my iPhone does not work. I'm sorry, I'm just gonna say it. Okay. I don't know what happened in you upgraded your software is happy. You're on iOS 18. It doesn't work. I after three years, I upgraded to the newest phone, I upgraded to the newest OS. The phone doesn't work, meaning like to call people, I can't call my wife anymore.

I can't call my kids anymore. The phone bricks constantly my photos app doesn't work. It is just really bad. And I think for a company of this scale, I don't understand how it does not go through a more complicated test harness that catches all of this. I'm not trying to complain, but because I know it's hard for them.

I know it's complicated. And but it's really bad. You're not the only person people are freaking out about the interface changes on photos crashing is a major thing. And Apple Intelligence just doesn't work. So it does seem key that Apple has gotten off their game of making polished stuff to race to try and I guess catch up to their perception of, you know, AI being a disruptive force at the interface level by your phone or desktop.

But what are your thoughts on this new story about them doing more chips, they've obviously had great success with the processors and phones and now the M four. Incredible if you haven't tried the Mac mini best computer for the dollar in the world right now. But what are your thoughts on Apple?

So the most important thing about Apple is remember, it's vertically integrated, and vertically integrated companies when you construct them properly, have a competitive advantage that really cannot be assaulted for a decade 2030 4050 years. And so chips, classic illustration, go all the way down to the metal in build a chip that's perfect for your desired interface, your desired use cases, your desired UI, and nobody's gonna be able to compete with you.

And if you have the resources, you know, because you need balance sheet resources to go in the chip direction, it just gives you another five inch hang your sort of competitive advantage. And so I love vertically integrated companies, you know, I posted a pin tweet, I think it's still my pin tweet about vertically integrate is the solution to the best possible companies.

But it's very difficult, you need different teams with different skill sets, and you need probably more money, truthfully, more capital. But Apple is going to keep going down the vertical integration software, hardware, you know, all day long. And there's nobody else who does hardware and software together in the planet, which is kind of shocking in some ways.

Is there a world class company, a company that's world class, it's both software and hardware? Tesla? Yeah, maybe. Nvidia? Well, not really. Could they do a world class UI? You know, maybe maybe there's a foundation, but you don't have a different vision, maybe a different team, not clear. Tesla's close, I guess.

I say the software's good. If you define software as it touches a consumer. Tesla, Apple, in some ways, Google, maybe meta with the meta glasses. Trying, trying, attempting, you can't say Nvidia, because I think Nvidia touches the consumer through an app that then sits on top of CUDA, which I think is that's a brilliant strategy for them.

But it's, it's a hard Tesla, and then a long tail of people, right? So anyway, has a lot of competitive advantages that, you know, actually leveraging for about 15 years now. And even back then, Steve, there's some old great Steve videos, I'll see if I can find you a clip, where he talks about this very intentionally from the 1990s.

You know, he came back to Apple, he said, we're doing vertical integration, basically using those words of software and hardware, and there's going to be nobody else that can compete with us. I think it's in an interview he did in it's published in in the company of giants, I believe, in these perfect on point, just follow that strategy for, you know, the next 25 years.

Now, you're seeing some of the manifestations, though, of a competitive strategy that gives you incredible advantages, is you get very sloppy in other places, especially over time, because you have such great competitive modes that you don't have to compete at the cutting edge of this, like the photos app is completely unusable.

I'm the biggest Apple fanboy in the world. Like I remember interviewing once with a job for Tim Cook. And I walked in and I said, he's like, why, you know, why are you interested? And I said, Well, you know, I own every SKU of every product you've ever produced, except I don't have every color of each, you know, iPod.

And he was like, blown away. And but now like, my photos app is completely unusable. So I totally understand, you know, it's about the frustration. And they are showing like the decay function, you know, culturally and otherwise, that eventually somebody will figure out an angle to rip them out.

Yeah, I'll tell you, we talked about dictators at the beginning of this trim off. And obviously, this is your wheelhouse as a dictator yourself, is, you know, there has to be a constant fear that some a hole is going to come to your office and be like, what did you do to the photos app?

And that fear does not exist inside of Apple. It's not like the mobile me you ever hear the mobile me story where he brought the mobile me team and said, How is mobile me supposed to work? They said, Well, it's supposed to back up everything. When you buy your new phone, you get everything, you never have to worry about losing a phone, slammed his hand down and said, Well, why the F doesn't work that way, fired the person brought the next person in and said, Now make it the way he said it's supposed to be game over.

I don't think Tim Cook's doing that. Johnny Ives not there. And obviously, Steve Jobs not there to terrorize people. Well, I don't think you look, you don't need to necessarily terrorize people. But I do think you have to go through uat. So I think it's pretty reasonable when you have a large footprint of consumers using an app to go through user acceptance testing is like, first base.

And typically, what happens is you can do a process of a few months where several 100,000 people get it all over the world. And as long as you do an okay job of getting a decent distribution of people, this would have come out. But I want to just talk about what Keith said, as well, it's literally not just photos, it's like the phone doesn't work.

So there are just core structural issues with this operating system now, that makes the iPhone maybe 10 to 30% less usable. And everything is really, everything is really frustrating. The command center, you know, when you pull up your little command center to change the brightness and your AirPods, it's just like, what are they doing?

I mean, by the way, so do you need a chip? Do you need a machine learning chip to do inference to figure out that when you constantly run your phone at a certain level of brightness, you should just allow the phone to be at a certain level of brightness?

Yes. Why does it read? This is not this is not complicated software engineering guys. No, but this is my point. There's no arbiter of taste anymore. Taste is the backstop. Yeah, let me let me pause, double click on that for a second. So I think taste is great if you have it, but there's only so many people on the planet that are going to have, you know, cutting edge taste and be right.

If you don't have taste, what most tech companies do is they use data. Data is something that's approachable and leverageable. Because Apple has like this, the antibodies to using data to measure success with the user experience measure, whatever success. If you subtract taste, even by a bit, you don't have the scaffolding that every other company would use.

And so you see the worst of both worlds. That's a great take. That's a great take. It's just go off the rails, right? You go off the rails. So Keith, you think that you think that what happened is like when Steve Jobs isn't there, and Johnny Ive isn't there.

There's still a bunch of folks that probably think they have taste, but the real taste folks left, and there's really no scaffolding left to Yeah, but the scaffolding you had at Facebook meta, obviously, or the Google users would catch some of this stuff, without a doubt, like no doubt about it, you know, that users are less thrilled, and they'd use things less, and you'd fix it.

And maybe even you take that to a stream, you never developed taste, like I could argue that about Google or meta, they don't really have taste. But like, yeah, you could, you could argue the paradigms. But fundamentally, if you don't have that backstop, if the taste subtracts even 10%, not all the way down, you're just not going to catch this stuff.

And I think there's only like, how many people in the world really have cutting edge technology user experience case? I don't know too many, I would fund them right away. It's an incredible Brian Chesky might have it. It's an incredible point, because I, if I'm being really insecure, I would want to say, Oh, yeah, no, we had a lot of taste at Facebook back in the day.

But actually, we had so much scaffolding around data, probably because intuitively, we knew that that was way more reliable for us. It's more predictable scale, it's certainly more scalable, right? Like you take Steve out, you don't need a dictator, but you need a taste and taste is artistic. This is anything adventure, like, you know, like scaling venture funds is really, really challenging.

Because early stage investing is more like taste, then driven. And later stage, you can use data and scale it and scaffolding. So I think there's just fields, it's a little bit also you see, like the sports teams, they just happened at Stanford, when Jim Harbaugh left. It took years for the decay function, for like the next coaching regime to show they were completely incompetent.

Like the next year, they're pretty good next year, they lost one more game, they should have next year lost two more games, they should have a lot and then eventually became like horrible. And you know, there's a decay function with an organization when you take out the person who is the original thinker, or the leader or the dictator or whatever.

And so I think some of this is showing up now. And then, you know, playing on a field that's not favorable to them, which is there are advantages Apple has an AI, but there's some significant organizational structural disadvantages. And that's the field that people are going to be competing on for the next five years, from a consumer perspective.

And they're playing on a field where they don't have all the advantages in their favor.