Apple History and Apple Psychology, How Apple Should Capitalize On Its AI Potential, Why It Probably Won't

Ben, how are you doing?

I'm doing well, Andrew. Getting girded up for some combination of history lesson and psychoanalysis—but not of you—so you can rest safely.

Thank you so much. I'm glad I'm not going to be in the therapy chair here tonight. I am also doing pretty well. I gotta tell you, I have never taken a position on this issue, but I think I'm becoming a pro-daylight-saving-time guy as I get older here.

It's really interesting because I have always been—well, number one, I'm pro the system as it is.

Mm-hmm.

Actually, my main objection was the whole moving it to be earlier and later in the year. I think what you want in the summer is summer nights, right? It's the best.

It's the best.

It is the best. And so, yes, twice-a-year changing everything is a pain. It's become less of a pain as everything becomes digital. You used to have to walk around the house and change everything; the microwave would never be updated. You want more light at night. Meanwhile, having grown up in the North, not having light in the morning is a real problem. Yeah, it sucks that it gets dark at night. Guess what? Everything about winter sucks. Not having light until 10:00 a.m. is way worse. So I've always been pro the system as it is. And actually, I believe in the U.S. they changed it in the 1970s.

Yeah.

Because people—this isn't the first time people have complained about this. And they actually changed it back within a year because people realized, actually, this really sucks, particularly in the winter.

I never knew that.

Yeah, and so—but I did see a pretty compelling argument. As I've gotten older and more aware of health issues and more attuned to sleep and—

Circadian rhythms, yeah.

Yeah. I actually kind of buy the argument that it's bad because you need light in the morning most of all. And so, again, I think the big problem is changing it to March when it used to be in April. Then it's not as big of an issue. Dark mornings remain a bigger problem than dark nights.

Okay.

So I am—

That's your take.

My take is I am pro the old daylight saving time, and then if we have to do just one and not change it, I am pro standard, not daylight. And that is a change for me as I've—

Okay.

—gotten older.

Yeah. I mean, it's been a source of heated debate. Nate Silver had a take. Saagar Enjeti had a take.

Yeah, I think Saagar's take helped convince me on the morning bit.

Yeah, I respect both those guys. I actually haven't really read much on either side of the argument. All I know is that for the last several days, it's been awesome to work until 5:30 or 6:00 and then have an hour of daylight to take my son to the playground as a palate cleanser. So I'm all in on this pro-daylight-saving side.

Well, wait, I have more takes.

Okay.

You didn't know what you were getting into. I have more takes. The other take that's interesting: I'm in Taiwan, which does not have any time changes.

Uh-huh.

And I always dislike that because it gets dark pretty early here, even in the summer. And I'm like, the being-light-longer is better. And then I remembered it is so freaking hot that it's only tolerable at night.

You need the darkness.

Right. And so it's actually a good thing that it gets darker sooner because that means it cools down. So my entire take psychology might be screwed up in that regard. Wisconsin's experience of sunlight and Taiwan's experience of sunlight are very, very different.

Well, I imagine we'll get some emails about this. Maybe we could keep the conversation going in the mailbag.

Oh, we're gonna get more emails about this than anything else. Yeah.

All I ask is that I don't get a wall of 3,000 words from people arguing one side or the other. Keep the takes concise if you want to weigh in.

Yep.

Yeah, let's keep it to 150 words and we'll roll from there. But as for this show, as promised, on Monday we're going to revisit Apple now that you have written your article. And before we dive into it, I just want to offer two notes at the top. Is that cool, a little preamble?

You're the host. It is Sharp Tech, not Thompson Tech.

There you go. It's Sharp Tech. So first of all, it occurred to me earlier in the week: every now and then we talk about missing the forest for the trees with respect to general AI progress and how incredible this moment in technology actually is. I also think it's been easy to miss the forest for the trees on Apple and its AI efforts, where what's happening here is pretty amazing.

We have the most valuable company in the entire world, the most successful company in the history of technology, and they are just completely lost as they try to incorporate AI software into their business. It's just a remarkable twist as we head into the new era here. Apple's flagship AI product was essentially vaporware, and for the past year they've had a worldwide marketing campaign advertising features that straight-up don't exist. I don't know how we got here. But I just wanted to state the obvious on that front because we've been in the weeds making jokes here and there. Stepping back, the broad strokes of what's happening are pretty remarkable. Apple suddenly looks like Microsoft.

And I think it's probably—and correct me if I'm wrong—particularly interesting for you because you have no recollection or remembrance of Apple's dark days. And you've only known Apple as this sort of behemoth astride the world. Behemoth? Behemoth?

Behemoth.

Behemoth.

Yep.

Thank you. John Gruber wrote a piece today, Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino, that is a tour de force. I think it is the definitive article on this whole episode. One of the most brilliant points he makes in this article is that one of the reasons we failed in our analysis—and the reason John is beating himself up in the first half of this article for failing in this analysis, as we talked a little bit about Dithering earlier in the week—is because Apple had built a tremendous well of credibility around the idea that, “We're going to ship what we say we're going to ship.”

Mm-hmm.

And as he notes, Apple in the 1990s was the opposite. They were the kings of vaporware. I think we called back last episode to Microsoft in the 2000s being the kings of vaporware. Apple did it first. I mean, there are lots of things Apple did first—and Microsoft copied. Selling things that didn't exist, software visions in keynotes that were never actually even possible—that is something Apple did. That was one of the first things Steve Jobs had to fix when he came back.

Yeah.

And what makes this distressing—and John really puts his finger on it and rightly draws it all the way up the chain to Tim Cook—is that this is a really fundamental failure in that regard.

Mm-hmm.

It's not just that they couldn't ship this. How did it even make it into a keynote suggesting that they could when they couldn't even do a demo of it? And fast-forward: how do you make a commercial about that? It's just—

Well, I think the fact that it was in the demo is why so many people suspended disbelief in terms of what Apple was capable of.

It's because Apple had credibility. If Microsoft put that in, I think there's still enough overhang of 2000s-era Microsoft where people—

Mm.

—like John and I would say, “Okay, let's see a demo.” Even with Alexa, we were on it this last week, saying, “I don't buy this.”

Let's wait and see.

I need to see this.

Yeah.

I need to see a demo of this. And my—I'm default skeptical that everything they show in the Alexa+ keynote would work. And guess what? We did not extend that skepticism to Apple because Apple has shipped what they promised, sometimes with delays.

Mm-hmm.

And the one exception is AirPower, but, you know, okay, you're allowed a mulligan in a span of 20 years. This goes far beyond that. And as John noted, there is no reason—and you would be a fool—to ever take seriously any Apple promise like this ever again until it's in people's hands.

Yeah, exactly. The reason I invoked Microsoft earlier is because Microsoft has released a couple of different products over the years that have instantly been punchlines, whether it’s the Zune, the Surface, or whatnot. Apple Intelligence is a punchline for eternity after the last 9 months here. The only other introductory note I had was that I finally tried Apple’s Image Playground.

Is it?

Man, oh, man. That was an impressively useless app. You mentioned it on Dithering with Gruber.

It’s so bad. It’s amazing.

I realize when you mentioned it, I had never actually opened it, so I gave it a whirl.

And then you search for Image Playground, and you see the icon, and you’re like, “This can’t be real.”

Oh, my God. I know. That’s the one thing they did ship, and I spent a good 3 minutes after using it trying to think of any scenario in which I would open it again, and I came up empty. So, not great.

1. The Scott Forstall Myth

But in terms of how we got here, you mentioned to me offline that Apple psychology was something that you used to write about often but haven’t discussed as much recently. I went back and reread a 2013 post you wrote on Apple and the App Store. As you noted at the top, I am going to put you in teacher mode for the first segment here, and we’ll start with a specific question that stems from your piece in 2013.

Who was Scott Forstall, why is he no longer at Apple, and how is that story relevant to Apple’s evolution as a company over the last 10 years?

Well, Scott Forstall is a mythic creature.

Okay.

He left Apple a long time ago—2012, 2013, somewhere around then. Because he’s been gone for so long, he gets to wear all the angst and wishes of people that are critical of everything Apple has done since then and can say, “Oh, if only Scott Forstall was there.”

He never made a mistake. This is what people do with Grantland, for the record. They talk about Grantland like it was the greatest website in the history of the world, and the further we get, the more perfect Grantland becomes. So, Scott Forstall.

Grantland was the best website in the history of the world.

It was a great website.

I said that when it existed, so this isn’t a looking-backwards thing.

Okay.

And number 2, it employed Andrew Sharp. How could it not have been one of the greatest websites of all time?

That’s right. I enjoyed my time there. No shots at Grantland.

People don’t realize that Grantland, the Bill Simmons project that started at ESPN, was amazing. Grantland was one of the last content-focused destination sites. Every single day, I had Grantland saved on my iPhone screen.

Mm-hmm.

I would go there and read what was on there, even if it was about a subject that I didn’t think I cared about, because I had such a high confidence that it would be a great article that I’d be happy to have read.

Yeah.

And that’s an amazing place to be. ESPN killed it in budget cuts and fights with Bill Simmons, and maybe it would have never existed going forward, but it’s truly one of the greatest websites of all time. I would like to think that we are, in some small senses, the progeny of Grantland.

Keeping the spirit alive. Absolutely.

Because where did you learn to podcast, Andrew?

My first podcast was out there in L.A.

At Grantland, that’s right.

With Juliet Litman and Chris Ryan. Then I got a note from Bill saying, “You’re pretty good at podcasting.”

Yeah, and you’re a classic example. You’re like, “Podcasting is stupid. I’m not—I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

Totally. So, all right, Grantland was great and deserves the reputation. Tell me about Scott Forstall.

Scott Forstall, the Grantland of tech executives. I like it. It’s even better than unicorn. Unicorn has other meanings. So yes, we’ll stick with that one. I’m adding this to the Sharp Tech nomenclature going forward—a mythical creature.

Perfect.

My personal experience with Scott Forstall, which I think helps color some of this, was one of the greatest things about being an intern at Apple. I was there in 2010 with the Apple University team, when that team was just getting spun up.

Today, it’s more like a glorified HR organization. Back then, it was the original vision: “We’re going to help Apple’s top 200”—this mythical group of people who get to go to the big retreat every year, where they make all their plans for the future—and help them understand what makes Apple Apple.

Mm-hmm.

I think that entire concept is doomed. When you start codifying things, you start to ossify them. But that’s a completely separate discussion that we could have another time.

I was there, and this was all interns in the company. Every week, there was a lunch where a different Apple executive would come in. Some of them would present, and some of them would just take Q&A. We got Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, Tim Cook, Scott Forstall, and a whole bunch of other executives.

Truly an amazing experience.

An unbelievable opportunity. Yeah.

Yeah, it was awesome. I can’t remember now exactly what Forstall said in that presentation, other than the fact that the tangible sense you got coming out of that presentation was, “This is the most arrogant son of a bitch I’ve ever encountered in my life.”

Okay.

I can’t even remember the details. It’s one of those things where memories are tinted by emotion, right? This is the problem with eyewitnesses in crimes. You’re in law school, right? You know the problem of eyewitnesses in crimes, right?

Yeah.

It’s what actually happened versus what that person felt as it was happening that colors their recollection. What I remember from that presentation is the palpable, tangible sense of arrogance that emanated off of this guy.

So when you fast-forward a few years and he basically gets unceremoniously dumped from Apple—allegedly because of the Apple Maps failure, but really, what you heard was that everyone on the executive team just hated this guy—you’re like, “Yep, that makes sense. I can get it.”

So what were his responsibilities? Why would he be conceivably the fall guy for Apple Maps 15 years ago?

Well, this gets to the other perspective that you would get from him if you talked to people from Apple at the time. I don’t know if I’ve ever talked to employees more loyal to their boss than anyone who worked for Scott Forstall.

Okay.

So who was Scott Forstall? Okay, we’re going deep back into history, and all this is, as we said at the top, the psychology of Apple. This might all be BS. Take this—this is like the Apple vaporware of podcasts. Take it with a grain of salt.

These are my takes on it as someone who worked at Apple for 3 months. I think that perspective was actually unique. I was in a very unique place to get some really interesting insights. I talked to a lot of senior executives—people very senior who were at Apple for a long time.

Obviously, I’ve followed the company for years. But this is one person’s perspective, so take it with a grain of salt. With that caveat up front.

Okay.

2. NeXT Rebuilds Apple

You have the original Apple. In 1976, I believe it was, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started the company. Wozniak’s the technical genius. Jobs is the marketing guy, the idea guy, the sort of conniving one who already ripped off Steve Wozniak at Atari. The whole package, I think, is one way to put it.

They started Apple. Their first computer was the Apple I, which was basically just a motherboard. You had to provide everything else around it.

Mm-hmm.

Then the Apple II. The Apple II was a huge breakout. It was actually a whole computer. The first spreadsheet was written for the Apple II. It was a big deal. It carried the company for a very long time.

You fast-forward, and they make something called the Lisa, which is the first graphical user interface. It was way too expensive, kind of a failure. Then the Macintosh in 1984.

People think about the Macintosh as being the core of Apple, but actually, throughout the ’80s, it was the Apple II. That’s what actually paid the bills.

Right.

Steve Jobs didn’t care about the Apple II. That was old technology. He cared about the Mac and was spending tons of money. It was losing tons of money, and Steve Jobs gets fired. He wasn’t focused on the actual core business.

Just being a pain in the rear end. And so Apple—the Macintosh, though—ends up becoming a hit over time as it gets more capable. It gets a huge market in desktop publishing because you get WYSIWYG, “what you see is what you get.” You could actually design newspapers and whatever on it.

Apple’s doing pretty well through the ’80s and ’90s. In the ’90s, they really start to fall behind. Classic Mac OS technically had so much technical debt; it was still downstream from the original Macintosh operating system. If one application crashed, your whole computer would crash. It wasn’t memory-safe. It was just a total mess, and their hardware was falling behind. The Wintel duopoly was running circles around them.

Mm-hmm.

Windows was a technically superior operating system, and Intel chips were way faster. It was just better in every respect. The Macintosh still had that ineffable taste. People liked using it.

Yeah.

I remember when I worked for the student newspaper in college, I gravitated toward the Macs. I just liked using them, and I learned how to use QuarkXPress and lay stuff out. But from any technical perspective, they stunk. The company was flailing around trying to find the next thing. This is where the vaporware and total absence of credibility come from.

Mm-hmm.

They were demoing all these things, doing XYZ. They were on the edge of bankruptcy. There was this famous Wired cover of Apple, the multicolored Apple logo with a crown of thorns—or a wreath of thorns—around it, and it just said, “Pray.”

Yeah.

It’s one of the best magazine covers of all time. It’s so good.

And they had lost, like, $1 billion at that point, right?

Yeah, they lost—like, which back then was a lot of money.

A lot.

Good point.

Back in 1995.

Yeah, this is back when you could talk about tech and also have some understanding of the normal economy.

Yep.

A skill that I have lost. So they’re in trouble. They reverse-acquire a company called NeXT, which Steve Jobs had started, and NeXT basically takes over Apple.

Mm-hmm.

The reason why this is important is Scott Forstall was a NeXT guy. He never worked at the original Apple, and he was hired, I think, as an intern with NeXT. He came up through that. One of the challenges that faced Steve Jobs when he came back to Apple was basically merging NeXT, which made its own computers. It was an Apple sort of thing, but they were more focused on the high end. They got a decent market in education, particularly, I think, universities and things like that, but they were still mostly a failed company—

Yep.

—and you wanted to combine the Apple sensibility and design, and obviously the user base, with the NeXT underpinnings. NeXT, by virtue of being developed later than the Macintosh, was much more technically forward. It was memory-safe. It was built on Unix as its underpinning, so it ended up being a huge deal later. It’s why developers adopted the Mac. You could have the same environment that you would have on a server on your local computer. This was before things like containers and stuff like that.

There was a real challenge to merge the stuff together. There was an executive, I think Bertrand Serlet, I believe was his name, who was sort of the head of this, and Forstall was under him as his deputy. Again, this young guy who’d come up through NeXT and was coming into Apple. I don’t know, but I suspect this is where a lot of the anti-Forstall sentiment started. You had a lot of the Apple people who did not like this.

“Who’s this guy?”

Yeah.

Sure.

This guy coming in and sort of telling them what to do. But Jobs appreciated Forstall, I think, a lot. When you think about it—

Well, technically speaking—

—you’re the guy up top—

—this was the DNA that would ultimately define the new era of Apple, correct?

That’s right.

From an OS standpoint.

That’s right. The DNA is NeXT. If you program for even iOS, there are some functions you call that are NS-da-da-da-da-da. The NS is NeXTSTEP. There’s still stuff in here that is from back then.

It’s funny. Someone asked me on Twitter, “What’s the oldest code in iOS?” They went back to the 2000s. I’m like, “No. There’s Unix code in here. There’s code that goes back to the ’70s.” That’s the case for all your software products. You’d be shocked and dismayed to understand the underpinnings of everything.

Everything is held up on scaffolding that was established in, like, the 1970s.

That’s right. That’s right.

Yeah.

There’s lots of NeXT stuff. But yes, that was the core of Apple software going forward, and that core, that kernel, undergirds macOS today. It undergirds iOS, tvOS, everything else. It’s all in this common foundation that is from NeXT. To the extent that the Apple bit came in, it was more on top of that—

Mm-hmm.

—making an aesthetic that you—the top menu bar and stuff like that. That was familiar.

When the first OS X came out—it was written OS X, but it was pronounced OS 10—a lot of Apple people lost their minds. They were like, “What are you doing here? This is terrible.” But it was obviously, in retrospect, the right thing to do.

So you fast-forward, and Steve Jobs, I think, did a very good job of being the decider-in-chief, or the editor-in-chief, is the way I always characterize it. He had different people who were fighting each other and going back and forth, and he would choose the way.

Right.

He wasn’t designing it. He was deciding it. I think that’s very underrated and underappreciated—how important that was. Steve Jobs is the one who made this merger of NeXTSTEP’s superior technical underpinnings with the Apple aesthetic and design. He made that merger work.

That merger does not happen without Steve Jobs as a force of nature making it happen and making the decisions to push things forward, mollifying one group and—

Right. Managing the factions, of course.

That’s right.

That makes sense.

3. Forstall Builds iOS

So you fast-forward, and Apple’s going to do this new project that turned out to be the iPhone. The person who was put in charge of that from a software perspective was Scott Forstall. Basically, iOS is Scott Forstall’s baby.

Mm-hmm.

Just like the hardware in the phone—or the technical underpinnings—was Tony Fadell, who’d done the iPod. Then you had Jony Ive doing the design. There were obviously other people involved. There’s a guy called Bob Mansfield—Bob Mansfield, I should say—who features in here.

So anyhow, the biggest project ever, right? It turns out to be the best product ever. It’s an obvious amazing success. It’s a technological success, a software success, and a design success. The entire industry copies it. It’s software-defined hardware, where Apple exclusively sells the hardware, and then the software provides the ecosystem, the lock-in, and all these sorts of things. A total triumph.

Scott Forstall led this team in the dark, in total secrecy, and they delivered.

Mm-hmm.

Within the first year, there became this big question: Developers really want to build apps for this. They really want to build apps for this phone. We already have all the APIs because we had to build our own apps internally. And Steve Jobs is like, “No apps.” He gets on the website and says, “We’ve got a great solution for you: web apps. You can save it on your home screen.”

Everyone—I think with the term, I don’t remember who coined it; this was the “shit sandwich,” probably Gruber, to be honest. Then people started jailbreaking their phones and figuring out how to run apps anyway. They were reverse-engineering and figuring out all the various function calls and things like that to do this.

Mm-hmm.

The big advocate inside Apple for allowing apps was Scott Forstall. He was the most pro-developer of all the Apple executives. I think this is pretty undisputed, whereas a lot of the Apple core was more suspicious of developers. This is the key point, which we’ll get to in a moment.

Okay.

That’s some foreshadowing. But he was the big developer advocate. If you talked to developers back then, particularly senior ones at large companies or bespoke companies that made amazing things, they would have an audience with Forstall and felt that he was an advocate for them.

And the fact that the App Store existed as it did, the features that existed for developers, and the work Apple did—I think pretty universally, most people ascribe that to Forstall.

Downstream of Forstall. So then where was the power struggle where Maps became a pretext to force him out? What was the tension?

Well, Steve Jobs died.

Yeah.

4. Apple Loses Its Center

I think that's the real issue. Steve Jobs had cultivated these warring fiefdoms that, over time, after a decade of working together, just hated each other.

Mm-hmm.

They absolutely despised each other. But guess what? If Steve Jobs calls a meeting and Scott Forstall is going to be there, and you're Jony Ive or Bob Mansfield, you go to the meeting because Steve Jobs called a meeting. You're going to fight and hate that guy, but Steve will figure it out. You can go to Steve afterward and say, "I'm sick of this," and he's going to say, "Deal with it," or whatever it might be.

I get it, but yeah. Mollifying everybody.

Here's a good analogy for you: Red Bull Racing, right?

Oh, boy.

What has happened to Red Bull in the last 2 years? You had basically 2 major factions. You had the Christian Horner faction, and maybe Newey was his own faction, I'm not sure, but then you also had the Helmut Marko faction.

Mm-hmm.

As long as the founder of Red Bull was alive—Dieter Mateschitz, I believe that is his name—it worked.

Yep.

What happened the moment he died?

Open war. Uh—

Open war.

Yeah.

I think it's actually a perfect analogy for what happened at Apple. You have Tim Cook come in as the CEO, with very low credibility in terms of the actual software. He's the operations guy, right? He can run the company. But that credibility wasn't just internal to Apple; it was also with Wall Street.

Wall Street was very nervous when Steve Jobs died. One of the ways that Apple addressed that was putting Jony Ive front and center: "Don't worry, Steve's gone, but Jony's still here."

"Here's this creative genius that you guys can trust to lead us."

Yeah.

Who designed all this stuff, right?

That was the story: He designed the iPhone. Even though I think iOS is more important to the success of the iPhone than the design—

Hmm.

—of the iPhone, Scott Forstall deserves more credit than Jony Ive does, in my opinion—

Hmm.

—for the iPhone in particular. The iPod is a different story. That is Jony Ive's crowning achievement. But I would argue it's different when it comes to the iPhone.

Wall Street doesn't have that distinction, and it was actually really important to Apple to have Jony Ive put forward.

Okay.

I think this was a disaster for Apple. I think Jony Ive, without a boss, was terrible. We got the MacBooks with keyboards that didn't work and too few ports. Steve Jobs would talk about function over form. Apple products became form over function. You got the iPhone 6 that bent.

Mm-hmm.

You got $17,000 gold Apple Watches. Jony Ive's brilliant, but he needs an editor. Steve Jobs was that editor. I just think it was a very bad decade for Apple.

But what was worse—and this is all scuttlebutt, just what I've heard—is that it basically got to the point where Jony Ive would not attend a meeting if Scott Forstall was there. It was a him—

Hmm.

—or-me situation. As I mentioned, I believe Bob Mansfield was in the same boat. He was more on the hardware side, but he similarly—

And again, I've had 1 interaction with Scott Forstall, just as an audience member, and I completely believe all the stories based on that 1 interaction, okay? So you have this—

But also, you talk about the sort of rudderless decade with Jony Ive without an editor. That same decade was when developer relations began to sour, and there was no advocate for the developers in that sort of power struggle—

Right. Exactly.

—within Apple.

Which I think is why we're getting to this whole story. So Apple Maps launches. It's a disaster. Apparently, the official story is a demand that Scott Forstall personally take responsibility for it publicly.

Mm-hmm.

Which, by the way, Apple doesn't do. That's like what you see this week with Apple Intelligence. If anyone takes responsibility, it's the CEO.

No one's falling on the sword, yeah.

Yeah. No, it's the CEO. That's the whole structure of Apple. In a functional organization, the CEO is the head. Apple is, to use another F1 analogy, a Red Bull car that's super pointy on the front end, one that no normal driver can handle but Max Verstappen can. That driver was Steve Jobs.

Part of the process when he was gone was reshaping an organization that couldn't stick together without him.

Yeah.

Because of that, I think you can make a strong argument that Forstall getting fired was the right thing to do, because the priority then was to keep the company together in a very uncertain period. It was a company that was tuned to run around Steve Jobs, and Steve Jobs wasn't there.

Okay.

They had to figure out a way to keep going. The problem is that Apple lost its biggest internal developer advocate—the guy who actually stood up against Apple, the Apple within Apple, and said, "No, actually, developers matter. We have to do things for them. We have to think about them."

I do think this is where all the developer stuff really started to go off the rails. There's just no one in Apple who is truly a developer advocate at the senior levels, as far as we can tell. Again, that's based on knowing the executives who've been around for a long time and looking at the actions. They just don't do stuff that's friendly to developers. They do stuff that's friendly to Apple, and you have to take it or leave it.

It was okay because the iPhone was so dominant. They could get away with treating developers like crap, and developers would still build apps for Apple. They would build them for the iPhone because the market was so large, they had no other choice.

5. Jobs Ends The Microsoft War

Okay, so before we move on, there was another aspect of Apple history that I want to hit before we return to Apple today. This is a keynote address that Steve Jobs delivered at the Macworld Boston conference in August 1997. I'm going to play the clip for you.

Where we are right now is we're shepherding some of the greatest assets in the computer industry. And if we want to move forward and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose, okay? We have to embrace the notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job.

And if others are going to help us, that's great, because we need all the help we can get. And if we screw up and we don't do a good job, it's not somebody else's fault. It's our fault. So I think that's a very important perspective.

I think if we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we'd better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude. We like their software. So the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over, as far as I'm concerned.

This is about getting Apple healthy, and this is about Apple being able to make incredibly great contributions to the industry, to get healthy and prosper again.

Now, I know that's a famous clip, but I'm curious. Obviously, the famous quote there is, "We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose." What was the context for that concession, and how does that history inform where Apple is today?

I asked you to play the longer clip because of exactly what you said. People know that 1 line, but I think the whole clip is super important. I think this is the single most important clip for understanding Apple's developer relations—whatever you want to call it: continual conflagration.

Developer tensions.

Yeah.

So you go back to the Apple II, right? VisiCalc, the 1st-ever spreadsheet. VisiCalc sold Apple IIs. They sold a ton of them because VisiCalc was incredible. You could put numbers in, and they would calculate for you right there. It was amazing.

This is normal people programming. You don't realize you're programming, but you are. You're doing if/then statements, right?

Mm-hmm.

Amazing stuff. And you fast-forward to desktop publishing, which I mentioned. Photoshop ran on a Mac. You would get a Mac so you could use Photoshop or QuarkXPress or whatever it might be. And yes, they would port it to Windows, but it wasn't nearly as good, and the Apple font rendering was better.

This is a famous Steve Jobs anecdote about his attention to detail in terms of Macintosh font rendering. It had more colors, and it was just better.

And so Apple was a platform that had these applications selling their devices on their behalf.

Yeah.

The problem was, as they fell further and further behind, these applications—and Microsoft Office and the Adobe Creative Suite are the 2 big ones, of course—they went to Windows. Microsoft for obvious reasons, but Adobe, why would they not? They didn't want to be dependent on Apple.

Mm-hmm.

And particularly as Apple hardware sucks, someone's going to come along and build it on Windows, and then they're screwed.

Windows, much bigger market.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so those were the applications that sold Macintosh devices. If they were on Windows, and Windows was faster and memory-safe—

There's no moat.

—and all these sorts of things.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's why Apple was going bankrupt in the '90s. Steve Jobs comes back, and their computers were so far behind because it took 6 or 7 years to get NeXTSTEP to OS X. They were stuck with Classic Mac OS on slow computers and on the verge of going bankrupt when Steve Jobs shows up.

Mm-hmm.

And a new version of Microsoft Office had come out on Windows. A new version of Photoshop and Illustrator and whatnot was coming out on Windows, and there was no economic reason for either company to update their applications on the Mac. The market was too small. The operating system was too crappy. It just wasn't worth it.

You're right.

And if the Mac didn't have those applications, Apple was dead.

So that was the fear.

Steve Jobs had to get on his hands and knees, figuratively, and beg these 2 companies to put their apps on the Mac.

Mm-hmm.

And if you actually get a visual of Macworld Boston, the other thing that's famous about this is Bill Gates comes in via satellite, and he talks about how we're going to update Office and invest in Apple. I think in retrospect it was probably an attempt to avoid antitrust because Apple was a competitor. They had to keep Apple alive for that to happen, right?

Mm.

And so the visuals are striking. You have this looming visage of Bill Gates looking down on the stage, this little Steve Jobs looking up at the screen, and it's humiliating. For someone who thought Bill Gates was certainly a peer but whom Jobs, I don't think, respected at all, it felt like they had ripped him off continuously—just a copycat that abused their relationship with IBM to kill us, and it wasn't fair.

Mm.

I mean, he had to. Look at him up there telling people, “We're investing in Apple. We're saving Steve Jobs' rear end. We're going to put Office on there.” People were booing. He had to do it, and that's why I think he gave this part of the speech off the cuff. What I emphasize—the reason to pull the whole clip—is that it's not just, “We can both succeed here.” There are a number of phrases: “You know where we are right now.”

Mm-hmm.

“If we want to move forward and see Apple healthy, we need all the help we can get.” This is about getting healthy. This is Apple and Steve Jobs desperate and needy for a third-party developer to come in and not kill their platform.

Right.

And when I mention my Apple University experience, I mention that Wired cover, and I mention this speech. One of the most interesting things about being at Apple—this was, again, 2010, so Apple had been doing great. The iPod had been killer. The iPhone was just starting to explode. It was obviously the next big thing. You would talk to younger people, and they were all optimistic: “We're taking over the world.”

Greatest company in the world, yeah.

You would talk to the older people who were at Apple in the '90s, and unprompted they would bring up that cover and they would bring up this speech. It's like Depression-era babies who hoard for the rest of their lives because they never want to be in that situation again. That was the level of employee who today is a senior executive at Apple. Some of them have retired or moved on, so I think it's fewer and fewer over time. But it's this sense that that was the worst experience of my professional career.

Yeah.

And Apple means so much to people. It's tied up in their own identity, so it's like the worst experience of their life. And we will never, ever again allow ourselves to be in that position. That's why I think Steve Jobs didn't want apps on the iPhone. It's like, “We have a killer product here. We're not going to create the conditions for someone to ever put us in the position that Microsoft and Adobe put us in in the '90s.”

Mm-hmm.

Not going to happen.

We're never going to be beholden—

We'll do it ourselves.

—to developers. Yeah.

That's right. One of the critiques I had, even of the App Store when it came out, is that they would do lots of stuff for games and brag about the numbers. And I'm like, “Why are you doing this?” The games are trivial to port to Android. The engine maker takes care of the problems of compatibility, and the assets; the game takes over the whole screen, so there's no UI commonality. I'm like—

Mm-hmm.

Apple should be investing in productivity apps. These are the apps that make you—that you can optimize for a platform, and it locks you in. They just never did anything. They never had them; it took them years and years to have trials.

But those apps also have a different business model that wouldn't—

Right.

—lend itself to the iOS platform.

That's right. They need subscription pricing or upgrade pricing. You're not going to reach the whole world with these. You're going to reach a core base, and you're going to make money from that base over time.

Mm-hmm.

And so, at this time, in 2013 when I wrote this article, they didn't exist. To me, this was an obvious thing that needed to be done. It would drive iPhone differentiation. But what did I just say? These are apps that people love, that they build their careers around, that they lock in on.

Right.

And I believe there's lots of details here. The App Store was built on iTunes. This old system to do all this stuff was hard and tricky, and there were technical reasons that a lot of this didn't exist. But I also think psychologically Apple did not want to do it.

Right.

They did not want to enable apps that became the most important application in your life.

It's a fascinating backstory. After 8,000 conversations between you and I about the App Store, I didn't know about some of what happened in the mid-'90s and the way that informed the executives' thinking on this issue. But it all makes sense.

Again, this is my supposition. To be clear, this is my supposition. No one is saying this.

There you go.

Right.

Reiterate the disclaimer.

Right.

This is—

But—

—psychoanalysis.

The one guy who didn't think that way was Scott Forstall. I think he was locked into iOS. He wanted iOS to succeed. He saw the value of being a platform, and so he's the one who fought for developers. He fought for the App Store to exist, and I don't know, but I would like to believe he fought for better business models, for productivity apps. Let's actually enable amazing new applications that are only possible on these devices, right? What's the problem with the iPad? There's no application that truly takes advantage of this. People try to start companies, and you realize that it's just not doable. If you can only—

Right, financially.

—sell an application once, which was the case back then, you're going to run out of customers. And then what, right? And so, yeah, I think that, again, maybe we're pinning too much on one person, but Apple has just never been developer-friendly since then. And it was fine with the iPhone, again, because the iPhone was so good and so big.

I got a lot of traction early in Stratechery by saying the iPhone is not doomed. Everyone's like, “Android's going to kill it just like Windows killed the Mac.” Windows came first. That's what people don't get. Windows didn't come first. DOS came first.

Mm-hmm.

And DOS was locked in via IBM. DOS was huge in that it had applications before the Mac even existed. When Windows layered perfectly on top of DOS, it was backward-compatible and ran all your old applications. They had a lock-in before. That wasn't the case with phones. The iPhone came first, before Android. Android was after that. It was a completely different scenario, and there was no enterprise lock-in like Windows basically stole wholesale from IBM. Android never had that.

And so, of course, the iPhone was going to be fine. Because they were first and because they got developers on board, they could get away with treating developers like crap.

Right.

The market was so large, there were so many users, and Apple's core functionality was so great that Apple could get away with it. What do you have today? You might have more and more executives who were not there in the '90s, so they maybe aren't as paralyzed as some of the most senior Apple executives might be subconsciously.

Mm-hmm.

What you have is almost worse. You have people whose entire careers have been spent treating developers like crap and getting away with it.

I was going to say, the culture over the last 15 years hasn't been much healthier in terms of understanding the value of developers. This is all context for what you wrote this week and what you mentioned on Monday's episode, which is that if Apple wants to capitalize on its AI potential—and when we say capitalize on its AI potential, they have hardware that, in theory, over the next several years should be great for running AI locally—I want to read 2 emails to you.

First, Sergey says, “Hey, guys. I've been loving the Apple discourse, but I think one issue has been absent. Apple does not make innovative software. Given that AI is software, think about it. What was the last software product by Apple that was truly innovative? Sure, they have good-enough software, and it's made better by their advantages, like platform lock-in, privacy stance, et cetera. But when was the last time Apple wrote some consumer-facing software that felt like magic?”

Honestly, my answer is the first iOS. It's been a while—18 years. So again, shout-out to Scott Forstall there.

That's right.

He's basically saying Apple has not made any good software since Forstall left.

Yes, and then Jens in Sweden says, “On Tuesday, Ben wrote, ‘Yes, Apple has cloud services, and yes, they are serviceable and not an embarrassment like they used to be, but they're hardly the company's forte.’”

“This statement is much too restrained,” Jens says. “They are all garbage, and probably due to no one caring about the backend of these services since the iTunes Store was launched in 2003.”

Jens sent a very thorough email. He lists 5 examples of Apple's software issues. He actually included screenshots as evidence, and then he closes by saying, “Since both the important Johns in the Apple universe, Gruber and Siracusa, have been unapologetic regarding Siri and Apple Intelligence, I now expect an Apple focus group like they once had for the Mac Pro.”

“Can you please help us understand how people want to use voice assistants? We all have our real personal assistants and don't know.”

I read those emails because each of them made me laugh, and then each of them also made me angry at myself for not thinking harder about Apple's failures when they first announced Apple Intelligence. When you really step back and look at Apple's attempts to innovate in software, there's more bad than good over the past 15 years or so.

To your point earlier, all of the best software on the iPhone comes from the App Store. Even making modest improvements to the iMessage experience has looked like a Herculean task for Apple over the last several years.

Oh, it's so bad.

I mean, I've convinced you over the years to use WhatsApp, and once you use WhatsApp heavily, iMessage is painful.

You look at iMessage like, “How is it this bad?” Exactly. Again, we're talking about the most valuable company in the world.

No, it's a great example of incentives, right? WhatsApp is very heavily incentivized to make it a great experience because they have to get you to install it and enjoy it. Apple, it's just there.

It's a great object lesson.

Well, Apple Intelligence is just there for the time being. But in terms of actually capitalizing on good AI hardware, you mentioned empowering the developer ecosystem. What would that look like in terms of the practical steps to make that a reality?

6. Apple’s Integration Trap

I think Sergey puts his finger on something important, which is that Apple historically—or at least since the NeXT acquisition—is amazing at software. The software they're amazing at is the operating system itself.

Mm-hmm.

Now, again, there are lots of things—I'm not going to get into a holy war about all the aspects of OS X that are good or not, or macOS versus Linux versus Windows. There are all sorts of things that are important to different people.

What I will say, primarily from a user perspective, is that OS X combines a core ease of use with incredible extensibility that lets developers fill in all the holes or even do replacements, but with a library of capabilities and UI elements that makes it all fit together and feel cohesive in a way Windows doesn't. I think I mentioned this before.

Right.

When I went to Microsoft and had to use Windows, people would ask, “How is it?” I'm like, “I miss third-party apps.” And they're like, “What?”

The third-party apps on Windows are slapped together for a line-of-business application. They don't fit the operating system, but they work; they function. Apple apps, you could get a third-party app to replace Apple functionality, and it would fit in. It looked like it was built by Apple because Apple's frameworks and all these things were so good.

That's a good point.

And it's all so intuitive to use. That's one of the reasons it's the most successful company on Earth now. Anybody can pick up an Apple product and it feels easy. That is a software triumph.

Yeah, and I think a lot of people would argue that is less and less the case over time. That was more the case a decade ago, but we're used to it, so it's sort of okay.

You know, I remember when the iPhone X came out and it had facial recognition. You could look at it and your messages would not show the message, but if you looked at the phone, it would show the message because it had verified that it was you, so it could safely show the contents of your text messages.

Mm-hmm.

I wrote an article like, “This is Apple at its best.” This is amazing. It's hardware, it's software, it's this delightful experience that you get by controlling both.

The key thing about integration is that there's tremendous value to be driven by integration. Another early Stratechery piece was arguing why the disruption thesis about Apple was wrong. A lot of the examples of disruption are about enterprise examples where people are buying things based on speed and fees and spreadsheets—the analytical mind—as opposed to consumers who like to look at their phone and see it expand: “Wow, that's so cool. That's delightful. I now have increased affinity for this company that gave me this experience.”

You deliver that with integration. The first iPhone depended on integration. It was, relatively speaking, so underpowered and had so little capability, and the battery life was so bad, that you had to wring everything out of the operating system to make it work.

The early Android phones were horrific in terms of these sorts of things because they were trying to do a modular approach when the stuff just wasn't good enough.

Mm-hmm.

You fast-forward to today, and it's good enough, right? But the other thing you get with integration is surprise and delight that is really compelling.

The thing with integration, though, is that it's dangerous to integrate too far because the further you integrate, the more brittle everything becomes. You're tying stuff together.

Part of the whole magic of integration is that you can use duct tape and glue and get it to work, delivering something that people who are trying to standardize interfaces and build LEGO-type constructions can't do.

Right.

But a LEGO-type construction is sturdier than trying to glue something together, right? If you're going to build one of those 5-foot LEGO things, you can do it because LEGOs stick together in a predictable, structurally efficient way. Trying to do it with sticks and glue and popsicles or whatever it might be, you're limited in how big you can actually get.

I think this is a failure case for Apple and for integrated companies: They try to integrate too much. So now, for Apple, it's not just the integration of hardware and software; it's hardware, software, and services.

And now we're dependent—

Mm-hmm.

—on iCloud. That gets to Sergey's point, and it was really rough for a long time. I'm going to take a middle ground: It's mostly functional. Although there was an app I was using this week where iCloud sync was failing on it, so who knows?

You're extending yourself into things that are hard to do and that really reap no benefit. What's the benefit to Apple? They can make more money.

They can—

Mm.

They can lock you in on further levels, and the apps are tied to iCloud. You have to use iTunes billing or App Store billing, and it's less about delivering a compelling user experience and more about what's good for the company.

Right. Well, you're also assuming full responsibility for what's now a failed product rather than—

We'll get to Apple Intelligence in a little bit, but even things like email clients or all the lock-in Safari that Apple’s had on its devices—again, there are reasons to do it that way. I think with Safari in particular, I'm somewhat sympathetic to Apple's desire to control rendering technology, given how deep that goes into the operating system and the impact it can have on things like battery life and stuff like that.

But you're also cutting off innovation. You're not developing features because then people have to build apps instead. There are lots of problematic aspects to this, and Apple Intelligence is this trend taken all the way to its very problematic end: We have to do it. We have to do it all. My argument is, no, you don't. Google needs to do it.

Google's entire theory of the case, in many respects, for Android is the unification. They have their own point of integration: the operating system and their services. They work seamlessly together on an Android phone. It's not compelling enough to switch to Android for a lot of people, but it—

Right.

It is a better experience. If you use all Google stuff, Android's painful if you use non-Google stuff—if you use Exchange or iCloud, God forbid, or whatever. But if you use all Google stuff, it all works.

Mm-hmm.

That's what you expect from a point of integration. But now you add on AI, and Google has this amazing infrastructure advantage in the cloud. They can deliver things more cheaply and more efficiently, so they can credibly start to offer this. If you have all your stuff in Google, you go all in on Google.

I fully expect Android is going to deliver a really compelling experience in the next few years, and it's going to get really amazing. Google Assistant is going to know a lot and is actually going to be able to do the demos that Apple showed—or it's not a demo, the vaporware videos Apple showed and could not demo. Google will demo it and ship.

They'll be doing it in real life on a live—

That's right.

Stage. Yeah, okay.

And because that's what they're good at, that's their point of integration. What Google can't do is make you independent of Google. You're going to be dependent on Google and Google's cloud. That's how they're going to pull this off.

They're going to pull it off on high-end devices and low-end devices and everything in the middle. They're not going to assume you have good hardware. Sure, they'll say, “Buy a Pixel phone; it'll be a better experience.” It's not going to make that much of a difference because their model is that it has to run everywhere.

Apple's bit is, “Oh, we have hardware. We can do it on-device.” Here's the problem: If Apple is doing it all themselves, who's the winner from doing it on-device?

Apple.

Apple, because they don't have to pay for the servers, right? They're internalizing the benefit of having good hardware by basically being cheap. The problem is it's going to be worse because it's running a small, crappy model. Well, actually, the processors are very powerful. A limited amount of memory is the real issue.

Mm-hmm.

Okay, we'll do it in Private Cloud Compute. That is certainly a cost center for Apple, so that is a little more credible. But it's interesting that their whole approach—the benefit accrues to them in saving money relative to Google, which has to do it all in the cloud. If you do it all in the cloud, you get better performance, and you have all this stuff there.

So Apple, in some respects, from a product-capability perspective, already has an arm tied behind its back by trying to do it on-device. How could you actually benefit from doing it on-device? What about third-party developers? Are they going to pay? It's really expensive to have a cloud service. You have to pay for GPUs. If it's just one guy operating something like Marco Arment and Overcast, how can he have AI in his application?

Yeah.

What if he could run it locally? If it's local, it's free. You have to pay for the electricity, but that doesn't really count, right? It's effectively free.

Totally.

This is amazing. Apple can credibly promise a certain level of performance because they control all the hardware. It's going to be A18 or better. Apple can do things like, “Oh, we know this is being installed on what kind of device. It's going on a Mac, an iPad, or a computer.” We can gate different capabilities and functions based on the device that it's going to.

And, by the way, we can have this back up to Private Cloud Compute, and we'll sell that to you as a developer. You can make a subscription app, and that will help you pay for this. From an Apple Intelligence perspective, having it on-device is a detriment. It makes for a worse service relative to Google.

Mm-hmm.

From a developer perspective, it's amazing. I get free inference. Even though it's crappy, it's free. That lets me do stuff I couldn't do otherwise. Google can't deliver that because they don't know what the devices are. They don't know if the hardware is good or not, so they're all cloud, and it's all Google.

Right.

Why does Apple want to compete with Google at what Google is good at? It's strategically—

That's—

7. Apple Should Unleash Developers

Nuts. What they should do is capitalize on what they're good at, which is predictable, high-end hardware that they can deliver to developers to create things that no one could imagine or think of because they have it for free. It's right there—a new capability.

All the Apple Intelligence models that are running on an iPhone should be purely open to developers. Don't gate them. Don't make an Image Playground that's a piece of garbage, and it's all edited and censored, and, oh, you could implement this in your app. Who wants that? No, give them the pure model.

Even if it's crappy, see what people can do with it. Even if they do stuff you don't like, that's not your problem. You're a platform. That's the app maker's responsibility. You deliver—

Absolutely.

The API, you deliver the credibility, and you let the developers solve this problem just like they solved the problem for the Mac back in the day. They created VisiCalc and Photoshop.

The problem is Apple is led by people who, 1, are scared of third-party developers or, 2, have grown up treating them like garbage and then still serving them anyway. What they need is for developers to come in and do things on an iPhone that they can't do anywhere else because Apple makes amazing hardware. It's an amazing opportunity.

The whole AI space is crying out for products. It's crying out for imagination. It's gated by the fact that you can't iterate and experiment because this stuff costs on a marginal basis. Apple can solve this problem, not just for them but for the entire industry, and unleash an entire wave of innovation.

I don't think they're going to because the executives' mindset about developers is totally screwed up, and we've been warning about this for ages. This is the final payoff for treating developers like crap for 15 years.

Yeah, okay.

It's not just that developers dislike you. It's that you've learned it's okay to treat them like crap, and it doesn't impact you. Guess what? It's going to impact you now.

Yeah. Well, I go back to the email from Jens and his mock focus group: “Can you please help us understand how people want to use voice assistants? We all have our real personal assistants and don't know.”

Offloading that responsibility to an ecosystem full of developers seems like a win, and it's one of the reasons this conversation is interesting to me. Your argument is worth reiterating because my gut instinct is that a version of this story applies to AI innovation more generally, where the more widely dispersed approach to innovation is going to create better products than an ecosystem that's controlled by a handful of large companies that are all—

It's an amazing opportunity. Again, the whole industry is crying out—you could imagine entire classes of AI products that start on an iPhone, where people have access to this free inference. They experiment.

Exactly. This is where everybody does their computing these days.

Right. And then people come along and say, “Oh, now let's—what if you do this in a data center with huge things?” These ideas could be this tremendous well of innovation.

Apple is the only company that could deliver this, and this is why I'm passionate about it. Apple is so screwed up, in my opinion, psychologically about third-party developers. This is the company that used to lead the way, that established and led the way with the GUI, that led the way with the iPhone, and they have an opportunity to lead the way for AI product development.

Again, they don't need to lead in models.

Mm-hmm.

Models are being commoditized. There are lots of models out there.

It's a better business for them not to—

Right.

…try to lead in models, yeah.

They could do so well in AI without spending all the capital expenditure everyone else is spending. There's open-source models out there. There's a part of Apple that gets it. One of the interesting people they sent two 512 GB Mac Studios to was the guy who started, I think, Exo Labs or something like that. Basically—

Mm-hmm.

…software that lets you connect two Macs together so you can share the memory pool. He's up there on Twitter showing two Mac Studios running the full version of DeepSeek-R1. The performance isn't amazing, but it works. It's incredible that it works, and this is only going to get better.

The capability of a model that can run on an iPhone, even in 16 GB of RAM, is going to get better and better. This is something where Steve Jobs used to love the Gretzky quote, “You skate to where the puck is going.” The puck is going to an amazing place. Apple itself is holding itself back by saying, “We will do it. We will make the apps. We will make Apple Intelligence,” despite the fact that, number 1, there's no evidence they can actually do this, either now or historically, and, number 2, no one knows what needs to be built. You need to harness the crowd. You need to unleash developers.

That's what I find really interesting. The Apple mistakes are obviously interesting in the context of Apple's history, present, and future. But there's also a parable here.

Google is capable of doing this, but they're not going to invent everything that needs to be invented because they're 1 entity. You need experimentation. You need to unleash developers in a way that happened in the '80s. When PCs came along, people didn't know what they'd be used for. You needed developers just making stuff—things like the whole desktop publishing thing.

When the Macintosh was created, yeah, they had MacPaint, but no one actually thought, “Yo, that had to be invented by someone,” because there was a platform on which to build. Platforms are the most valuable entities there are because they don't just make money for themselves. They unleash and create the conditions for innovation. Apple used to do that. They don't anymore.

Yeah. Yeah. To me, it's a parable about the value of diffused knowledge and access. The Apple Intelligence disaster is the risk of going in the opposite direction and being really controlling, really risk-averse, and trying to do all of it yourself. Unfortunately, you've just given me a lot of different reasons why Apple is not going to adopt any of your suggestions this week. That did make me more excited for the future of AI, and I hope that at some point Apple comes to its senses on this front because I—

Yeah, it might be a leadership transition at some point, honestly. Apple's great, right? They're making a lot of money. This is the hard thing about making changes.

Mm-hmm.

Who is going to be the Satya Nadella who comes in and says, “No, actually, Windows-centricity is well and truly dead. We have to go forward”? Tim Cook has had a better run than Steve Ballmer, for sure, particularly from a stock-price perspective, but there's an old—

I mean, that's the thing, yeah.

…there's a somewhat old mindset that needs to go, and there's an ancient mindset that needs to come back, if that makes sense.

Yeah. I mean, look, they're locked into a business model that has made developers hate them and mistrust them, and they're now making so much money in that area.

Actually, it just occurred to me: the Microsoft analogy goes deeper. The original Microsoft was a developer-tools company. That's, in many respects, what Satya Nadella took Microsoft back to: away from being the Windows company, back to being a developer company. Apple, in this regard, needs to get away from being the App Store–iPhone company and back to being the platform company.

The hardware.

It's not—

Yeah.

…it's not perfectly analogous, but there is a bit where companies don't become new things. What you can maybe hope for, and Microsoft gives you hope in this regard, is that you can dig up old things and become them once again.

Return to the DNA. Yeah. Okay. Well, that is an optimistic note to end on, so I'll take it. Maybe Apple—it may take a change in leadership. I think that is a good take to go out on. In any event, we will revisit all of this in the weeks to come. A lot to chew on.

Yeah, I know—

But for now—

…we did a lot of Apple the last 3 times, but the reason I messaged you is because you're relatively new to tech. It's new to Sharp Tech, but I think this is in a context that actually undergirds so many of our conversations that it is worth getting on the record. I think it's more pertinent now than it's been in a long time.

100%, particularly as the stakes for developer relations get higher in the years to come. I did want to end with a postscript from Jens to his earlier, very comprehensive takedown of Apple and its cloud services. He said, “Sharp Tech is one of the highlights of my podcast feed, together with the F1 podcast Bring Back V10s. Please keep it up.”

We will keep it up, Jens, and thank you for making me aware that there is an F1 podcast called Bring Back V10s. That's a great sentiment, a true hardcore F1 sentiment there.

I've never listened to it—

So I'm going to have to check that out.

…but I already like it.

Yeah, exactly. They get an endorsement from both of us. All right, Ben. Well, on that note, enjoy the Australian Grand Prix this weekend. You've been sandbagging very hard about all the success that Red Bull and Max Verstappen are not going to have this year.

No, I mean it seriously.

Pre-loading excuses.

No.

I know.

McLaren—the only reason they didn't win last year is because it took them until 7 or 8 races into the season to start to dominate. Now they're going to dominate from the beginning. It's not going to be close.

There you go. Congrats, Lando Norris, on your—

No.

…2025 drivers' championship.

My hope is Oscar Piastri is the one who actually ends up winning.

Um—

Which would be amazing. I'm an Oscar fan.

Well, Australia's own Oscar Piastri.

That's right.

In the meantime, continue sending us emails, email@sharptech.fm. Ben, have a great weekend, and I will talk to you next week.

Talk to you later.