Jailbreaking and iOS 7 Expectations

Yeah, I would like to see better notifications. I desperately want to see the notifications of work better. There's a way too many toggles. Number one, number two. The way that the toasts, the little alerts come down from the top. Um, that's and say in fact, I should have mentioned it earlier. Like, the number one reason I jailbroke my iPhone is so that I could get those skinny alerts that just take up the status bar instead of coming down over the whole thing. Um, I just hits two-way all the time. I'm not patient enough to wait from the clear so I grab and throw them away almost like a whack-a-mole game.

From you now. Yeah, but I mean Apple chose back in the day to put their prime navigation element of the entire device in my opinion second to the home button. The back button. Yes, in the upper left-hand corner. I still don't like that decision by the way. But fine, you're gonna put your navigation way up there in the upper left cool but then you choose when you do notifications to cover it. Yeah, come on, yeah. You're covering the second-most navigation important navigation element on your entire platform all the time.

My other gripe is that it's still back, back, back, back. Oh suddenly it takes to another screen. It should own it. Should stop when that button changes. It should stop so that repeated hitting of it does not yeah. Yeah, I wonder if they could do multiple user accounts in a way that if my mom gets an iPad and it's her, she never even knows it exists. Sort of like like my mom never uses my sister, never uses fast app switching. You never use any of those things that the rebel Mr. to them. If you know you go into settings and enable user accounts and then suddenly you have them. Yeah, hundreds of millions of happy iPad users don't worry about them but everyone else can.

You know anyone who's in business or in a multiple family environment and flick the switch and have that almost like flicking a switch default apps. You know it so user you have to do a user action to enable them. Um yeah, I guess I'd be fine with that. I mean to be honest, I don't think that it's necessary to stick a toggle especially on an iPad where you've got so much screen real estate. Look at the lock screen on an iPad; it's just like your big wallpaper, like yeah, you know switch accounts and have a guest account. Please have a guest account. Right now, you have to use guided access to lock it in Safari if you want to do against it.

Yeah, I mean there's other things that I could foresee happening in iOS 7. I could foresee them building in the necessary bits to support the Apple watch. Give any thoughts on you me party pot something I watch eater. Hope they do it well but my main thing is I hope that whatever support they build into iOS to support their watch, I hope that they support other like the Pebble oh crap here talk to those as well because I'm sure the eyewatch is going to be really great amazingly great but more so than with phones people want to have different watches and if there if Apple is not going to make that at least make a gesture towards letting that be an open ecosystem for people. I'll find that to be a huge bummer.

Yeah, if they at least provide some level hoping I'd be I support for whatever the watch is pulling right dear that was awesome it was it was like Old Home Week for means fantastic ya know it's been a ton of fun it's a really good talking to him. I'm happy to come on anytime I know a lot of people already know where to find you but for those few people who aren't already following you, where can they find you? Go way more followers and I do on Twitter so don't act all humble about this. Uh jump to say well you're just a reserved Minnesota guy you never really you know cuz never a hi I'm dieter I'm over here hi I'm Peter I'm at the verge calm and on Twitter I am at back lawn and you know I'm searchable I'm on the facebooks and the Google give us a little background you'll find almost consistent dieter content yeah pretty much all right.

Thank you very much, I really appreciate you being on. Thanks, Ray, you can find me at Rene Ritchie, you can find all of us at mobile nations calm / shows and if you haven't already please stop by itunes leave us a review leave us a rating it encourages itunes to feature us and that's how we get to meet more great people like you. Thanks everyone, have a great evening, you\\n

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: engood evening everyone it is March 22 2013 I'm Rene Ritchie and tonight we are talking about Apple hiring Kevin Lynch from Adobe we are talking about the competitive market in 2013 and we're talking about our thoughts for iOS 7 this is the I'm our show joining me today is the senior mobile editor or one of the senior mobile editors from the verge dieter bohn are you dinner I am doing very well how are you Renee good I know you hate when I drag this kind of stuff up but just for the audience Peter actually created this show and not only did he hire me originally for I more but he started me off in podcasting so now some three hundred and forty odd episodes later dieter your back ya know I actually I just tweeted it myself that I was coming on and so I went and I hunted down the completely broken page from the original phone different podcast from July thirtieth 2007 so this the show in its various iterations is creeping up on its six-year anniversary it's fantastical to me because I remember when you first hired me my whole thing to you was Theatres which one phone on one network there's no way that I'm gonna write anything every day it's not gonna be going to write about yeah yeah that turned out to be wrong there's there's plenty to write about um and maybe soon I don't know if we don't you talk to this but maybe soon they'll be more than one phone on you know multiple networks but let's dye this I mean that I think is because we look at the competitive landscape and I don't i was at New York with Phil doing the galaxy s4 and you had Malay and I think Dan there yeah bring it and this is the competition apples facing the HTC One the galaxy s4 and they keep doing it with so far one phone a year almost always within the same three-month period and I don't know how long that's a tenable situation to them I think that they can do it as long as their phone doesn't feel stale as long as it you know is capturing the popular imagination actually I think that if I'm Apple I'm less concerned about I mean I'm concerned about the galaxy s4 obviously I'm not super concerned about the HTC One but I am also concerned about and this is going to sound insane but bear with me I'm a little bit concerned about the also Ran's I'm a little bit concerned about Windows Phone and I'm a little bit concerned about bear with me Tizen and maybe even tiny little tiny bit Firefox because they are you know everybody is admitted and given up on the US market US market I mean they're not giving up they're still trying but everybody sort of gifts that launch day in the u.s. today right it's blackberry launch day I had hopefully they do okay I'd like to see more competition and have it not be a two-horse race in the US but I think that that dynamic isn't likely to change very soon but where things are a lot more fluid is in developing and emerging markets so China Indonesia Africa and Latin America there's a lot more opportunity on the low end to to bring stuff in and the question I think Apple has to answer there is is last year's and two years ago's model of the iphone sufficient compete in those markets and if it's not is Apple comfortable with with seating some of that stuff's just some of those those crazy new entrants or do they want to take them on I think also there's a case that could be made I think we talked about that Arnold Kim a couple weeks ago where the previous generation iphones are so good that they become an easy choice to make over the brand new iphone than the average sales price even in first world markets comes down which may not concern Apple too much but seems to concern the market a lot right and maybe a cheap plastic alternative makes people buy more of the high price premium one just really don't want to cheap plastic yeah I mean the question is you know is somebody more likely to buy a cheap plastic new iphone than they are last year's iPhone is there a stigma attached to buying last year's iPhone that's strong enough that you would not do it but you would buy something that's basically the exact same specs but came out this year and I think Tim Cook fielded this on the conference call when the analysts were asking what the mix was and he said you know iphone 5 mix is pretty much what iphone 4s make but when iphone 5 becomes a cheap one hundred bucks cheaper against this you know presumably a similar-looking iphone 5s do more people start buying the five to save a hundred bucks and then does that affect 15 s sales yeah and I mean to be blunt I it's a failure of imagination but I am hard pressed to tell you what they could put in a in a 5s that would make people think that the five was old and stale is it is it is it insane that we live in a world now where people looked at the galaxy for the galaxy s4 event and said oh it's a galaxy you know 3s I can't do their names right g3s whatever yeah it is but it's also I think that it's a sign of Samsung's confidence that Samsung dominates the market they dominate the android market and they are able to put out a phone that yeah it's got a bigger screen and faster and you know it's your standard spec you know raced kind of phone but the design is so similar and I don't think it's that Samsung thinks it has the most beautiful perfect designs whenever maybe they do but I mean it's clearly not it's it's an ok looking android phone but it shows that samsung has confidence in their leadership position that they don't need to try and do a crazy new iteration of a phone every year they just like yep we're samsung we can put out you know the same design and try and maintain that consistency i mean just look at here are such a hundred I've got phones on my desk look at what HTC had to do from last year to this year they went from this this is the 11 x from last year it's a very good-looking phone polycarbonate unibody blah blah blah too here's the the one this year you know they had they have to keep on completely redesigning stuff and changing their industrial design and changing their software to try and find some way to gain traction in the market whereas Samsung can just keep on keep it on and they're allowed to do that because they've got such a huge market share in such a huge marketing presence you're talking about the 5s if Apple holds to pattern because apples not predictable but they are sort of like they do seem to stick to certain patterns we would get an iphone 5 casing with presumably a more advanced processor which could be faster but will likely also be maybe a smaller dice eyes more power efficient and we could get a better camera and that no longer just means more megapixels but could mean better optics better glass better sensor but those are the trademark improvements the rest for the S series has always been some software feature like FaceTime or Siri and I think Apple especially with the pressure putting on being put on by Google the services start becoming much more important in these off years yeah well I mean I I really hope that they can get their their services story figured out and I mean I've been reporting on dropbox more lately because the company is opening a bit more they're having people over their headquarters and I mean I think they're probably you know working towards getting an IPO and Dropbox is becoming a really interesting story they just bought mailbox they bought a photo service they bought a music service while ago I think but just compared that most yeah exactly but compare that to iCloud and I mean I don't know I I try to use iCloud maybe once every three to four months and I just can't can't handle it I'm not fond of the way any of it works and I don't think it's because I'm a curmudgeon that wants my file system I really don't it's I mean I am a curmudgeon man I do want my fast system but I don't think that's the only reason that I'm not fond of iCloud and I don't think developers are especially fond of it either and it's it's funny because like fixing that is not a super like flashy cool you know thing that you can get up on a keynote stage and be like we've made our API better like you could do that but like nobody's going to write that headline and be interested in that and you know sales reps on the star aren't going to push that but that's the kind of boring work that they need to do they need to just sort of like incrementally push day after day week after week to make their cloud services better and in the way that you know google has or Dropbox has yeah I think it's really interesting and I like the file system a lot my mom is completely confused by a file system extent that she will call me and ask me where her documents are so i have this ideal world my head where uh because I I love dropbox it works great but it's it's to normal it's too traditional for someone like my mom she doesn't even bother with her dropbox account which drives me nuts and I cloud is simple enough for her to use but for me it's broken on so many levels like Core Data Sync doesn't work all your files are locked into app so if you switch apps you no longer have access to your files and it's it's it's of the future but just doesn't work and i would love there to be some system that had dropbox sort of underneath and on top of that had an iCloud layer and for all of it to actually work i feeI me my ideal well I think I mean I think Dropbox wants to do that I don't know about iCloud but they they are they understand that cloud storage is a commodity business cloud storage is like selling toilet paper you know it's like you can go to any corner store and get cloud storage so they need to find a way to layer on services on top of that and they are in features on top of that that are actually useful and interesting and they're making steps in that direction but they're not moving quickly enough I think but that's the competition for Apple it's google and it's dropbox for like that sort of basic you know sinking cloud storage stuff no box has to get off as three eventually to be their own person or you think they're fine with s3 for the long haul i know i think they're probably fine with s3 for quite a while unless unless amazon decides to get serious all right and like somehow make life worse for them the kindle phone has been announced and we're deprecating a bunch of XP I think we're going to see a kindle phone I think that I think that the story maybe not a 2013 but 2014 if this new management shakeup at Google doesn't get itself figured out doesn't get google on a new path for android i think that there's a really big chance that we're going to see a trend of companies going the amazon route with android we might see samsung go to the Amazon route with Android and basically completely fork Android and that's a real danger for google and so it's a real danger for their whole ecosystem I want to get that you raise an interesting point tune is something yeah we discussed a long time ago it's scott forstall no longer at Apple every Reuben no longer at Google and not only are those two people know he's a don't forget Stephen snaps get my hair sinofsky but he was more of a desktop guy the interesting thing with me about Forrestal and Reuben is that they were mobile guys taken off their mobile projects and their mobile projects were handed to the traditional at Apple explicitly the OS 10 you know desktop platform died and at Google to the Chrome OS apps guy which is arguably Google's desktop platform yeah and mobile is the future mobile for everything is going but it seems like the minute these things are growing up and mature they're kind of taking it away from the mobile guys and saying all right you don't know how to run a platform the old guys do you've had your to hit this line yeah I mean I think there's a lot of dynamics going on with with andy rubin specifically and in him moving over to the Google X labs or whatever and you know we've got a story up looking at some of the issues and I think I mean it's like he Rubin was really good at like starting something but you know I don't know if he's just that interested in maintaining Android long-term he's much better at new projects but I do you really get that sense about Horst all the Forrestal was like he was a startup guy but not canta can't keep running a platform is that I thought that what you think the dynamic was there I don't think I I think maybe at a certain point for Apple it was more important to have iOS in as being run by their platform guy rather than being run by an iOS guy right Tim Cook had this vision for and I do this analogy before but you know when Steve Jobs came to Apple he destroyed the product line and said mobile hurry up movie said a consumer professional desktop and laptop I think Tim Cook wanted to do that he decided ok we have technology design hardware and software and individual buckets like a not the iOS guy didn't really fit into that anymore so it was almost a new vision right so is that your analysis of this the story that came out in the Wall Street Journal I guess yesterday as a recording that there's a new spirit collaboration at apple with design and then Johnny I was doing his job basically what we expected that he's he's working with both software and hardware people and moving towards a flatter design for iOS III think they put a bunch of stuff together like they sort of packed a bunch of stuff into that story yeah Johnny I've as far as I heard you'd been there for since since he got that job he's been in the labs and some people are thrilled to have him there because Johnny I you know it's you that is as close as you get to an all star of design and people are thrilled to have them in the labs uh I os7 has been in development since before iOS 6 launch that's the way any product roadmap works you have your feature set what you can do in a certain point of time and features that go beyond that and they're probably ramping up on iOS 8 and he's well you know this with with Google right Matias Duarte went from webos to Android and he had to kind of get in there midstream and I don't I I think the expectation from some people is that he's going to go in with a sandblaster and remove anything that resembles a texture from iOS but from his statements his public statements is he really believes that design is all about usability and aspects of usability if i open an app and I can't tell what app it is at a glance if all of it is UI kit that's a massive usability hit for for iOS I think he's going to have a much more nuanced approach then and an extremist one well I think he has to I think that consistency and familiarity is super important to apple and I mean I know everybody's fond and I actually you were probably the first person to start saying this uh years ago that we're going to see iOS be the oldest you know mobile OS you know that's viable on the market and we're there here we are and so the question is do they do they get caught in a Microsoft Windows scenario where they get they feel mold into backwards compatibility and i don't mean app compatibility i basically mean like design compatibility is like their big challenge now is to move their OS forward to a place where it feels like I'm not making a compromise by moving from a mac to an iOS device like an iPad or even an iphone can they add power to the platform without you know making it over complicated you know without making it maybe it's complicated to say Android is for some people but also you know keep consistency like those three things all need to happen and balancing those is the kind of thing that you need somebody like Johnny Hyde should handle I think one of the most important things with him is if you get rid of a Scott Forstall and you tell people they're reporting to someone new whether it's the hardware guy or the software guy having that person be Johnny I've just you know removes a lot of barriers that you might face both from an outside and inside reflective because people won't panic Oh Scott for assaults gone hey everyone remember Johnny I've corrected he's kind of assuring but I agree with you completely I think when I sir sauce when I see a lot of like iOS 7 wish list to me it's the last thing I want like uh the podcast app was updated yesterday and the reel-to-reel is gone yeah people think that's you know the tea leaves of the future for me stuff like that is the least of the things i want them fixing it's a lot of what you mentioned neither android or iOS is complete to me know and they're all they're all haunted by the decisions of their original architecture android was supposed to be this windows mobile standard this blackberry thing and they pivoted really smartly into an iphone but their display layers never caught up there they don't have good compositing and have good masking they don't have they don't push pixels as well as iOS and iOS arguably was never really meant to run third party apps and they write it on multitasking they bolted on fast app switching and it doesn't work as well as something like Android which was conceived of to do this so they both are sort of trying to recover but neither of them have good experiences in their areas of weakness yet yeah i mean if if I'm realistic with myself and not you know dreaming pie in the sky threw everything away and start new what I want most in iOS 7 is probably some sort of better interact communication you know androids got that little share panel which is kind of a mess but it works really well Windows has got charms which lets I don't know why we've calling him charms whatever but I science contracts and intense oh my god but I feel like like apps in iOS are just way way too siloed way too often I am I just jailbroke my iphone last snow earlier this week and I did it like basically for three things one so i can quickly get two toggles to toggle the Wi-Fi and tethering and bluetooth and two so i could set a chrome as my default browser and do that scary security thing and give it access to the the faster JavaScript engine yeah and it's great I'm super happy I also i also remapped long press the home button to google search instead of serie yo sorry shares you think that that before we switch on to that that's a really interesting topic but it's it's those little things and we've had this conversation before I I have a nexus for that I don't use a lot because the scrolling is like nails on a chalkboard but for many people the inability to do interrupt communications is that same nails on a chalkboard thing and GarageBand was just updated using a third service to do interrupt communication which to me is bizarro world it's wild and it's it's you know it's this third party service think it's not it's not act like it's using all the legitimate stuff but it's using these urban api's in a way that maybe Apple didn't anticipate but the fact that Apple took this thing that is sort of like like leveraging this this API in a non-standard way that wasn't intended like they're they're adopting this third-party standard that these developers you know created and just all just started working together on I actually find that really heartwarming I think it's great i think that you know that's the kind of interaction with your developer community that you know we want to see uh and hopefully it's a sign of you know other other sort of long-standing oh I can't we are you know have apps talk to each other whatever developer complaints that might be might be getting dressed it amazes me that six years later in a whole regime change we're still looking at the gravity of dark matter try and figure out what's happening with Apple in and their direction sample man I mean what do you want yeah read that the whole Google now Google search thing was baffling to me this week and if people are listening and not aware of it Google now is a fantastic service i have it on nexus 4 evah nexus 7 i love it if you're familiar with Siri it's it's somewhat like Siri but it goes further its predictive it's what roger mcnamee talked about in the early days of webos right Peter where I was where you are and when and and it can predict stuff now to set the stage a while ago Google search was updated with really good voice querying and I in a post I said it's like Google now and I got a very nice note from google saying please don't say that google search is like Google now Google search is a product or iOS google now is exclusive to android and we're not making any comments about that so I was told real nice in fact in fact when they launched Google now I was on on the next for wasn't it no it was on the next successfully or whatever it was when they when they launched Google now like there was they had that same distinction of like Google now refers to this area where these cards show up it's not the same thing as hitting the voice search button and so it's not it's it's not the same thing as Siri because series about voice search and then assisting and Google now is these predictive cards and it's like come on I mean if you're gonna like if you're gonna take a whole bunch of stuff and merge it we want to call that yes absolutely they're calling the best friend that you give us but we at last I condition conversation too but the so Eric Schmidt who to me is this generation Steve Ballmer and that's funny Kristy bombers still around but he says the most remarkable things and it's not that he says them it's that they're they're preposterous on the surface but he acts like and this is my maybe I'm wrong but he acts to me like he thinks we're dumb enough to believe him I don't think he believes them but I think he thinks we're dumb enough to believe him and one of the odds and I think you're giving him way too much credit i think that he just decided he wants to be a cranky old uncle baby but he's he may feel minute they feel a little bit manipulative so the one this week was that they asked him what about google now for iOS there was a leaked video and it was a bunch of interest in it and he said you have to ask Apple and that led to some strong suspicion that Google had submitted google now to apple and apple was either rejecting it or putting it in limbo but you guys found out that's not the case right both Apple and Google have said no Apple said we don't have it google said yeah we didn't submit it like he just like he just Schmidt just went off and started talking about stuff he talked about the the google now thing he mentioned like he's still using a blackberry like dude really really if you're still using your Eric Schmidt if you are still using a blackberry because you lo the keyboard um I'm sorry make a Nexus device with a keyboard yes I would buy that it's well that that's that's called interesting things not only the Google tell of the verge that they did destroy the apical diversity did not have google mount approval a lot of people immediately thought oh well apples just being clever they've submitted an update to Google search that includes now there's look at this still from this video google told apples will do that there was no applications can review in nothing yeah yeah and then they told i think they told john chow ski at all things d like a google told john chow ski at all things d ya know we haven't submitted anything to that so uh which is that so that yeah so that the black boy thing is interesting but he got an apple got a lot of heat for that and there were people if you look at the comment string on the verge you look at it and I more people were lambasting Apple for that and when Apple said the apples line and Google finally said it it I don't understand the comment from that I donors and like what either he went off the reservation or you know it was manipulation the point about the blackberry and we talked about this on the original smartphone when you the first time he was caught with it i think was during her second round robin where some companies like blackberry and Apple you know that they love those devices know my clouser itís is down there with their screwdriver every day working on the radio and Steve Jobs is flinging that thing at people's heads and it felt like Microsoft and Google kinda just felt they had to have screens in the game and I cannot imagine a situation where tim cook or torsten hines would be consistently using a competing product in public for years ya know it's insane right and be like I don't even no what what the analogy would be but it's like like Eric's was such a dyed-in-the-wool old-school business guy that like he can't imagine not having a blackberry it's like part of his identity or something make why like I said make one the man run like other people run from the biggest company in the world he could have any Pony wants he give us any phone he wants yeah I don't know it's it's it's weird and then he also talked about keeping Android and Chrome OS separate and that was like Winston Darvish I went over to take over android there you know including me I want you to like well it seems obvious that you're going to need to do something with these two divergent operating systems at some point it was like no they're just a separate to so like yeah I whatever's going on over there with Eric Schmidt like they they need to have a chat or or or maybe you're right maybe it's intentional and he is doing some kind of you know manipulation hear that he's sort of there he can go out there and say stuff on the Google come tonight later but they still get the story out there yeah he's either Jim Balsillie or I'm gonna get the guy named Ron Victor Rhonda gironda good no droid ultra he's one of those two people I'm not sure which one it could be either to me as fast was fascinating that we went from a world where the you know 2007 iphone event most of us had trio some of us had BlackBerry's we saw that webos gets introduced Android gets introduced and now we have for the first time I can remember every company fielding a modern device so maybe we don't like some of them as much as others but all of them would work for it for someone who wants to buy a smartphone today yeah yeah no I mean um and you know blackberry you know just you know they're called it's so hard for me not to call the rim by the way yes um they just you know z10 launch day and that's six years so Steve Jobs was actually wrong it wasn't five years to catch up it was six a lot of that was stubborn it was years of their perfusing too I mean to Google's credit people people say things about Google and say things about samsung but to their credit they pivoted on a dime and they got their stuff to market really quick ya know completely and they got their stuff to market really quick but more to the point they got they got verizon and other carriers that didn't have the iphone behind the right products or at least behind products that could be competitive to to change the market and get some real share so the other news that was kind of big this weekend was shocking to a lot of people who had followed Apple for years was that they hired Kevin Lynch yeah okay okay so briefly was Kevin Lynch he was the chief um technology officer for Adobe but most people are familiar with him because he was in essence the frontman for the at the adobe side of the Apple adobe flash viewed he wrote several blog post he starred in a take-off Mythbusters video um about it and that man is now going to report directly to Bob Mansfield as vice president of technology at apple and hopefully never be involved in marketing for anything for Apple ever no I don't think he'll never speaking in public again except in small developer panels because that video of him that mythbusters parody oh man it was bad was it worse than the last blackberry developer singalong video oh ah that's that's a hard one that's neck and neck right there I'm gonna say no that the blackberry video is still worse but so I mean your take that you rode up and I more i'm kevin lynch is really good and I think Michael mace wrote up something good about it as well like you know uh it's it's a little weird and but I don't you know I I guess basically right now my take on it is I mean I mostly trust apples judgment still in their executive hiring and executive decisions rowlett that's awesome well yeah well they've had some problems so that's why I say mostly trust um but I think that I mean come on think the people at Apple aren't stupid right they know that this was a guy that was a I'm going to say it this is a guy a flash point of controversy yes and you know so they took that into account that it was worth the everybody going wha no kind of PR hit to get this guy they you know I think they need something I mean I guess I can play devil's advocate I mean uh I've used flash on mobile I use flash on mobile web for when they first started pushing it back in the day on you know windows mobile and a couple it was on it was on like a Java platform some rtos I got some other phone something else I can't remember um use it on the pre famously yeah and you know it was bad on all those platforms it was very very bad but it worked right and so to play devil's advocate for just a moment here flash on my computer on my Mac on my ridiculously powerful Mac that was built less than a year ago with a ton of ram and more processing power I know what to do with I sort of flash just a flash video that's doing nothing more than like displaying what I know is probably an mp4 back on the server spins up my fans and sets the thing on fire right so that's flashes performance on an insanely powerful computer so the fact that this guy maybe was involved in getting flash to work at all on phones in 2008 um you know maybe he's a pretty good technologist that's almost like the argument that says you'll win it whatever you think about windows the fact that it boots on a million different Hardware skews every day is an engineering miracle you know I think that's true the groupers point and you know goober goober had a very confused reaction he thought his reaction was confusing but he was confused by the decision and he stayed and I think it's a valid point that even if kevin lynch was toeing the company line that he was saying that flash was great because adobe employed him and said that it was great as chief technology officer that was acceptable in 2008 but by 2010 the writing was clearly on the wall and he should have all positioned Adobe better for the future then just trying to ride the flash train into the to the explosive you know by heart ending the I mean it was yeah it was it was easily clear by 2010 i mean i would think that was clear before that but um you know have people got different personalities and he just likes being out there and positive about his company's thing I don't know majid readjusting to his take was that it's a toss-up was he is he the wrong guy or was he just the right guy in the wrong job and he will be the right guy at the right job at apple right um oh yeah I mean him being so flamboyantly pro flash in such a public way so late in the game does give me pause that he's the right guy but for now like I said I'm I'm trusting Apple that they saw something in him that they really wanted and that didn't bother them John pukowski d I think it was John at all things digital said that he heard that his role at Apple is going to be coordinating between the hardware and software divisions initially it's an it was announced that he's reporting the Bob Mansfield seems like an odd fit because he was a software and services guy he's a guy who took creative suite and put it on the Creative Cloud which makes him feel like an eddy cue services iCloud guy but he was given to Mansfield uh who's making antennas and chips and that's really odd and him being used as a liaison seems really odd says also a theory that maybe he's just orbiting right now an apple isn't announcing where he's ultimately gonna land maybe I mean I think that being the guy between hardware and software does make a lot of sense um although it's funny right I mean isn't apples whole bag that they are they keep those things very tightly combined and together and so they're better than other companies they don't need to have you know a guy at a you know VP senior VP level come in and make sure that they're you know taking meetings with each other especially after they reorg to increase coordination and communication right so I pull that's I think I think that's the context we have to look at this higher in is this is uh this is a Tim Cook higher yes this is a Tim Cook new Apple new collaboration new everybody's talking to each other and the silos don't have giant 10 foot steel walls with Barbara at the top there only eight foot walls and there is a game well there's an advantage that one of the continued criticisms about Microsoft was that they kept everything in silos they had duplicate of efforts they were mean-spirited towards each other based a lot on Microsoft's corporate culture which involves very strange managerial tactics and a lot of internal competition android has gotten ok Google has gotten a little bit of that too with reports like the chrome team not getting along with the Android team and it's it's a problem with big companies apples always been organized in a cell like unit where you have tiny little teams of people grouped together to try to keep a start-up environment going and I wonder if that this is they're always trying to keep that corporate culture from really stagnating at Apple you know i mean i think that Apple worked i think especially well but you mentioned that they have these little cells and so if you if you got a group that's you know about more than 20 people it's hard to like get former bunker mentality and hate that other group over there but if you've got a group of you know 150 people politics become very different in terms of dealing with some other corporate division that also has 150 people but it's you know i think it might be a notable that Apple needs to get their groups to that size and some of their divisions and so I think Tim's cook Tim Cook's challenge is to make sure that they don't get what's the word like any other word i'll just they don't get tribal right they don't get right and i think that's like these stories of them coming out and like I there be more collaborative these stories that come out that there I don't know that they're talking to press a little bit more that being a little bit more open we are and we're looking at that Tim Cook's Apple that's like and and it's what's funny is like I think it's been Tim Cook's Apple for quite a while but we're now because it's Apple we're just now start of sorting to see their their their corporate face look like it from the outside it's almost like there was a series of strategic steps bringing all of software together under one guy bringing all of design together so you they used to have one guy running iOS one guy running OS 10 and to some extent that resulted in duplicate of activities because you had you know this fire team in the mobile safari team Johnny and I've apparently according to The Wall Street Journal had his own little software team doing specific things that they didn't want to share in early stages with the actual human interface group at Apple and now that seems to have gone away so it does seem like they Tim Cook is running through the halls kind of removing a few of those vault doors that used to exist yeah and and so then the question becomes like now that those doors are gone Apple is going to be operating itself in a new way can it do so successfully hey and he was I forget who said it but there was a series of decisions that look to be like Apple we know that Apple is 20 Fidel lost the battle of Scott Forstall about using the ipod OS versus the I versus OS 10 on the iphone and that resulted in a lot like you know that reduced massively the amount of technology Apple has to maintain because and we've seen that things like quicktime 10 or clicked imax a bunch of wood which x version they use on that one got moved back from the iphone to OS 10 a lot of the things that Apple does now they get to use across their entire platform and even though that the richest company in the world that's a huge like efficiency score for them yeah and it's it's a I mean Microsoft is finally there with windows 8 windows phone 8 although there's some more that they could do to bring those together but I think that those two operating systems are about on par in terms of their synergies with iOS and OS 10 and I think that Google needs to get there with chrome and Android they're not at all and I think that their decision to bring some herbage high and charge of Android maybe as a sign that they want to also have have those synergies so I mean apples out ahead there and yeah I lost my train of thought but there you go you're right good job right well it just it android always felt and we discussed this long time ago like a not very Google product rise it was local it was native they bought it from the guy who created danger Andy Rubin and I always had this little joke in my mind of google sigh oh we have to get into mobile what can we do oh we're gonna buy Andy's thing we're gonna buy android and then webos came out and sort of a smack their head and goes that's what we should have made that's a google-like product but instead of buying that they started because they already had android it was gaining traction they kind of spun up Chrome OS which is maybe even more Google like than webos was yeah and they're sort of trapped between the product that works the old world park that works now and there for a visionary product that doesn't quite work now yeah i mean i mean i'm using Chrome OS we've got a Chromebook it's okay it's I mean you know it's chrome and like the apps aren't quite there yet the window management isn't there yet which is really frustrating just like I need more than two windows and a couple of tabs to get her out of my stuff but yeah they need to they need to do something to make Android feel a little bit more googly and they need to do something to make chrome have more apps and a little bit more native power without losing its web centric nature so both Android and Chrome have something that the other guy needs yeah and badly and so it makes a lot of sense for them to get them to start working together more and you know like the Chromebook pixel as ridiculous as it is I'd like to think that they didn't just put a touchscreen on there because they could yeah I'd like to think that there's a plan for Chrome OS to in a great touch stuff that has to happen it really needs to happen at this I Oh event next month like I lines they have a plan right but I also kind of worried maybe they don't I mean we like to assume that Google has a giant master plan especially since they're a page came over they've got a lot more direction than they used to they don't just try random crap but there's still let's just try so we're going to crap and cats like the rest are crap yeah huh man it's so if you guys that opera day over to Google Reader which has been cancelled and there's been a lot of drama about a nerd nerd eggs I gotta say I am I mean I wrote a piece about it but basically like I think that the the best thinking about what needs to happen there is probably coming from Marco Arment of you know Google Reader came in it sucked all the air out but RSS is important as plumbing for the Internet I actually think it could be more important as planning for the internet but I'm actually I'm not dedicated to like RSS as a standard like it could be JSON I don't care as long as every site continues to use it and offer it for other apps to take advantage of but what's weird about Google Reader and like you know it's you know I clearly they didn't feel like they had enough users but Google supposedly does makes their business on monetizing information about you right they monetize they see what you search for they can advertise against it they see what emails are getting and they can advertise against that they see where you are in the city and Google now can throw up a you know information carbon like maybe they'll put ads in there Sunday on and on ron arad they monetize what they learn about you I have a really hard time believing that they couldn't think of a way to make money off of millions of people telling them what the most important things are on the Internet in news I wonder I have a suspicion I know this is true and um credit where it's due Brent Brent Simmons song writing on the wall for this a long time ago as well that when they started playing around with reader it was for the benefit of google plus try to move some of the engagement and the social activities to Google+ and I wonder which is exactly what you said earlier that Google is figuring out their core brands and what's the what is most important to them if Google now Google Plus and things like that or the core brands and they will sacrifice some things that are interesting and maybe you know provide a lot of information and I certainly beloved by a key influential part of their audience for the benefit of something like Google Plus which maybe hasn't caught the traction or the attention that they wanted to and figure they can maybe move some of that officially they're okay yeah but here's the thing they didn't offer a replacement Google+ substitute that's even in the same neighbor again much less ballpark of what Google Reader was um you know they've got currents I guess but I mean honestly like if you're if you're trying to get people to move over to Google Plus then you need to give them a path to do it yes and even if they had given people passed to do it I mean you go out and find me 10 hardcore google reader users that are like oh yeah I can't wait to use their Google+ RSS product they're cancelling google reader faster than a canceling my google right oh yeah that's attending on what July first yeah and then many people think feedburner might join it on me oh yeah for sure um but okay so like let's let's bring this back to Apple I mean Apple cancels products every down man um oh now but I sold Safari RSS and male RSS a year ago already right right right um so I mean apple doesn't see I mean they are still supporting podcast I kind of was actually surprised to see I think they had to update podcast because it was kind of an embarrassment for them um but I don't see I don't see you know people just does Apple really care that much about the podcast listening audience I don't know if they well they did at least to me it looks like they pulled everything that wasn't monetized out of the iTunes Store apps i took itunes you out and he's a pod casts out and those now sit in separate apps which is what people would people and asking from to do desktop you know modularization for years now that's only really occurring on iOS and content cells devices for Apple they they run they say they run the itunes store in the App Store barely above break even and they provide for free apps with their own expense on the app store so I think that there is a line of thought at Apple that massive amounts of content helps them make it or make the case for their ecosystem so it's very easy if you look at the verbiage and I'm explain this valley on the podcast app it starts off the easiest way to which is very similar to the passbook verbiage I think their idea is to say look when you buy this this is all the amazing free stuff input at a press release for itunes you recently so i think for them it's just ecosystem investment at this point yeah i mean that makes sense i mean i'm trying the new new version of the podcast app i had to actually deleted the old one because i am very confident that it was ignoring my only download over Wi-Fi toggle and pushed my data usage a couple months ago into like that like the four gigabyte territorial it was worth it so iOS 6 when it came out had a bug that would have it pull the same packet over and over again he would be downloading and it would go on to sell and not only would it download / celibate would download massive amounts of times over cells why Stassi I like 300 for a dollar ya know same thing happened to me and like you know I called 18t about it like you know this was a bug it's not really my fault like no that only happened not verizon phones that didn't happen in our alright alright phones are great i believe it was okay i was foundation Oh Apple I'm get on how do we get out of the oats services and like supporting products even though they have small user bases I guess I I trust Apple to hang on to most of its products more than I trust Google right now and just because they tend to only kill things when they're terrible and they tend to find a replacement for you know look at you know mobile right but with with google and its services like the core stuff that I know they're making money on great they're they're good enough and they're valuable enough that I would I want to continue to use them but we're in places where like Google or Apple remember like Google its specific if they make a product that is like okay I'm not going to go and choose that anymore because I don't trust them you know like I'm I'm not going to use google keep because I don't you know I don't see how I don't see how they make money off that I guess they're collecting data on beat but there but you know Evernote and simple note are way better depending on your use case needs and there's no need for me to switch over to that I think you're right about the thing with me is that the products that Apple may they've canceled were not great products like Safari RSS was useful in a certain context but it didn't do what google reader does idisk a lot of people are upset they cancel his Dropbox way better than I ever was Google's google reader i didn't use web interface but I used it to sink every single RSS client that I had across every single platform and that was insanely useful to me so that leaves it yeah also no one really led Apple have that many markets for themselves the Apple wasn't the only RSS Vita they weren't the only on storage where Google Reader really was the only online RSS syncing tool Lynette getting used that was an newsgator everyone else canceled there is because google gave it away for free yeah yeah exactly um yeah and like I I'm more willing to use like a core apple service or app than I am a core kind of any other service or app from rim or check blackberry or Google whomever because I just I kind of feel like it's gonna be there but there are you know there are some things on periphery that they kill off and uh you know they kind of do it because it's you know it's with the times like they keep they they saw the writing on the walls far SS and it wasn't that good of a product anyway so they killed off your later Google's like oh yeah turns out we don't want to do an RSS product either so they do it um I will never forgive Apple yeah I'll never forgive him for killing Sherlock though make sure lucked it and killed it and uh it so this is something interesting to so now we're seeing in verse for locking which jason Snell called moriarty where things like fantastical come out and it's way better than apple's version and they can actually rise the top of the app sales charge making an app that apple already gives away for free and there's been a few cases of that where there are apps that are so good that people use them instead of the default some people use a lot like you said chrome simple we use sparrow now the gmail app or or mailbox or some of the other ones that are going we talked about dropbox earlier to Brett yeah Michael Druids had a you know I used to be apples developer evangelist anyone when to double WC knows jury he was talking about the cost of free apps where there's nothing is ever for free either they're they're extracting information you but also there's a cost on the market in a lot of hardware products dumping is illegal if you put a product on the market at below cost in it's almost it's considered under certain conditions considered anti-competitive but that idea doesn't exist in software you can give anything you want away for free and that can destroy the business opportunity for a lot of companies that make great products and I don't know if we if the mobile app market is mature enough but it does seem like it's really hard to extract value from a lot of these platforms especially for independent developers yeah well I mean the we saw prices go from what they were before the iphone where you could you could charge fifteen dollars for a nap and that was when he was thirty bucks on my treo deeper yeah i know and i paid it uh and bug me are that there's a note saying platform oh it's like 199 on iOS now or something yeah yeah but prices are starting to come back up for apps on mobile but in terms of you know you can't compete with free the question for me is what is the purpose of a calendar app or a note taking app or a podcast app coming from apple and i'd like to think that apple is trying to cover the basics in the basis and that if you're a power user apples okay with you moving on to some other more powerful app it stable x minute right so it's there so that you know your your mom your grandma your whoever can go and buy an iphone and not have to go looking for that stuff that's a beautiful thought I don't think that's true because if it were true then they would they would open up the platform more so you know you can get more I mean the fact that fantastical is even possible on the iphone i feel like it's kind of amazing like I'm actually kind of surprised that they can get the access that they need to do to make that product and get into the calendars and stuff that didn't used to be the case so I don't worry too much about Apple or whomever releasing a core app on a mobile device that is going to suck up to market as long as it's not that good and as long as I out for access but I don't know that that that both of those two things is always the case well Sparrow was a paid app and they couldn't make a go of it they got bought by google mail box was a free app they barely had a chance to see where they would go with it and it was bought up by Dropbox yeah so it's interesting is paid obviously especially with the amount of money you can't know maybe Duritz had this great line during at this great line he said like if you double the cost of your app and you lose less than half your customers you're making money right and that's not a mentality that's widely embraced especially after the race for the bottom but there's a lighthouse client just came out ten dollars they're ours apps that are coming out and trying to stake a price to put a price stake in the ground and I want this kind of apps I want the kind of apps that are you know the two guy boutique shop very specific very well done because I think there is a user for whom time is more valuable than money I paid for fantastical because it's much faster for me then the built-in calendar app and you know whatever they charge think was three dollars five dollars it's so little its own less than a cup of coffee for me to save 30 seconds a day over you know every day for a year or two years well worth it to me and I wonder if that's going to be a market for them that they can know aim it for people who are less price sensitive and more convenient sensitive I think the markets there I think that it wasn't there initially it wasn't there in 2009-2010 because there just wasn't that what that much smartphone adoption but I think we're at a place now where there's enough numbers where you can you can there's a small enough segment of that big pie that you can afford to sell to pocket casts is making money on Android theaters obviously there's you don't want kids pocket casts is pretty good it's not be happy with it yeah I mean I've been a dog catcher guy and I just finally started like really trying it I know it's been out for a while it's been the hot stuff for a while but I'm using it pretty happy with it be annoyed at first yeah so I guess the last thing I want your take on is and we kind of rest a little bit in the beginning is presumably we're going to have iOS 7 this year Apple has been fairly good about what they've been perfectly good about once a year software upgrades last year arguably they they treaded water because their biggest effort was spent on redoing a Maps app and regardless of whether the maps app is good or not that's a tremendous amount of engineering work to make a maps that very few companies can actually make and deploy a Maps app takes tremendous resources come on hang on there's a million maps apps I mean so to redo a build a Maps app from scratch i think is where the bulk of their time on iOS 6 was spent yeah I suppose and I guess to be fair that the companies i'm thinking of have been doing maps apps for years and i'm thinking of your tellin aves your way if you're you know kia's your Microsoft's um your there's a few others so okay uh I will grant that making a Maps app is pretty non-trivial mean it's a non trivial undertaking it's not like making a little doodad app like a to go development team app like the remote app for Apple that's it just because it's hard doesn't mean we can forget that such a terrible job I'm not freaking I'm just saying I think that's where a lot of the time when that's why we didn't see as much on iOS 6 they also outsource all their social they set up passbook going into iOS 7 another it's another difficult year because Scott Forstall left while OS iOS 7 was under way johnny is stepping in Craig federighi is stepping in but the stakes are much higher samsung through a tremendous amount of spaghetti at the wall just last month HTC has a bunch of really interesting features the z10 I'm Canadian have to call it a z10 it has a bunch of really interesting gesture navigate there's a lot of ideas out there iOS being the oldest mobile platform now springboard looking essentially the same way that it's looked since 2007 Peter what what's a realistic goal that Apple should be skating for iOS 7 a visual refresh not a complete interaction refresh I would like to see like I said a better interact communication I think that's realistic I think it's also realistic that they do something with Notification Center to make it not a joke I wanted to be actionable the way webos was and we Android is becoming yeah no totally I think it completely ought to be and I think that there's there's just not very good thinking about you know like the clearing how it gets cleared out you know like this that they did it to do what they didn't do it to make it a useful help me in my job done likes but it's not a cupful right and it doesn't even work like it it's there and it does it shows a few things but like it doesn't it doesn't empower yes you know in a way that I feel like my phone should but I think the most important thing for apple with iOS 7 is not to act like here we are we're totally changing iOS and we're doing this amazing thing they need to pick one or two features one of them is probably going to be Seri related and that's a great target to you know smarten up Siri a bit more and maybe have it start to be more predictive and like you know a little bit of a visual refresh so it you know looks a little bit different but still basically operates the same so I know this is crazy because I kind of went after Apple for not just doing a whole bunch of polishing for iOS 6 but I feel like if I'm Apple I pick one or two features that people will focus on be like hey wow that's cool and new and I do a little bit more polishing and I save all of my big guns my big resources for iOS 8 because by then it'll be like oh my god they need finishing up it'll be very bad and I don't think that like they've got anything in the chamber to fire off you know this summer or fall whenever they launched the next iPhone that's going to be on my boy they continued the gun metaphor right so don't act like you do just like you know we've done these things here's this one new feature that's amazing and it looks a little bit cleaner we've done a couple of those things and they are still strong enough relative to Android wear like that'll be enough people will be like grumble grumble grumble and that's fine but they should just like take their lumps so they can do something completely crazy that like makes me say why am i carrying a laptop around they can do that in 20 they can do that in 2014 I'm okay with them doing something kind of we're right in 2013 so you raise a couple quick questions me that's interesting when people jailbreak now a lot of the things you hear about them jailbreaking for is for example grant Paul Zephyr so you get the gesture navigation on the iphone bite SMS so that like III can't stand witches i'm too lazy to go and look at a home screen and finds up i want that stuff coming to me I want that text message to be responsible in the notification email I want you know audio controls away palm had them in notifications tho those seem to be the things that users are telling Apple at least certain level of users are telling an arrow are interesting to them but i wonder if the ipad and the iphone also have to diverge more if to be that real fancy car that will replace the computer the ipad needs things like user accounts or needs things that I gotta be user accounts if they don't do user accounts in iOS 7 for the ipad i am going to flip a tape cannot be enticed not only feature or do they have to keep the platforms imperatore the devices of parity I don't care it can be it can be it can be ipad-only I don't see any reason why it needs to be on the iphone i mean if it's free and easy do it on the iphone too but they have to do it on the ipad ipads are shared with families my my brother he bought my old iPad and he's got a three and a half year old son and he has an iphone too and he literally is keeping him on separate accounts he's not getting to use his apps across his phone and his ipad you know he's not doing his own email on the iPad because he had to make that ipad like the family ipad and so all the benefits you get from being on a single platform across your phone your phone your tablet there's a lot of people just choosing not to do that because they don't have multiple accounts they got to do that you take your notification my pad to work and suddenly i was looking at your stuff it says not yeah and with regards to like like the interface stuff on on jailbreaking yeah i would like to see better notifications i would desperately like to see the notifications of work better there's a way too many toggles number one number two the way that the toasts the little alerts come down from the top um that's and say in fact I should have mentioned it earlier like the number one reason i jailbroke my iphone is so that i could get those skinny alerts that just take up the status bar instead of coming down over the whole thing um I just hits two way all the time I can't roll out patient enough to wait from the clear so I grab and throw them away almost almost like a whack-a-mole game from you now yeah but I mean Apple chose back in the day to put their prime the primary navigation element of the entire alas in my opinion second to the home button the back button yes in the upper left-hand corner I still don't like that decision by the way but fine you're gonna put your navigation way up there in the upper left cool but then you choose when you do notifications to cover it yes come on yes you're covering the second-most navigation important navigation element on your entire platform all the time my other gripe is that it's still back back back back Oh suddenly it takes to another screen it should own it should stop when that button changes it should stop so that repeated hitting of it does not yes yeah I wonder if they could do multiple user accounts in a way that if my mom gets an ipad and it's her she never even knows it exists sort of like like my mom never uses my sister never uses fast app switching you never use any of those things that the rebel mr. to them if you know you go into settings and enable user accounts and then suddenly you have them that way the hundreds of millions of happy iPad users don't worry about them but everyone else can you know anyone who's in business or in a multiple family environment and flick the switch and have that almost like flicking a switch a default apps you know it so user you have to do a user action to enable them uh yeah I guess I'd be fine with that I mean to be honest I don't think that it's necessary to stick a toggle especially on an iPad where you've got so much screen real estate I mean look at the the lock screen on an iPad it's just you know it's a bit your big wallpaper like yeah you know you put a little you know head in the lower right-hand corner it's like you know switch accounts and have a guest account please have a guest account oh yeah definitely have a guest account right now you have to use guided access to lock it in Safari if you want to do against it yeah I mean there's other things that I could foresee happening in iOS 7 I could foresee them building in the necessary bits to support the Apple watch give any thoughts on you me party pot something i watch eater I hope they do it well but my main thing is I hope that whatever support they build into iOS to support their watch I hope that they support you know let other like the pebble oh crap here talk to those as well because i'm sure the eyewash is going to be really great amazingly great but more so than with phones people want to have different watches and if there if Apple is not going to make that at least make a gesture towards letting that be an open ecosystem for people I'll find that to be a huge bummer yeah if they at least provide some level hoping I'd be I support for whatever the watch is pulling right dear that was awesome it was it was like Old Home Week for means fantastic ya know it's been a ton of fun it's a really good talking to him I'm happy to come on anytime I know a lot of people already know where to find you but for those few people who aren't already following you where can they find you go way more followers and I do on Twitter so don't act all humble about this uh jump to say well you're just a reserved Minnesota guy you never really you know cuz never a hi I'm dieter I'm over here hi I'm Peter I'm at the verge calm and on twitter i am at back lawn and you know I'm searchable I'm on the facebooks and the Google give us a little background you'll find almost consistent dieter content yeah pretty much all right thank you very much i really i really appreciate you being on thanks ray you can find me at Rene Ritchie you can find all of us at I more for all of our shows you can go to mobile nations calm / shows and if you haven't already please stop by itunes leave us a review leave us a rating it encourages itunes to feature us and that's how we get to meet more great people like you thanks everyone have a great evening yougood evening everyone it is March 22 2013 I'm Rene Ritchie and tonight we are talking about Apple hiring Kevin Lynch from Adobe we are talking about the competitive market in 2013 and we're talking about our thoughts for iOS 7 this is the I'm our show joining me today is the senior mobile editor or one of the senior mobile editors from the verge dieter bohn are you dinner I am doing very well how are you Renee good I know you hate when I drag this kind of stuff up but just for the audience Peter actually created this show and not only did he hire me originally for I more but he started me off in podcasting so now some three hundred and forty odd episodes later dieter your back ya know I actually I just tweeted it myself that I was coming on and so I went and I hunted down the completely broken page from the original phone different podcast from July thirtieth 2007 so this the show in its various iterations is creeping up on its six-year anniversary it's fantastical to me because I remember when you first hired me my whole thing to you was Theatres which one phone on one network there's no way that I'm gonna write anything every day it's not gonna be going to write about yeah yeah that turned out to be wrong there's there's plenty to write about um and maybe soon I don't know if we don't you talk to this but maybe soon they'll be more than one phone on you know multiple networks but let's dye this I mean that I think is because we look at the competitive landscape and I don't i was at New York with Phil doing the galaxy s4 and you had Malay and I think Dan there yeah bring it and this is the competition apples facing the HTC One the galaxy s4 and they keep doing it with so far one phone a year almost always within the same three-month period and I don't know how long that's a tenable situation to them I think that they can do it as long as their phone doesn't feel stale as long as it you know is capturing the popular imagination actually I think that if I'm Apple I'm less concerned about I mean I'm concerned about the galaxy s4 obviously I'm not super concerned about the HTC One but I am also concerned about and this is going to sound insane but bear with me I'm a little bit concerned about the also Ran's I'm a little bit concerned about Windows Phone and I'm a little bit concerned about bear with me Tizen and maybe even tiny little tiny bit Firefox because they are you know everybody is admitted and given up on the US market US market I mean they're not giving up they're still trying but everybody sort of gifts that launch day in the u.s. today right it's blackberry launch day I had hopefully they do okay I'd like to see more competition and have it not be a two-horse race in the US but I think that that dynamic isn't likely to change very soon but where things are a lot more fluid is in developing and emerging markets so China Indonesia Africa and Latin America there's a lot more opportunity on the low end to to bring stuff in and the question I think Apple has to answer there is is last year's and two years ago's model of the iphone sufficient compete in those markets and if it's not is Apple comfortable with with seating some of that stuff's just some of those those crazy new entrants or do they want to take them on I think also there's a case that could be made I think we talked about that Arnold Kim a couple weeks ago where the previous generation iphones are so good that they become an easy choice to make over the brand new iphone than the average sales price even in first world markets comes down which may not concern Apple too much but seems to concern the market a lot right and maybe a cheap plastic alternative makes people buy more of the high price premium one just really don't want to cheap plastic yeah I mean the question is you know is somebody more likely to buy a cheap plastic new iphone than they are last year's iPhone is there a stigma attached to buying last year's iPhone that's strong enough that you would not do it but you would buy something that's basically the exact same specs but came out this year and I think Tim Cook fielded this on the conference call when the analysts were asking what the mix was and he said you know iphone 5 mix is pretty much what iphone 4s make but when iphone 5 becomes a cheap one hundred bucks cheaper against this you know presumably a similar-looking iphone 5s do more people start buying the five to save a hundred bucks and then does that affect 15 s sales yeah and I mean to be blunt I it's a failure of imagination but I am hard pressed to tell you what they could put in a in a 5s that would make people think that the five was old and stale is it is it is it insane that we live in a world now where people looked at the galaxy for the galaxy s4 event and said oh it's a galaxy you know 3s I can't do their names right g3s whatever yeah it is but it's also I think that it's a sign of Samsung's confidence that Samsung dominates the market they dominate the android market and they are able to put out a phone that yeah it's got a bigger screen and faster and you know it's your standard spec you know raced kind of phone but the design is so similar and I don't think it's that Samsung thinks it has the most beautiful perfect designs whenever maybe they do but I mean it's clearly not it's it's an ok looking android phone but it shows that samsung has confidence in their leadership position that they don't need to try and do a crazy new iteration of a phone every year they just like yep we're samsung we can put out you know the same design and try and maintain that consistency i mean just look at here are such a hundred I've got phones on my desk look at what HTC had to do from last year to this year they went from this this is the 11 x from last year it's a very good-looking phone polycarbonate unibody blah blah blah too here's the the one this year you know they had they have to keep on completely redesigning stuff and changing their industrial design and changing their software to try and find some way to gain traction in the market whereas Samsung can just keep on keep it on and they're allowed to do that because they've got such a huge market share in such a huge marketing presence you're talking about the 5s if Apple holds to pattern because apples not predictable but they are sort of like they do seem to stick to certain patterns we would get an iphone 5 casing with presumably a more advanced processor which could be faster but will likely also be maybe a smaller dice eyes more power efficient and we could get a better camera and that no longer just means more megapixels but could mean better optics better glass better sensor but those are the trademark improvements the rest for the S series has always been some software feature like FaceTime or Siri and I think Apple especially with the pressure putting on being put on by Google the services start becoming much more important in these off years yeah well I mean I I really hope that they can get their their services story figured out and I mean I've been reporting on dropbox more lately because the company is opening a bit more they're having people over their headquarters and I mean I think they're probably you know working towards getting an IPO and Dropbox is becoming a really interesting story they just bought mailbox they bought a photo service they bought a music service while ago I think but just compared that most yeah exactly but compare that to iCloud and I mean I don't know I I try to use iCloud maybe once every three to four months and I just can't can't handle it I'm not fond of the way any of it works and I don't think it's because I'm a curmudgeon that wants my file system I really don't it's I mean I am a curmudgeon man I do want my fast system but I don't think that's the only reason that I'm not fond of iCloud and I don't think developers are especially fond of it either and it's it's funny because like fixing that is not a super like flashy cool you know thing that you can get up on a keynote stage and be like we've made our API better like you could do that but like nobody's going to write that headline and be interested in that and you know sales reps on the star aren't going to push that but that's the kind of boring work that they need to do they need to just sort of like incrementally push day after day week after week to make their cloud services better and in the way that you know google has or Dropbox has yeah I think it's really interesting and I like the file system a lot my mom is completely confused by a file system extent that she will call me and ask me where her documents are so i have this ideal world my head where uh because I I love dropbox it works great but it's it's to normal it's too traditional for someone like my mom she doesn't even bother with her dropbox account which drives me nuts and I cloud is simple enough for her to use but for me it's broken on so many levels like Core Data Sync doesn't work all your files are locked into app so if you switch apps you no longer have access to your files and it's it's it's of the future but just doesn't work and i would love there to be some system that had dropbox sort of underneath and on top of that had an iCloud layer and for all of it to actually work i feeI me my ideal well I think I mean I think Dropbox wants to do that I don't know about iCloud but they they are they understand that cloud storage is a commodity business cloud storage is like selling toilet paper you know it's like you can go to any corner store and get cloud storage so they need to find a way to layer on services on top of that and they are in features on top of that that are actually useful and interesting and they're making steps in that direction but they're not moving quickly enough I think but that's the competition for Apple it's google and it's dropbox for like that sort of basic you know sinking cloud storage stuff no box has to get off as three eventually to be their own person or you think they're fine with s3 for the long haul i know i think they're probably fine with s3 for quite a while unless unless amazon decides to get serious all right and like somehow make life worse for them the kindle phone has been announced and we're deprecating a bunch of XP I think we're going to see a kindle phone I think that I think that the story maybe not a 2013 but 2014 if this new management shakeup at Google doesn't get itself figured out doesn't get google on a new path for android i think that there's a really big chance that we're going to see a trend of companies going the amazon route with android we might see samsung go to the Amazon route with Android and basically completely fork Android and that's a real danger for google and so it's a real danger for their whole ecosystem I want to get that you raise an interesting point tune is something yeah we discussed a long time ago it's scott forstall no longer at Apple every Reuben no longer at Google and not only are those two people know he's a don't forget Stephen snaps get my hair sinofsky but he was more of a desktop guy the interesting thing with me about Forrestal and Reuben is that they were mobile guys taken off their mobile projects and their mobile projects were handed to the traditional at Apple explicitly the OS 10 you know desktop platform died and at Google to the Chrome OS apps guy which is arguably Google's desktop platform yeah and mobile is the future mobile for everything is going but it seems like the minute these things are growing up and mature they're kind of taking it away from the mobile guys and saying all right you don't know how to run a platform the old guys do you've had your to hit this line yeah I mean I think there's a lot of dynamics going on with with andy rubin specifically and in him moving over to the Google X labs or whatever and you know we've got a story up looking at some of the issues and I think I mean it's like he Rubin was really good at like starting something but you know I don't know if he's just that interested in maintaining Android long-term he's much better at new projects but I do you really get that sense about Horst all the Forrestal was like he was a startup guy but not canta can't keep running a platform is that I thought that what you think the dynamic was there I don't think I I think maybe at a certain point for Apple it was more important to have iOS in as being run by their platform guy rather than being run by an iOS guy right Tim Cook had this vision for and I do this analogy before but you know when Steve Jobs came to Apple he destroyed the product line and said mobile hurry up movie said a consumer professional desktop and laptop I think Tim Cook wanted to do that he decided ok we have technology design hardware and software and individual buckets like a not the iOS guy didn't really fit into that anymore so it was almost a new vision right so is that your analysis of this the story that came out in the Wall Street Journal I guess yesterday as a recording that there's a new spirit collaboration at apple with design and then Johnny I was doing his job basically what we expected that he's he's working with both software and hardware people and moving towards a flatter design for iOS III think they put a bunch of stuff together like they sort of packed a bunch of stuff into that story yeah Johnny I've as far as I heard you'd been there for since since he got that job he's been in the labs and some people are thrilled to have him there because Johnny I you know it's you that is as close as you get to an all star of design and people are thrilled to have them in the labs uh I os7 has been in development since before iOS 6 launch that's the way any product roadmap works you have your feature set what you can do in a certain point of time and features that go beyond that and they're probably ramping up on iOS 8 and he's well you know this with with Google right Matias Duarte went from webos to Android and he had to kind of get in there midstream and I don't I I think the expectation from some people is that he's going to go in with a sandblaster and remove anything that resembles a texture from iOS but from his statements his public statements is he really believes that design is all about usability and aspects of usability if i open an app and I can't tell what app it is at a glance if all of it is UI kit that's a massive usability hit for for iOS I think he's going to have a much more nuanced approach then and an extremist one well I think he has to I think that consistency and familiarity is super important to apple and I mean I know everybody's fond and I actually you were probably the first person to start saying this uh years ago that we're going to see iOS be the oldest you know mobile OS you know that's viable on the market and we're there here we are and so the question is do they do they get caught in a Microsoft Windows scenario where they get they feel mold into backwards compatibility and i don't mean app compatibility i basically mean like design compatibility is like their big challenge now is to move their OS forward to a place where it feels like I'm not making a compromise by moving from a mac to an iOS device like an iPad or even an iphone can they add power to the platform without you know making it over complicated you know without making it maybe it's complicated to say Android is for some people but also you know keep consistency like those three things all need to happen and balancing those is the kind of thing that you need somebody like Johnny Hyde should handle I think one of the most important things with him is if you get rid of a Scott Forstall and you tell people they're reporting to someone new whether it's the hardware guy or the software guy having that person be Johnny I've just you know removes a lot of barriers that you might face both from an outside and inside reflective because people won't panic Oh Scott for assaults gone hey everyone remember Johnny I've corrected he's kind of assuring but I agree with you completely I think when I sir sauce when I see a lot of like iOS 7 wish list to me it's the last thing I want like uh the podcast app was updated yesterday and the reel-to-reel is gone yeah people think that's you know the tea leaves of the future for me stuff like that is the least of the things i want them fixing it's a lot of what you mentioned neither android or iOS is complete to me know and they're all they're all haunted by the decisions of their original architecture android was supposed to be this windows mobile standard this blackberry thing and they pivoted really smartly into an iphone but their display layers never caught up there they don't have good compositing and have good masking they don't have they don't push pixels as well as iOS and iOS arguably was never really meant to run third party apps and they write it on multitasking they bolted on fast app switching and it doesn't work as well as something like Android which was conceived of to do this so they both are sort of trying to recover but neither of them have good experiences in their areas of weakness yet yeah i mean if if I'm realistic with myself and not you know dreaming pie in the sky threw everything away and start new what I want most in iOS 7 is probably some sort of better interact communication you know androids got that little share panel which is kind of a mess but it works really well Windows has got charms which lets I don't know why we've calling him charms whatever but I science contracts and intense oh my god but I feel like like apps in iOS are just way way too siloed way too often I am I just jailbroke my iphone last snow earlier this week and I did it like basically for three things one so i can quickly get two toggles to toggle the Wi-Fi and tethering and bluetooth and two so i could set a chrome as my default browser and do that scary security thing and give it access to the the faster JavaScript engine yeah and it's great I'm super happy I also i also remapped long press the home button to google search instead of serie yo sorry shares you think that that before we switch on to that that's a really interesting topic but it's it's those little things and we've had this conversation before I I have a nexus for that I don't use a lot because the scrolling is like nails on a chalkboard but for many people the inability to do interrupt communications is that same nails on a chalkboard thing and GarageBand was just updated using a third service to do interrupt communication which to me is bizarro world it's wild and it's it's you know it's this third party service think it's not it's not act like it's using all the legitimate stuff but it's using these urban api's in a way that maybe Apple didn't anticipate but the fact that Apple took this thing that is sort of like like leveraging this this API in a non-standard way that wasn't intended like they're they're adopting this third-party standard that these developers you know created and just all just started working together on I actually find that really heartwarming I think it's great i think that you know that's the kind of interaction with your developer community that you know we want to see uh and hopefully it's a sign of you know other other sort of long-standing oh I can't we are you know have apps talk to each other whatever developer complaints that might be might be getting dressed it amazes me that six years later in a whole regime change we're still looking at the gravity of dark matter try and figure out what's happening with Apple in and their direction sample man I mean what do you want yeah read that the whole Google now Google search thing was baffling to me this week and if people are listening and not aware of it Google now is a fantastic service i have it on nexus 4 evah nexus 7 i love it if you're familiar with Siri it's it's somewhat like Siri but it goes further its predictive it's what roger mcnamee talked about in the early days of webos right Peter where I was where you are and when and and it can predict stuff now to set the stage a while ago Google search was updated with really good voice querying and I in a post I said it's like Google now and I got a very nice note from google saying please don't say that google search is like Google now Google search is a product or iOS google now is exclusive to android and we're not making any comments about that so I was told real nice in fact in fact when they launched Google now I was on on the next for wasn't it no it was on the next successfully or whatever it was when they when they launched Google now like there was they had that same distinction of like Google now refers to this area where these cards show up it's not the same thing as hitting the voice search button and so it's not it's it's not the same thing as Siri because series about voice search and then assisting and Google now is these predictive cards and it's like come on I mean if you're gonna like if you're gonna take a whole bunch of stuff and merge it we want to call that yes absolutely they're calling the best friend that you give us but we at last I condition conversation too but the so Eric Schmidt who to me is this generation Steve Ballmer and that's funny Kristy bombers still around but he says the most remarkable things and it's not that he says them it's that they're they're preposterous on the surface but he acts like and this is my maybe I'm wrong but he acts to me like he thinks we're dumb enough to believe him I don't think he believes them but I think he thinks we're dumb enough to believe him and one of the odds and I think you're giving him way too much credit i think that he just decided he wants to be a cranky old uncle baby but he's he may feel minute they feel a little bit manipulative so the one this week was that they asked him what about google now for iOS there was a leaked video and it was a bunch of interest in it and he said you have to ask Apple and that led to some strong suspicion that Google had submitted google now to apple and apple was either rejecting it or putting it in limbo but you guys found out that's not the case right both Apple and Google have said no Apple said we don't have it google said yeah we didn't submit it like he just like he just Schmidt just went off and started talking about stuff he talked about the the google now thing he mentioned like he's still using a blackberry like dude really really if you're still using your Eric Schmidt if you are still using a blackberry because you lo the keyboard um I'm sorry make a Nexus device with a keyboard yes I would buy that it's well that that's that's called interesting things not only the Google tell of the verge that they did destroy the apical diversity did not have google mount approval a lot of people immediately thought oh well apples just being clever they've submitted an update to Google search that includes now there's look at this still from this video google told apples will do that there was no applications can review in nothing yeah yeah and then they told i think they told john chow ski at all things d like a google told john chow ski at all things d ya know we haven't submitted anything to that so uh which is that so that yeah so that the black boy thing is interesting but he got an apple got a lot of heat for that and there were people if you look at the comment string on the verge you look at it and I more people were lambasting Apple for that and when Apple said the apples line and Google finally said it it I don't understand the comment from that I donors and like what either he went off the reservation or you know it was manipulation the point about the blackberry and we talked about this on the original smartphone when you the first time he was caught with it i think was during her second round robin where some companies like blackberry and Apple you know that they love those devices know my clouser itís is down there with their screwdriver every day working on the radio and Steve Jobs is flinging that thing at people's heads and it felt like Microsoft and Google kinda just felt they had to have screens in the game and I cannot imagine a situation where tim cook or torsten hines would be consistently using a competing product in public for years ya know it's insane right and be like I don't even no what what the analogy would be but it's like like Eric's was such a dyed-in-the-wool old-school business guy that like he can't imagine not having a blackberry it's like part of his identity or something make why like I said make one the man run like other people run from the biggest company in the world he could have any Pony wants he give us any phone he wants yeah I don't know it's it's it's weird and then he also talked about keeping Android and Chrome OS separate and that was like Winston Darvish I went over to take over android there you know including me I want you to like well it seems obvious that you're going to need to do something with these two divergent operating systems at some point it was like no they're just a separate to so like yeah I whatever's going on over there with Eric Schmidt like they they need to have a chat or or or maybe you're right maybe it's intentional and he is doing some kind of you know manipulation hear that he's sort of there he can go out there and say stuff on the Google come tonight later but they still get the story out there yeah he's either Jim Balsillie or I'm gonna get the guy named Ron Victor Rhonda gironda good no droid ultra he's one of those two people I'm not sure which one it could be either to me as fast was fascinating that we went from a world where the you know 2007 iphone event most of us had trio some of us had BlackBerry's we saw that webos gets introduced Android gets introduced and now we have for the first time I can remember every company fielding a modern device so maybe we don't like some of them as much as others but all of them would work for it for someone who wants to buy a smartphone today yeah yeah no I mean um and you know blackberry you know just you know they're called it's so hard for me not to call the rim by the way yes um they just you know z10 launch day and that's six years so Steve Jobs was actually wrong it wasn't five years to catch up it was six a lot of that was stubborn it was years of their perfusing too I mean to Google's credit people people say things about Google and say things about samsung but to their credit they pivoted on a dime and they got their stuff to market really quick ya know completely and they got their stuff to market really quick but more to the point they got they got verizon and other carriers that didn't have the iphone behind the right products or at least behind products that could be competitive to to change the market and get some real share so the other news that was kind of big this weekend was shocking to a lot of people who had followed Apple for years was that they hired Kevin Lynch yeah okay okay so briefly was Kevin Lynch he was the chief um technology officer for Adobe but most people are familiar with him because he was in essence the frontman for the at the adobe side of the Apple adobe flash viewed he wrote several blog post he starred in a take-off Mythbusters video um about it and that man is now going to report directly to Bob Mansfield as vice president of technology at apple and hopefully never be involved in marketing for anything for Apple ever no I don't think he'll never speaking in public again except in small developer panels because that video of him that mythbusters parody oh man it was bad was it worse than the last blackberry developer singalong video oh ah that's that's a hard one that's neck and neck right there I'm gonna say no that the blackberry video is still worse but so I mean your take that you rode up and I more i'm kevin lynch is really good and I think Michael mace wrote up something good about it as well like you know uh it's it's a little weird and but I don't you know I I guess basically right now my take on it is I mean I mostly trust apples judgment still in their executive hiring and executive decisions rowlett that's awesome well yeah well they've had some problems so that's why I say mostly trust um but I think that I mean come on think the people at Apple aren't stupid right they know that this was a guy that was a I'm going to say it this is a guy a flash point of controversy yes and you know so they took that into account that it was worth the everybody going wha no kind of PR hit to get this guy they you know I think they need something I mean I guess I can play devil's advocate I mean uh I've used flash on mobile I use flash on mobile web for when they first started pushing it back in the day on you know windows mobile and a couple it was on it was on like a Java platform some rtos I got some other phone something else I can't remember um use it on the pre famously yeah and you know it was bad on all those platforms it was very very bad but it worked right and so to play devil's advocate for just a moment here flash on my computer on my Mac on my ridiculously powerful Mac that was built less than a year ago with a ton of ram and more processing power I know what to do with I sort of flash just a flash video that's doing nothing more than like displaying what I know is probably an mp4 back on the server spins up my fans and sets the thing on fire right so that's flashes performance on an insanely powerful computer so the fact that this guy maybe was involved in getting flash to work at all on phones in 2008 um you know maybe he's a pretty good technologist that's almost like the argument that says you'll win it whatever you think about windows the fact that it boots on a million different Hardware skews every day is an engineering miracle you know I think that's true the groupers point and you know goober goober had a very confused reaction he thought his reaction was confusing but he was confused by the decision and he stayed and I think it's a valid point that even if kevin lynch was toeing the company line that he was saying that flash was great because adobe employed him and said that it was great as chief technology officer that was acceptable in 2008 but by 2010 the writing was clearly on the wall and he should have all positioned Adobe better for the future then just trying to ride the flash train into the to the explosive you know by heart ending the I mean it was yeah it was it was easily clear by 2010 i mean i would think that was clear before that but um you know have people got different personalities and he just likes being out there and positive about his company's thing I don't know majid readjusting to his take was that it's a toss-up was he is he the wrong guy or was he just the right guy in the wrong job and he will be the right guy at the right job at apple right um oh yeah I mean him being so flamboyantly pro flash in such a public way so late in the game does give me pause that he's the right guy but for now like I said I'm I'm trusting Apple that they saw something in him that they really wanted and that didn't bother them John pukowski d I think it was John at all things digital said that he heard that his role at Apple is going to be coordinating between the hardware and software divisions initially it's an it was announced that he's reporting the Bob Mansfield seems like an odd fit because he was a software and services guy he's a guy who took creative suite and put it on the Creative Cloud which makes him feel like an eddy cue services iCloud guy but he was given to Mansfield uh who's making antennas and chips and that's really odd and him being used as a liaison seems really odd says also a theory that maybe he's just orbiting right now an apple isn't announcing where he's ultimately gonna land maybe I mean I think that being the guy between hardware and software does make a lot of sense um although it's funny right I mean isn't apples whole bag that they are they keep those things very tightly combined and together and so they're better than other companies they don't need to have you know a guy at a you know VP senior VP level come in and make sure that they're you know taking meetings with each other especially after they reorg to increase coordination and communication right so I pull that's I think I think that's the context we have to look at this higher in is this is uh this is a Tim Cook higher yes this is a Tim Cook new Apple new collaboration new everybody's talking to each other and the silos don't have giant 10 foot steel walls with Barbara at the top there only eight foot walls and there is a game well there's an advantage that one of the continued criticisms about Microsoft was that they kept everything in silos they had duplicate of efforts they were mean-spirited towards each other based a lot on Microsoft's corporate culture which involves very strange managerial tactics and a lot of internal competition android has gotten ok Google has gotten a little bit of that too with reports like the chrome team not getting along with the Android team and it's it's a problem with big companies apples always been organized in a cell like unit where you have tiny little teams of people grouped together to try to keep a start-up environment going and I wonder if that this is they're always trying to keep that corporate culture from really stagnating at Apple you know i mean i think that Apple worked i think especially well but you mentioned that they have these little cells and so if you if you got a group that's you know about more than 20 people it's hard to like get former bunker mentality and hate that other group over there but if you've got a group of you know 150 people politics become very different in terms of dealing with some other corporate division that also has 150 people but it's you know i think it might be a notable that Apple needs to get their groups to that size and some of their divisions and so I think Tim's cook Tim Cook's challenge is to make sure that they don't get what's the word like any other word i'll just they don't get tribal right they don't get right and i think that's like these stories of them coming out and like I there be more collaborative these stories that come out that there I don't know that they're talking to press a little bit more that being a little bit more open we are and we're looking at that Tim Cook's Apple that's like and and it's what's funny is like I think it's been Tim Cook's Apple for quite a while but we're now because it's Apple we're just now start of sorting to see their their their corporate face look like it from the outside it's almost like there was a series of strategic steps bringing all of software together under one guy bringing all of design together so you they used to have one guy running iOS one guy running OS 10 and to some extent that resulted in duplicate of activities because you had you know this fire team in the mobile safari team Johnny and I've apparently according to The Wall Street Journal had his own little software team doing specific things that they didn't want to share in early stages with the actual human interface group at Apple and now that seems to have gone away so it does seem like they Tim Cook is running through the halls kind of removing a few of those vault doors that used to exist yeah and and so then the question becomes like now that those doors are gone Apple is going to be operating itself in a new way can it do so successfully hey and he was I forget who said it but there was a series of decisions that look to be like Apple we know that Apple is 20 Fidel lost the battle of Scott Forstall about using the ipod OS versus the I versus OS 10 on the iphone and that resulted in a lot like you know that reduced massively the amount of technology Apple has to maintain because and we've seen that things like quicktime 10 or clicked imax a bunch of wood which x version they use on that one got moved back from the iphone to OS 10 a lot of the things that Apple does now they get to use across their entire platform and even though that the richest company in the world that's a huge like efficiency score for them yeah and it's it's a I mean Microsoft is finally there with windows 8 windows phone 8 although there's some more that they could do to bring those together but I think that those two operating systems are about on par in terms of their synergies with iOS and OS 10 and I think that Google needs to get there with chrome and Android they're not at all and I think that their decision to bring some herbage high and charge of Android maybe as a sign that they want to also have have those synergies so I mean apples out ahead there and yeah I lost my train of thought but there you go you're right good job right well it just it android always felt and we discussed this long time ago like a not very Google product rise it was local it was native they bought it from the guy who created danger Andy Rubin and I always had this little joke in my mind of google sigh oh we have to get into mobile what can we do oh we're gonna buy Andy's thing we're gonna buy android and then webos came out and sort of a smack their head and goes that's what we should have made that's a google-like product but instead of buying that they started because they already had android it was gaining traction they kind of spun up Chrome OS which is maybe even more Google like than webos was yeah and they're sort of trapped between the product that works the old world park that works now and there for a visionary product that doesn't quite work now yeah i mean i mean i'm using Chrome OS we've got a Chromebook it's okay it's I mean you know it's chrome and like the apps aren't quite there yet the window management isn't there yet which is really frustrating just like I need more than two windows and a couple of tabs to get her out of my stuff but yeah they need to they need to do something to make Android feel a little bit more googly and they need to do something to make chrome have more apps and a little bit more native power without losing its web centric nature so both Android and Chrome have something that the other guy needs yeah and badly and so it makes a lot of sense for them to get them to start working together more and you know like the Chromebook pixel as ridiculous as it is I'd like to think that they didn't just put a touchscreen on there because they could yeah I'd like to think that there's a plan for Chrome OS to in a great touch stuff that has to happen it really needs to happen at this I Oh event next month like I lines they have a plan right but I also kind of worried maybe they don't I mean we like to assume that Google has a giant master plan especially since they're a page came over they've got a lot more direction than they used to they don't just try random crap but there's still let's just try so we're going to crap and cats like the rest are crap yeah huh man it's so if you guys that opera day over to Google Reader which has been cancelled and there's been a lot of drama about a nerd nerd eggs I gotta say I am I mean I wrote a piece about it but basically like I think that the the best thinking about what needs to happen there is probably coming from Marco Arment of you know Google Reader came in it sucked all the air out but RSS is important as plumbing for the Internet I actually think it could be more important as planning for the internet but I'm actually I'm not dedicated to like RSS as a standard like it could be JSON I don't care as long as every site continues to use it and offer it for other apps to take advantage of but what's weird about Google Reader and like you know it's you know I clearly they didn't feel like they had enough users but Google supposedly does makes their business on monetizing information about you right they monetize they see what you search for they can advertise against it they see what emails are getting and they can advertise against that they see where you are in the city and Google now can throw up a you know information carbon like maybe they'll put ads in there Sunday on and on ron arad they monetize what they learn about you I have a really hard time believing that they couldn't think of a way to make money off of millions of people telling them what the most important things are on the Internet in news I wonder I have a suspicion I know this is true and um credit where it's due Brent Brent Simmons song writing on the wall for this a long time ago as well that when they started playing around with reader it was for the benefit of google plus try to move some of the engagement and the social activities to Google+ and I wonder which is exactly what you said earlier that Google is figuring out their core brands and what's the what is most important to them if Google now Google Plus and things like that or the core brands and they will sacrifice some things that are interesting and maybe you know provide a lot of information and I certainly beloved by a key influential part of their audience for the benefit of something like Google Plus which maybe hasn't caught the traction or the attention that they wanted to and figure they can maybe move some of that officially they're okay yeah but here's the thing they didn't offer a replacement Google+ substitute that's even in the same neighbor again much less ballpark of what Google Reader was um you know they've got currents I guess but I mean honestly like if you're if you're trying to get people to move over to Google Plus then you need to give them a path to do it yes and even if they had given people passed to do it I mean you go out and find me 10 hardcore google reader users that are like oh yeah I can't wait to use their Google+ RSS product they're cancelling google reader faster than a canceling my google right oh yeah that's attending on what July first yeah and then many people think feedburner might join it on me oh yeah for sure um but okay so like let's let's bring this back to Apple I mean Apple cancels products every down man um oh now but I sold Safari RSS and male RSS a year ago already right right right um so I mean apple doesn't see I mean they are still supporting podcast I kind of was actually surprised to see I think they had to update podcast because it was kind of an embarrassment for them um but I don't see I don't see you know people just does Apple really care that much about the podcast listening audience I don't know if they well they did at least to me it looks like they pulled everything that wasn't monetized out of the iTunes Store apps i took itunes you out and he's a pod casts out and those now sit in separate apps which is what people would people and asking from to do desktop you know modularization for years now that's only really occurring on iOS and content cells devices for Apple they they run they say they run the itunes store in the App Store barely above break even and they provide for free apps with their own expense on the app store so I think that there is a line of thought at Apple that massive amounts of content helps them make it or make the case for their ecosystem so it's very easy if you look at the verbiage and I'm explain this valley on the podcast app it starts off the easiest way to which is very similar to the passbook verbiage I think their idea is to say look when you buy this this is all the amazing free stuff input at a press release for itunes you recently so i think for them it's just ecosystem investment at this point yeah i mean that makes sense i mean i'm trying the new new version of the podcast app i had to actually deleted the old one because i am very confident that it was ignoring my only download over Wi-Fi toggle and pushed my data usage a couple months ago into like that like the four gigabyte territorial it was worth it so iOS 6 when it came out had a bug that would have it pull the same packet over and over again he would be downloading and it would go on to sell and not only would it download / celibate would download massive amounts of times over cells why Stassi I like 300 for a dollar ya know same thing happened to me and like you know I called 18t about it like you know this was a bug it's not really my fault like no that only happened not verizon phones that didn't happen in our alright alright phones are great i believe it was okay i was foundation Oh Apple I'm get on how do we get out of the oats services and like supporting products even though they have small user bases I guess I I trust Apple to hang on to most of its products more than I trust Google right now and just because they tend to only kill things when they're terrible and they tend to find a replacement for you know look at you know mobile right but with with google and its services like the core stuff that I know they're making money on great they're they're good enough and they're valuable enough that I would I want to continue to use them but we're in places where like Google or Apple remember like Google its specific if they make a product that is like okay I'm not going to go and choose that anymore because I don't trust them you know like I'm I'm not going to use google keep because I don't you know I don't see how I don't see how they make money off that I guess they're collecting data on beat but there but you know Evernote and simple note are way better depending on your use case needs and there's no need for me to switch over to that I think you're right about the thing with me is that the products that Apple may they've canceled were not great products like Safari RSS was useful in a certain context but it didn't do what google reader does idisk a lot of people are upset they cancel his Dropbox way better than I ever was Google's google reader i didn't use web interface but I used it to sink every single RSS client that I had across every single platform and that was insanely useful to me so that leaves it yeah also no one really led Apple have that many markets for themselves the Apple wasn't the only RSS Vita they weren't the only on storage where Google Reader really was the only online RSS syncing tool Lynette getting used that was an newsgator everyone else canceled there is because google gave it away for free yeah yeah exactly um yeah and like I I'm more willing to use like a core apple service or app than I am a core kind of any other service or app from rim or check blackberry or Google whomever because I just I kind of feel like it's gonna be there but there are you know there are some things on periphery that they kill off and uh you know they kind of do it because it's you know it's with the times like they keep they they saw the writing on the walls far SS and it wasn't that good of a product anyway so they killed off your later Google's like oh yeah turns out we don't want to do an RSS product either so they do it um I will never forgive Apple yeah I'll never forgive him for killing Sherlock though make sure lucked it and killed it and uh it so this is something interesting to so now we're seeing in verse for locking which jason Snell called moriarty where things like fantastical come out and it's way better than apple's version and they can actually rise the top of the app sales charge making an app that apple already gives away for free and there's been a few cases of that where there are apps that are so good that people use them instead of the default some people use a lot like you said chrome simple we use sparrow now the gmail app or or mailbox or some of the other ones that are going we talked about dropbox earlier to Brett yeah Michael Druids had a you know I used to be apples developer evangelist anyone when to double WC knows jury he was talking about the cost of free apps where there's nothing is ever for free either they're they're extracting information you but also there's a cost on the market in a lot of hardware products dumping is illegal if you put a product on the market at below cost in it's almost it's considered under certain conditions considered anti-competitive but that idea doesn't exist in software you can give anything you want away for free and that can destroy the business opportunity for a lot of companies that make great products and I don't know if we if the mobile app market is mature enough but it does seem like it's really hard to extract value from a lot of these platforms especially for independent developers yeah well I mean the we saw prices go from what they were before the iphone where you could you could charge fifteen dollars for a nap and that was when he was thirty bucks on my treo deeper yeah i know and i paid it uh and bug me are that there's a note saying platform oh it's like 199 on iOS now or something yeah yeah but prices are starting to come back up for apps on mobile but in terms of you know you can't compete with free the question for me is what is the purpose of a calendar app or a note taking app or a podcast app coming from apple and i'd like to think that apple is trying to cover the basics in the basis and that if you're a power user apples okay with you moving on to some other more powerful app it stable x minute right so it's there so that you know your your mom your grandma your whoever can go and buy an iphone and not have to go looking for that stuff that's a beautiful thought I don't think that's true because if it were true then they would they would open up the platform more so you know you can get more I mean the fact that fantastical is even possible on the iphone i feel like it's kind of amazing like I'm actually kind of surprised that they can get the access that they need to do to make that product and get into the calendars and stuff that didn't used to be the case so I don't worry too much about Apple or whomever releasing a core app on a mobile device that is going to suck up to market as long as it's not that good and as long as I out for access but I don't know that that that both of those two things is always the case well Sparrow was a paid app and they couldn't make a go of it they got bought by google mail box was a free app they barely had a chance to see where they would go with it and it was bought up by Dropbox yeah so it's interesting is paid obviously especially with the amount of money you can't know maybe Duritz had this great line during at this great line he said like if you double the cost of your app and you lose less than half your customers you're making money right and that's not a mentality that's widely embraced especially after the race for the bottom but there's a lighthouse client just came out ten dollars they're ours apps that are coming out and trying to stake a price to put a price stake in the ground and I want this kind of apps I want the kind of apps that are you know the two guy boutique shop very specific very well done because I think there is a user for whom time is more valuable than money I paid for fantastical because it's much faster for me then the built-in calendar app and you know whatever they charge think was three dollars five dollars it's so little its own less than a cup of coffee for me to save 30 seconds a day over you know every day for a year or two years well worth it to me and I wonder if that's going to be a market for them that they can know aim it for people who are less price sensitive and more convenient sensitive I think the markets there I think that it wasn't there initially it wasn't there in 2009-2010 because there just wasn't that what that much smartphone adoption but I think we're at a place now where there's enough numbers where you can you can there's a small enough segment of that big pie that you can afford to sell to pocket casts is making money on Android theaters obviously there's you don't want kids pocket casts is pretty good it's not be happy with it yeah I mean I've been a dog catcher guy and I just finally started like really trying it I know it's been out for a while it's been the hot stuff for a while but I'm using it pretty happy with it be annoyed at first yeah so I guess the last thing I want your take on is and we kind of rest a little bit in the beginning is presumably we're going to have iOS 7 this year Apple has been fairly good about what they've been perfectly good about once a year software upgrades last year arguably they they treaded water because their biggest effort was spent on redoing a Maps app and regardless of whether the maps app is good or not that's a tremendous amount of engineering work to make a maps that very few companies can actually make and deploy a Maps app takes tremendous resources come on hang on there's a million maps apps I mean so to redo a build a Maps app from scratch i think is where the bulk of their time on iOS 6 was spent yeah I suppose and I guess to be fair that the companies i'm thinking of have been doing maps apps for years and i'm thinking of your tellin aves your way if you're you know kia's your Microsoft's um your there's a few others so okay uh I will grant that making a Maps app is pretty non-trivial mean it's a non trivial undertaking it's not like making a little doodad app like a to go development team app like the remote app for Apple that's it just because it's hard doesn't mean we can forget that such a terrible job I'm not freaking I'm just saying I think that's where a lot of the time when that's why we didn't see as much on iOS 6 they also outsource all their social they set up passbook going into iOS 7 another it's another difficult year because Scott Forstall left while OS iOS 7 was under way johnny is stepping in Craig federighi is stepping in but the stakes are much higher samsung through a tremendous amount of spaghetti at the wall just last month HTC has a bunch of really interesting features the z10 I'm Canadian have to call it a z10 it has a bunch of really interesting gesture navigate there's a lot of ideas out there iOS being the oldest mobile platform now springboard looking essentially the same way that it's looked since 2007 Peter what what's a realistic goal that Apple should be skating for iOS 7 a visual refresh not a complete interaction refresh I would like to see like I said a better interact communication I think that's realistic I think it's also realistic that they do something with Notification Center to make it not a joke I wanted to be actionable the way webos was and we Android is becoming yeah no totally I think it completely ought to be and I think that there's there's just not very good thinking about you know like the clearing how it gets cleared out you know like this that they did it to do what they didn't do it to make it a useful help me in my job done likes but it's not a cupful right and it doesn't even work like it it's there and it does it shows a few things but like it doesn't it doesn't empower yes you know in a way that I feel like my phone should but I think the most important thing for apple with iOS 7 is not to act like here we are we're totally changing iOS and we're doing this amazing thing they need to pick one or two features one of them is probably going to be Seri related and that's a great target to you know smarten up Siri a bit more and maybe have it start to be more predictive and like you know a little bit of a visual refresh so it you know looks a little bit different but still basically operates the same so I know this is crazy because I kind of went after Apple for not just doing a whole bunch of polishing for iOS 6 but I feel like if I'm Apple I pick one or two features that people will focus on be like hey wow that's cool and new and I do a little bit more polishing and I save all of my big guns my big resources for iOS 8 because by then it'll be like oh my god they need finishing up it'll be very bad and I don't think that like they've got anything in the chamber to fire off you know this summer or fall whenever they launched the next iPhone that's going to be on my boy they continued the gun metaphor right so don't act like you do just like you know we've done these things here's this one new feature that's amazing and it looks a little bit cleaner we've done a couple of those things and they are still strong enough relative to Android wear like that'll be enough people will be like grumble grumble grumble and that's fine but they should just like take their lumps so they can do something completely crazy that like makes me say why am i carrying a laptop around they can do that in 20 they can do that in 2014 I'm okay with them doing something kind of we're right in 2013 so you raise a couple quick questions me that's interesting when people jailbreak now a lot of the things you hear about them jailbreaking for is for example grant Paul Zephyr so you get the gesture navigation on the iphone bite SMS so that like III can't stand witches i'm too lazy to go and look at a home screen and finds up i want that stuff coming to me I want that text message to be responsible in the notification email I want you know audio controls away palm had them in notifications tho those seem to be the things that users are telling Apple at least certain level of users are telling an arrow are interesting to them but i wonder if the ipad and the iphone also have to diverge more if to be that real fancy car that will replace the computer the ipad needs things like user accounts or needs things that I gotta be user accounts if they don't do user accounts in iOS 7 for the ipad i am going to flip a tape cannot be enticed not only feature or do they have to keep the platforms imperatore the devices of parity I don't care it can be it can be it can be ipad-only I don't see any reason why it needs to be on the iphone i mean if it's free and easy do it on the iphone too but they have to do it on the ipad ipads are shared with families my my brother he bought my old iPad and he's got a three and a half year old son and he has an iphone too and he literally is keeping him on separate accounts he's not getting to use his apps across his phone and his ipad you know he's not doing his own email on the iPad because he had to make that ipad like the family ipad and so all the benefits you get from being on a single platform across your phone your phone your tablet there's a lot of people just choosing not to do that because they don't have multiple accounts they got to do that you take your notification my pad to work and suddenly i was looking at your stuff it says not yeah and with regards to like like the interface stuff on on jailbreaking yeah i would like to see better notifications i would desperately like to see the notifications of work better there's a way too many toggles number one number two the way that the toasts the little alerts come down from the top um that's and say in fact I should have mentioned it earlier like the number one reason i jailbroke my iphone is so that i could get those skinny alerts that just take up the status bar instead of coming down over the whole thing um I just hits two way all the time I can't roll out patient enough to wait from the clear so I grab and throw them away almost almost like a whack-a-mole game from you now yeah but I mean Apple chose back in the day to put their prime the primary navigation element of the entire alas in my opinion second to the home button the back button yes in the upper left-hand corner I still don't like that decision by the way but fine you're gonna put your navigation way up there in the upper left cool but then you choose when you do notifications to cover it yes come on yes you're covering the second-most navigation important navigation element on your entire platform all the time my other gripe is that it's still back back back back Oh suddenly it takes to another screen it should own it should stop when that button changes it should stop so that repeated hitting of it does not yes yeah I wonder if they could do multiple user accounts in a way that if my mom gets an ipad and it's her she never even knows it exists sort of like like my mom never uses my sister never uses fast app switching you never use any of those things that the rebel mr. to them if you know you go into settings and enable user accounts and then suddenly you have them that way the hundreds of millions of happy iPad users don't worry about them but everyone else can you know anyone who's in business or in a multiple family environment and flick the switch and have that almost like flicking a switch a default apps you know it so user you have to do a user action to enable them uh yeah I guess I'd be fine with that I mean to be honest I don't think that it's necessary to stick a toggle especially on an iPad where you've got so much screen real estate I mean look at the the lock screen on an iPad it's just you know it's a bit your big wallpaper like yeah you know you put a little you know head in the lower right-hand corner it's like you know switch accounts and have a guest account please have a guest account oh yeah definitely have a guest account right now you have to use guided access to lock it in Safari if you want to do against it yeah I mean there's other things that I could foresee happening in iOS 7 I could foresee them building in the necessary bits to support the Apple watch give any thoughts on you me party pot something i watch eater I hope they do it well but my main thing is I hope that whatever support they build into iOS to support their watch I hope that they support you know let other like the pebble oh crap here talk to those as well because i'm sure the eyewash is going to be really great amazingly great but more so than with phones people want to have different watches and if there if Apple is not going to make that at least make a gesture towards letting that be an open ecosystem for people I'll find that to be a huge bummer yeah if they at least provide some level hoping I'd be I support for whatever the watch is pulling right dear that was awesome it was it was like Old Home Week for means fantastic ya know it's been a ton of fun it's a really good talking to him I'm happy to come on anytime I know a lot of people already know where to find you but for those few people who aren't already following you where can they find you go way more followers and I do on Twitter so don't act all humble about this uh jump to say well you're just a reserved Minnesota guy you never really you know cuz never a hi I'm dieter I'm over here hi I'm Peter I'm at the verge calm and on twitter i am at back lawn and you know I'm searchable I'm on the facebooks and the Google give us a little background you'll find almost consistent dieter content yeah pretty much all right thank you very much i really i really appreciate you being on thanks ray you can find me at Rene Ritchie you can find all of us at I more for all of our shows you can go to mobile nations calm / shows and if you haven't already please stop by itunes leave us a review leave us a rating it encourages itunes to feature us and that's how we get to meet more great people like you thanks everyone have a great evening you\n"