(Preview) New iPhones and an Absence of Awe, How Oracle Wins in the AI Era, Questions on MidJourney, Meta, and Armageddon

Hello, and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp. And on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how are you doing?

Disappointed, Andrew. Disappointed.

Disappointed in what?

In honor of my Green Bay Packers playing your Washington Commanders, I’m wearing a green shirt. You are wearing a blue shirt. Where is the maroon and gold?

Oh, boy. I thought we solved this problem a year ago. I’m wearing Cowboys blue here on the podcast.

No.

It’s really terrible.

Renounce your past. You were just being a punk kid wanting to rebel against your dad. Dad was right, and you should be wearing maroon and gold.

Oh, yes. We’re recording mere hours before Commanders-Packers on Thursday night. By the time people listen to this, the Packers will probably kick the Commanders’ ass. Are you a Packers shareholder by any chance? Am I talking to an NFL owner here?

Of course I am. What a silly question.

All right. That’s good to hear. And the Packers—

I understand it’s not on my disclosure, my ethical disclosure on Stratechery, so maybe I should add it on there. That would be hilarious. I do explicitly own stock in the Green Bay Packers, just a heads-up.

—look great when they play.

Well, honest to God, that’s why I was curious, because you famously only invest in index funds out of journalistic integrity. But I’m glad to know that I’m talking to an NFL owner.

Terrible for the bottom line, but what are you going to do? Yeah, I made the editorial decision. You know what? I read about the big tech companies. I can’t cover everything. Should’ve done that with my portfolio a long time ago, but what are you going to do?

Yes. We’ll see if we can make it through this podcast with the clash coming Thursday night. But I’m very excited. I’m back into football—

It’s great. I love this for you.

Well, yeah. I’ve always been into college football, watching every Saturday, but I’m now back on the NFL bandwagon. It goes back to what we were saying last week, where oftentimes the things that become cultural touchstones are massively popular because they’re good. I was reminded of that over and over again as I was watching a fantastic opening weekend in the NFL last weekend.

They’re good, and it’s also fun to be in touch with cultural touchstones. Even if you don’t like the NFL that much, everyone likes it, so it’s fun to talk about. There’s just value in the social currency.

It’s just yet another way that our alleged cool people have failed us with their policies, which is pretending that if something’s popular, it must be bad and you should reject it. Actually, you know what? If something’s popular, that makes it more fun, not less.

Exactly. I had a lot of fun all last weekend, and I’ve been counting the days until Commanders-Packers on Thursday night to start it all over again. Unfortunately, I’m not wearing my enthusiasm literally like Ben is on the other line. No maroon for me for this podcast.

It was actually a total coincidence that I had a green shirt on, but it worked out well for this opening.

Indeed. Well, it’s sort of a puke green. It’s not—

I know. It’s not—

—a forest green.

I was thinking, maybe I should run up and grab a Packers jersey. That would’ve made it even better, but what are you going to do?

Maybe next week. They’re going to be one of the best teams in the league, so we’re going to have plenty of opportunities.

As for the show today, it’s time to close out Apple Week, Ben. We’re going to talk about the iPhone event, and we’re going to start with an email from Karthik, who writes:

“Guys, I just want to take a victory lap for calling out relatively early on the Sharp Tech timeline that Apple is no longer a company interested in making bicycles for the mind. I’d come to think of Apple more as a fashion outfit, but I think Ben’s CPG angle is better. The sugar-water analogy is especially rough, and I see why Ben picked that one, given Apple’s history. I’d settle in between and say that Apple is to technology what consumer packaged-goods companies are to chemicals. They use technology and chemicals for sure, but that isn’t what they’re really about anymore.”

1. Apple Still Makes Technology

Is Apple still a technology company at its core? That’s the question that looms over everything. Any thoughts on that, Ben?

No, no, no, no. I disagree. Sorry, Karthik. I’m glad you patted yourself on the back, because I am not going to join in.

Apple is a technology company; they’re just focused on technologies that most people don’t really care that much about anymore. They’re still the best mobile chipmaker in the world. The phones, I think, were very impressive this year.

The AirPods—I was just recording Dithering; that’ll be posted tomorrow. John was raving about them, just an unbelievable sort of leap forward.

Are these the AirPods Pro 3? Is he using the 3?

Yeah. Sorry, this is a product you’re not familiar with, but it’s basically like the AirPods that you have on right now, but without the wire. It’s amazing.

No, I didn’t say they were not a technology company. I don’t think that they’re not a technology company. The technology they’re focused on is one that a lot of people don’t care much about. I think that’s an important distinction.

Yeah.

And we can get to the sugar-water point maybe in a bit.

But what I was trying to capture with that is the frustration and sense with Apple: Do we want to sit here like seals and clap a company for having fiscal discipline? What we want and what we love is a company going for it, just doing things and trying to change the world. That’s the part that’s gone—the vision.

Apple’s just nonexistent in the most interesting technology space. That’s just sort of a fact of the matter. It is kind of a bummer. As a business analyst, I will, I guess, reluctantly admire their cash-flow statement and their low CapEx relative to their peers and all those sorts of things. It doesn’t get me very excited, I’ll tell you that much.

Well, that’s the thing. In the past—10 years ago—these iPhone events did capture people’s imagination, and Apple was pushing forward and innovating in all sorts of mind-blowing ways.

But let’s work backward, as we have an Apple state-of-the-union conversation here. For anybody who missed it, there was an Apple event on Tuesday. It was billed as an awe-dropping event from Apple in the weeks leading up to it.

Forget about that.

And I hated that copy. It made me audibly groan when I saw it a couple of weeks ago.

Did it make you awe-dibly groan?

Oh, God. That’s going to make me groan right here on the podcast.

Apple, at this event, announced updates to the base iPhone and the iPhone Pro. They also announced a new iPhone Air that will be thinner than any iPhone that’s ever been made. The Pros are made of aluminum now, as opposed to the titanium used in the last 2 generations. They will have 12 gigabytes of RAM as opposed to 8 gigabytes of RAM, along with a bigger battery and a better camera.

So, Ben, am I missing any crucial nerdy details about what was announced, and what did you think of these updates to the iPhone, the most successful product of the last 25 years?

2. The iPhone Air Pushes Forward

Well, I think the Air was the most interesting, but for a non-obvious reason.

My prediction is they actually don’t sell very many iPhone Airs. If you care about the camera—and, by the way, I don’t know why we need a camera bump on the Air, because if you care about the camera, you’re going to get the Pro.

You’re going to get a Pro. Yeah.

Right.

Exactly.

If you care about battery life, you’re obviously going to get the Pro. The Air does have the high-end processor, which I think is great. It makes it much more attractive than the old regular iPhone Plus or whatever it was called. I can never keep the name straight. It wasn’t a Max. What was it? Ah, whatever. There was—

Mm.

—not the Mini. They had the larger one.

Plus.

It was the Plus.

Oh, yeah.

I find it compelling for 2 reasons.

Mm-hmm.

Number 1, it’s cool. There’s a bit where John Siracusa used to have an old thing about why they make the iMac thin. It’s a computer on your desk.

Yeah.

Who cares how thick it is? It’s an admirable bit. You make it thin because you can.

Right.

You learn stuff, you miniaturize stuff, and you figure out how to do things in the future. It will pay off in the long run in ways that will be unclear until you get there.

Right.

You can't anticipate it. By the way, that is the era of Apple that was capturing people's imaginations and taking their breath away. In that respect, with the Air, what they're doing is putting all of the compute in the little module that also holds the camera.

Which I love.

Yeah.

There's this idea—it reminds me of the Dynamic Island. Apple has Face ID, and they have the front-facing camera, of course. The question is, they don't have the technology yet to put that inside the screen so you don't even know it is shooting through whatever it might be, which I'm sure they would prefer to do.

Mm-hmm.

So you have a sort of lemon, and it's a brilliant example of making lemonade. Instead of just having this black thing in the middle of your screen, let's use it. Let's create an entire user interface around it that is actually genuinely useful.

I think the Dynamic Island, when you're going on a trip, has your flight information on there, or whatever it might be. You could easily access the podcast that you're playing. It's a great example of, okay, there's this thing, and the easy solution, as you see on Android, is to make the black part as small as possible and then just ignore it and pretend it's not there. Instead, they took it and made it into something that's cool.

Yeah.

And all the software around it—the way the bubbles sort of expand and compress, and how it can be two things at once—I love it. It's a great thing. I see a similar thing here. The camera bump is really annoying. It gets in the way, and it was just growing and growing like this big wart on the corner of your phone. It's like, okay, if we're going to bump out the phone and have this thing there, what if we actually leverage that?

Yeah.

This idea is that we can put all the compute up there, because one of the challenges with thinness—and we'll get to this with the Pro—is heat dissipation. They have the high-end chip, but their chips run hot. You have to dissipate the heat. You can't have it squeezed in the phone with the battery around it, with all those sorts of challenges. You have to run electronics to it. All these things are just—

You ever open up an iPhone? It's incredible how stuff is all packed in there. So if we're going to have an extrusion, let's make the extrusion bigger, actually—

Let's see what kind of advantages that gives us.

And you had lots of people picturing the module—

Yeah.

Could this lead to the future of glasses? Yes, right? You get the practice of making electronics really small and confined in small places. That will pay off in the long run. And sorry, Karthik, that is technological work that Apple is better at than almost anyone, so that's super cool.

Again, I think they screwed up with the camera. If you care about the camera, you're going to get a Pro. They should have made the plateau flat and made it a little thinner, without the extra camera bump. I think that was a mistake. Maybe they'll fix it on the next one.

You're selling thinness. You're fighting physics at some point. If you want to sell thinness, degrade the camera so it fits in the phone. That would be my one critique.

Also, I'm not going to buy it, and I am going to reference the Air all the time, because you'll have people saying, “Oh, the Pro's so big. The Pro's so heavy.”

Get an Air.

“Blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Whiners.

Go get an Air.

Yeah.

Give me my big, chonky, thick phone that actually runs all day and has 47 gazillion cameras, all of which are now super high-resolution. Perfect. That's the philosophy.

And it feels like Apple having the Air was good for Apple, because they can actually make the Pro pro. It's like when they fixed the MacBook Pros. They actually made them thicker. They added ports. They made them into tools. I see my devices as tools that help me get stuff done, and the Pro is more tool-like.

People were complaining about the font, this big, thick, chonky font. That font is in contrast to the Air's delicate, super-thin font. I feel like you could put a poster of the iPhone Pro next to a poster of Milwaukee Tool or something like that. You're getting the same sort of sense, and that's great. I love it.

I completely agree, and I found myself wondering as they were rolling through the iPhone Air announcement: Who exactly is this product for? What person cares about a camera and isn't going to get the Pro?

Yeah, I feel like you've got to innovate and you've got to shut up all the whiners. That's my feeling about it.

Yeah, but also—

That’s my feeling about it.

Like, battery life is more important to me than just about any feature the iPhone has.

And by the way, the iPhone Pro benefits from what they did for the Air, because it also has all the electronics up in a massively larger plateau up there, which is great. Give me more battery life. It's fantastic.

Well, it speaks to the primacy of the iPhone generally and how important it is in basically every iPhone customer's life. The thought of sacrificing battery to have a thinner phone is at least unfathomable to me, but maybe there will be a bigger market than I imagine for the iPhone Air.

3. The Pro Gets Practical

But the Pro—I came away from the announcements about the upgrades to the Pro planning to buy a new iPhone. And going into this event—

Yeah, I was actually kind of disappointed. I'm like, “I'm actually going to do Android for real this year.” I use AI so much. I'm really excited to explore, and I want this phone in a major way. It's not just because it's orange, although that is definitely a benefit.

Well, look, it's also partly because the iPhone that I have is made of titanium. It gets really hot every day. The battery life sucks. I'm just not happy with the product. That's one of the reasons I've been flirting with the idea of getting an Android or a Pixel or whatever it may be.

Yeah, no, I think Jonathan was on this a while ago. The opposite of Karthik. Karthik is like, “Pat me on the back.” Jonathan is like, “I deserve a pat on the back, but I wasn't bad enough to get it.”

I'll read Jonathan here. He says, “Goats, I mentally wrote an email to you a year ago, and I never sent it. I'm kicking myself now. The thesis of the email—”

Yeah, I'm really going to kick you too, Jonathan. You should've sent this email.

“The thesis of the email was that the iPhone 16 Pro was deeply disappointing for 3 reasons. 1, titanium is unattractive and doesn't hold color well. The color options all suck. 2, the phone was way too heavy. 3, titanium does not disperse heat well, and the phone gets way too warm.

“I felt very strongly about all 3 points, but I was afraid to say it with my chest. Well, fast-forward a year, and it seems Apple agrees, because they have finally reverted back to aluminum for the Pro phones. Aluminum allows for much better colors, it's lighter, and disperses heat better. It remains the ideal material for high-end phones. Thank goodness our national nightmare is over.”

No, I agree with all the points except for 1.

Okay.

But the Pro is not yet perfect for me.

Why not?

Because what I want is a plastic phone.

Oh.

No, I'm actually dead serious. I view this—it's not a fashion accessory. It is a tool. Plastic does not attenuate radio signals, so you could actually have better antennas. One thing I like about this is that the glass bit on the back is small. But yeah, they need that, in part, for signal reasons.

Aluminum is a gazillion times better. I think I was happy about titanium because at least it wasn't steel, which they were doing for a while. I don't know what they were doing.

Yeah.

It really felt like—and it was so—I mean, I'll join Karthik in saying that Apple dropping a Steve Jobs design, as if that's how it works, sometimes feels a little bit rich. You need to be more in our good graces when you're doing that, Apple, to invoke the Steve Jobs quote.

If you do that, I'm going to invoke a Steve Jobs quote in response.

Yeah.

But the steel, really? At least titanium was somewhat lighter. And in this case, this phone is actually heavier than the previous one with titanium, even though aluminum is lighter. That's because it has more battery. Battery is the heavy part there, and I will make that trade.

And again, if you want a light phone, get the Air.

Yeah.

So yeah, Jonathan is totally right. Jonathan’s big mistake here is not sending the email. But yes, heat dissipation is a big deal. The last 2 phones have been crazy hot, and I don’t like to play games. I can’t imagine anything—

I find myself wondering, “Am I using this wrong? Is it breaking? Do I need to get a new phone tomorrow because something’s wrong with my phone?” And—

Yep.

So if I can sidestep that process with an aluminum iPhone 17 Pro, I’m going to do it. I’ll be buying a phone on Friday.

Yep. No, for sure. I love the phones. I think they’re great.

4. Apple Loses Its Awe

You seem to be in the minority with that reaction to the event. Look, my reaction to the event, the presentation of these keynotes, is so stilted and antiseptic that I find myself rolling my eyes throughout most of it, and it’s hard for me even—

I know. It’s almost hard to pay attention.

That’s how I feel. I don’t really retain information about what’s being presented because it’s so boring and monotone.

I know. At least they went to a real city this time. It was great to see some Midwest representation. Chicago—beautiful.

There you go.

That is a gorgeous Apple Store right on the river there. But yeah, it’s just funny. People were ripping on the Google presentation with Jimmy Fallon hosting and a bunch of stars. Giannis was in there.

Mm-hmm.

I paid attention to that presentation. There’s an aspect of being live—

Yeah.

That is meaningful. You might screw up. Just the delivery is interesting to observe. I would rather have had the Google presentation than watched Apple executives for the 47th time standing in an Apple Store talking about these products. It’s terrible.

Recording a 70-minute commercial. It’s a tough ask.

At least it was only 70 minutes. But that’s a problem: it was actually quite short and still felt long.

Yeah.

Not ideal.

Yes. It was a bit of a grind, but then I read about the updates afterward and I was like, “Man, I actually need to go get an iPhone 17 Pro.” But the wider reaction to these updates seemed more angsty. What did you think of the general public, and particularly the Apple fanboys, and the way they processed the iPhone event this week?

Well, this is what I thought was so interesting. Number 1, you mentioned—and maybe this is because titanium really wasn’t good.

Mm-hmm.

They’ve been on a 3-year cycle for phones, but this is a 2-year update. They came out with the new version only 2 years ago, and they’ve already updated again. That might just be an issue of realizing they screwed up and needed to fix it sooner.

Yeah.

But it’s the in-between phones, like last year’s phone or the S editions, that are boring. Yes, they do updates, new cameras, and a new chip, blah, blah, blah, but it’s still the same phone. It’s a totally new phone. They introduced a completely new form factor in addition to the new chip, which, by the way, has a new GPU with units or aspects of the GPU designed for LLMs.

Okay.

One thing that I think I’ve mentioned before: Apple’s neural processing unit wasn’t useful for LLMs. That’s meant for some basic machine-learning algorithms, like photo identification and things along those lines. This is sort of a low-key admission: “Okay, now we’re actually designing this.” But hey, it’s 2025, not that long after this whole movement came along.

Mm-hmm.

And I think that’s a good timeline for introducing a meaningful AI upgrade in terms of their hardware and their chip. So you get a new chip and a new form factor. The cameras—3 full-resolution cameras—are great. I think the selfie camera, with the square sort of idea, means it doesn’t matter how you hold your phone. You’re going to get the same quality no matter what.

Yeah.

Super obvious, but also a great addition. It makes sense. And yet everyone immediately fell back to, “So boring. Guess I’ll wait till next year.”

Waste of time. Yeah.

Next year’s going to be more boring because I don’t think they’re going to update the industrial design again next year. And I could have ended there, right? “No, you guys are wrong.”

Yeah.

5. Apple Feels Left Behind

But I think what was happening is people were reaching for something to describe how they felt, and I think they reached for the wrong thing. I don’t think what was happening here was that Apple had a boring update. I think it was a very interesting update.

Mm-hmm.

What they’re reaching for is the growing, ongoing sense of disillusionment that Apple is just not really important or involved in the future.

The most important technology that we’ll see in the next 20 years.

That’s right. They mention that Apple Intelligence does this, and they have the live-translation thing, et cetera, et cetera. But hanging over all this, there was no update on the timeline for the new Siri, by the way.

Mm-hmm.

Hanging over this is just this general sense that Apple is still stuck in 2015, right? And I wrote after WWDC—the article I wrote then was called “Apple Retreats”—and I’m like, unlike last year, when they promised the moon and totally failed to deliver—

Yeah.

This year they’re like, “Oh, let’s do what we’re good at. Here’s a new user interface,” which, by the way, I thought looked terrible in all the screenshots and images. I’m not looking forward to that.

That’s the only reason I’m reluctant to get the 17 Pro. I don’t know if I want to dive in headfirst into whatever—

Yeah.

They’re pushing on people, but such is life.

But there was an aspect of, “Look, the company needed to reset.” They got over their skis. They promised stuff they couldn’t deliver. It was super embarrassing. John Gruber wrote, “Something’s rotten in the state of Cupertino,” and I think he was right.

It was spot-on. Yep.

Yeah. And so it was healthy, I think, to reset, but I think the angst and disappointment and flatness of the response—that’s sort of the price of resetting. That’s the price of retreating.

Mm-hmm.

People are excited if you announce new stuff, and if you realize, healthily, I think, that you’re not in the state or don’t have the capability to deliver stuff and you need to make sure you can underpromise and overdeliver, the implication is that you’re not going to get the hype and people aren’t going to be excited.

Yeah.

And that’s what I think people were feeling, and they were articulating it as, “Oh, there’s nothing here.” There was a lot here. It just wasn’t what people wanted it to be.

Interesting, yes. It wasn’t what these events used to be like to experience as a tech community. They opened—

Right, and I think the broader context here is that it was timely that we had the remedies decision last week.

Yeah.

And we mocked it last week, this idea that Apple’s not going to have money. Look, the Google deal is conservatively $20 billion a year.

Mm-hmm.

Probably more like $25 or $26 million at this point because it’s tied to the volume of searches, which does keep going up. Some sort of decline in the last 12 months, supposedly, but still, that number is from 2020 or 2021 or something like that.

Yeah.

And they made $100 billion of profit last year. So 20% to 25%—you cut that out, and it’s going to hurt. On an objective level, they still would have $75 billion in profit, okay? They would have money to spend on innovation, and it’s absurd that this was a reason for the judge not to impose what seemed like a pretty straightforward remedy to undo the harm because of that.

Mm-hmm.

But what’s funny is the judge is like, “Apple might innovate less,” and I’m like, “That’s what happened.” The entire anticompetitive problem with Google paying off Apple was not DuckDuckGo or Bing or Yahoo or whatever the heck alternatives to Google there might have been. The only entity that could conceivably fight with Google at Google’s level is Apple.

Mm-hmm.

And they bought ’em off.

Yeah.

They bought them off. And Apple—and this is where I was getting at with the sugar-water thing—a long time ago chose profits in exchange for basically not competing in an entire space, and that space just happened to be the best way in, the lead-in—

Mm-hmm.

To AI. There is a clear link between what it takes to build a compelling search engine and what it takes to build AI. You have to get a lot of data. You have to catalog it. You have to sort it. You have to be able to manage, reason over, and deal with large data sets. Apple basically opted out of that entire game in exchange for a check.

And now today, when people are angsty and Apple can't deliver on AI, it's like, well—

They don't have the muscle groups anymore.

You're trying to go into the gym and bench-press a large amount of weight, and you haven't worked out in 10 years.

Yeah.

At best, you're going to fail.

Which I've done.

At worst, you're going to hurt yourself.

It doesn't end well.

Which they did last year.

Yeah.

They hurt themselves badly by promising stuff they couldn't deliver, which was basically analogous to someone going into a gym after 10 years, trying to do something they used to be able to do, and finding they couldn't anymore.

Mm-hmm.

And then they screwed up their back.

Yeah.

Apple screwed up their back. I mean, there's a theme here. I've written “Apple's Middle Age.” I wrote “Boomer Apple” a while ago. It is what it is.

So now, are they just embracing being in their mid-40s and accepting reality and adjusting accordingly? Because they opened with the Steve Jobs quote, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” And as you mentioned earlier, we've mentioned the sugar water quote a couple of times. Steve Jobs famously asked John Sculley in the early '80s—he was, at that point, the CEO of Pepsi—“Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or come with me and change the world?” So is Apple accepting that they're in the selling-sugar-water era of their company's life cycle?

Yeah, I don't love the sugar water analogy. I just went there because of the famousness of the quote. Again—

Mm-hmm.

By using “sugar water,” I open myself up to Karthik's unfair attacks. I guess I have to blame myself for that.

Well—

But—

And look, I don't know how the soda business works, but Pepsi has basically been the same product for about 75 years.

Right.

Coca-Cola, same deal. Apple is making incremental improvements year over year.

Right. So it's not sugar water per se. The more interesting part is the “change the world” part.

Mm-hmm.

Does anyone feel like Apple is changing the world?

Yeah. It's a fair question.

And I think the fact that the answer is clearly no is what drives the overall disillusionment and disappointment, or worse—

Mm-hmm.

Complete disinterest.

Yeah. Well, I like this quote from Jobs that you also featured in your article. He said, “My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great