What happened to Apple!? Here's why iOS 18.2 is BROKEN!

00:00:00.000 | my iPhone does not work. I'm sorry, I'm just gonna say it.

00:00:02.520 | Okay. I don't know what happened in you upgraded your

00:00:05.600 | software is happy. You're on iOS 18. It doesn't work. I after

00:00:09.080 | three years, I upgraded to the newest phone, I upgraded to the

00:00:11.920 | newest OS. The phone doesn't work, meaning like to call

00:00:15.280 | people, I can't call my wife anymore. I can't call my kids

00:00:18.040 | anymore. The phone bricks constantly my photos app doesn't

00:00:21.600 | work. It is just really bad. And I think for a company of this

00:00:25.040 | scale, I don't understand how it does not go through a more

00:00:28.360 | complicated test harness that catches all of this. I'm not

00:00:32.120 | trying to complain, but because I know it's hard for them. I

00:00:34.360 | know it's complicated. And but it's really bad.

00:00:37.320 | You're not the only person people are freaking out about

00:00:39.840 | the interface changes on photos crashing is a major thing. And

00:00:44.600 | Apple Intelligence just doesn't work. So it does seem key that

00:00:48.400 | Apple has gotten off their game of making polished stuff to race

00:00:52.440 | to try and I guess catch up to their perception of, you know,

00:00:57.120 | AI being a disruptive force at the interface level by your

00:01:00.880 | phone or desktop. But what are your thoughts on this new story

00:01:04.600 | about them doing more chips, they've obviously had great

00:01:06.640 | success with the processors and phones and now the M four.

00:01:10.040 | Incredible if you haven't tried the Mac mini best computer for

00:01:12.960 | the dollar in the world right now. But what are your thoughts

00:01:15.560 | on Apple?

00:01:16.320 | So the most important thing about Apple is remember, it's

00:01:18.680 | vertically integrated, and vertically integrated companies

00:01:21.640 | when you construct them properly, have a competitive

00:01:24.320 | advantage that really cannot be assaulted for a decade 2030 4050

00:01:29.040 | years. And so chips, classic illustration, go all the way

00:01:32.400 | down to the metal in build a chip that's perfect for your

00:01:35.800 | desired interface, your desired use cases, your desired UI, and

00:01:40.160 | nobody's gonna be able to compete with you. And if you

00:01:41.920 | have the resources, you know, because you need balance sheet

00:01:44.160 | resources to go in the chip direction, it just gives you

00:01:48.440 | another five inch hang your sort of competitive advantage. And so

00:01:52.040 | I love vertically integrated companies, you know, I posted a

00:01:54.760 | pin tweet, I think it's still my pin tweet about vertically

00:01:57.640 | integrate is the solution to the best possible companies. But

00:02:01.280 | it's very difficult, you need different teams with different

00:02:03.160 | skill sets, and you need probably more money, truthfully,

00:02:05.280 | more capital. But Apple is going to keep going down the vertical

00:02:08.480 | integration software, hardware, you know, all day long. And

00:02:11.880 | there's nobody else who does hardware and software together

00:02:14.320 | in the planet, which is kind of shocking in some ways. Is there

00:02:16.960 | a world class company, a company that's world class, it's both

00:02:19.880 | software and hardware? Tesla? Yeah, maybe. Nvidia? Well, not

00:02:26.600 | really. Could they do a world class UI? You know, maybe maybe

00:02:30.760 | there's a foundation, but you don't have a different vision,

00:02:32.880 | maybe a different team, not clear. Tesla's close, I guess. I

00:02:37.120 | say the software's good. If you define software as it touches a

00:02:41.560 | consumer. Tesla, Apple, in some ways, Google, maybe meta with

00:02:49.560 | the meta glasses. Trying, trying, attempting, you can't

00:02:53.720 | say Nvidia, because I think Nvidia touches the consumer

00:02:56.080 | through an app that then sits on top of CUDA, which I think is

00:02:59.440 | that's a brilliant strategy for them. But it's, it's a hard

00:03:04.360 | Tesla, and then a long tail of people, right? So anyway, has a

00:03:08.840 | lot of competitive advantages that, you know, actually

00:03:12.480 | leveraging for about 15 years now. And even back then, Steve,

00:03:15.800 | there's some old great Steve videos, I'll see if I can find

00:03:18.160 | you a clip, where he talks about this very intentionally from the

00:03:21.480 | 1990s. You know, he came back to Apple, he said, we're doing

00:03:25.760 | vertical integration, basically using those words of software

00:03:29.000 | and hardware, and there's going to be nobody else that can

00:03:31.400 | compete with us. I think it's in an interview he did in it's

00:03:34.040 | published in in the company of giants, I believe, in these

00:03:37.280 | perfect on point, just follow that strategy for, you know, the

00:03:40.640 | next 25 years. Now, you're seeing some of the

00:03:42.960 | manifestations, though, of a competitive strategy that gives

00:03:46.240 | you incredible advantages, is you get very sloppy in other

00:03:48.840 | places, especially over time, because you have such great

00:03:52.280 | competitive modes that you don't have to compete at the cutting

00:03:54.560 | edge of this, like the photos app is completely unusable. I'm

00:03:57.160 | the biggest Apple fanboy in the world. Like I remember

00:04:00.160 | interviewing once with a job for Tim Cook. And I walked in and I

00:04:03.360 | said, he's like, why, you know, why are you interested? And I

00:04:05.600 | said, Well, you know, I own every SKU of every product

00:04:08.360 | you've ever produced, except I don't have every color of each,

00:04:12.080 | you know, iPod. And he was like, blown away. And but now like,

00:04:16.120 | my photos app is completely unusable. So I totally

00:04:18.600 | understand, you know, it's about the frustration. And they are

00:04:21.920 | showing like the decay function, you know, culturally and

00:04:25.500 | otherwise, that eventually somebody will figure out an

00:04:28.400 | angle to rip them out. Yeah, I'll tell you, we talked about

00:04:31.200 | dictators at the beginning of this trim off. And obviously,

00:04:34.120 | this is your wheelhouse as a dictator yourself, is, you know,

00:04:37.680 | there has to be a constant fear that some a hole is going to

00:04:43.640 | come to your office and be like, what did you do to the photos

00:04:46.520 | app? And that fear does not exist inside of Apple. It's not

00:04:50.280 | like the mobile me you ever hear the mobile me story where he

00:04:54.920 | brought the mobile me team and said, How is mobile me supposed

00:04:57.560 | to work? They said, Well, it's supposed to back up everything.

00:04:59.640 | When you buy your new phone, you get everything, you never have

00:05:01.280 | to worry about losing a phone, slammed his hand down and said,

00:05:03.440 | Well, why the F doesn't work that way, fired the person

00:05:07.000 | brought the next person in and said, Now make it the way he

00:05:09.040 | said it's supposed to be game over. I don't think Tim Cook's

00:05:11.760 | doing that. Johnny Ives not there. And obviously, Steve

00:05:14.240 | Jobs not there to terrorize people.

00:05:15.840 | Well, I don't think you look, you don't need to necessarily

00:05:19.240 | terrorize people. But I do think you have to go through uat. So I

00:05:23.560 | think it's pretty reasonable when you have a large footprint

00:05:26.080 | of consumers using an app to go through user acceptance testing

00:05:29.000 | is like, first base. And typically, what happens is you

00:05:32.440 | can do a process of a few months where several 100,000 people get

00:05:36.640 | it all over the world. And as long as you do an okay job of

00:05:40.040 | getting a decent distribution of people, this would have come

00:05:43.040 | out. But I want to just talk about what Keith said, as well,

00:05:46.280 | it's literally not just photos, it's like the phone doesn't

00:05:49.360 | work. So there are just core structural issues with this

00:05:53.560 | operating system now, that makes the iPhone maybe 10 to 30% less

00:06:00.720 | usable. And everything is really, everything is really

00:06:04.080 | frustrating.

00:06:04.560 | The command center, you know, when you pull up your little

00:06:06.520 | command center to change the brightness and your AirPods, it's

00:06:10.040 | just like, what are they doing? I mean,

00:06:11.800 | by the way, so do you need a chip? Do you need a machine

00:06:15.320 | learning chip to do inference to figure out that when you

00:06:17.720 | constantly run your phone at a certain level of brightness, you

00:06:21.640 | should just allow the phone to be at a certain level of

00:06:24.200 | brightness? Yes. Why does it read? This is not this is not

00:06:29.840 | complicated software engineering guys.

00:06:32.360 | No, but this is my point. There's no arbiter of taste

00:06:36.360 | anymore. Taste is the backstop.

00:06:38.760 | Yeah, let me let me pause, double click on that for a

00:06:42.800 | second. So I think taste is great if you have it, but

00:06:45.760 | there's only so many people on the planet that are going to

00:06:47.440 | have, you know, cutting edge taste and be right. If you

00:06:50.760 | don't have taste, what most tech companies do is they use data.

00:06:53.680 | Data is something that's approachable and leverageable.

00:06:57.160 | Because Apple has like this, the antibodies to using data to

00:07:00.840 | measure success with the user experience measure, whatever

00:07:03.720 | success. If you subtract taste, even by a bit, you don't have

00:07:08.200 | the scaffolding that every other company would use. And so you

00:07:11.960 | see the worst of both worlds.

00:07:13.240 | That's a great take. That's a great take. It's just go off

00:07:16.480 | the rails, right? You go off the rails. So Keith, you think

00:07:18.800 | that you think that what happened is like when Steve

00:07:21.040 | Jobs isn't there, and Johnny Ive isn't there. There's still a

00:07:24.600 | bunch of folks that probably think they have taste, but the

00:07:27.480 | real taste folks left, and there's really no scaffolding

00:07:30.400 | left to

00:07:31.520 | Yeah, but the scaffolding you had at Facebook meta, obviously,

00:07:34.920 | or the Google users would catch some of this stuff, without a

00:07:37.680 | doubt, like no doubt about it, you know, that users are less

00:07:40.280 | thrilled, and they'd use things less, and you'd fix it. And

00:07:42.960 | maybe even you take that to a stream, you never developed

00:07:45.840 | taste, like I could argue that about Google or meta, they don't

00:07:48.360 | really have taste. But like, yeah, you could, you could argue

00:07:51.200 | the paradigms. But fundamentally, if you don't have

00:07:53.680 | that backstop, if the taste subtracts even 10%, not all the

00:07:57.440 | way down, you're just not going to catch this stuff. And I think

00:08:00.560 | there's only like, how many people in the world really have

00:08:03.000 | cutting edge technology user experience case? I don't know

00:08:05.760 | too many, I would fund them right away. It's an incredible

00:08:07.880 | Brian Chesky might have it.

00:08:09.240 | It's an incredible point, because I, if I'm being really

00:08:14.240 | insecure, I would want to say, Oh, yeah, no, we had a lot of

00:08:18.560 | taste at Facebook back in the day. But actually, we had so

00:08:21.880 | much scaffolding around data, probably because intuitively, we

00:08:25.080 | knew that that was way more reliable for us.

00:08:27.320 | It's more predictable scale, it's certainly more scalable,

00:08:29.920 | right? Like you take Steve out, you don't need a dictator, but

00:08:32.520 | you need a taste and taste is artistic. This is anything

00:08:36.320 | adventure, like, you know, like scaling venture funds is really,

00:08:39.240 | really challenging. Because early stage investing is more

00:08:42.320 | like taste, then driven. And later stage, you can use data

00:08:46.560 | and scale it and scaffolding. So I think there's just fields,

00:08:50.400 | it's a little bit also you see, like the sports teams, they just

00:08:53.480 | happened at Stanford, when Jim Harbaugh left. It took years for

00:08:58.000 | the decay function, for like the next coaching regime to show

00:09:01.640 | they were completely incompetent. Like the next year,

00:09:03.920 | they're pretty good next year, they lost one more game, they

00:09:05.960 | should have next year lost two more games, they should have a

00:09:08.120 | lot and then eventually became like horrible. And you know,

00:09:11.160 | there's a decay function with an organization when you take out

00:09:13.320 | the person who is the original thinker, or the leader or the

00:09:16.560 | dictator or whatever. And so I think some of this is showing up

00:09:20.160 | now. And then, you know, playing on a field that's not favorable

00:09:23.920 | to them, which is there are advantages Apple has an AI, but

00:09:27.160 | there's some significant organizational structural

00:09:30.400 | disadvantages. And that's the field that people are going to

00:09:33.040 | be competing on for the next five years, from a consumer

00:09:35.920 | perspective. And they're playing on a field where they don't have

00:09:39.280 | all the advantages in their favor.

What happened to Apple!? Here's why iOS 18.2 is BROKEN!

Chapters