That whole system is a mess.

Speaker 2:
[33:51] It's a complicated problem, but they definitely could do better at it.

Speaker 1:
[33:53] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[33:54] With the zones, because a room can be in multiple zones, so you can always treat them like tags and make multiple combinations of them. But you want, I think, in the Home app at some point to be some way to visualize all of the things in a particular zone. For upstairs and downstairs, like what I have, it'd be nice if I could see all my lights visually that are upstairs, but there's no view for it in the Home app. It only shows you by room. You can't show them all in one room at a time, unless you do favorites on the home screen. So the zones don't really have any purpose in the Home app. They're only useful for Siri interactions. Some third-party HomeKit apps do expose zones as a view, and you can navigate to them and see the accessories that are in the zone. But I don't use any of them. The Home app is great generally for accessory control. But when it comes to zones, it just doesn't really have any UI for it.

Speaker 1:
[34:48] We talked last week and I think the week before about the ongoing saga of Mac Studio availability, Mac Mini availability, and then, of course, the looming update to the MacBook Pro. In his Power On newsletter last weekend, Mark Gurman shared some more details. And there's bad news for people waiting for the new MacBook Pro overall, like you are, Mayo. He says that because of supply shortages throughout the overall supply chain, this revamped OLED touchscreen thinner MacBook Pro that was expected to ship as soon as the end of this year probably won't come until early 2027 instead.

Speaker 2:
[35:21] Is that March? Is that January? Unclear.

Speaker 1:
[35:24] Unclear. If I was putting money on it, I would say we're looking at March. I just think so much of this is out of Apple's control at this point. Like Mark says that from a software perspective, with all of the new software accommodations for the touch interface, like we've talked about how the menu bar will adapt when it detects you've pressed it with your finger, how controls will try to surface relevant options when you're using the touchscreen, all of that will be ready as part of Mac OS 27. So it is purely just taking the hardware needed for this thing and putting it all together. And I think that's just going to be an example of Apple having to wait like a lot of other companies looking to launch new products.

Speaker 2:
[36:04] Yeah. And to be honest, the news is bad if you're waiting for MacBook Pro, but it's even worse if you're waiting for the next Mac Studio, because I think the recent supply chain shortages and the currently unavailable things had set people up to think the M5 Mac Studio revision is close. Why are these things 12 weeks delayed or currently unavailable? Well, they're going to rev them within 12 weeks. That was the going theory. And so maybe in June, WWC, they'd have a Mac Studio update. But Gehrman says, well, if you think in the MacBook Pro, maybe you've gone from October, November to January, February, March, the Mac Studio has gone from May, June to October. So that's like five months away. So if you're out there waiting for a big Mac Studio overhaul, which will probably be M5 Ultra, right? Because that's kind of what they signaled. They didn't do an M4 Ultra, but the implication was they're going to do like an M5 Ultra. Then that's not going to come until October now, apparently purely because of supply chain shortages when engineers was previously talking middle of the year update.

Speaker 1:
[37:02] So what do you think about the Mac Mini? Because Gehrman doesn't really say anything. Does that mean a Mac Mini is coming sooner rather than later? Like, does that get priority over the Mac Studio, do you think?

Speaker 2:
[37:13] It probably gets priority over the Mac Studio, but I think anything that isn't a laptop isn't getting prioritized. And even with the laptops, we're seeing the MacBook Pro high-end model getting pushed back a bit. So I wouldn't make any claims about the state of the Mac Mini right now. I just think the only thing that Mac Mini has going for it is that it's just like the most basic chip, the M5, right? Like the Mac Studio is getting higher-end configs, like the Macs and the Ultra, which obviously have lower yields. There's just less of them produced. The M5 is produced en masse because it goes in the iPad, it goes in the base MacBook Pro, it goes in the MacBook Air. And so maybe they just have more of them around. And maybe we'll see it come out, but you won't be able to get higher-end RAM options for a while or something. But yeah, so that's the only thing the Mac Mini has going for it. The Mac Studio is just way more niche because of the chips that it requires. And the MacBook Pro, by the way, this touchscreen one is meant to be M6. Yes, so it's not just, oh, we'll take the M5 Max and M5 Pro out of the current things and put them in this and give it OLED screen. It's like, no, we're also getting a chip bump, as well as the touchscreen, as well as the OLED.

Speaker 1:
[38:15] And you're planning to buy one of those whenever it does ship, right?

Speaker 2:
[38:20] Yep, that is the next upgrade.

Speaker 1:
[38:21] You're not going to chicken out of that, like you chickened out of the studio display update that you promised me?

Speaker 2:
[38:25] No, because there's a difference. Yes, the MacBook Pro, I've been ready for them to do the OLED update. There's no going to be no downside. The studio display problem is the poor situation and the fact that the studio display update was a bit naff. The base studio display barely changed. A MacBook Pro that's got OLED and a touchscreen on it is like a big update regardless of what else they do. I mean, the fact that it's also going to be the M6 generation is even gravy on the top. I would buy it if it was still M5, so I'm not really worried about the MacBook Pro being a disappointment. It's going to be expensive, but it's not going to be a disappointment.

Speaker 1:
[38:59] Then also in Power On, Mark explained that the artwork for WWDC 26, which is that black background, kind of silver text and the 26 in the word Mark is glowing, like from the back kind of, he says that this is actually a direct hint at the new Siri interface that is coming as part of iOS 27. So he says the design currently being tested includes a Siri interface that sits within the dynamic island. When it's triggered, the island expands with a prompt that reads search or ask accompanied by a glowing cursor that looks similar to the 26 in the WWDC 26 artwork. This to me is just so stupid because they nailed the design of Apple Intelligence as part of iOS 18. And I know that there's like, there's like some negative connotations stigma. Yeah. I know that that's there, but to go from that really nice and I love the colors of that, how it glows in the rainbow glows in from the edges of the home screen, like it looks so good and that they are going to just go and throw that out in favor of this glowing black and white color. Like it removes a little bit of the whimsy, I think.

Speaker 2:
[40:07] Yeah, because Mark even says that it looks best in dark mode, which is why the WDCR is also done on dark background. You see a bit more of the kind of like the glowing animation. If you look at the Greg Joswiak tweet, because it has like, it's not just like black and white glow, there's like chromatic aberration to it, right? So I think it'd be a bit fancier than maybe what the online picture shows, but it does sound less vibrant than the current design with the edge lighting rainbow. The changes of the dynamic island also support just the fact that you're going to have more of a back and forth conversation. So when it expands, you'll get like the conversation thread, right? Whereas the edge lighting version is kind of set up that some requests don't even present follow up UI at all. It just does the action and the rainbow disappears. If you do some HomeKit requests on the phone, sometimes you don't even know if it's heard you, it's like the rainbow lights up and then if it reacts quickly, the rainbow disappears, and that's all that happens. You don't always get a visual affirmative UI. I think with this 27 revamp, they're going to push a bit more on the chatbot look of it. So that's why you've got the dynamic island expanding thing, which is something that the current design didn't really have to accommodate. The big mistake here, which we talked about at the time, was why did they ship a Siri visual redesign without the new Siri stuff?

Speaker 1:
[41:24] I mean, yeah, that was the stupid part.

Speaker 2:
[41:26] They burned a whole design. I mean, I guess you can argue back then, they didn't think it would take two years for them to bring it out, but they should just wait. If back then they thought it was only going to take three months, they should just wait the three months. Because it set people up. They burned a design that was cool. They've attracted negativity to a rainbow appearance, which looks cool. They've misled people for two years. Because if you're a lay person, just a random customer, you don't know all the details about it. But if you see that Siri suddenly looks different, you're probably fairly reasonably going to assume that it also works differently, and it just doesn't. They just screwed up expectations. They burnt goodwill. They should just kept it on the old design. Then at least all of the negativity about Siri could have been thrown at the orb design, instead of pretending like they've got a new Siri when they really didn't. That was the root cause of this, and this is the fallout. Now, they're going to have to go in a radically different direction.

Speaker 1:
[42:20] I wonder how much of the interface will be controlled entirely through the Dynamic Island. You start a prompt with Apple's, with the voice assistant, you type something or you say something, then do you get taken into a standalone Siri app? Does it just stay there floating like the type of Siri does now? It's like this sounds very much like the interface for brief interactions.

Speaker 2:
[42:44] The way I was imagining it is that it will be like starting the island, it will expand to a bigger bubble, and then if you want to carry on, you can swipe on it and it will go to full screen. It's like a couple intermediate states, where the quick actions kind of stuff that you do with Siri today, it will, the Dynamic Island will glow and wake up, and then maybe get a bit bigger to give you the result. Then if you want to have a persistent conversation, you can pull down on it or something and it will go full screen. That's kind of how I was imagining it.

Speaker 1:
[43:16] We've got some rumors about the iPhone 18 Pro colors. So this comes from Macworld, and they say that Apple is developing the iPhone 18 Pro models in four colors. So light blue, which they describe as similar to the current mist blue color of the base iPhone 17, then dark cherry that they describe as deep wine-like red, not a bright fruit punch style red. Then we have silver described as being similar to the iPhone 17 Pro's silver and white design, and then a dark gray that looks like a proper space gray or space black color. The most interesting part about this is that this dark cherry does not look anything like what Mark Gurman and others have said is a deep red.

Speaker 2:
[43:59] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[43:59] I mean, unless I am just totally off base about what I think deep red looks like, this is purple, this is not red.

Speaker 2:
[44:06] Deep red is more like what some of the product red iPhones were like in my head.

Speaker 1:
[44:09] See, I expected darker than that, I expected kind of a crimson.

Speaker 2:
[44:13] Yeah. I mean, obviously, when you say product red iPhone, some of them were lighter than others, but there were quite dark ones. Like maybe the iPhone 7 product red was quite dark, I'm remembering. But yeah, this is not, this is in the family of purples, I would say. I mean, it looks nice, I'll give it that, but it's not red.

Speaker 1:
[44:29] Which I assume of these, you like the space black, dark gray.

Speaker 2:
[44:33] Oh, you've got that dead on. I'm so happy they're going back to a black color.

Speaker 1:
[44:37] But you, I guess you think the midnight's too blue, because you don't like any of the iPhone 17 Pro colors. And that's one of the reasons you went with the iPhone Air.

Speaker 2:
[44:46] Definitely one of the reasons. The blue is the color I'd buy if I was getting the Pro, but I think it looks more blue than midnight. Like some of the midnight on like home pods or laptops and stuff is more neutral, I think. On the iPhone, I think it's pretty blue.

Speaker 1:
[45:00] I think of these four colors for the iPhone 18 Pro, I would probably be most inclined to go black, just because I don't like the purple. The blue is fine, but it's not for me. The silver is okay. I think it's going to depend a lot on the color of the glass, because right now it's very, there's a stark contrast between the silver of the aluminum and the white of the glass.

Speaker 2:
[45:19] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[45:19] So maybe silver, but probably the dark gray.

Speaker 2:
[45:22] You don't like the blue, like the lighter blue?

Speaker 1:
[45:24] I like it. I just don't think it's for me. Yeah. A bit too bright. I love the orange. Don't get me wrong. I love the orange, but I love the orange because it's different. It's flashy and it's fun and it's just weird to have an orange phone. The blue is nice, but they've basically done a blue like this before, too. Yeah, they have. Both on the base iPhone 17 and then it was the Pacific blue iPhone 12 Pro, I think is what it was.

Speaker 2:
[45:51] One of the Pro phones, yeah, the last one.

Speaker 1:
[45:53] None of these stand out to me as being as cool as the cosmic orange.

Speaker 2:
[45:56] None of them are as bold as the orange. I can't wait for the pushback from people like, I'm not upgrading this year because they're not doing orange, but they're going for different colors and maybe the dark cherry looks really good in person and appeals to other people more. I don't hate it from the pictures, but it's definitely not as striking as the orange was. The thing that was most interesting in this Mac code report was that it said there's going to be a smaller gap between the glass cutout on the back and the camera bump.

Speaker 1:
[46:23] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[46:24] Might make it look like, because I don't really like the back of the phones this generation. The two-tone cutout thing, it looks a bit jigsaw puzzle piece slapped in there. Maybe if the gap is shorter, it will look less silly. I don't really understand why the glass section isn't like a full width element. It's weird how it's framed by the aluminium, and so it looks a bit stuck in the middle of it like a sticker.

Speaker 1:
[46:48] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[46:49] But a shorter gap doesn't sound like full width glass, it just sounds like the top of it will be closer to where the camera bump is maybe.

Speaker 1:
[46:56] Which almost sounds weird from a spacing perspective.

Speaker 2:
[46:59] Yeah, it almost sounds worse.

Speaker 1:
[47:00] Yeah, from the top of the camera bump to the top of the phone, then have a smaller gap between the bottom of the camera bump and the glass. It almost sounds worse. I don't know. It's one of those things we have to see it to fully know what they're describing.

Speaker 2:
[47:11] Yeah, I mean, if they made the bevel on the camera bump less sharp, it might make it smooth a bit more, so then there's less distance visually, and so that's why they can bump it up a little bit. But yeah, it's definitely something we have to see to really interpret properly.

Speaker 1:
[47:27] Then the report also says that smaller dynamic island is still in the works. That's been back and forth a lot between the Weibo leakers and everything.

Speaker 2:
[47:34] Yeah. Now, it's like the island's getting smaller, but it's a debate about how much smaller.

Speaker 1:
[47:38] How much smaller, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[47:39] Yeah. Is one of the face-heady components going to be under the screen or not, or are they just shrinking it while still keeping them above the screen? It's currently the debate. It hasn't really been resolved one way or the other.

Speaker 1:
[47:49] The current state of the iPhone 18 Pro rumors strike me as a more aggressive form of the rumors start out with the most ambitious thing, and then slowly, as supply chain rumors evolve, you come back towards the mean of what the current iPhone looks like. I think that's what we're seeing with these iPhone 18 Pro rumors. It seems like the focus is going to be on the fold, and then any noticeable change to the main Pro design is not going to happen, and we'll have to wait until the glass-wing phone next year to really see that.

Speaker 2:
[48:20] Yeah. Shocker, the year after they did a big redesign, this initiative update on the same design. They do that playbook so often.

Speaker 1:
[48:27] Well, it's good that they're replacing the CEO with somebody who can innovate.

Speaker 2:
[48:32] Yeah, a folder ball could never be done under Tim Cook.

Speaker 1:
[48:35] Never.

Speaker 2:
[48:36] That's the thing with the smile display is going to come out in September as well. It's like, whoa, a whole new product category. It's very easy. That's the thing with the roadmaps are so long, it will take a while for that to shake out. But yeah, with the iPhone, the best predictor of what an iPhone looks like is the iPhone from the year before. And so I think the Pro phones will look mostly the same as last year's Pro phones. They're just doing the different color lineup. I'm glad they're going to four colors rather than three, just to give a bit more variety. And I'm glad the extra color is a very neutral black, because I think they'll look good. But I still love the air too much to switch away from the Pro phone and I'm not buying a foldable, I think.

Speaker 1:
[49:12] Then, finally this week, a rumor again from Weibo about device support for iOS 27. So, you'll remember that with iOS 26, Apple dropped support for the iPhone XS generation. Now, this rumor says that for iOS 27, Apple will drop support for the iPhone 11 generation, so that's the 11, the 11 Pro and the 11 Pro Max, which were released in 2019, and the iPhone SE2 that was released in 2020.

Speaker 2:
[49:39] Sounds reasonable.

Speaker 1:
[49:41] Yeah, it sounds totally reasonable, especially when you also remember that the biggest iOS 27 features are going to be Apple Intelligence related, so you'll need an iPhone 15 Pro to use those anyway. So, I feel like nowadays, your phone being supported or not supported by that year's big update means less and less.

Speaker 2:
[50:00] Yeah, I mean, for a long time, it's always been like, well, the support goes back six years, but the older phones don't get all the features, right? That's happened a lot, but it's more acute recently when Apple Intelligence hangs off so much and you need like basically you need 15 Pro or newer to get like all the new stuff. I did see someone funny comment on the Siri article, the design thing, where it's like, oh, does that mean the iPhone SE third generation or fourth generation won't get support because it doesn't have a dynamic island? No, they'll just do a different design for that one. Same way that live activities, they're best on phones with dynamic islands, but if you don't, they just show them on the lock screen. So they'll make it work. But yeah, we're one year further on and they're just cutting off the next generation of oldest phone, like last year they did the XS, then next year, this year they're doing the XI. You get lucky some years where they keep support for all phones that supported the previous version, but doesn't surprise me in the slightest that they're moving, they're just bumping along by one. The kind of window of support moves forward.

Speaker 1:
[50:58] All right, I think that does it for this week. You can find us on Apple podcasts where you can leave a rating and a review. Find and add free version of the show at 9to5mac.com/join for $5 a month or $50 a year. Send us feedback, happyhour at 9to5mac.com. I am on threads and elsewhere at Chance H Miller. And Mayo, what about you?

Speaker 2:
[51:20] At BZMIA.

Speaker 1:
[51:22] All right, thanks Mayo.

Speaker 2:
[51:23] Bye bye.

Speaker 1:
[51:25] And plus this week, a saga that I know you have been literally checking and refreshing things. Every day has finally come to a resolution. Is that right?

Speaker 2:
[51:36] Every day might be slightly exaggerating because I think I've given up hope. So but yeah, I have been checking. So this is the savant. This is the Apple TV show that was meant to come out in like September and at the very 11th hour, it got pulled. Apple said after careful consideration, we're not releasing it this time. This was in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination. The show depicts like extremism and domestic violence and terrorism. So Apple never directly said that that was the reason they were pulling it, but that was the reason they were pulling it. There was a big hoo-ha because the star and executive producer, Jessica Chastain said she's not aligned with Apple on the decision to remove the release. Still in the TV app now, it says that it is dated with the 2025 year and says coming out later date. So they haven't updated the page at all since it got pulled in September. Then literally months have gone by with no news on it. So a lot of people have written it off as never being released. Now apparently, that has not going to be the case and that it's coming out in July. So Chastain had an interview where she said to the press that, before I didn't know if it was coming out, now I can tell you it's coming out. So she's basically confirming that they are going to release it, and then Variety had sources familiar with that saying that Apple is targeting a July launch. So the saga is hopefully going to be over. I don't really think they achieved much by delaying it like this. If anything, they brought more attention to it than if they just released it normally. How many Apple shows just come and go and nobody hears a peeve about them?

Speaker 1:
[53:07] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[53:07] They could have just dropped it or maybe delayed it by a month or something, but the fact they definitely pulled it and didn't even give it another day at the time, it's just drawn eyes to it. We don't know whether the show's going to be popular or not now. So maybe it will come out in July and also just be a nothing burger and people move on. But the way they handled it was not ideal, I don't think. If you're going to release it at some point, did it really matter if it was two weeks to the proximity of that event? I don't know. Even before the assassination happened, there had been some pushback from some of the right-wing media about laughing at the advert and how it was showing, how the trailer depicted some things.

Speaker 1:
[53:45] Which you had caught on to that before anything really happened, right? You saw that blow back on Twitter a bit.

Speaker 2:
[53:52] Then there had been viral tweets about it for days. But it doesn't seem like that was the reason. I presume some of that will return when it finally gets a new date and stuff. But the close term event was the Charlie Kirk thing. Obviously, it's Apple's priority. They don't have to release anything that they pay for and make. But it wasn't ideally handled, I don't think. You don't want to be in a situation where your star is saying they're not aligned with you because it just looks bad, especially when that star is currently filming another project for you, and is signed on for another project. You want to keep relations strong. I think they bungled it a bit. If you're not going to have the confidence to release these things that you're producing, then you shouldn't sign off on them in the first place. It's a bit of a repeat of what happened with Jon Stewart. Apple went out, made a big statement of hiring Jon Stewart to do non-fiction documentary content, and then when Jon Stewart did non-fiction documentary content that they didn't really like, they shut him down. I don't think they have a prerogative to host Jon Stewart on their platform, they don't want to, but if you're going to go out and do it, you got to be sure that you're going to be okay with it in the first instance. Luckily, they haven't really repeated that. This was slightly different circumstances, but it's the closest they've got since the Stewart thing. It's a bit of a black eye, a bit of a black mark on their record, but I'm glad that the saga is going to be over.

Speaker 1:
[55:07] Then something else that we mentioned in passing related to the Apple TV, think last week, but that is that Netflix updated their Apple TV app to abandon using the native TV OS video player in favor of their own custom cross-platform interface, whatever you want to call it. And we referenced it in passing, but in the intervening week or so, I saw just more and more posts on Twitter and Reddit about people complaining. And I don't watch a lot of stuff on Netflix, so I hadn't really experienced this firsthand. So I went to check it out and it is so bad. I don't know if you've tried it. I don't know if you've tried it, Mayo, but it is just god awful. Like you don't realize how many of the core Apple TV features, the things that make watching stuff on Apple TV better than watching on any other platform, how many of those things are exclusive to using the native tvOS player?

Speaker 2:
[55:59] Yeah. The thing I love so much is what they added, what, last year, where if you go back 30 seconds, it just puts the subtitles on for those 30 seconds. Because before that, they had a thing where you could ask the Siri emote, like, oh, what did she say, or what did he say? And it would jump back 30 seconds, turn the subtitles on, and then turn them off. But the discoverability on that is terrible, because who knows that special phrase to tell the remote for it to do that thing. It's so much more natural when people pause or just rewind a short amount for it to just turn subtitles on. And I think loads of people love that feature. That feature's even been implemented on third-party Apple TV apps. So like the Android app, the Firestick app, it will do that when you're watching Apple TV original stuff. They like added that as a platform feature. And I see loads of people on my like TweetDeck feeds like saying, oh wow, that's so impressive. And like that's a cool thing that other people should do. But when you're on the Apple TV itself, you only get that when you're using the native player. Other things too, in terms of, you know, like the audio, some of the audio effect options, like enhanced dialogue and things, and just the smoothness of how you're able to like pause the scrubber and then just like flick around on the touch surface of the remote to skip between areas of the video. Yeah, obviously the native player is fantastic at that. The third party players are like mediocre to awful because they're lowest common denominator. Their implementations, which means they target fire sticks. And what do fire sticks have? Well, they just have a simple D-pad. So, yeah, accommodations for nice gestures and swiping isn't really there. And that's what you get here with Netflix. They've standardized on the same player they use everywhere else. They would say it's for consistency and customers like it and they can move from device to device to device. And the player works the same way. Oh, if people buying Apple TVs are generally a bit more fanatical, right? Because it's the more niche, high-end option. And so we get really mad about it. Unfortunately, the Apple TV platform, the hardware box, it just isn't big enough for people to warrant doing that development, even though it's clearly a worse experience, right? I would much prefer it if all the apps use the native player, but they just don't. The Apple TV hardware is expensive and not sells in low volumes compared to FireStix and Google TV and all the smart TV platforms where the apps just come built in. How bad are the streaming apps built in to smart TVs? They're terrible, right?

Speaker 1:
[58:20] Truly, yes. Oh, yeah, awful.

Speaker 2:
[58:22] That's what 90% of people use.

Speaker 1:
[58:24] Yeah, unfortunately so.

Speaker 2:
[58:25] Unfortunately so, right? I'm not saying it's good, it's a terrible experience, but that's what most people use because they don't even consciously perceive that it could be a better way. And so that's why these companies get away with it, right? So why does Netflix bother doing a separate implementation of its video service if 99.9% of the customers aren't going to make us think about it? And so they just don't, and that's how you get here. And they were one of the last ones standing, right? I know people love to paint Netflix as the big bad enemy, but they were the last of the streaming apps that I know of to keep using the Apple TV video player. Disney and Hulu and Paramount, they already use third party players that are of varying quality. Netflix was one of the last standing players that, despite not being a very good steward of the Apple TV platform in other ways, they did use the native player, but now that has gone too. Now, just to couch some of the criticism, there are sometimes technical reasons why third party companies can't use the native player. Like the native player only supports certain codecs and certain formats. And so if you have an archive of video stored in different media types, the native player can't always support those. So there are sometimes technical reasons. It's not just a UI, UX, lowest common denominator thing. There are sometimes literally, I have video content I can't play using the standard player. And maybe that's where Netflix is heading. So like, obviously, right now, they have to maintain a library of all the content to stream an Apple compatible format. But in the future, maybe they want to stream in like AV2 or some other weird thing that's coming up, and then they can do it through a native player, through their own custom player that the native player doesn't support. And so there are sometimes technical reasons. But the main reason is just the product managers don't see any pushback when they do it. It's cheaper for them to just run one system. I have seen a lot of people say, why doesn't Apple enforce third-party apps use the native player as a rule of the platform? Unfortunately, I don't think they have the sway.

Speaker 1:
[60:11] The sway, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[60:12] They could force that through on the iPhone. They could probably force it through on the iPad. They're not forcing it through on TVOS. If they want to have that kind of power, they need cheaper Apple TV boxes to sell that run through TVOS, because the market share is just not there. Honestly, I think a lot of these streaming apps, they could probably get away with cutting the Apple TV Apple together, and they would not get that much pushback relative to the size of the market. Because I think estimates like TVOS is like 5% of the streaming market. It's dominated by Android smart TVs that aren't running TVOS. So that is the sad truth. I wish it would be different, but it's not going to be. It's just like how I wish on the Mac, every app I use would be a nice native application, using native controls and native UI. And most of them are just like electron web apps.

Speaker 1:
[61:02] I think the primary reason for Netflix making this change is likely something to do with advertising. Like they're really pushing and leaning in to the ad-supported plans now. They're raising the prices of the ad-free plans.

Speaker 2:
[61:14] So I will say, in Apple's defense, the native player does have pretty good support for interstitials.

Speaker 1:
[61:19] But if Netflix wants to do something that's like interactive, like I'm thinking of some of the ads that YouTube does on the Apple TV app, because they use their own player and they have all kinds of weird ad implementations and ways to gamify ads and whatever. Like if Netflix wants to do something like that.

Speaker 2:
[61:36] So on that basis, I would say, technically, it is possible to do that using the native player. So like, you know what YouTube does? All of those functions you could do with the native player, because you want to overlay screens and have interstitials and block off the pause button stuff. But that means doubling your engineering work just for TVOS. So that's why they're not going to do it, not because the native player doesn't support it at all, but because it's just easier for them to do everything on one unified code base.

Speaker 1:
[62:02] I think the favorite TVOS native player feature that I miss in Netflix and some of these other apps that use their own is the ability to tap the touchpad and see what time, what you're watching is going to end, because it gives you the perfect way to gauge whether you have time to watch one more episode before you want to go to bed or whatever. It's just those little touches that when companies shift away from using the native player that you just miss out on. And the idea of giving consistency across platforms is just not, I just don't buy it. Like if you're watching on an Apple TV, the odds that you're going to go watch on a fire stick somewhere else, like that's just not, I don't envision many people caring or doing that enough.

Speaker 2:
[62:47] Well, you might have like two TVs in your house, one is an Apple TV box, one doesn't. You probably have a tablet, you have a phone, you can access it through the web browser. Like then it can all look the same with the same controls.

Speaker 1:
[63:00] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[63:00] So that's where they would argue. I don't necessarily agree with them, but that's kind of their position. And it's partly that and it's also partly, it's easier for them to just have one code base to run the stuff on. If Apple really wanted to fight against this, I think the best thing they could do was elevate Apple TV channels.

Speaker 1:
[63:14] They're not elevating it, they basically killed it.

Speaker 2:
[63:17] Well, that's, I mean, at their own cost.

Speaker 1:
[63:19] Yeah, yes.

Speaker 2:
[63:20] If channels were stronger, you could access third-party content through the Apple Surface, i.e. the TV app with the native player and only access the content that isn't Apple original, right? It's just channels is not strong enough. And unlike TVS in general, channels you can get on some third-party platforms. You can subscribe to channels through some of the TV app interfaces on Android TV, for instance. So that would be their way in to try and fight back, but they haven't really shown much gusto on doing that either. This is why I campaign for just making the TV app all in on TV Plus, like TV originals, because I haven't seen the enthusiasm or the drive from Apple itself to push the other initiatives that they started. They just kind of get left behind. The only thing they invest in regularly is the Apple original content now.

Speaker 1:
[64:05] Did you see the Hollywood reporter that said John Ternus is a fan of Apple TV but wants it to be more competitive? I'm curious to see what exactly that means.

Speaker 2:
[64:16] He meant the streaming service on that.

Speaker 1:
[64:17] Yes, he meant the streaming service.

Speaker 2:
[64:19] What they can do, get a back catalog.

Speaker 1:
[64:21] Yeah, maybe that would make it more competitive, but it's already a pretty competitive offer, I feel like, with the quality of the content, the price is pretty reasonable compared to others. Of course, now you bundle in F1, it's more competitive than it's been ever.

Speaker 2:
[64:37] Yeah, I think their movie offering is still a bit weak, I would say. The TV show cadence is pretty strong now, several new releases every month. The movie releases are further and farther between, and when they come out, they're just not as good. They don't hit the quality bar as much. I don't know why that is. I don't know if there's dysfunction inside the unit that's producing the movies. I think they could probably benefit from doing a window licensing deal with a big, like get movies out of theatrical and license them for the TV platform for a year or whatever. So you get like big budget movies that people recognize because the Apple original pipeline on that is just not strong. So, you know, one argument would be, well, just bolster the movie pipeline. But if that's a hard thing to do, so do that alongside getting some licensed content, maybe on the movie side. I don't think they need it as much on the TV side. But yeah, that'd be because some people worried that like Cook will be out and then Apple's interest in Hollywood would fade because Cook doesn't want to go to any of the... Ternus isn't interested in the red carpet parties. I mean, I can't see Ternus being at the Oscars like Cook was. Maybe Cook will be one of his sustained roles, his chairman, him and Q will still carry on going to the award shows. But if Ternus likes TV, that's at least a good sign for the division.