The Complexity of App Store Fees: A Conversation with William Gallagher

Apple Insider's podcast host sat down with William Gallagher to discuss the intricacies of the App Store fees and the challenges faced by small developers. The conversation began with the topic of the 30% fee that Apple charges for transactions made through its platform.

"No, no, no," said Gallagher when asked if he believed the 30% was a fair price. "The way this works is that you keep the prices uniform across consumers. The consumer sees the same price and you eat the 30%. But that's not how it works. The reason we do this is that Apple takes care of a lot of the tax documentation that you need to have to sell worldwide. They take care of the payment processing, so you can sell worldwide without having to advertise yourself worldwide." Gallagher explained that while Amazon does offer some similar services, small developers rely heavily on Apple's platform.

Gallagher shared his own experience with developing an app for the App Store. "I had an app on the App Store and I went through the internationalization process," he said. "Even with Apple doing everything, it was quite dizzying working out what applied where. The idea of having to do it all from scratch for myself would have been a giant headache." He also mentioned that even after being required to sell his app at the lowest price point, he still found the sales process complex and daunting.

When asked if selling more on iOS due to its popularity was worth paying the extra 30%, Gallagher acknowledged the point but argued that it's an additional cost of doing business. "I trust the person who said that," he said, referring to a commenter on Reddit. "The dollar value per unit is the same, but you will sell more units on iPhone and so it's worth it." However, Gallagher also emphasized that this is not a universal truth for all developers.

Gallagher ended the conversation by inviting listeners to share their thoughts on the topic. "We've overshot our time," he said with a laugh. "I meant to keep this a little bit shorter but it's been such a pleasure speaking with you William." The podcast host expressed his enthusiasm for future conversations and invited listeners to reach out to him on social media or email [appleinsider@news.com](mailto:appleinsider@news.com).

The conversation has shed light on the complexities of the App Store fees and the challenges faced by small developers. Gallagher's insights have provided a unique perspective on the topic, highlighting the importance of Apple's platform in terms of tax documentation, payment processing, and internationalization.

In other news, JAM.io is now offering a solution for businesses to manage and protect their Apple devices. The company's service allows users to check their digital inventory, distribute Wi-Fi settings, deploy apps, protect company data, and even lock or wipe a device as needed from anywhere. Apple Insider podcast listeners can take advantage of this offer by setting up their first three devices for free forever. Additional devices can be added for just $2 per month. To learn more about JAM.io's services, visit [jam.com](http://jam.com) and enter the code "appleinsider" at checkout to receive a discount.

For those interested in staying up-to-date with Apple Insider's content, including articles on the latest developments in the world of Apple, be sure to check back regularly. Gallagher will continue to share his expertise and insights as he explores new topics and technologies related to Apple's ecosystem.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to this episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor and joining me this week is the wonderful William Gallagher oh I like that hello our wonderful Victor welcome William I'm so glad to have you here thanks it's a treat to be on here I like the canteen you've got I've said this before nice place here yeah now the canteen of course is only open for a limited number of hours during the day but we'll make sure that when they are they serve excellent tea thank you very much yes yeah oong Earl gry no herbal uh Yorkshire Tea if we're getting this specific and you're picking up on my English accent Yorkshire Tea uh soft water a little bit of milk uh no sugar place okay got it I'll get right on that thanks thank you well I do we should talk a little bit about a story that Mikey Campbell published on the site this week now this is this is one that we've been covering for ages this is a story going back two years but uh your favorite analyst and mine mingi quo believes that Apple still has autonomous vehicle aspirations that project Titan as we've been calling it all this time is going to result in a shipping consumer product that could be available as early as 2023 you know know an actual Apple car if you will mhm well yeah it's what you see as the phrase was as early as 2023 but I'm thinking that's 5 years away of addiction uh I don't know i' like it to be true you you say that but I'm going to keep bringing it up every time we have a story that Mikey writes about it so the the Apple car is Mikey's beat as it were and every time the story comes up the question is will there be a car or is Apple simply working on telematics to provide a platform that they'll work with some other partner on it's a curious thing isn't it because everything we've heard so far is that they tried to have their own platform and chose for various reasons to go the other route and yet it feels more Apple like to try at least try to do the complete uh thing in one um maybe I'm wrong they abandoned monitors at least for a bit but yeah it doesn't feel like it would be an Apple car if it was a Tesla with I don't know a spectacular version of carplay added to it well and and thinking about that it's interesting because the first Tesla was in fact a Lotus oh no I didn't know that the original Tesla Roadster was a Lotus that they gutted and put all of their bits into and the reason they stopped doing that and went to build the model S was because it it turned out there were in fact no cost savings by using the Lotus platform it was it was actually worse well that's interesting it was more expensive to to buy Lotus Platforms in retrofit traditionally the the motor industry has claimed that well actually much like the phone industry that a new company can't just come in and do something because it's it's the complexity uh is so much greater than I might imagine as an ordinary driver uh but it does sound like yeah maybe just I want this to be true but I'm finding reasons to be convinced by it um so historically the the way that Apple got into phones was they originally partnered with Motorola on a on a phone a regular feature phone type handset that had iTunes synchronization capability built into it terrible terrible phone called the The Rocker error wasn't it I just Dre that's right yeah it was the motor rocker and you could tell at the announcement at the keynote that Steve Jobs was holding back yes any any kind of vitriol that he might have reserved for the thing to make the announcement of success and and you know there are people that watch Steve Jobs Keynotes and I think the times that you really learn the most from those Keynotes are when you're watching him announce something he doesn't want to announce when you're watching him deal with a PR Fiasco that he would have rather not had to have dealt with like the iPhone 4 antenna gate nonsense yeah or when he doesn't have anything of significance to announce like if you go back to the the 2001 time for frame when he announced the flower power and dalmatian blue iMac models yes that was back when uh they had to announce things because they were at maor and maor was on a fixed schedule and maybe that contributed to why they abandoned that and only do their own although oh absolutely it did yeah so you know are they going to make a car is a good question and I I agree with you they do their best and they are happiest when they have control over every part of the product and I I think the lesson to learn from the displays as you mentioned and I would also add to that the airport Wi-Fi routers that they've gotten out of is that they leave these segments when they feel like the rest of the market has caught up and there's nothing left exciting to contribute okay that feels quite um magnanimous of them uh like we have created this Market we have dispensed wisdom and now the rest of you can just carry on in our field but that does seem to be what happened with Wi-Fi yes I mean with not only with Wi-Fi if you go back historically right printers they had laser writers when Laser Printers were a big deal they had inkjet printers that were essentially uh partner made products with Canon and others that they got out of when they were no longer a big deal right they had digital cameras they had the quick shot cameras quick take and they got out of that as well great if now you say it it's a it is a patent isn't it I hadn't seen that I used to have one of those laser writers uh yes all right okay well in that case it's absolutely definitely true I'm crossing my fingers but you think we'll see apple and somebody else first and then Apple I'm not sure that's that's the historical pattern but on a thing this big that is this important to them right if they were announcing this it would be a Halo product and in fact quo says that this could take the the company towards the two $2 trillion valuation right doubling where they are today so if if that's true would they want to share that with anyone else now obviously they're going to be using tons of partner manufacturers as they currently do for all the other products they don't actually own the manufacturing capacity anyway but they would want it to be a fully apple branded product not a partner product true I don't see them getting into making rubber for the tires uh for example they will buy in for that just this reminds starting to remind me of the Apple watch which we were waiting for for so long um and then in 2015 when they finally announced it uh they how long did they said they've been working on it not as long as we thought I think but this feels the same and it I don't know I love my Apper watch and I think it's been a great success for Apple but when it was on its way everybody was expecting it to be the new iPhone the new giant thing and it and it hasn't been that and I possibly don't think it could ever have been yet that kind of anticipation feeling um didn't really have it over even the airpods which I adore the homod which seems great but I'm starting to get it now with the car so now this is just all adding to me wanting it doesn't help whether it's true I feel like with the watch and airpods that this is a they're pieces of a puzzle that is still coming together that that we can't quite see all of the pieces in place yet but the idea is what if you don't have to take your phone out of the pocket every time what if you can leave your phone at home some of the time and if you've got the watch and the airpods then you've got a decent amount of input and interaction with a device that doesn't require taking this big screen of glass out of your phone out of your pocket I I think we've talked about augmented reality and Tim Cook's vision for augmented reality currently that relies on the phone glass but there's also been a lot of talk about micro displays and glasses and things like that and of course the problem with glasses is they're obtrusive but presuming that Apple knows what they're doing and wants to make glasses that are inobtrusive then imagine you have that as a display you've got the watch as a secondary display and you've got the airpods for audio that's augmented reality and interaction then you've got something that comes together where you don't need the phone any longer which just you can you imagine any other company doing that they have this brilliant phone most of them Microsoft they would be milking it every possible way Forever Until it died but Apple does have this habit of just tossing aside something I remember with the was the iPad Mini incredible success totally wiped it out and replaced it with something else uh uh better if you like but constantly moving forward and chucking things away it's quite animalistic and impressive I think and I don't know any other company you have to be willing to kill your children and think of the products as children because they they do take 9 months to two years to give birth to but you have to be willing to kill them before someone else does yes absolutely I mean I'm a writer to the phrase killing your children and your babies uh it talks very specifically about things that are really personal to you and you have to have a certain Detachment which is true here but then that part you said they're about competitors uh coming in and things uh cannibalizing your own sales that's the phrase and it's yes surely that's how Apple has been heading has how it's got to the first trillion seems reasonable to think that's how it will get to the next now the thing about the car ownership for me is interesting because I think we're talking clearly about an autonomous car here that's one of the things that apple and Tesla and everyone else is also working towards yeah if car ownership changes in the future potentially does does if if cars are autonomous and you can use car services to call them and Page them when you want do you have to own a car necessarily what is the advantage of owning a car if you can have one come whenever you like the I think there is a personality thing there have been times in my life when I've enjoyed having my car and driving but right now it's just this bucket of metal that I have to service too often uh right now I'm more into the journey uh so I lean towards uh just you know snapping your fingers and the nearest one coming to you but are other people no I can see it as uh personal identity as well but you're right over time Steve Jobs had a interesting phrase about uh typing or something on computer I think he said that uh ultimately death will sort out the problem because as new people come along they don't have the old expectations and they do embrace the new so yes maybe we are the last car owning generation wow you know we you and I grew up associating car ownership and driver's licenses with personal freedom yes yes we did and yeah I I think what we're seeing is the unbundling of Transportation because we we've got of course these these car services that come when you want them we've got car autonomy coming we've also got the the uh bicycle programs for ride you know sharing bicycle sharing that's littered around major cities we've got the uh the electric scooters that have been littered around cities as well uh I don't know if you've seen those yet but they've been around in San Francisco and they're now in my city on the East Coast as well uh where what they're doing is these these uh push scooters that you'd stand up and ride upon have an electric front wheel they're uh sold by xiaoi and others and these companies have have attached a QR code and an app and a GPS to them and basically you scan the QR code with your phone you pay a dollar to ride to your desk ation and you ride on the scooter for however long that's great getting across London would be really I mean we have the bikes here but we don't have that I really fancy that hurry up and bring it to London so that's coming and the thing that comes after that are electric bicycles and electric mopeds okay and you know electric with well you know with London you've got the uh the whole congestion reduction and uh emissions reduction acts right you want to have a fewer cars driving through London testing London you want to have fewer cars driving through smogging up the place and so all electric all littered all over the place at convenient locations to pick up makes a big difference doesn't it absolutely and London already is better since the congestion charge came in however many years ago it was um I just I'm when I was thinking about the scooters uh I kind of run across London on foot a lot and leap in and out of the tube so it's like individual transport I'm very bitty getting to this Mee and getting to that friend uh and for that kind of thing the ability to just step on a scooter and effectively throw it away at the other end just bung it back in yeah you just drop it off and that's that right yeah oh I love that yes yes that's interesting that's actually making that appeals to me and I was briefly thinking that uh all of this talk of Apple cars is making me more interested in driving um I had a test drive in a Tesla recently and uh it was such a gorgeous thing even you 10-minute Drive I was hooked by the end and actually particularly about this um I remember the salesman was telling me about this you know Auto sensing of the car ahead and it was speeding up and all this and I thought you know longtime driver I will never trust that within seconds he was pointing out another control to me and I realized I was looking where he was pointing I'd just forgotten the road completely and it didn't matter cuz the car was dealing with me you really adapt to these things fast so even a long-standing driver like me I think is going to embrace these if they come as early as 2023 yes now we should take a moment and let our listeners know that this episode is brought to you by jamp now jamp now makes it easy to set up manage and protect your Apple devices it's easy to keep track of your own Mac iPad or iPhone but what about the other devices at work as a business grows so does its digital inventory making it harder to manage everyone's Apple devices and this is especially true if employees are remote with jamp now you can protect your digital inventory distribute Wi-Fi and email settings deploy apps protect company data and even lock or wipe a device from anywhere champ now manages devices so you can focus on your business instead and there's no it experience needed Apple Insider podcast listeners can start securing your business today by setting up your first three devices for free forever and you can add more for just $2 a month per device create your free account today at j.com appleinsider that's jf.com slapple Insider William are you familiar with Warren Buffett at all oh yes absolutely but I realize actually I know why you're mentioning him now because he's bought Apple shares I only ever seem to hear of this guy when he buys Apple shares and he keeps buying them um but he seems to be doing well with this m Mr Buffett is sometimes called the um the wizard of Omaha and he has Brookshire Hathaway and they've made money after money money on top of money over the years through policies that that he thinks are really quite simple and of course this is this is something that he's pretty much done since he became an adult it's he's never worked for anywhere else this has just been his thing and it's grown and grown and grown so clearly he's doing something correctly one of the things that he said years ago was that he would only buy a share in a company if he really felt like he wanted to own the whole company that this was the way that he thought of ownership that that if he would be willing to own the whole business then he was willing to own a share of it and with apple clearly he feels like this is a company that he could own or he would like to own because he keeps buying buying and buying it looks as if he has increased his position by 5% now that is 252 million shares wow okay so yeah he's serious about it yeah yeah that's um you know his his most recent purchase was uh about 12 million some shares or about $5.4 billion that's more money than I earned last year well you need to you need to change jobs clearly clear or or take on a second one you could be working more William come on that is sh I'm sorry oh following Warren Buffett's advice well is it advice he just keeps doing it does he have to tell people what he does because it doesn't seem like everybody rushes to copy him each time and yet here's the thing you when you've got a moment and are looking for something mildly entertaining to do look at the annual letters that they put out they they publish their annual report as companies tend to do and theirs are easy to read They're digestible and somewhat entertaining and there are nuggets of the advice contained within okay that's where I got this quote from that that said that you know his policy was to own a whole own parts of company if he felt like he'd own the whole company and and looking at some of the things that he's owned over the years he doesn't necessarily understand the whole business or he doesn't necessarily feel like he could run the whole business you know he bought a farm at one point they have they have a realy arm that does residential house sales but that's not the detail the detail is would he want to own that whole business not necessarily would he want to become a farmer or a realtor and so there's all sorts of little bits of of interesting bits in there and of course I was mistaken earlier when I said he was The Wizard Of Omaha he's in fact the Oracle of Omaha because that alliteration is important and I blew it but um you know his quote here his quote here is Apple was a company I liked a business liked very much Buffett said in an interview it was a company I liked a business I liked very much and we could buy a lot of it I clearly like apple and why buy them to hold we bought about 5% of the company I'd like to Own 100% of it so he says it again okay this doesn't sound like your typical business analyst investor it feels like somebody who actually cares um uh in the detail rather than the money I'm sure investors you know very clever and all this stuff but it it feels well maybe he's just got the money to indulge interest in it but it's working out as a seems to be working out as a business venture as well well I mean it's it's apple as a business is not incredibly hard to understand right they make products they sell products they make services available for those products and they sell those too and they just happen to do quite a lot of it there's it's it's you're forgetting that apple is also doomed all the time that's what I keep reading so well perennially but um and and also by the way supposedly Amazon is going to be the the real1 trillion company and and all sorts of things like that but the the point is that Apple does things that are are at a root level very easy to explain it's not like trying to explain Bitcoin for example right right yes and we've tried to do that on this show in the past and we could do it again but you know it's it's not like saying there are distributed applications held on a blockchain that is immutable and trading is done through exchanges right right there are a lot of terms there that a lot of people won't really want to bother understanding Apple they make products they sell them they make nice products which is why they sell a lot of them and they have a retail arm through which they can sell them and all of that is done Tastefully and successfully that's that's a good reason to want to own that business wouldn't you say well certainly since it works I mean no I can't disagree yes my mind with then when you went about the stores I suddenly thought about Microsoft stores which I think are well done but they don't work out but actually uh Microsoft it's all tied to the products as well isn't it so apple has a much clearer much more easily embraceable set of products so yes I completely agree I fany that business um shall we invest uh honestly I already did oh cool okay I I have uh I have fewer than 100 shares I've got probably around 40 shares 30 shares something like that so you're not really competing with Warren Buffett uh for Apple's attention not no not one bit now you know I you might say that my uh my reporting and my coverage of Apple is colored by my investment by my Holdings um but the the fact that I can't remember how many or few that I actually have should let on that I'm not that uh that fuss well actually I mean you're a journalist aren't you and it's particularly in business it's really useful sometimes to have a tiny share in any company because it immediately opens you to getting information uh that they wouldn't release otherwise so that's why most uh I was on BBC news for a while and lots of people would do that sort of thing for that um journalistic purposes there you go we should ALS also talk a little bit about Apple's expanding admissions in healthcare now we mentioned the Apple watch previously uh Apple has of course their big health research center and it appears that they posted a job listing where they're looking for Asic which is uh application specific integrated circuits or chip design Architects to develop new sensors and sensing systems for future Apple products and it's it seems to be that it's specifically in health wellness and fitness sensors so are you surprised by this Revelation I wasn't expecting it uh but it's one of those where in retrospect I'm happy with it I mean as you said that my mind went fact that I'm in Britain we're in the middle of the brexit stuff and I don't know if the rest of the world cares but it's had peculiar repercussions with passports and things even an argument about the color it's just insane and the idea that actually a device that you would carry with you anyway always or where and your watch would do the job of a passport that actually appeals to me we covered that last week actually we covered that apple as a patent on this and we talked about that last week um now I know I know you want your blue passport cover back and I really don't care hly yeah the color yeah very important but that's so British isn't it I think to care about the color um but yes I want to keep my EU passport but this is a whole other issue I'm sorry I'm I think I'm mixing things up here uh Apple seems be doing a lot of biometal work uh then well they are and and you know there's this whole push to revolutionize what the uh medical health record is and Apple's been doing some work on this and using the health kit and care kit and uh research kit data to guide that they've got their health research center and they've got uh or at least had applications open for some medical staff that they were going to hire as a sort of Apple employee health care center we thought so there's a lot of interest in in medical health and Apple trying to rewrite what a health record looks like and who has control over it for example for example in America patients don't really have access to or control over their health record doctors do yes and in other countries in in uh I'm going to get this wrong but forgive me uh Sweden Denmark Norway something like this uh one of those I believe that that patients own the record and the record stays with them rather than the doctor necessarily um and and that's a very different interesting position now there was also a report that I had earlier this week that said that uh Google and Amazon and Microsoft were working on a plan to create a Consortium to rewrite what a medical record is so there's a lot of attention on this and really giving the patient access and giving the patient control I I currently have access to my medical records from at least three different providers in healthkit actually which is incredibly convenient I can get test results and look them up and see what what my vitals were at the last time I was checked it's really quite useful it s I'd be sorry too scared to look I think but the having the ability is great I mean we have a thing the UK is so far behind on certain things and one of them is is Medical Records I mean we have the Fantastic NHS but it's been just gutted from the inside with uh budget cuts and things we have this issue now that a lot of local health care provider it's still all the records are on paper and there are moves to slowly move them onto digital but there's some uh push back of people not wanting things to go on digital and and I do understand the security but the idea if I uh get incredibly ill in Glasgow I don't want a delay uh of them finding out some condition I've got because I live in Birmingham or London or somewhere I want people to have that ability to know what's right and to fix me um but I realized actually as soon as you say Microsoft and Google are doing this am I wrong but I'm thinking are they also looking for a way to monetize this and and why wouldn't they but still uh well Google is interesting and Google wants to monetize a number of things but at the same time there's this other side of Google that is about medical research and and Longevity and and this is a pet project of uh Larry because Larry and Sergey both think that that one time they said that to achieve all that they wanted to accomplish they would have to live to be 150 and so they have been applying machine learning and research to try and figure out how to increase longevity so it's it's it's not the profit motive as much as the ulterior motive of actually them being able to continue living yes it'd be nice if we all had that I said a moment ago that uh we might be the last car driving generation there is an argument that we might be the last comparatively short-lived generation at the one after us will not be immortal but will go on vastly longer lives this makes us the unluckiest generation ever really doesn't it well I I don't want to go down and saying that because I me far too depressing depends on what happens with your brexit for example you could have lasting effects that make the Next Generation a lot unluckier okay I don't know why I'm laughing it's true but yes you're laughing because crying hurts too much yes right uh I I'll so later over my tea okay I'll join you okay uh so Google is doing a good thing and Microsoft will do an efficient thing I still think Apple will do the Privacy thing uh I could be wrong to have more faith in apple it's just you know so many things in the past this thing with even location stuff Google saying uh you can switch off location tracking and really care exactly uh so maybe apple is secretly evil and just covers it better but right now um I really like health kit I think the strides that are happening there the abilities it's giving the world are a fantastic thing so more of that I'd be happy with yeah the thing that matters here is adoption and Apple has done a decent job of having adoption of research kit and a decent job of adoption with care kit and they know what's required to get adoption having gone through the banking system to get Apple pay adopted everywhere where Android pay is still not by many financial institutions and so that's that's the detail that really counts is getting people participating Google has tried to do Google medical records in years past and couldn't get adoption Google has Google Fit which doesn't have near the adoption that healthkit does so there's a lot at work there that says that Google and Microsoft if they do manage to revolutionize these things they're going to have to do it in a way that catches up on adoption you know Apple currently has somewhere between 50 and 100 institutions that are sharing medical records into health kit that are available on Apple Health right now and that doesn't sound like a lot but when you're dealing with bureaucracy it's not nothing no I'm impressed with that I I'm just conscious that here I am liking Apple But ultimately there are so many more Android phones in the world that uh people who have that are not contributing data to anywhere as just been able to have something that they worked they they would have problems catching up with Apple's connections with institutions but as soon as something works and is adopted on every Android phone that massive data would be fantastic right so the the thing is that research kit is is open source carekit is open source I believe but um the health data is not and so what could happen is that people can figure out how to work with research kit uh and other devices potentially or that Apple can go ahead and bless that as they've blessed Apple music on other platforms or this can be a wedge to say you know you can get your records the traditional way by speaking with your provider or you could go have an iPhone and have them all yes right and which one would be Apple's preferred way I can't quite work that one out so I mean Apple Apple's very subtle about this they don't really advertise this but it's it's sort of a a nice byproduct of having the iPhone they um yes you know they're busy talking about normal things like Apple pay cash and trying to do person-to person payments and things like that which they also need to push quite frankly but uh I I think you know I I used an phone over the summer I used an Android phone for 2 months as a primary device and for notifications and and day-to-day use it was pretty slick it was certainly faster and more responsive on a 2-year-old Nexus 6p than it was on my my aging iPhone 6 so I I really felt the the sort of pangs the sort of tug at the heartstrings could I go with Android fulltime but there's so many other benefits to using the I phone and using all the things that Apple has in place that um I I think I'll be sticking with iOS for the foreseeable future it's not um the iPhone it's the Apple ecosystem that that Mak sense okay it really does it does there is one odity about the Apple ecosystem you mentioned about Apple pay and apple having to work hard to get institutions doing it in the UK at least the moment Apple pay launched it was everywhere because it worked with any um contact system that was in and that was it straight away so the UK has both uh chip card on the uh the the credit cards chip and pin and also had tap to pay in place with Oyster card and things like that for years uh America had an early early trial with tap to pay and it failed abysmally because it was said in the press to not be secure at the time and that was that was decades ago it was early on not to not very secure and it was it was in place and used at McDonald's and I think Exxon speed pay were the places that it was used at the gas pump at the petrol pump and uh you know the the stories that would go around where you know if you had it in your pocket and someone brushed up against you with your reader they could steal your number kind of thing and you have to recall that it's only been the past couple of years that America transitioned to Chip and signature we didn't I didn't realize that chip we never had chip on the cards before they were always swipe the stripe cards and we only just transition in the past few years to chip in signature we did not transition to chip in pin this explains why I keep hearing that the greater majority of credit card Ford happens in America it's because uh the system is inherently less secure does that sound plausible well what happens is that it's not so much sealing stripe data it's that the hacks are at the register or the hacks are at the data center right okay I said earlier that Britain technology was lacking but in this one case it actually seems uh in place I don't know how that happened but I'm GL about it it came down to a cost assessment right the transition didn't take place until the risk of reputation damage and fraud damage exceeded the cost of replacing all of the pin Terminals and all of the register software and all of the cards in circulation it it was it was a huge transition cost and so as long as the cost of Fraud and reputation damage were less than that cost no one cared that makes sense and I forget I mean how huge job it would be to change everything in the states um I thought it was a big job here but it's infinitesimal compared to the number of registers little larger than you yeah tiny yes your island nation over there yes yes sorry no it's true I look out the window I can see the sea no I can't actually but we had a politician over here who used to say that she could see Russia from her front porch it didn't go very well for her it was yes oh I remember when she seemed such a threat to politics and now is kind of sweetly Innocent but that's getting too serious isn't it we don't really discuss politics deeply on this show probably for good reason but uh you know if if we've offended any of you listeners out there please feel free to let us know at newsapple insider.com I do apologize yes and for me too for any brexit fans we have over here there must be one or two cuz we voted for it so okay yes let's change again to a completely new topic so Apple partner quanta may see a surge in orders there's a rumor that apple is working on a new inexpensive notebook and they're thinking shipments will Top about 10 million units in December as a result of of this apple order now this comes from taiwan's Digi times and they didn't name this as a new Macbook Digi times has a very mixed track record when it comes to Apple product but it's pretty reliable when they talk about the Taiwanese electronics Industry so this this is interesting you know the the recently MacBook Pros were were updated rather they were updated recently but the 12-in MacBook and 13-in MacBook Air have stayed pretty stagnant for a while haven't they they have I still really like them though if I was in the market for a notebook I'd be so tempted by those current MacBooks even though they're a bit old in there what MacBook do you use uh I actually have um I'm mostly on an iMac but I have an ancient MacBook Pro from about 2009 and things I take out for the odd emergency otherwise it's my iPad Pro for everything it's just I worked with a a friend who got out one of these MacBooks and I loved the keyboard I loved the display she's recently just I mean this week she's bought an iMac she said she was using the MacBook every day and she felt like it was being worn out by it so I'm not sure how useful it is over extended use but for the odd thing I would have uh I love that form factor I even really like the pink gold you know I'm just I'm really I'm a style Guru more than a writer that's what I think it is exactly okay well so it's an interesting report let's keep it in mind because we've got a couple of different kinds of rumors right there's obviously this rumor that the 12-in MacBook is overdue for an update um there's a sense that of course the MacBook Air is definitely overview for an update and the reason the MacBook Air has hung around is because it is so inexpensive and it does a little bit more than the MacBook with its lower spec processor the the thing that we we thought about is that of course the MacBook needs to get a new keyboard to keep Pace with the updated keyboard in the new Macbook Pros also we've had this rumor for ages and ages and ages talking about arm processors in a Macbook and oh yes now we we sort of saw some of this kind of talk at the end of WWDC announcements where they said that by the way here's the system by which you'll be able to run iOS apps on your Mac and it's called marzipan and they showed that they had brought some of the uh the iOS apps over to Mac OS that it was very much a system in development and that people should start looking at it but it's not finalized exactly but they let the cat out of the bag now if you had an arm processor then you could run those Marsen apps without having to emulate them for x86 or recompile them for x86 or x64 you know you would just be running them on their native home platform their native chip if you compiled all of Mac OS for arm and then had fat binaries the same way that we had fat binaries when we transition from Power PC to Intel does this get interesting actually gets slightly Eerie uh we run a pace uh This Way can Ider about the history of the Mac Pro um and uh when I was writing it I was looking at some of the videos of various key launches and I watched Steve Jobs explaining why they were moving from Power PC to Intel and actually some of the arguments feel like they are exactly right again that uh he said we have all these something like we have all these great products we want to do for you but we don't know how we'll do them with the current road map and he meant power PC and they swapped over to Intel but again again we are already seeing things delayed by Intel's uh slower than expected releases that's suddenly when this first came out you cheaper MacBooks I thought that really doesn't sound like apple and what ultimately would be the difference between that and an iPad with a Smart Keyboard but um I have a feeling that if Apple does go to arm it'll do what it did with Intel it'll go all the way everything will swap over um but maybe I'm wrong maybe this is like a test for it I'm interested yeah well the reason that I bring up arm is is that we've had this rumor before but arm has released a road map now arm has never really released a road map before but the road map that they've released makes strong comparisons between themselves and Intel's mid-tier I5 processors and it shows them surpassing those this year wow okay and especially next year with their the next level stuff so so they're really pushing this as a potential laptop kind of chip it's it's intriguing to me because you know you named the power PC transition and having rewatched the keynote that came down to IBM's failure to follow through on their Promises at the time yes you know they they were making the G5 Power Mac chips and they had promised all along that they would be able to make a chip for laptops for a PowerBook G5 and they utterly failed to do so and so here we are that's how that happened do we know if any Windows uh manufacturers are considering arm cuz they have the same thing I suppose well actually it's happened already it's the uh the Surface RT the Microsoft Surface RT was an arm-based product a couple of years ago and that utterly failed in the marketplace because it it was really quite Limited as to what you could run on it and there's been a push to do it again there's there's another product that's a more current product where they're going back to that but the uh this is an idea that keeps coming up and it keeps coming up because of the performance and because of battery management interesting you can do a whole lot if if you have that arm chip now a valid question is you just said you're using an iPad instead of a laptop so yeah it's it's sort of where where does this all fit kind of thing right yes and and of course to the consumer it probably doesn't matter because if you have the laptop and running Mac OS you don't care what chip is there no absolutely as it runs right yeah yeah and yet it seems to me I remember with the launch of the iPad there was that famous slide where jobs was saying it has to be something that sits in between a laptop and a phone it's got to be better than this and who buying an iPad would strictly speaking care about that but because it fit quite naturally it it made sense you knew whether you wanted one you knew whether it would be any use to you and then you bought it uh so I think finding a natural narrative for where things fit helps Apple um you mentioned battery performance I think i' totally forgotten about the transition from Power PC to Intel was as well as performance uh Apple went into really great detail in this uh presentation about uh the specifically the power consumption and they said yes normally you think about that for desktops but it has all of these implications for uh desktops as well sorry look about for laptops it has implications for everything you can do this you can do that um so suddenly battery power and stuff uh this is becoming a perfect storm um they must swap to arm I think we've decided that okay well it's settled there you go all right there you go done it's it's good to help Apple out with some advice every now and again isn't it oh they need it don't they yes yes here's an example where they really need it there was a young man from Australia who has plad guilty to downloading 90 GB of secure files from Apple's internal systems and he accessed customer accounts in repeated hacks from his nice sub been home a teenager in Melbourne yes dreamed of working for apple one day will be sentenced next month now at this happened last year Apple alerted the FBI who coordinated with Australian authorities and and apple was very of course sensitive about publicity the case was kept out of the media until these Court proceedings now aside from the 90 Gig of data it's really clear just how widespread this breach is or or what type of counts were accessed or what other information was there and we don't know whether it was worldwide or limited to Australia or or any of this Apple's not commenting in a big surprise but um he did it from his Suburban Family Home and his home was raided last year by authorities they found all the files in a folder named are you ready mhm hacky hack hack okay you sure this was Australia cuz in Britain we have things like boy mcboat face and things a name suggested for things I like this guy now hacky sorry hacky hack hack yes right Australian federal police seized two Apple laptops they found that the accused had obtained authorized keys to access Apple systems there's no indication we don't know if the acquired data was provided to any third parties um he communicated with others using Whatsapp about the intrusion but the content of those conversations has not been released it's um yeah now earlier this week just to keep things in context Australia's government has a debate going on they're scheduling over whether to force a weakening of encryption by Apple and other companies and uh this is something that comes up perennially with governments they continually want the keys and I expect Apple to to maintain their current position of no no under no circumstances um Apple was fined 6.7 million in June by Australian Regulators over iPhone and iPad repair practices um also very much kind of a non-story right 6.7 million Australian dollars you think Apple blinked too hard at that well we say that but it's still um you know somebody in the accounts Department got very cross writing that check or something I'm sure so just yes but their repair policies maintain them as the Central Supply of parts and documentation and service and they do so even though the alternative position is that Parts should be available to third parties at will that documentation should be available and that you should be able to choose who you want to service your device but they do this to maintain tight control for a reason and and the reason is that they want to make sure that the parts are up to their standards they want to make sure that the work is up to their standards and because when a device fails and fails spectacularly whether that's Up in Flames or damage to property or damage to a person or or anything else horrible that could happen it's their reputation that gets the hit and it also means that they know that their parts assembled maintain a secure device the secure element is the the gatekeeper if you will of all privacy and Security in the device and they need to make sure that it and touch ID and face ID and all those things are not um compromised so there they have reasons for being the central source of this but what it's done is there's an interesting side effect of this that there is a whole business around producing aftermarket compatible parts M you know you can't you can't get the screens from Apple and you can't get them from Apple suppliers because they don't want to lose their contract but there's this whole builtup industry around supplying third party parts that are part compatible and maybe not as good or maybe as good but it's hard to know as a consumer you know whether or not the flexible printed circuit was made up to the same standards kind of thing but um it's out there and and that's what sprung up in in to fill this vacuum that Apple has allowed to happen interesting so you're seeing the fines as uh well Apple regard as the cost of doing business uh but also I think you're saying you can't tell as a consumer I think my automatic assumption must be that a part has got to be not as good as Apple because Apple can make will make a million of these things and a third party company might make a few hundred or a few thousand of them so the chance of The Kinks being worked out is infinitely greater on the Apple side but the expense of Apple repairs yes yes so I was uh when I was traveling and I was using the Android phone my daughter was using her SE and she had it in an OtterBox case a a really really rugged proper case and she dropped at 3 feet to the floor and the screen did not shatter there was no broken glass but the colors appeared in stripes on the screen they they you could still see our image but touch died as a result wow and okay so the SC the screen was functional the home button was functional but you couldn't touch it and there was a weird cast to some stripes in the thing but you could still see all of the content and all the content was represented it was just as if some of the stripes were faded in color and I took it to a kiosk along the side of the street from where we were and for 250 shekels because of the currency where I was they changed it to a replacement display and I know that display is a third party not an original product I'm aware of it it functions the touch functions on it maybe the touch controller on the Apple product is slightly better but I can't really measure that it seems to function perfectly from that standpoint the only thing that I can complain about the repair was that they I don't think they used the correct Square adhesive around the home button because the home button the the touch ID button has a little bit more rock to it than it does when the phone ships from Apple okay but it still works as Touch ID totally functional yeah absolutely functional didn't change that's brilliant then yes I mean I don't know what the shekel to dollar rate is somewhere around the 3.6 range I think okay a bargain n nominally 70 bucks let's say okay um I had a screen repaired uh by Apple I think it was 90 but it was a couple years AG I'm trying to guess now which is not a massive massive difference uh from that but it's more it's quite a bit more yeah okay well you see I'm I'm rich obviously that's what it is uh I don't notice this small change yeah stuff he said 250 shekels is $67 and 90 British pound is17 okay I'm really not confident now of how much it cost but it was around that Mark for it but okay I mean actually I remember thinking it was less than I feared uh and it was obviously less than getting a new phone for it so I was quite relieved but I I'm quite reassured now that you had a good experience with an alternative uh next time think I think my concern is with these newer phones iPhone 7 and forward where they're used a lot of glue and under water resistant because obviously anyone outside of Apple is going to irreparably damage that that water resistance right so you realize you just made me think oh I could go to a third party thing and now you've taken that away from me for one moment I had all these opportunities I dangled that bright future out there and I snatch it back every bit as quick you did okay thanks I realized actually we got away from the the teenage hacker and the thing that keeps coming back to my mind is what was the 90 gigabytes I me what could fit into that is that just customer billing details is I I we'll never know but I'm fascinated by the specificness of 90 gabt what could he have got so here's here are the things that I'm speculating about and this is pure speculation this isn't in the news story it's just me spitballing here if you're hacking Apple there there are two things that you want right there's there's the reputation from your mates for having done it there's so there's reputation gain right what could you possibly get well you could get unreleased software you could get Internal Documentation you but but the real prize if there's a prize is the ability to undo iCloud right and and by Cloud I mean iCloud lock where if your device is stolen um and someone resets it they can't get into your device or can't open the device without putting in your email address and password for iCloud to be able to get back into the device uh effectively stolen devices are nearly useless if you can't defeat that and so one of the real things that's out there is if you could steal the information required to be able to unlock stolen I iOS devices then you would have a product that you could resell that makes sense be curious to well there's also things of where this data would be you're saying we don't know if it was worldwide and stuff how much does Apple release outside catino is everything well so Apple Apple has data centers worldwide because what they're trying to do is make the services faster and so you make Services Faster by placing data centers local to where the consumers are Chinese data centers are in China and in fact there was a whole cruffle about that because they had to be held by uh you know with Chinese access to them kind of thing uh presumably there's a data center in Australia so that the Australians data is kept there as well um you know trying to push data over Transatlantic cable as opposed to things that are local to you it's there's a speed hit um so that's that's the what we don't know is did he get information from Australian consumers did he get customer information from worldwide we have no idea I was just speculating I just yeah but you're right those are the targets well they're the targets you would think I I would I don't know something about the fact that he dreamed of working for Apple which I suspect might not happen now um and that he was a teenager I think is what you said if their they cued us to prestige every time I've hacked into Apple it's been to score some points and impress my friends down the pub yeah okay impress your friends get girls whatever the old thing was exactly so there is this dream of of hacking someone and then working there the the concept and it's very misinformed very misguided but the idea is if I show them they've got a vulnerability then they'll hire me to fix it and and there is such a thing as penetration testing but when you do pen testing when you do this kind of thing you are hired as a security consult consultant first and then you do the hack it's it's not the reverse order where you you want to be um want to show up and say hey by the way look at all I got no doesn't go over nearly as well as when it's pre-arranged the but but you know it's a valid question is how do you position yourself as someone that should be hired for that kind of penetration testing well what if you done well I hacked apple and I got 90 gigs interesting okay good point yes so so he may not work for Apple but he may be able to spin it into a consultancy for penetration testing and security testing okay there was something oddly innocent about the the dreaming to work Apple but yes this could have set his it could ultimately have been a good move for his career I suppose uh presumably he's not going to prison we don't know actually sentencing next month isn't it or something yes it is yes anyway he's only Teenage he'll be out before he's yeah my age yes okay last story I've got last thing I want to talk about is the App Store now there was a meeting held last year at a New York Loft we're only finding out it now that this is from a report in Business Insider Apple convened an invitation only meeting in New York in uh April of 2017 so going way back aimed at letting developers know that the model the business model for apps was changing and that what Apple needed them to know is that they needed to think about recurring revenue from subscriptions rather than one-time sales what we've seen in the past year is that more and more apps are switching to a subscription model which led to Apple's announcement of the last quarterly earnings report that paid subscriptions from Apple and third parties have passed 300 million now we don't know which developers were at the meeting we don't know who was there representing Apple we don't even know who owns the waft where it took a place what we know is that Apple introduced the developers at this meeting to an idea referred to as subscription 2.0 and this is the idea of software as a service that they needed to shift their focus away from upfront costs into long-term Revenue this makes complete sense to me from the standpoint of solving the question of how do you keep app developers in business which is something Apple has to have been concerned with right you know if you're an app developer you have one Hill when you release the app and a lot of valleys and terms of income earning right it's basically you launch and it dives off a cliff afterwards and how do you keep people going and how do you keep developers able to keep going if if this is the model I like it when you put it like that it makes sense it's Apple obviously looking after its own interests but also looking after developers trying to help them um but it's just funny the idea of a secret meeting in a New York Loft uh selected audience it just feels like apple you know cracking its Knuckles and say right this is how it's going to be from now on you're going to pay us a subscri it just feels a bit more ominous until you put it that way I like it it's not Apple saying you're going to pay us a subscription it's it's Apple telling developers right you're charging 99 C for your app how exactly do you intend to feed yourself how are how are you going to afford a new Macbook Pro with shiny new xcode if you're charging a dollar for your app and all of your sales are on your first day of release yes okay now Apple wants their 30% that they take from every app store purchase absolutely but it's it's uh it's symbiotic really right they Apple doesn't have an app store if there aren't developers and developers what happens sorry what happens with um Apple's cut of subscription uh is that still 30% of every year I subscribe is it I think that it is okay then would make sense uh wouldn't it I was I was getting into a discussion about the 30% with someone on Reddit and and the first rule is never get into a discussion with someone on Reddit that that's that was my first error but the the fellow was talking about how Amazon purchases specifically Kindle kind of thing or Prime video don't happen through the Prime Video app and don't happen through the Kindle app that you have to go out to a browser to be able to do that or in his case he was telling his girlfriend to order on an Android because Android doesn't take that cut and he was saying that if they were going to do it on iOS that they would have to raise the price by 30% and I said no no no that's not how any of this works the way that this works is that you keep the prices uniform across consumers the consumer seems at the same price and you eat the 30% and the reason you do this he says well the 30% is the is being charged because Apple claims they can charge it because their secure their their app store is more secure and again no no that's not how any of this works the reason that Apple charges 30% is because they take care of a lot of the tax documentation that you need to have to be able to sell worldwide they take care of the payment processing so that you can sell worldwide you don't have to advertise yourself worldwide you list once on one app store and they take care of it for you that's what you're paying your 30% for every payment processor no matter who you're doing takes a fee now yes if you're Amazon you don't need Apple to do that you can do it just as well yourself but for smalltime developers you absolutely want Apple to be your payment processor because trying to arrange that for yourself in different countries is a giant headache well actually I have an app on the app store and I went through the internationalist and even with apple doing everything I found it quite dizzying working out what applied where and things so the idea of having to do it all from scratch for myself it just I wouldn't have I would have stopped I would have walked away I also used to have an app on the App Store what's what's your app mine's called River passage it's a poem by a British author called Jeff Phelps um done as Arts Council project really rather than a big commercial thing uh but it was an interesting model getting his work in a new form seeing how it might change poetry apps it's still a thing in progress really but the app bit um we were required to sell it for the lowest price the 99 Cents thing and that meant having to make sure I understood all of the sales process for it and yes it always boil down to just ticking a box here or there with apple um the complexity was hidden and I still found it a bit daunting I haven't yet uh been compelled back with the next release but sooner or later I will because they do make it easier um I thought you were going to say that the thing about eating the 30% is yes all of that makes sense but also you are going to sell more on iOS than you will on Android uh because people will buy things on iOS so yes the the dollar value per unit is the same but you will sell more units on uh iPhone and so it's worth it's another cost of doing business to get that custom in so I trust the person on Reddit was uh thoroughly persuaded and convinced by your arguments yes I I think you overestimate Reddit okay well we've overshot our time I meant to keep this a little bit shorter but it's been such a pleasure speaking with you William I have enjoyed this and we should do it again I'd like that be nice checking yes you know and if you've been listening to us and you've enjoyed this one please let me know and in fact if you've not enjoyed it if you think this was a complete waste of time and was awful you can tell me that too uh go ahead and reach out to us I'm ATV marks on Twitter or we can you can email newsapple insider.com or William what are you on Twitter I'm W gallager so wga l h h wonderful that's fantastic this is the end of another great episode of the Apple Insider podcast we will be back next week in the meantime go ahead and let us know what you thought and go ahead and please give us feedback and also make sure you keep an eye out for Williams stories on Apple Insider this next week um actually I was so looking forward to the articles that are coming out next week on Apple Insider things I really like exploring as a journalist so I hope everybody enjoys it too uh and uh Victor has been a treat having a proper chat with you thank you for this wonderful let's go have some tea excellent Sal I put the kettle on right now biscuits biscuits biscuits I need to let all of our listeners know that jamp now makes it easy to set up manage and protect your Apple devices so you can focus on your business there's no it experience needed with jamp now you can check your digital inventory distribute Wi-Fi email settings deploy apps protect company data and even lock or wipe a device as needed from anywhere and now Apple Insider podcast listeners can start securing your business today by setting up your first three devices for free forever add more for just $2 a month per device create your free account today at jam.com appleinsider that's jf.com slapple inssider I've got you on Slackyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to this episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor and joining me this week is the wonderful William Gallagher oh I like that hello our wonderful Victor welcome William I'm so glad to have you here thanks it's a treat to be on here I like the canteen you've got I've said this before nice place here yeah now the canteen of course is only open for a limited number of hours during the day but we'll make sure that when they are they serve excellent tea thank you very much yes yeah oong Earl gry no herbal uh Yorkshire Tea if we're getting this specific and you're picking up on my English accent Yorkshire Tea uh soft water a little bit of milk uh no sugar place okay got it I'll get right on that thanks thank you well I do we should talk a little bit about a story that Mikey Campbell published on the site this week now this is this is one that we've been covering for ages this is a story going back two years but uh your favorite analyst and mine mingi quo believes that Apple still has autonomous vehicle aspirations that project Titan as we've been calling it all this time is going to result in a shipping consumer product that could be available as early as 2023 you know know an actual Apple car if you will mhm well yeah it's what you see as the phrase was as early as 2023 but I'm thinking that's 5 years away of addiction uh I don't know i' like it to be true you you say that but I'm going to keep bringing it up every time we have a story that Mikey writes about it so the the Apple car is Mikey's beat as it were and every time the story comes up the question is will there be a car or is Apple simply working on telematics to provide a platform that they'll work with some other partner on it's a curious thing isn't it because everything we've heard so far is that they tried to have their own platform and chose for various reasons to go the other route and yet it feels more Apple like to try at least try to do the complete uh thing in one um maybe I'm wrong they abandoned monitors at least for a bit but yeah it doesn't feel like it would be an Apple car if it was a Tesla with I don't know a spectacular version of carplay added to it well and and thinking about that it's interesting because the first Tesla was in fact a Lotus oh no I didn't know that the original Tesla Roadster was a Lotus that they gutted and put all of their bits into and the reason they stopped doing that and went to build the model S was because it it turned out there were in fact no cost savings by using the Lotus platform it was it was actually worse well that's interesting it was more expensive to to buy Lotus Platforms in retrofit traditionally the the motor industry has claimed that well actually much like the phone industry that a new company can't just come in and do something because it's it's the complexity uh is so much greater than I might imagine as an ordinary driver uh but it does sound like yeah maybe just I want this to be true but I'm finding reasons to be convinced by it um so historically the the way that Apple got into phones was they originally partnered with Motorola on a on a phone a regular feature phone type handset that had iTunes synchronization capability built into it terrible terrible phone called the The Rocker error wasn't it I just Dre that's right yeah it was the motor rocker and you could tell at the announcement at the keynote that Steve Jobs was holding back yes any any kind of vitriol that he might have reserved for the thing to make the announcement of success and and you know there are people that watch Steve Jobs Keynotes and I think the times that you really learn the most from those Keynotes are when you're watching him announce something he doesn't want to announce when you're watching him deal with a PR Fiasco that he would have rather not had to have dealt with like the iPhone 4 antenna gate nonsense yeah or when he doesn't have anything of significance to announce like if you go back to the the 2001 time for frame when he announced the flower power and dalmatian blue iMac models yes that was back when uh they had to announce things because they were at maor and maor was on a fixed schedule and maybe that contributed to why they abandoned that and only do their own although oh absolutely it did yeah so you know are they going to make a car is a good question and I I agree with you they do their best and they are happiest when they have control over every part of the product and I I think the lesson to learn from the displays as you mentioned and I would also add to that the airport Wi-Fi routers that they've gotten out of is that they leave these segments when they feel like the rest of the market has caught up and there's nothing left exciting to contribute okay that feels quite um magnanimous of them uh like we have created this Market we have dispensed wisdom and now the rest of you can just carry on in our field but that does seem to be what happened with Wi-Fi yes I mean with not only with Wi-Fi if you go back historically right printers they had laser writers when Laser Printers were a big deal they had inkjet printers that were essentially uh partner made products with Canon and others that they got out of when they were no longer a big deal right they had digital cameras they had the quick shot cameras quick take and they got out of that as well great if now you say it it's a it is a patent isn't it I hadn't seen that I used to have one of those laser writers uh yes all right okay well in that case it's absolutely definitely true I'm crossing my fingers but you think we'll see apple and somebody else first and then Apple I'm not sure that's that's the historical pattern but on a thing this big that is this important to them right if they were announcing this it would be a Halo product and in fact quo says that this could take the the company towards the two $2 trillion valuation right doubling where they are today so if if that's true would they want to share that with anyone else now obviously they're going to be using tons of partner manufacturers as they currently do for all the other products they don't actually own the manufacturing capacity anyway but they would want it to be a fully apple branded product not a partner product true I don't see them getting into making rubber for the tires uh for example they will buy in for that just this reminds starting to remind me of the Apple watch which we were waiting for for so long um and then in 2015 when they finally announced it uh they how long did they said they've been working on it not as long as we thought I think but this feels the same and it I don't know I love my Apper watch and I think it's been a great success for Apple but when it was on its way everybody was expecting it to be the new iPhone the new giant thing and it and it hasn't been that and I possibly don't think it could ever have been yet that kind of anticipation feeling um didn't really have it over even the airpods which I adore the homod which seems great but I'm starting to get it now with the car so now this is just all adding to me wanting it doesn't help whether it's true I feel like with the watch and airpods that this is a they're pieces of a puzzle that is still coming together that that we can't quite see all of the pieces in place yet but the idea is what if you don't have to take your phone out of the pocket every time what if you can leave your phone at home some of the time and if you've got the watch and the airpods then you've got a decent amount of input and interaction with a device that doesn't require taking this big screen of glass out of your phone out of your pocket I I think we've talked about augmented reality and Tim Cook's vision for augmented reality currently that relies on the phone glass but there's also been a lot of talk about micro displays and glasses and things like that and of course the problem with glasses is they're obtrusive but presuming that Apple knows what they're doing and wants to make glasses that are inobtrusive then imagine you have that as a display you've got the watch as a secondary display and you've got the airpods for audio that's augmented reality and interaction then you've got something that comes together where you don't need the phone any longer which just you can you imagine any other company doing that they have this brilliant phone most of them Microsoft they would be milking it every possible way Forever Until it died but Apple does have this habit of just tossing aside something I remember with the was the iPad Mini incredible success totally wiped it out and replaced it with something else uh uh better if you like but constantly moving forward and chucking things away it's quite animalistic and impressive I think and I don't know any other company you have to be willing to kill your children and think of the products as children because they they do take 9 months to two years to give birth to but you have to be willing to kill them before someone else does yes absolutely I mean I'm a writer to the phrase killing your children and your babies uh it talks very specifically about things that are really personal to you and you have to have a certain Detachment which is true here but then that part you said they're about competitors uh coming in and things uh cannibalizing your own sales that's the phrase and it's yes surely that's how Apple has been heading has how it's got to the first trillion seems reasonable to think that's how it will get to the next now the thing about the car ownership for me is interesting because I think we're talking clearly about an autonomous car here that's one of the things that apple and Tesla and everyone else is also working towards yeah if car ownership changes in the future potentially does does if if cars are autonomous and you can use car services to call them and Page them when you want do you have to own a car necessarily what is the advantage of owning a car if you can have one come whenever you like the I think there is a personality thing there have been times in my life when I've enjoyed having my car and driving but right now it's just this bucket of metal that I have to service too often uh right now I'm more into the journey uh so I lean towards uh just you know snapping your fingers and the nearest one coming to you but are other people no I can see it as uh personal identity as well but you're right over time Steve Jobs had a interesting phrase about uh typing or something on computer I think he said that uh ultimately death will sort out the problem because as new people come along they don't have the old expectations and they do embrace the new so yes maybe we are the last car owning generation wow you know we you and I grew up associating car ownership and driver's licenses with personal freedom yes yes we did and yeah I I think what we're seeing is the unbundling of Transportation because we we've got of course these these car services that come when you want them we've got car autonomy coming we've also got the the uh bicycle programs for ride you know sharing bicycle sharing that's littered around major cities we've got the uh the electric scooters that have been littered around cities as well uh I don't know if you've seen those yet but they've been around in San Francisco and they're now in my city on the East Coast as well uh where what they're doing is these these uh push scooters that you'd stand up and ride upon have an electric front wheel they're uh sold by xiaoi and others and these companies have have attached a QR code and an app and a GPS to them and basically you scan the QR code with your phone you pay a dollar to ride to your desk ation and you ride on the scooter for however long that's great getting across London would be really I mean we have the bikes here but we don't have that I really fancy that hurry up and bring it to London so that's coming and the thing that comes after that are electric bicycles and electric mopeds okay and you know electric with well you know with London you've got the uh the whole congestion reduction and uh emissions reduction acts right you want to have a fewer cars driving through London testing London you want to have fewer cars driving through smogging up the place and so all electric all littered all over the place at convenient locations to pick up makes a big difference doesn't it absolutely and London already is better since the congestion charge came in however many years ago it was um I just I'm when I was thinking about the scooters uh I kind of run across London on foot a lot and leap in and out of the tube so it's like individual transport I'm very bitty getting to this Mee and getting to that friend uh and for that kind of thing the ability to just step on a scooter and effectively throw it away at the other end just bung it back in yeah you just drop it off and that's that right yeah oh I love that yes yes that's interesting that's actually making that appeals to me and I was briefly thinking that uh all of this talk of Apple cars is making me more interested in driving um I had a test drive in a Tesla recently and uh it was such a gorgeous thing even you 10-minute Drive I was hooked by the end and actually particularly about this um I remember the salesman was telling me about this you know Auto sensing of the car ahead and it was speeding up and all this and I thought you know longtime driver I will never trust that within seconds he was pointing out another control to me and I realized I was looking where he was pointing I'd just forgotten the road completely and it didn't matter cuz the car was dealing with me you really adapt to these things fast so even a long-standing driver like me I think is going to embrace these if they come as early as 2023 yes now we should take a moment and let our listeners know that this episode is brought to you by jamp now jamp now makes it easy to set up manage and protect your Apple devices it's easy to keep track of your own Mac iPad or iPhone but what about the other devices at work as a business grows so does its digital inventory making it harder to manage everyone's Apple devices and this is especially true if employees are remote with jamp now you can protect your digital inventory distribute Wi-Fi and email settings deploy apps protect company data and even lock or wipe a device from anywhere champ now manages devices so you can focus on your business instead and there's no it experience needed Apple Insider podcast listeners can start securing your business today by setting up your first three devices for free forever and you can add more for just $2 a month per device create your free account today at j.com appleinsider that's jf.com slapple Insider William are you familiar with Warren Buffett at all oh yes absolutely but I realize actually I know why you're mentioning him now because he's bought Apple shares I only ever seem to hear of this guy when he buys Apple shares and he keeps buying them um but he seems to be doing well with this m Mr Buffett is sometimes called the um the wizard of Omaha and he has Brookshire Hathaway and they've made money after money money on top of money over the years through policies that that he thinks are really quite simple and of course this is this is something that he's pretty much done since he became an adult it's he's never worked for anywhere else this has just been his thing and it's grown and grown and grown so clearly he's doing something correctly one of the things that he said years ago was that he would only buy a share in a company if he really felt like he wanted to own the whole company that this was the way that he thought of ownership that that if he would be willing to own the whole business then he was willing to own a share of it and with apple clearly he feels like this is a company that he could own or he would like to own because he keeps buying buying and buying it looks as if he has increased his position by 5% now that is 252 million shares wow okay so yeah he's serious about it yeah yeah that's um you know his his most recent purchase was uh about 12 million some shares or about $5.4 billion that's more money than I earned last year well you need to you need to change jobs clearly clear or or take on a second one you could be working more William come on that is sh I'm sorry oh following Warren Buffett's advice well is it advice he just keeps doing it does he have to tell people what he does because it doesn't seem like everybody rushes to copy him each time and yet here's the thing you when you've got a moment and are looking for something mildly entertaining to do look at the annual letters that they put out they they publish their annual report as companies tend to do and theirs are easy to read They're digestible and somewhat entertaining and there are nuggets of the advice contained within okay that's where I got this quote from that that said that you know his policy was to own a whole own parts of company if he felt like he'd own the whole company and and looking at some of the things that he's owned over the years he doesn't necessarily understand the whole business or he doesn't necessarily feel like he could run the whole business you know he bought a farm at one point they have they have a realy arm that does residential house sales but that's not the detail the detail is would he want to own that whole business not necessarily would he want to become a farmer or a realtor and so there's all sorts of little bits of of interesting bits in there and of course I was mistaken earlier when I said he was The Wizard Of Omaha he's in fact the Oracle of Omaha because that alliteration is important and I blew it but um you know his quote here his quote here is Apple was a company I liked a business liked very much Buffett said in an interview it was a company I liked a business I liked very much and we could buy a lot of it I clearly like apple and why buy them to hold we bought about 5% of the company I'd like to Own 100% of it so he says it again okay this doesn't sound like your typical business analyst investor it feels like somebody who actually cares um uh in the detail rather than the money I'm sure investors you know very clever and all this stuff but it it feels well maybe he's just got the money to indulge interest in it but it's working out as a seems to be working out as a business venture as well well I mean it's it's apple as a business is not incredibly hard to understand right they make products they sell products they make services available for those products and they sell those too and they just happen to do quite a lot of it there's it's it's you're forgetting that apple is also doomed all the time that's what I keep reading so well perennially but um and and also by the way supposedly Amazon is going to be the the real1 trillion company and and all sorts of things like that but the the point is that Apple does things that are are at a root level very easy to explain it's not like trying to explain Bitcoin for example right right yes and we've tried to do that on this show in the past and we could do it again but you know it's it's not like saying there are distributed applications held on a blockchain that is immutable and trading is done through exchanges right right there are a lot of terms there that a lot of people won't really want to bother understanding Apple they make products they sell them they make nice products which is why they sell a lot of them and they have a retail arm through which they can sell them and all of that is done Tastefully and successfully that's that's a good reason to want to own that business wouldn't you say well certainly since it works I mean no I can't disagree yes my mind with then when you went about the stores I suddenly thought about Microsoft stores which I think are well done but they don't work out but actually uh Microsoft it's all tied to the products as well isn't it so apple has a much clearer much more easily embraceable set of products so yes I completely agree I fany that business um shall we invest uh honestly I already did oh cool okay I I have uh I have fewer than 100 shares I've got probably around 40 shares 30 shares something like that so you're not really competing with Warren Buffett uh for Apple's attention not no not one bit now you know I you might say that my uh my reporting and my coverage of Apple is colored by my investment by my Holdings um but the the fact that I can't remember how many or few that I actually have should let on that I'm not that uh that fuss well actually I mean you're a journalist aren't you and it's particularly in business it's really useful sometimes to have a tiny share in any company because it immediately opens you to getting information uh that they wouldn't release otherwise so that's why most uh I was on BBC news for a while and lots of people would do that sort of thing for that um journalistic purposes there you go we should ALS also talk a little bit about Apple's expanding admissions in healthcare now we mentioned the Apple watch previously uh Apple has of course their big health research center and it appears that they posted a job listing where they're looking for Asic which is uh application specific integrated circuits or chip design Architects to develop new sensors and sensing systems for future Apple products and it's it seems to be that it's specifically in health wellness and fitness sensors so are you surprised by this Revelation I wasn't expecting it uh but it's one of those where in retrospect I'm happy with it I mean as you said that my mind went fact that I'm in Britain we're in the middle of the brexit stuff and I don't know if the rest of the world cares but it's had peculiar repercussions with passports and things even an argument about the color it's just insane and the idea that actually a device that you would carry with you anyway always or where and your watch would do the job of a passport that actually appeals to me we covered that last week actually we covered that apple as a patent on this and we talked about that last week um now I know I know you want your blue passport cover back and I really don't care hly yeah the color yeah very important but that's so British isn't it I think to care about the color um but yes I want to keep my EU passport but this is a whole other issue I'm sorry I'm I think I'm mixing things up here uh Apple seems be doing a lot of biometal work uh then well they are and and you know there's this whole push to revolutionize what the uh medical health record is and Apple's been doing some work on this and using the health kit and care kit and uh research kit data to guide that they've got their health research center and they've got uh or at least had applications open for some medical staff that they were going to hire as a sort of Apple employee health care center we thought so there's a lot of interest in in medical health and Apple trying to rewrite what a health record looks like and who has control over it for example for example in America patients don't really have access to or control over their health record doctors do yes and in other countries in in uh I'm going to get this wrong but forgive me uh Sweden Denmark Norway something like this uh one of those I believe that that patients own the record and the record stays with them rather than the doctor necessarily um and and that's a very different interesting position now there was also a report that I had earlier this week that said that uh Google and Amazon and Microsoft were working on a plan to create a Consortium to rewrite what a medical record is so there's a lot of attention on this and really giving the patient access and giving the patient control I I currently have access to my medical records from at least three different providers in healthkit actually which is incredibly convenient I can get test results and look them up and see what what my vitals were at the last time I was checked it's really quite useful it s I'd be sorry too scared to look I think but the having the ability is great I mean we have a thing the UK is so far behind on certain things and one of them is is Medical Records I mean we have the Fantastic NHS but it's been just gutted from the inside with uh budget cuts and things we have this issue now that a lot of local health care provider it's still all the records are on paper and there are moves to slowly move them onto digital but there's some uh push back of people not wanting things to go on digital and and I do understand the security but the idea if I uh get incredibly ill in Glasgow I don't want a delay uh of them finding out some condition I've got because I live in Birmingham or London or somewhere I want people to have that ability to know what's right and to fix me um but I realized actually as soon as you say Microsoft and Google are doing this am I wrong but I'm thinking are they also looking for a way to monetize this and and why wouldn't they but still uh well Google is interesting and Google wants to monetize a number of things but at the same time there's this other side of Google that is about medical research and and Longevity and and this is a pet project of uh Larry because Larry and Sergey both think that that one time they said that to achieve all that they wanted to accomplish they would have to live to be 150 and so they have been applying machine learning and research to try and figure out how to increase longevity so it's it's it's not the profit motive as much as the ulterior motive of actually them being able to continue living yes it'd be nice if we all had that I said a moment ago that uh we might be the last car driving generation there is an argument that we might be the last comparatively short-lived generation at the one after us will not be immortal but will go on vastly longer lives this makes us the unluckiest generation ever really doesn't it well I I don't want to go down and saying that because I me far too depressing depends on what happens with your brexit for example you could have lasting effects that make the Next Generation a lot unluckier okay I don't know why I'm laughing it's true but yes you're laughing because crying hurts too much yes right uh I I'll so later over my tea okay I'll join you okay uh so Google is doing a good thing and Microsoft will do an efficient thing I still think Apple will do the Privacy thing uh I could be wrong to have more faith in apple it's just you know so many things in the past this thing with even location stuff Google saying uh you can switch off location tracking and really care exactly uh so maybe apple is secretly evil and just covers it better but right now um I really like health kit I think the strides that are happening there the abilities it's giving the world are a fantastic thing so more of that I'd be happy with yeah the thing that matters here is adoption and Apple has done a decent job of having adoption of research kit and a decent job of adoption with care kit and they know what's required to get adoption having gone through the banking system to get Apple pay adopted everywhere where Android pay is still not by many financial institutions and so that's that's the detail that really counts is getting people participating Google has tried to do Google medical records in years past and couldn't get adoption Google has Google Fit which doesn't have near the adoption that healthkit does so there's a lot at work there that says that Google and Microsoft if they do manage to revolutionize these things they're going to have to do it in a way that catches up on adoption you know Apple currently has somewhere between 50 and 100 institutions that are sharing medical records into health kit that are available on Apple Health right now and that doesn't sound like a lot but when you're dealing with bureaucracy it's not nothing no I'm impressed with that I I'm just conscious that here I am liking Apple But ultimately there are so many more Android phones in the world that uh people who have that are not contributing data to anywhere as just been able to have something that they worked they they would have problems catching up with Apple's connections with institutions but as soon as something works and is adopted on every Android phone that massive data would be fantastic right so the the thing is that research kit is is open source carekit is open source I believe but um the health data is not and so what could happen is that people can figure out how to work with research kit uh and other devices potentially or that Apple can go ahead and bless that as they've blessed Apple music on other platforms or this can be a wedge to say you know you can get your records the traditional way by speaking with your provider or you could go have an iPhone and have them all yes right and which one would be Apple's preferred way I can't quite work that one out so I mean Apple Apple's very subtle about this they don't really advertise this but it's it's sort of a a nice byproduct of having the iPhone they um yes you know they're busy talking about normal things like Apple pay cash and trying to do person-to person payments and things like that which they also need to push quite frankly but uh I I think you know I I used an phone over the summer I used an Android phone for 2 months as a primary device and for notifications and and day-to-day use it was pretty slick it was certainly faster and more responsive on a 2-year-old Nexus 6p than it was on my my aging iPhone 6 so I I really felt the the sort of pangs the sort of tug at the heartstrings could I go with Android fulltime but there's so many other benefits to using the I phone and using all the things that Apple has in place that um I I think I'll be sticking with iOS for the foreseeable future it's not um the iPhone it's the Apple ecosystem that that Mak sense okay it really does it does there is one odity about the Apple ecosystem you mentioned about Apple pay and apple having to work hard to get institutions doing it in the UK at least the moment Apple pay launched it was everywhere because it worked with any um contact system that was in and that was it straight away so the UK has both uh chip card on the uh the the credit cards chip and pin and also had tap to pay in place with Oyster card and things like that for years uh America had an early early trial with tap to pay and it failed abysmally because it was said in the press to not be secure at the time and that was that was decades ago it was early on not to not very secure and it was it was in place and used at McDonald's and I think Exxon speed pay were the places that it was used at the gas pump at the petrol pump and uh you know the the stories that would go around where you know if you had it in your pocket and someone brushed up against you with your reader they could steal your number kind of thing and you have to recall that it's only been the past couple of years that America transitioned to Chip and signature we didn't I didn't realize that chip we never had chip on the cards before they were always swipe the stripe cards and we only just transition in the past few years to chip in signature we did not transition to chip in pin this explains why I keep hearing that the greater majority of credit card Ford happens in America it's because uh the system is inherently less secure does that sound plausible well what happens is that it's not so much sealing stripe data it's that the hacks are at the register or the hacks are at the data center right okay I said earlier that Britain technology was lacking but in this one case it actually seems uh in place I don't know how that happened but I'm GL about it it came down to a cost assessment right the transition didn't take place until the risk of reputation damage and fraud damage exceeded the cost of replacing all of the pin Terminals and all of the register software and all of the cards in circulation it it was it was a huge transition cost and so as long as the cost of Fraud and reputation damage were less than that cost no one cared that makes sense and I forget I mean how huge job it would be to change everything in the states um I thought it was a big job here but it's infinitesimal compared to the number of registers little larger than you yeah tiny yes your island nation over there yes yes sorry no it's true I look out the window I can see the sea no I can't actually but we had a politician over here who used to say that she could see Russia from her front porch it didn't go very well for her it was yes oh I remember when she seemed such a threat to politics and now is kind of sweetly Innocent but that's getting too serious isn't it we don't really discuss politics deeply on this show probably for good reason but uh you know if if we've offended any of you listeners out there please feel free to let us know at newsapple insider.com I do apologize yes and for me too for any brexit fans we have over here there must be one or two cuz we voted for it so okay yes let's change again to a completely new topic so Apple partner quanta may see a surge in orders there's a rumor that apple is working on a new inexpensive notebook and they're thinking shipments will Top about 10 million units in December as a result of of this apple order now this comes from taiwan's Digi times and they didn't name this as a new Macbook Digi times has a very mixed track record when it comes to Apple product but it's pretty reliable when they talk about the Taiwanese electronics Industry so this this is interesting you know the the recently MacBook Pros were were updated rather they were updated recently but the 12-in MacBook and 13-in MacBook Air have stayed pretty stagnant for a while haven't they they have I still really like them though if I was in the market for a notebook I'd be so tempted by those current MacBooks even though they're a bit old in there what MacBook do you use uh I actually have um I'm mostly on an iMac but I have an ancient MacBook Pro from about 2009 and things I take out for the odd emergency otherwise it's my iPad Pro for everything it's just I worked with a a friend who got out one of these MacBooks and I loved the keyboard I loved the display she's recently just I mean this week she's bought an iMac she said she was using the MacBook every day and she felt like it was being worn out by it so I'm not sure how useful it is over extended use but for the odd thing I would have uh I love that form factor I even really like the pink gold you know I'm just I'm really I'm a style Guru more than a writer that's what I think it is exactly okay well so it's an interesting report let's keep it in mind because we've got a couple of different kinds of rumors right there's obviously this rumor that the 12-in MacBook is overdue for an update um there's a sense that of course the MacBook Air is definitely overview for an update and the reason the MacBook Air has hung around is because it is so inexpensive and it does a little bit more than the MacBook with its lower spec processor the the thing that we we thought about is that of course the MacBook needs to get a new keyboard to keep Pace with the updated keyboard in the new Macbook Pros also we've had this rumor for ages and ages and ages talking about arm processors in a Macbook and oh yes now we we sort of saw some of this kind of talk at the end of WWDC announcements where they said that by the way here's the system by which you'll be able to run iOS apps on your Mac and it's called marzipan and they showed that they had brought some of the uh the iOS apps over to Mac OS that it was very much a system in development and that people should start looking at it but it's not finalized exactly but they let the cat out of the bag now if you had an arm processor then you could run those Marsen apps without having to emulate them for x86 or recompile them for x86 or x64 you know you would just be running them on their native home platform their native chip if you compiled all of Mac OS for arm and then had fat binaries the same way that we had fat binaries when we transition from Power PC to Intel does this get interesting actually gets slightly Eerie uh we run a pace uh This Way can Ider about the history of the Mac Pro um and uh when I was writing it I was looking at some of the videos of various key launches and I watched Steve Jobs explaining why they were moving from Power PC to Intel and actually some of the arguments feel like they are exactly right again that uh he said we have all these something like we have all these great products we want to do for you but we don't know how we'll do them with the current road map and he meant power PC and they swapped over to Intel but again again we are already seeing things delayed by Intel's uh slower than expected releases that's suddenly when this first came out you cheaper MacBooks I thought that really doesn't sound like apple and what ultimately would be the difference between that and an iPad with a Smart Keyboard but um I have a feeling that if Apple does go to arm it'll do what it did with Intel it'll go all the way everything will swap over um but maybe I'm wrong maybe this is like a test for it I'm interested yeah well the reason that I bring up arm is is that we've had this rumor before but arm has released a road map now arm has never really released a road map before but the road map that they've released makes strong comparisons between themselves and Intel's mid-tier I5 processors and it shows them surpassing those this year wow okay and especially next year with their the next level stuff so so they're really pushing this as a potential laptop kind of chip it's it's intriguing to me because you know you named the power PC transition and having rewatched the keynote that came down to IBM's failure to follow through on their Promises at the time yes you know they they were making the G5 Power Mac chips and they had promised all along that they would be able to make a chip for laptops for a PowerBook G5 and they utterly failed to do so and so here we are that's how that happened do we know if any Windows uh manufacturers are considering arm cuz they have the same thing I suppose well actually it's happened already it's the uh the Surface RT the Microsoft Surface RT was an arm-based product a couple of years ago and that utterly failed in the marketplace because it it was really quite Limited as to what you could run on it and there's been a push to do it again there's there's another product that's a more current product where they're going back to that but the uh this is an idea that keeps coming up and it keeps coming up because of the performance and because of battery management interesting you can do a whole lot if if you have that arm chip now a valid question is you just said you're using an iPad instead of a laptop so yeah it's it's sort of where where does this all fit kind of thing right yes and and of course to the consumer it probably doesn't matter because if you have the laptop and running Mac OS you don't care what chip is there no absolutely as it runs right yeah yeah and yet it seems to me I remember with the launch of the iPad there was that famous slide where jobs was saying it has to be something that sits in between a laptop and a phone it's got to be better than this and who buying an iPad would strictly speaking care about that but because it fit quite naturally it it made sense you knew whether you wanted one you knew whether it would be any use to you and then you bought it uh so I think finding a natural narrative for where things fit helps Apple um you mentioned battery performance I think i' totally forgotten about the transition from Power PC to Intel was as well as performance uh Apple went into really great detail in this uh presentation about uh the specifically the power consumption and they said yes normally you think about that for desktops but it has all of these implications for uh desktops as well sorry look about for laptops it has implications for everything you can do this you can do that um so suddenly battery power and stuff uh this is becoming a perfect storm um they must swap to arm I think we've decided that okay well it's settled there you go all right there you go done it's it's good to help Apple out with some advice every now and again isn't it oh they need it don't they yes yes here's an example where they really need it there was a young man from Australia who has plad guilty to downloading 90 GB of secure files from Apple's internal systems and he accessed customer accounts in repeated hacks from his nice sub been home a teenager in Melbourne yes dreamed of working for apple one day will be sentenced next month now at this happened last year Apple alerted the FBI who coordinated with Australian authorities and and apple was very of course sensitive about publicity the case was kept out of the media until these Court proceedings now aside from the 90 Gig of data it's really clear just how widespread this breach is or or what type of counts were accessed or what other information was there and we don't know whether it was worldwide or limited to Australia or or any of this Apple's not commenting in a big surprise but um he did it from his Suburban Family Home and his home was raided last year by authorities they found all the files in a folder named are you ready mhm hacky hack hack okay you sure this was Australia cuz in Britain we have things like boy mcboat face and things a name suggested for things I like this guy now hacky sorry hacky hack hack yes right Australian federal police seized two Apple laptops they found that the accused had obtained authorized keys to access Apple systems there's no indication we don't know if the acquired data was provided to any third parties um he communicated with others using Whatsapp about the intrusion but the content of those conversations has not been released it's um yeah now earlier this week just to keep things in context Australia's government has a debate going on they're scheduling over whether to force a weakening of encryption by Apple and other companies and uh this is something that comes up perennially with governments they continually want the keys and I expect Apple to to maintain their current position of no no under no circumstances um Apple was fined 6.7 million in June by Australian Regulators over iPhone and iPad repair practices um also very much kind of a non-story right 6.7 million Australian dollars you think Apple blinked too hard at that well we say that but it's still um you know somebody in the accounts Department got very cross writing that check or something I'm sure so just yes but their repair policies maintain them as the Central Supply of parts and documentation and service and they do so even though the alternative position is that Parts should be available to third parties at will that documentation should be available and that you should be able to choose who you want to service your device but they do this to maintain tight control for a reason and and the reason is that they want to make sure that the parts are up to their standards they want to make sure that the work is up to their standards and because when a device fails and fails spectacularly whether that's Up in Flames or damage to property or damage to a person or or anything else horrible that could happen it's their reputation that gets the hit and it also means that they know that their parts assembled maintain a secure device the secure element is the the gatekeeper if you will of all privacy and Security in the device and they need to make sure that it and touch ID and face ID and all those things are not um compromised so there they have reasons for being the central source of this but what it's done is there's an interesting side effect of this that there is a whole business around producing aftermarket compatible parts M you know you can't you can't get the screens from Apple and you can't get them from Apple suppliers because they don't want to lose their contract but there's this whole builtup industry around supplying third party parts that are part compatible and maybe not as good or maybe as good but it's hard to know as a consumer you know whether or not the flexible printed circuit was made up to the same standards kind of thing but um it's out there and and that's what sprung up in in to fill this vacuum that Apple has allowed to happen interesting so you're seeing the fines as uh well Apple regard as the cost of doing business uh but also I think you're saying you can't tell as a consumer I think my automatic assumption must be that a part has got to be not as good as Apple because Apple can make will make a million of these things and a third party company might make a few hundred or a few thousand of them so the chance of The Kinks being worked out is infinitely greater on the Apple side but the expense of Apple repairs yes yes so I was uh when I was traveling and I was using the Android phone my daughter was using her SE and she had it in an OtterBox case a a really really rugged proper case and she dropped at 3 feet to the floor and the screen did not shatter there was no broken glass but the colors appeared in stripes on the screen they they you could still see our image but touch died as a result wow and okay so the SC the screen was functional the home button was functional but you couldn't touch it and there was a weird cast to some stripes in the thing but you could still see all of the content and all the content was represented it was just as if some of the stripes were faded in color and I took it to a kiosk along the side of the street from where we were and for 250 shekels because of the currency where I was they changed it to a replacement display and I know that display is a third party not an original product I'm aware of it it functions the touch functions on it maybe the touch controller on the Apple product is slightly better but I can't really measure that it seems to function perfectly from that standpoint the only thing that I can complain about the repair was that they I don't think they used the correct Square adhesive around the home button because the home button the the touch ID button has a little bit more rock to it than it does when the phone ships from Apple okay but it still works as Touch ID totally functional yeah absolutely functional didn't change that's brilliant then yes I mean I don't know what the shekel to dollar rate is somewhere around the 3.6 range I think okay a bargain n nominally 70 bucks let's say okay um I had a screen repaired uh by Apple I think it was 90 but it was a couple years AG I'm trying to guess now which is not a massive massive difference uh from that but it's more it's quite a bit more yeah okay well you see I'm I'm rich obviously that's what it is uh I don't notice this small change yeah stuff he said 250 shekels is $67 and 90 British pound is17 okay I'm really not confident now of how much it cost but it was around that Mark for it but okay I mean actually I remember thinking it was less than I feared uh and it was obviously less than getting a new phone for it so I was quite relieved but I I'm quite reassured now that you had a good experience with an alternative uh next time think I think my concern is with these newer phones iPhone 7 and forward where they're used a lot of glue and under water resistant because obviously anyone outside of Apple is going to irreparably damage that that water resistance right so you realize you just made me think oh I could go to a third party thing and now you've taken that away from me for one moment I had all these opportunities I dangled that bright future out there and I snatch it back every bit as quick you did okay thanks I realized actually we got away from the the teenage hacker and the thing that keeps coming back to my mind is what was the 90 gigabytes I me what could fit into that is that just customer billing details is I I we'll never know but I'm fascinated by the specificness of 90 gabt what could he have got so here's here are the things that I'm speculating about and this is pure speculation this isn't in the news story it's just me spitballing here if you're hacking Apple there there are two things that you want right there's there's the reputation from your mates for having done it there's so there's reputation gain right what could you possibly get well you could get unreleased software you could get Internal Documentation you but but the real prize if there's a prize is the ability to undo iCloud right and and by Cloud I mean iCloud lock where if your device is stolen um and someone resets it they can't get into your device or can't open the device without putting in your email address and password for iCloud to be able to get back into the device uh effectively stolen devices are nearly useless if you can't defeat that and so one of the real things that's out there is if you could steal the information required to be able to unlock stolen I iOS devices then you would have a product that you could resell that makes sense be curious to well there's also things of where this data would be you're saying we don't know if it was worldwide and stuff how much does Apple release outside catino is everything well so Apple Apple has data centers worldwide because what they're trying to do is make the services faster and so you make Services Faster by placing data centers local to where the consumers are Chinese data centers are in China and in fact there was a whole cruffle about that because they had to be held by uh you know with Chinese access to them kind of thing uh presumably there's a data center in Australia so that the Australians data is kept there as well um you know trying to push data over Transatlantic cable as opposed to things that are local to you it's there's a speed hit um so that's that's the what we don't know is did he get information from Australian consumers did he get customer information from worldwide we have no idea I was just speculating I just yeah but you're right those are the targets well they're the targets you would think I I would I don't know something about the fact that he dreamed of working for Apple which I suspect might not happen now um and that he was a teenager I think is what you said if their they cued us to prestige every time I've hacked into Apple it's been to score some points and impress my friends down the pub yeah okay impress your friends get girls whatever the old thing was exactly so there is this dream of of hacking someone and then working there the the concept and it's very misinformed very misguided but the idea is if I show them they've got a vulnerability then they'll hire me to fix it and and there is such a thing as penetration testing but when you do pen testing when you do this kind of thing you are hired as a security consult consultant first and then you do the hack it's it's not the reverse order where you you want to be um want to show up and say hey by the way look at all I got no doesn't go over nearly as well as when it's pre-arranged the but but you know it's a valid question is how do you position yourself as someone that should be hired for that kind of penetration testing well what if you done well I hacked apple and I got 90 gigs interesting okay good point yes so so he may not work for Apple but he may be able to spin it into a consultancy for penetration testing and security testing okay there was something oddly innocent about the the dreaming to work Apple but yes this could have set his it could ultimately have been a good move for his career I suppose uh presumably he's not going to prison we don't know actually sentencing next month isn't it or something yes it is yes anyway he's only Teenage he'll be out before he's yeah my age yes okay last story I've got last thing I want to talk about is the App Store now there was a meeting held last year at a New York Loft we're only finding out it now that this is from a report in Business Insider Apple convened an invitation only meeting in New York in uh April of 2017 so going way back aimed at letting developers know that the model the business model for apps was changing and that what Apple needed them to know is that they needed to think about recurring revenue from subscriptions rather than one-time sales what we've seen in the past year is that more and more apps are switching to a subscription model which led to Apple's announcement of the last quarterly earnings report that paid subscriptions from Apple and third parties have passed 300 million now we don't know which developers were at the meeting we don't know who was there representing Apple we don't even know who owns the waft where it took a place what we know is that Apple introduced the developers at this meeting to an idea referred to as subscription 2.0 and this is the idea of software as a service that they needed to shift their focus away from upfront costs into long-term Revenue this makes complete sense to me from the standpoint of solving the question of how do you keep app developers in business which is something Apple has to have been concerned with right you know if you're an app developer you have one Hill when you release the app and a lot of valleys and terms of income earning right it's basically you launch and it dives off a cliff afterwards and how do you keep people going and how do you keep developers able to keep going if if this is the model I like it when you put it like that it makes sense it's Apple obviously looking after its own interests but also looking after developers trying to help them um but it's just funny the idea of a secret meeting in a New York Loft uh selected audience it just feels like apple you know cracking its Knuckles and say right this is how it's going to be from now on you're going to pay us a subscri it just feels a bit more ominous until you put it that way I like it it's not Apple saying you're going to pay us a subscription it's it's Apple telling developers right you're charging 99 C for your app how exactly do you intend to feed yourself how are how are you going to afford a new Macbook Pro with shiny new xcode if you're charging a dollar for your app and all of your sales are on your first day of release yes okay now Apple wants their 30% that they take from every app store purchase absolutely but it's it's uh it's symbiotic really right they Apple doesn't have an app store if there aren't developers and developers what happens sorry what happens with um Apple's cut of subscription uh is that still 30% of every year I subscribe is it I think that it is okay then would make sense uh wouldn't it I was I was getting into a discussion about the 30% with someone on Reddit and and the first rule is never get into a discussion with someone on Reddit that that's that was my first error but the the fellow was talking about how Amazon purchases specifically Kindle kind of thing or Prime video don't happen through the Prime Video app and don't happen through the Kindle app that you have to go out to a browser to be able to do that or in his case he was telling his girlfriend to order on an Android because Android doesn't take that cut and he was saying that if they were going to do it on iOS that they would have to raise the price by 30% and I said no no no that's not how any of this works the way that this works is that you keep the prices uniform across consumers the consumer seems at the same price and you eat the 30% and the reason you do this he says well the 30% is the is being charged because Apple claims they can charge it because their secure their their app store is more secure and again no no that's not how any of this works the reason that Apple charges 30% is because they take care of a lot of the tax documentation that you need to have to be able to sell worldwide they take care of the payment processing so that you can sell worldwide you don't have to advertise yourself worldwide you list once on one app store and they take care of it for you that's what you're paying your 30% for every payment processor no matter who you're doing takes a fee now yes if you're Amazon you don't need Apple to do that you can do it just as well yourself but for smalltime developers you absolutely want Apple to be your payment processor because trying to arrange that for yourself in different countries is a giant headache well actually I have an app on the app store and I went through the internationalist and even with apple doing everything I found it quite dizzying working out what applied where and things so the idea of having to do it all from scratch for myself it just I wouldn't have I would have stopped I would have walked away I also used to have an app on the App Store what's what's your app mine's called River passage it's a poem by a British author called Jeff Phelps um done as Arts Council project really rather than a big commercial thing uh but it was an interesting model getting his work in a new form seeing how it might change poetry apps it's still a thing in progress really but the app bit um we were required to sell it for the lowest price the 99 Cents thing and that meant having to make sure I understood all of the sales process for it and yes it always boil down to just ticking a box here or there with apple um the complexity was hidden and I still found it a bit daunting I haven't yet uh been compelled back with the next release but sooner or later I will because they do make it easier um I thought you were going to say that the thing about eating the 30% is yes all of that makes sense but also you are going to sell more on iOS than you will on Android uh because people will buy things on iOS so yes the the dollar value per unit is the same but you will sell more units on uh iPhone and so it's worth it's another cost of doing business to get that custom in so I trust the person on Reddit was uh thoroughly persuaded and convinced by your arguments yes I I think you overestimate Reddit okay well we've overshot our time I meant to keep this a little bit shorter but it's been such a pleasure speaking with you William I have enjoyed this and we should do it again I'd like that be nice checking yes you know and if you've been listening to us and you've enjoyed this one please let me know and in fact if you've not enjoyed it if you think this was a complete waste of time and was awful you can tell me that too uh go ahead and reach out to us I'm ATV marks on Twitter or we can you can email newsapple insider.com or William what are you on Twitter I'm W gallager so wga l h h wonderful that's fantastic this is the end of another great episode of the Apple Insider podcast we will be back next week in the meantime go ahead and let us know what you thought and go ahead and please give us feedback and also make sure you keep an eye out for Williams stories on Apple Insider this next week um actually I was so looking forward to the articles that are coming out next week on Apple Insider things I really like exploring as a journalist so I hope everybody enjoys it too uh and uh Victor has been a treat having a proper chat with you thank you for this wonderful let's go have some tea excellent Sal I put the kettle on right now biscuits biscuits biscuits I need to let all of our listeners know that jamp now makes it easy to set up manage and protect your Apple devices so you can focus on your business there's no it experience needed with jamp now you can check your digital inventory distribute Wi-Fi email settings deploy apps protect company data and even lock or wipe a device as needed from anywhere and now Apple Insider podcast listeners can start securing your business today by setting up your first three devices for free forever add more for just $2 a month per device create your free account today at jam.com appleinsider that's jf.com slapple inssider I've got you on Slackyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to this episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor and joining me this week is the wonderful William Gallagher oh I like that hello our wonderful Victor welcome William I'm so glad to have you here thanks it's a treat to be on here I like the canteen you've got I've said this before nice place here yeah now the canteen of course is only open for a limited number of hours during the day but we'll make sure that when they are they serve excellent tea thank you very much yes yeah oong Earl gry no herbal uh Yorkshire Tea if we're getting this specific and you're picking up on my English accent Yorkshire Tea uh soft water a little bit of milk uh no sugar place okay got it I'll get right on that thanks thank you well I do we should talk a little bit about a story that Mikey Campbell published on the site this week now this is this is one that we've been covering for ages this is a story going back two years but uh your favorite analyst and mine mingi quo believes that Apple still has autonomous vehicle aspirations that project Titan as we've been calling it all this time is going to result in a shipping consumer product that could be available as early as 2023 you know know an actual Apple car if you will mhm well yeah it's what you see as the phrase was as early as 2023 but I'm thinking that's 5 years away of addiction uh I don't know i' like it to be true you you say that but I'm going to keep bringing it up every time we have a story that Mikey writes about it so the the Apple car is Mikey's beat as it were and every time the story comes up the question is will there be a car or is Apple simply working on telematics to provide a platform that they'll work with some other partner on it's a curious thing isn't it because everything we've heard so far is that they tried to have their own platform and chose for various reasons to go the other route and yet it feels more Apple like to try at least try to do the complete uh thing in one um maybe I'm wrong they abandoned monitors at least for a bit but yeah it doesn't feel like it would be an Apple car if it was a Tesla with I don't know a spectacular version of carplay added to it well and and thinking about that it's interesting because the first Tesla was in fact a Lotus oh no I didn't know that the original Tesla Roadster was a Lotus that they gutted and put all of their bits into and the reason they stopped doing that and went to build the model S was because it it turned out there were in fact no cost savings by using the Lotus platform it was it was actually worse well that's interesting it was more expensive to to buy Lotus Platforms in retrofit traditionally the the motor industry has claimed that well actually much like the phone industry that a new company can't just come in and do something because it's it's the complexity uh is so much greater than I might imagine as an ordinary driver uh but it does sound like yeah maybe just I want this to be true but I'm finding reasons to be convinced by it um so historically the the way that Apple got into phones was they originally partnered with Motorola on a on a phone a regular feature phone type handset that had iTunes synchronization capability built into it terrible terrible phone called the The Rocker error wasn't it I just Dre that's right yeah it was the motor rocker and you could tell at the announcement at the keynote that Steve Jobs was holding back yes any any kind of vitriol that he might have reserved for the thing to make the announcement of success and and you know there are people that watch Steve Jobs Keynotes and I think the times that you really learn the most from those Keynotes are when you're watching him announce something he doesn't want to announce when you're watching him deal with a PR Fiasco that he would have rather not had to have dealt with like the iPhone 4 antenna gate nonsense yeah or when he doesn't have anything of significance to announce like if you go back to the the 2001 time for frame when he announced the flower power and dalmatian blue iMac models yes that was back when uh they had to announce things because they were at maor and maor was on a fixed schedule and maybe that contributed to why they abandoned that and only do their own although oh absolutely it did yeah so you know are they going to make a car is a good question and I I agree with you they do their best and they are happiest when they have control over every part of the product and I I think the lesson to learn from the displays as you mentioned and I would also add to that the airport Wi-Fi routers that they've gotten out of is that they leave these segments when they feel like the rest of the market has caught up and there's nothing left exciting to contribute okay that feels quite um magnanimous of them uh like we have created this Market we have dispensed wisdom and now the rest of you can just carry on in our field but that does seem to be what happened with Wi-Fi yes I mean with not only with Wi-Fi if you go back historically right printers they had laser writers when Laser Printers were a big deal they had inkjet printers that were essentially uh partner made products with Canon and others that they got out of when they were no longer a big deal right they had digital cameras they had the quick shot cameras quick take and they got out of that as well great if now you say it it's a it is a patent isn't it I hadn't seen that I used to have one of those laser writers uh yes all right okay well in that case it's absolutely definitely true I'm crossing my fingers but you think we'll see apple and somebody else first and then Apple I'm not sure that's that's the historical pattern but on a thing this big that is this important to them right if they were announcing this it would be a Halo product and in fact quo says that this could take the the company towards the two $2 trillion valuation right doubling where they are today so if if that's true would they want to share that with anyone else now obviously they're going to be using tons of partner manufacturers as they currently do for all the other products they don't actually own the manufacturing capacity anyway but they would want it to be a fully apple branded product not a partner product true I don't see them getting into making rubber for the tires uh for example they will buy in for that just this reminds starting to remind me of the Apple watch which we were waiting for for so long um and then in 2015 when they finally announced it uh they how long did they said they've been working on it not as long as we thought I think but this feels the same and it I don't know I love my Apper watch and I think it's been a great success for Apple but when it was on its way everybody was expecting it to be the new iPhone the new giant thing and it and it hasn't been that and I possibly don't think it could ever have been yet that kind of anticipation feeling um didn't really have it over even the airpods which I adore the homod which seems great but I'm starting to get it now with the car so now this is just all adding to me wanting it doesn't help whether it's true I feel like with the watch and airpods that this is a they're pieces of a puzzle that is still coming together that that we can't quite see all of the pieces in place yet but the idea is what if you don't have to take your phone out of the pocket every time what if you can leave your phone at home some of the time and if you've got the watch and the airpods then you've got a decent amount of input and interaction with a device that doesn't require taking this big screen of glass out of your phone out of your pocket I I think we've talked about augmented reality and Tim Cook's vision for augmented reality currently that relies on the phone glass but there's also been a lot of talk about micro displays and glasses and things like that and of course the problem with glasses is they're obtrusive but presuming that Apple knows what they're doing and wants to make glasses that are inobtrusive then imagine you have that as a display you've got the watch as a secondary display and you've got the airpods for audio that's augmented reality and interaction then you've got something that comes together where you don't need the phone any longer which just you can you imagine any other company doing that they have this brilliant phone most of them Microsoft they would be milking it every possible way Forever Until it died but Apple does have this habit of just tossing aside something I remember with the was the iPad Mini incredible success totally wiped it out and replaced it with something else uh uh better if you like but constantly moving forward and chucking things away it's quite animalistic and impressive I think and I don't know any other company you have to be willing to kill your children and think of the products as children because they they do take 9 months to two years to give birth to but you have to be willing to kill them before someone else does yes absolutely I mean I'm a writer to the phrase killing your children and your babies uh it talks very specifically about things that are really personal to you and you have to have a certain Detachment which is true here but then that part you said they're about competitors uh coming in and things uh cannibalizing your own sales that's the phrase and it's yes surely that's how Apple has been heading has how it's got to the first trillion seems reasonable to think that's how it will get to the next now the thing about the car ownership for me is interesting because I think we're talking clearly about an autonomous car here that's one of the things that apple and Tesla and everyone else is also working towards yeah if car ownership changes in the future potentially does does if if cars are autonomous and you can use car services to call them and Page them when you want do you have to own a car necessarily what is the advantage of owning a car if you can have one come whenever you like the I think there is a personality thing there have been times in my life when I've enjoyed having my car and driving but right now it's just this bucket of metal that I have to service too often uh right now I'm more into the journey uh so I lean towards uh just you know snapping your fingers and the nearest one coming to you but are other people no I can see it as uh personal identity as well but you're right over time Steve Jobs had a interesting phrase about uh typing or something on computer I think he said that uh ultimately death will sort out the problem because as new people come along they don't have the old expectations and they do embrace the new so yes maybe we are the last car owning generation wow you know we you and I grew up associating car ownership and driver's licenses with personal freedom yes yes we did and yeah I I think what we're seeing is the unbundling of Transportation because we we've got of course these these car services that come when you want them we've got car autonomy coming we've also got the the uh bicycle programs for ride you know sharing bicycle sharing that's littered around major cities we've got the uh the electric scooters that have been littered around cities as well uh I don't know if you've seen those yet but they've been around in San Francisco and they're now in my city on the East Coast as well uh where what they're doing is these these uh push scooters that you'd stand up and ride upon have an electric front wheel they're uh sold by xiaoi and others and these companies have have attached a QR code and an app and a GPS to them and basically you scan the QR code with your phone you pay a dollar to ride to your desk ation and you ride on the scooter for however long that's great getting across London would be really I mean we have the bikes here but we don't have that I really fancy that hurry up and bring it to London so that's coming and the thing that comes after that are electric bicycles and electric mopeds okay and you know electric with well you know with London you've got the uh the whole congestion reduction and uh emissions reduction acts right you want to have a fewer cars driving through London testing London you want to have fewer cars driving through smogging up the place and so all electric all littered all over the place at convenient locations to pick up makes a big difference doesn't it absolutely and London already is better since the congestion charge came in however many years ago it was um I just I'm when I was thinking about the scooters uh I kind of run across London on foot a lot and leap in and out of the tube so it's like individual transport I'm very bitty getting to this Mee and getting to that friend uh and for that kind of thing the ability to just step on a scooter and effectively throw it away at the other end just bung it back in yeah you just drop it off and that's that right yeah oh I love that yes yes that's interesting that's actually making that appeals to me and I was briefly thinking that uh all of this talk of Apple cars is making me more interested in driving um I had a test drive in a Tesla recently and uh it was such a gorgeous thing even you 10-minute Drive I was hooked by the end and actually particularly about this um I remember the salesman was telling me about this you know Auto sensing of the car ahead and it was speeding up and all this and I thought you know longtime driver I will never trust that within seconds he was pointing out another control to me and I realized I was looking where he was pointing I'd just forgotten the road completely and it didn't matter cuz the car was dealing with me you really adapt to these things fast so even a long-standing driver like me I think is going to embrace these if they come as early as 2023 yes now we should take a moment and let our listeners know that this episode is brought to you by jamp now jamp now makes it easy to set up manage and protect your Apple devices it's easy to keep track of your own Mac iPad or iPhone but what about the other devices at work as a business grows so does its digital inventory making it harder to manage everyone's Apple devices and this is especially true if employees are remote with jamp now you can protect your digital inventory distribute Wi-Fi and email settings deploy apps protect company data and even lock or wipe a device from anywhere champ now manages devices so you can focus on your business instead and there's no it experience needed Apple Insider podcast listeners can start securing your business today by setting up your first three devices for free forever and you can add more for just $2 a month per device create your free account today at j.com appleinsider that's jf.com slapple Insider William are you familiar with Warren Buffett at all oh yes absolutely but I realize actually I know why you're mentioning him now because he's bought Apple shares I only ever seem to hear of this guy when he buys Apple shares and he keeps buying them um but he seems to be doing well with this m Mr Buffett is sometimes called the um the wizard of Omaha and he has Brookshire Hathaway and they've made money after money money on top of money over the years through policies that that he thinks are really quite simple and of course this is this is something that he's pretty much done since he became an adult it's he's never worked for anywhere else this has just been his thing and it's grown and grown and grown so clearly he's doing something correctly one of the things that he said years ago was that he would only buy a share in a company if he really felt like he wanted to own the whole company that this was the way that he thought of ownership that that if he would be willing to own the whole business then he was willing to own a share of it and with apple clearly he feels like this is a company that he could own or he would like to own because he keeps buying buying and buying it looks as if he has increased his position by 5% now that is 252 million shares wow okay so yeah he's serious about it yeah yeah that's um you know his his most recent purchase was uh about 12 million some shares or about $5.4 billion that's more money than I earned last year well you need to you need to change jobs clearly clear or or take on a second one you could be working more William come on that is sh I'm sorry oh following Warren Buffett's advice well is it advice he just keeps doing it does he have to tell people what he does because it doesn't seem like everybody rushes to copy him each time and yet here's the thing you when you've got a moment and are looking for something mildly entertaining to do look at the annual letters that they put out they they publish their annual report as companies tend to do and theirs are easy to read They're digestible and somewhat entertaining and there are nuggets of the advice contained within okay that's where I got this quote from that that said that you know his policy was to own a whole own parts of company if he felt like he'd own the whole company and and looking at some of the things that he's owned over the years he doesn't necessarily understand the whole business or he doesn't necessarily feel like he could run the whole business you know he bought a farm at one point they have they have a realy arm that does residential house sales but that's not the detail the detail is would he want to own that whole business not necessarily would he want to become a farmer or a realtor and so there's all sorts of little bits of of interesting bits in there and of course I was mistaken earlier when I said he was The Wizard Of Omaha he's in fact the Oracle of Omaha because that alliteration is important and I blew it but um you know his quote here his quote here is Apple was a company I liked a business liked very much Buffett said in an interview it was a company I liked a business I liked very much and we could buy a lot of it I clearly like apple and why buy them to hold we bought about 5% of the company I'd like to Own 100% of it so he says it again okay this doesn't sound like your typical business analyst investor it feels like somebody who actually cares um uh in the detail rather than the money I'm sure investors you know very clever and all this stuff but it it feels well maybe he's just got the money to indulge interest in it but it's working out as a seems to be working out as a business venture as well well I mean it's it's apple as a business is not incredibly hard to understand right they make products they sell products they make services available for those products and they sell those too and they just happen to do quite a lot of it there's it's it's you're forgetting that apple is also doomed all the time that's what I keep reading so well perennially but um and and also by the way supposedly Amazon is going to be the the real1 trillion company and and all sorts of things like that but the the point is that Apple does things that are are at a root level very easy to explain it's not like trying to explain Bitcoin for example right right yes and we've tried to do that on this show in the past and we could do it again but you know it's it's not like saying there are distributed applications held on a blockchain that is immutable and trading is done through exchanges right right there are a lot of terms there that a lot of people won't really want to bother understanding Apple they make products they sell them they make nice products which is why they sell a lot of them and they have a retail arm through which they can sell them and all of that is done Tastefully and successfully that's that's a good reason to want to own that business wouldn't you say well certainly since it works I mean no I can't disagree yes my mind with then when you went about the stores I suddenly thought about Microsoft stores which I think are well done but they don't work out but actually uh Microsoft it's all tied to the products as well isn't it so apple has a much clearer much more easily embraceable set of products so yes I completely agree I fany that business um shall we invest uh honestly I already did oh cool okay I I have uh I have fewer than 100 shares I've got probably around 40 shares 30 shares something like that so you're not really competing with Warren Buffett uh for Apple's attention not no not one bit now you know I you might say that my uh my reporting and my coverage of Apple is colored by my investment by my Holdings um but the the fact that I can't remember how many or few that I actually have should let on that I'm not that uh that fuss well actually I mean you're a journalist aren't you and it's particularly in business it's really useful sometimes to have a tiny share in any company because it immediately opens you to getting information uh that they wouldn't release otherwise so that's why most uh I was on BBC news for a while and lots of people would do that sort of thing for that um journalistic purposes there you go we should ALS also talk a little bit about Apple's expanding admissions in healthcare now we mentioned the Apple watch previously uh Apple has of course their big health research center and it appears that they posted a job listing where they're looking for Asic which is uh application specific integrated circuits or chip design Architects to develop new sensors and sensing systems for future Apple products and it's it seems to be that it's specifically in health wellness and fitness sensors so are you surprised by this Revelation I wasn't expecting it uh but it's one of those where in retrospect I'm happy with it I mean as you said that my mind went fact that I'm in Britain we're in the middle of the brexit stuff and I don't know if the rest of the world cares but it's had peculiar repercussions with passports and things even an argument about the color it's just insane and the idea that actually a device that you would carry with you anyway always or where and your watch would do the job of a passport that actually appeals to me we covered that last week actually we covered that apple as a patent on this and we talked about that last week um now I know I know you want your blue passport cover back and I really don't care hly yeah the color yeah very important but that's so British isn't it I think to care about the color um but yes I want to keep my EU passport but this is a whole other issue I'm sorry I'm I think I'm mixing things up here uh Apple seems be doing a lot of biometal work uh then well they are and and you know there's this whole push to revolutionize what the uh medical health record is and Apple's been doing some work on this and using the health kit and care kit and uh research kit data to guide that they've got their health research center and they've got uh or at least had applications open for some medical staff that they were going to hire as a sort of Apple employee health care center we thought so there's a lot of interest in in medical health and Apple trying to rewrite what a health record looks like and who has control over it for example for example in America patients don't really have access to or control over their health record doctors do yes and in other countries in in uh I'm going to get this wrong but forgive me uh Sweden Denmark Norway something like this uh one of those I believe that that patients own the record and the record stays with them rather than the doctor necessarily um and and that's a very different interesting position now there was also a report that I had earlier this week that said that uh Google and Amazon and Microsoft were working on a plan to create a Consortium to rewrite what a medical record is so there's a lot of attention on this and really giving the patient access and giving the patient control I I currently have access to my medical records from at least three different providers in healthkit actually which is incredibly convenient I can get test results and look them up and see what what my vitals were at the last time I was checked it's really quite useful it s I'd be sorry too scared to look I think but the having the ability is great I mean we have a thing the UK is so far behind on certain things and one of them is is Medical Records I mean we have the Fantastic NHS but it's been just gutted from the inside with uh budget cuts and things we have this issue now that a lot of local health care provider it's still all the records are on paper and there are moves to slowly move them onto digital but there's some uh push back of people not wanting things to go on digital and and I do understand the security but the idea if I uh get incredibly ill in Glasgow I don't want a delay uh of them finding out some condition I've got because I live in Birmingham or London or somewhere I want people to have that ability to know what's right and to fix me um but I realized actually as soon as you say Microsoft and Google are doing this am I wrong but I'm thinking are they also looking for a way to monetize this and and why wouldn't they but still uh well Google is interesting and Google wants to monetize a number of things but at the same time there's this other side of Google that is about medical research and and Longevity and and this is a pet project of uh Larry because Larry and Sergey both think that that one time they said that to achieve all that they wanted to accomplish they would have to live to be 150 and so they have been applying machine learning and research to try and figure out how to increase longevity so it's it's it's not the profit motive as much as the ulterior motive of actually them being able to continue living yes it'd be nice if we all had that I said a moment ago that uh we might be the last car driving generation there is an argument that we might be the last comparatively short-lived generation at the one after us will not be immortal but will go on vastly longer lives this makes us the unluckiest generation ever really doesn't it well I I don't want to go down and saying that because I me far too depressing depends on what happens with your brexit for example you could have lasting effects that make the Next Generation a lot unluckier okay I don't know why I'm laughing it's true but yes you're laughing because crying hurts too much yes right uh I I'll so later over my tea okay I'll join you okay uh so Google is doing a good thing and Microsoft will do an efficient thing I still think Apple will do the Privacy thing uh I could be wrong to have more faith in apple it's just you know so many things in the past this thing with even location stuff Google saying uh you can switch off location tracking and really care exactly uh so maybe apple is secretly evil and just covers it better but right now um I really like health kit I think the strides that are happening there the abilities it's giving the world are a fantastic thing so more of that I'd be happy with yeah the thing that matters here is adoption and Apple has done a decent job of having adoption of research kit and a decent job of adoption with care kit and they know what's required to get adoption having gone through the banking system to get Apple pay adopted everywhere where Android pay is still not by many financial institutions and so that's that's the detail that really counts is getting people participating Google has tried to do Google medical records in years past and couldn't get adoption Google has Google Fit which doesn't have near the adoption that healthkit does so there's a lot at work there that says that Google and Microsoft if they do manage to revolutionize these things they're going to have to do it in a way that catches up on adoption you know Apple currently has somewhere between 50 and 100 institutions that are sharing medical records into health kit that are available on Apple Health right now and that doesn't sound like a lot but when you're dealing with bureaucracy it's not nothing no I'm impressed with that I I'm just conscious that here I am liking Apple But ultimately there are so many more Android phones in the world that uh people who have that are not contributing data to anywhere as just been able to have something that they worked they they would have problems catching up with Apple's connections with institutions but as soon as something works and is adopted on every Android phone that massive data would be fantastic right so the the thing is that research kit is is open source carekit is open source I believe but um the health data is not and so what could happen is that people can figure out how to work with research kit uh and other devices potentially or that Apple can go ahead and bless that as they've blessed Apple music on other platforms or this can be a wedge to say you know you can get your records the traditional way by speaking with your provider or you could go have an iPhone and have them all yes right and which one would be Apple's preferred way I can't quite work that one out so I mean Apple Apple's very subtle about this they don't really advertise this but it's it's sort of a a nice byproduct of having the iPhone they um yes you know they're busy talking about normal things like Apple pay cash and trying to do person-to person payments and things like that which they also need to push quite frankly but uh I I think you know I I used an phone over the summer I used an Android phone for 2 months as a primary device and for notifications and and day-to-day use it was pretty slick it was certainly faster and more responsive on a 2-year-old Nexus 6p than it was on my my aging iPhone 6 so I I really felt the the sort of pangs the sort of tug at the heartstrings could I go with Android fulltime but there's so many other benefits to using the I phone and using all the things that Apple has in place that um I I think I'll be sticking with iOS for the foreseeable future it's not um the iPhone it's the Apple ecosystem that that Mak sense okay it really does it does there is one odity about the Apple ecosystem you mentioned about Apple pay and apple having to work hard to get institutions doing it in the UK at least the moment Apple pay launched it was everywhere because it worked with any um contact system that was in and that was it straight away so the UK has both uh chip card on the uh the the credit cards chip and pin and also had tap to pay in place with Oyster card and things like that for years uh America had an early early trial with tap to pay and it failed abysmally because it was said in the press to not be secure at the time and that was that was decades ago it was early on not to not very secure and it was it was in place and used at McDonald's and I think Exxon speed pay were the places that it was used at the gas pump at the petrol pump and uh you know the the stories that would go around where you know if you had it in your pocket and someone brushed up against you with your reader they could steal your number kind of thing and you have to recall that it's only been the past couple of years that America transitioned to Chip and signature we didn't I didn't realize that chip we never had chip on the cards before they were always swipe the stripe cards and we only just transition in the past few years to chip in signature we did not transition to chip in pin this explains why I keep hearing that the greater majority of credit card Ford happens in America it's because uh the system is inherently less secure does that sound plausible well what happens is that it's not so much sealing stripe data it's that the hacks are at the register or the hacks are at the data center right okay I said earlier that Britain technology was lacking but in this one case it actually seems uh in place I don't know how that happened but I'm GL about it it came down to a cost assessment right the transition didn't take place until the risk of reputation damage and fraud damage exceeded the cost of replacing all of the pin Terminals and all of the register software and all of the cards in circulation it it was it was a huge transition cost and so as long as the cost of Fraud and reputation damage were less than that cost no one cared that makes sense and I forget I mean how huge job it would be to change everything in the states um I thought it was a big job here but it's infinitesimal compared to the number of registers little larger than you yeah tiny yes your island nation over there yes yes sorry no it's true I look out the window I can see the sea no I can't actually but we had a politician over here who used to say that she could see Russia from her front porch it didn't go very well for her it was yes oh I remember when she seemed such a threat to politics and now is kind of sweetly Innocent but that's getting too serious isn't it we don't really discuss politics deeply on this show probably for good reason but uh you know if if we've offended any of you listeners out there please feel free to let us know at newsapple insider.com I do apologize yes and for me too for any brexit fans we have over here there must be one or two cuz we voted for it so okay yes let's change again to a completely new topic so Apple partner quanta may see a surge in orders there's a rumor that apple is working on a new inexpensive notebook and they're thinking shipments will Top about 10 million units in December as a result of of this apple order now this comes from taiwan's Digi times and they didn't name this as a new Macbook Digi times has a very mixed track record when it comes to Apple product but it's pretty reliable when they talk about the Taiwanese electronics Industry so this this is interesting you know the the recently MacBook Pros were were updated rather they were updated recently but the 12-in MacBook and 13-in MacBook Air have stayed pretty stagnant for a while haven't they they have I still really like them though if I was in the market for a notebook I'd be so tempted by those current MacBooks even though they're a bit old in there what MacBook do you use uh I actually have um I'm mostly on an iMac but I have an ancient MacBook Pro from about 2009 and things I take out for the odd emergency otherwise it's my iPad Pro for everything it's just I worked with a a friend who got out one of these MacBooks and I loved the keyboard I loved the display she's recently just I mean this week she's bought an iMac she said she was using the MacBook every day and she felt like it was being worn out by it so I'm not sure how useful it is over extended use but for the odd thing I would have uh I love that form factor I even really like the pink gold you know I'm just I'm really I'm a style Guru more than a writer that's what I think it is exactly okay well so it's an interesting report let's keep it in mind because we've got a couple of different kinds of rumors right there's obviously this rumor that the 12-in MacBook is overdue for an update um there's a sense that of course the MacBook Air is definitely overview for an update and the reason the MacBook Air has hung around is because it is so inexpensive and it does a little bit more than the MacBook with its lower spec processor the the thing that we we thought about is that of course the MacBook needs to get a new keyboard to keep Pace with the updated keyboard in the new Macbook Pros also we've had this rumor for ages and ages and ages talking about arm processors in a Macbook and oh yes now we we sort of saw some of this kind of talk at the end of WWDC announcements where they said that by the way here's the system by which you'll be able to run iOS apps on your Mac and it's called marzipan and they showed that they had brought some of the uh the iOS apps over to Mac OS that it was very much a system in development and that people should start looking at it but it's not finalized exactly but they let the cat out of the bag now if you had an arm processor then you could run those Marsen apps without having to emulate them for x86 or recompile them for x86 or x64 you know you would just be running them on their native home platform their native chip if you compiled all of Mac OS for arm and then had fat binaries the same way that we had fat binaries when we transition from Power PC to Intel does this get interesting actually gets slightly Eerie uh we run a pace uh This Way can Ider about the history of the Mac Pro um and uh when I was writing it I was looking at some of the videos of various key launches and I watched Steve Jobs explaining why they were moving from Power PC to Intel and actually some of the arguments feel like they are exactly right again that uh he said we have all these something like we have all these great products we want to do for you but we don't know how we'll do them with the current road map and he meant power PC and they swapped over to Intel but again again we are already seeing things delayed by Intel's uh slower than expected releases that's suddenly when this first came out you cheaper MacBooks I thought that really doesn't sound like apple and what ultimately would be the difference between that and an iPad with a Smart Keyboard but um I have a feeling that if Apple does go to arm it'll do what it did with Intel it'll go all the way everything will swap over um but maybe I'm wrong maybe this is like a test for it I'm interested yeah well the reason that I bring up arm is is that we've had this rumor before but arm has released a road map now arm has never really released a road map before but the road map that they've released makes strong comparisons between themselves and Intel's mid-tier I5 processors and it shows them surpassing those this year wow okay and especially next year with their the next level stuff so so they're really pushing this as a potential laptop kind of chip it's it's intriguing to me because you know you named the power PC transition and having rewatched the keynote that came down to IBM's failure to follow through on their Promises at the time yes you know they they were making the G5 Power Mac chips and they had promised all along that they would be able to make a chip for laptops for a PowerBook G5 and they utterly failed to do so and so here we are that's how that happened do we know if any Windows uh manufacturers are considering arm cuz they have the same thing I suppose well actually it's happened already it's the uh the Surface RT the Microsoft Surface RT was an arm-based product a couple of years ago and that utterly failed in the marketplace because it it was really quite Limited as to what you could run on it and there's been a push to do it again there's there's another product that's a more current product where they're going back to that but the uh this is an idea that keeps coming up and it keeps coming up because of the performance and because of battery management interesting you can do a whole lot if if you have that arm chip now a valid question is you just said you're using an iPad instead of a laptop so yeah it's it's sort of where where does this all fit kind of thing right yes and and of course to the consumer it probably doesn't matter because if you have the laptop and running Mac OS you don't care what chip is there no absolutely as it runs right yeah yeah and yet it seems to me I remember with the launch of the iPad there was that famous slide where jobs was saying it has to be something that sits in between a laptop and a phone it's got to be better than this and who buying an iPad would strictly speaking care about that but because it fit quite naturally it it made sense you knew whether you wanted one you knew whether it would be any use to you and then you bought it uh so I think finding a natural narrative for where things fit helps Apple um you mentioned battery performance I think i' totally forgotten about the transition from Power PC to Intel was as well as performance uh Apple went into really great detail in this uh presentation about uh the specifically the power consumption and they said yes normally you think about that for desktops but it has all of these implications for uh desktops as well sorry look about for laptops it has implications for everything you can do this you can do that um so suddenly battery power and stuff uh this is becoming a perfect storm um they must swap to arm I think we've decided that okay well it's settled there you go all right there you go done it's it's good to help Apple out with some advice every now and again isn't it oh they need it don't they yes yes here's an example where they really need it there was a young man from Australia who has plad guilty to downloading 90 GB of secure files from Apple's internal systems and he accessed customer accounts in repeated hacks from his nice sub been home a teenager in Melbourne yes dreamed of working for apple one day will be sentenced next month now at this happened last year Apple alerted the FBI who coordinated with Australian authorities and and apple was very of course sensitive about publicity the case was kept out of the media until these Court proceedings now aside from the 90 Gig of data it's really clear just how widespread this breach is or or what type of counts were accessed or what other information was there and we don't know whether it was worldwide or limited to Australia or or any of this Apple's not commenting in a big surprise but um he did it from his Suburban Family Home and his home was raided last year by authorities they found all the files in a folder named are you ready mhm hacky hack hack okay you sure this was Australia cuz in Britain we have things like boy mcboat face and things a name suggested for things I like this guy now hacky sorry hacky hack hack yes right Australian federal police seized two Apple laptops they found that the accused had obtained authorized keys to access Apple systems there's no indication we don't know if the acquired data was provided to any third parties um he communicated with others using Whatsapp about the intrusion but the content of those conversations has not been released it's um yeah now earlier this week just to keep things in context Australia's government has a debate going on they're scheduling over whether to force a weakening of encryption by Apple and other companies and uh this is something that comes up perennially with governments they continually want the keys and I expect Apple to to maintain their current position of no no under no circumstances um Apple was fined 6.7 million in June by Australian Regulators over iPhone and iPad repair practices um also very much kind of a non-story right 6.7 million Australian dollars you think Apple blinked too hard at that well we say that but it's still um you know somebody in the accounts Department got very cross writing that check or something I'm sure so just yes but their repair policies maintain them as the Central Supply of parts and documentation and service and they do so even though the alternative position is that Parts should be available to third parties at will that documentation should be available and that you should be able to choose who you want to service your device but they do this to maintain tight control for a reason and and the reason is that they want to make sure that the parts are up to their standards they want to make sure that the work is up to their standards and because when a device fails and fails spectacularly whether that's Up in Flames or damage to property or damage to a person or or anything else horrible that could happen it's their reputation that gets the hit and it also means that they know that their parts assembled maintain a secure device the secure element is the the gatekeeper if you will of all privacy and Security in the device and they need to make sure that it and touch ID and face ID and all those things are not um compromised so there they have reasons for being the central source of this but what it's done is there's an interesting side effect of this that there is a whole business around producing aftermarket compatible parts M you know you can't you can't get the screens from Apple and you can't get them from Apple suppliers because they don't want to lose their contract but there's this whole builtup industry around supplying third party parts that are part compatible and maybe not as good or maybe as good but it's hard to know as a consumer you know whether or not the flexible printed circuit was made up to the same standards kind of thing but um it's out there and and that's what sprung up in in to fill this vacuum that Apple has allowed to happen interesting so you're seeing the fines as uh well Apple regard as the cost of doing business uh but also I think you're saying you can't tell as a consumer I think my automatic assumption must be that a part has got to be not as good as Apple because Apple can make will make a million of these things and a third party company might make a few hundred or a few thousand of them so the chance of The Kinks being worked out is infinitely greater on the Apple side but the expense of Apple repairs yes yes so I was uh when I was traveling and I was using the Android phone my daughter was using her SE and she had it in an OtterBox case a a really really rugged proper case and she dropped at 3 feet to the floor and the screen did not shatter there was no broken glass but the colors appeared in stripes on the screen they they you could still see our image but touch died as a result wow and okay so the SC the screen was functional the home button was functional but you couldn't touch it and there was a weird cast to some stripes in the thing but you could still see all of the content and all the content was represented it was just as if some of the stripes were faded in color and I took it to a kiosk along the side of the street from where we were and for 250 shekels because of the currency where I was they changed it to a replacement display and I know that display is a third party not an original product I'm aware of it it functions the touch functions on it maybe the touch controller on the Apple product is slightly better but I can't really measure that it seems to function perfectly from that standpoint the only thing that I can complain about the repair was that they I don't think they used the correct Square adhesive around the home button because the home button the the touch ID button has a little bit more rock to it than it does when the phone ships from Apple okay but it still works as Touch ID totally functional yeah absolutely functional didn't change that's brilliant then yes I mean I don't know what the shekel to dollar rate is somewhere around the 3.6 range I think okay a bargain n nominally 70 bucks let's say okay um I had a screen repaired uh by Apple I think it was 90 but it was a couple years AG I'm trying to guess now which is not a massive massive difference uh from that but it's more it's quite a bit more yeah okay well you see I'm I'm rich obviously that's what it is uh I don't notice this small change yeah stuff he said 250 shekels is $67 and 90 British pound is17 okay I'm really not confident now of how much it cost but it was around that Mark for it but okay I mean actually I remember thinking it was less than I feared uh and it was obviously less than getting a new phone for it so I was quite relieved but I I'm quite reassured now that you had a good experience with an alternative uh next time think I think my concern is with these newer phones iPhone 7 and forward where they're used a lot of glue and under water resistant because obviously anyone outside of Apple is going to irreparably damage that that water resistance right so you realize you just made me think oh I could go to a third party thing and now you've taken that away from me for one moment I had all these opportunities I dangled that bright future out there and I snatch it back every bit as quick you did okay thanks I realized actually we got away from the the teenage hacker and the thing that keeps coming back to my mind is what was the 90 gigabytes I me what could fit into that is that just customer billing details is I I we'll never know but I'm fascinated by the specificness of 90 gabt what could he have got so here's here are the things that I'm speculating about and this is pure speculation this isn't in the news story it's just me spitballing here if you're hacking Apple there there are two things that you want right there's there's the reputation from your mates for having done it there's so there's reputation gain right what could you possibly get well you could get unreleased software you could get Internal Documentation you but but the real prize if there's a prize is the ability to undo iCloud right and and by Cloud I mean iCloud lock where if your device is stolen um and someone resets it they can't get into your device or can't open the device without putting in your email address and password for iCloud to be able to get back into the device uh effectively stolen devices are nearly useless if you can't defeat that and so one of the real things that's out there is if you could steal the information required to be able to unlock stolen I iOS devices then you would have a product that you could resell that makes sense be curious to well there's also things of where this data would be you're saying we don't know if it was worldwide and stuff how much does Apple release outside catino is everything well so Apple Apple has data centers worldwide because what they're trying to do is make the services faster and so you make Services Faster by placing data centers local to where the consumers are Chinese data centers are in China and in fact there was a whole cruffle about that because they had to be held by uh you know with Chinese access to them kind of thing uh presumably there's a data center in Australia so that the Australians data is kept there as well um you know trying to push data over Transatlantic cable as opposed to things that are local to you it's there's a speed hit um so that's that's the what we don't know is did he get information from Australian consumers did he get customer information from worldwide we have no idea I was just speculating I just yeah but you're right those are the targets well they're the targets you would think I I would I don't know something about the fact that he dreamed of working for Apple which I suspect might not happen now um and that he was a teenager I think is what you said if their they cued us to prestige every time I've hacked into Apple it's been to score some points and impress my friends down the pub yeah okay impress your friends get girls whatever the old thing was exactly so there is this dream of of hacking someone and then working there the the concept and it's very misinformed very misguided but the idea is if I show them they've got a vulnerability then they'll hire me to fix it and and there is such a thing as penetration testing but when you do pen testing when you do this kind of thing you are hired as a security consult consultant first and then you do the hack it's it's not the reverse order where you you want to be um want to show up and say hey by the way look at all I got no doesn't go over nearly as well as when it's pre-arranged the but but you know it's a valid question is how do you position yourself as someone that should be hired for that kind of penetration testing well what if you done well I hacked apple and I got 90 gigs interesting okay good point yes so so he may not work for Apple but he may be able to spin it into a consultancy for penetration testing and security testing okay there was something oddly innocent about the the dreaming to work Apple but yes this could have set his it could ultimately have been a good move for his career I suppose uh presumably he's not going to prison we don't know actually sentencing next month isn't it or something yes it is yes anyway he's only Teenage he'll be out before he's yeah my age yes okay last story I've got last thing I want to talk about is the App Store now there was a meeting held last year at a New York Loft we're only finding out it now that this is from a report in Business Insider Apple convened an invitation only meeting in New York in uh April of 2017 so going way back aimed at letting developers know that the model the business model for apps was changing and that what Apple needed them to know is that they needed to think about recurring revenue from subscriptions rather than one-time sales what we've seen in the past year is that more and more apps are switching to a subscription model which led to Apple's announcement of the last quarterly earnings report that paid subscriptions from Apple and third parties have passed 300 million now we don't know which developers were at the meeting we don't know who was there representing Apple we don't even know who owns the waft where it took a place what we know is that Apple introduced the developers at this meeting to an idea referred to as subscription 2.0 and this is the idea of software as a service that they needed to shift their focus away from upfront costs into long-term Revenue this makes complete sense to me from the standpoint of solving the question of how do you keep app developers in business which is something Apple has to have been concerned with right you know if you're an app developer you have one Hill when you release the app and a lot of valleys and terms of income earning right it's basically you launch and it dives off a cliff afterwards and how do you keep people going and how do you keep developers able to keep going if if this is the model I like it when you put it like that it makes sense it's Apple obviously looking after its own interests but also looking after developers trying to help them um but it's just funny the idea of a secret meeting in a New York Loft uh selected audience it just feels like apple you know cracking its Knuckles and say right this is how it's going to be from now on you're going to pay us a subscri it just feels a bit more ominous until you put it that way I like it it's not Apple saying you're going to pay us a subscription it's it's Apple telling developers right you're charging 99 C for your app how exactly do you intend to feed yourself how are how are you going to afford a new Macbook Pro with shiny new xcode if you're charging a dollar for your app and all of your sales are on your first day of release yes okay now Apple wants their 30% that they take from every app store purchase absolutely but it's it's uh it's symbiotic really right they Apple doesn't have an app store if there aren't developers and developers what happens sorry what happens with um Apple's cut of subscription uh is that still 30% of every year I subscribe is it I think that it is okay then would make sense uh wouldn't it I was I was getting into a discussion about the 30% with someone on Reddit and and the first rule is never get into a discussion with someone on Reddit that that's that was my first error but the the fellow was talking about how Amazon purchases specifically Kindle kind of thing or Prime video don't happen through the Prime Video app and don't happen through the Kindle app that you have to go out to a browser to be able to do that or in his case he was telling his girlfriend to order on an Android because Android doesn't take that cut and he was saying that if they were going to do it on iOS that they would have to raise the price by 30% and I said no no no that's not how any of this works the way that this works is that you keep the prices uniform across consumers the consumer seems at the same price and you eat the 30% and the reason you do this he says well the 30% is the is being charged because Apple claims they can charge it because their secure their their app store is more secure and again no no that's not how any of this works the reason that Apple charges 30% is because they take care of a lot of the tax documentation that you need to have to be able to sell worldwide they take care of the payment processing so that you can sell worldwide you don't have to advertise yourself worldwide you list once on one app store and they take care of it for you that's what you're paying your 30% for every payment processor no matter who you're doing takes a fee now yes if you're Amazon you don't need Apple to do that you can do it just as well yourself but for smalltime developers you absolutely want Apple to be your payment processor because trying to arrange that for yourself in different countries is a giant headache well actually I have an app on the app store and I went through the internationalist and even with apple doing everything I found it quite dizzying working out what applied where and things so the idea of having to do it all from scratch for myself it just I wouldn't have I would have stopped I would have walked away I also used to have an app on the App Store what's what's your app mine's called River passage it's a poem by a British author called Jeff Phelps um done as Arts Council project really rather than a big commercial thing uh but it was an interesting model getting his work in a new form seeing how it might change poetry apps it's still a thing in progress really but the app bit um we were required to sell it for the lowest price the 99 Cents thing and that meant having to make sure I understood all of the sales process for it and yes it always boil down to just ticking a box here or there with apple um the complexity was hidden and I still found it a bit daunting I haven't yet uh been compelled back with the next release but sooner or later I will because they do make it easier um I thought you were going to say that the thing about eating the 30% is yes all of that makes sense but also you are going to sell more on iOS than you will on Android uh because people will buy things on iOS so yes the the dollar value per unit is the same but you will sell more units on uh iPhone and so it's worth it's another cost of doing business to get that custom in so I trust the person on Reddit was uh thoroughly persuaded and convinced by your arguments yes I I think you overestimate Reddit okay well we've overshot our time I meant to keep this a little bit shorter but it's been such a pleasure speaking with you William I have enjoyed this and we should do it again I'd like that be nice checking yes you know and if you've been listening to us and you've enjoyed this one please let me know and in fact if you've not enjoyed it if you think this was a complete waste of time and was awful you can tell me that too uh go ahead and reach out to us I'm ATV marks on Twitter or we can you can email newsapple insider.com or William what are you on Twitter I'm W gallager so wga l h h wonderful that's fantastic this is the end of another great episode of the Apple Insider podcast we will be back next week in the meantime go ahead and let us know what you thought and go ahead and please give us feedback and also make sure you keep an eye out for Williams stories on Apple Insider this next week um actually I was so looking forward to the articles that are coming out next week on Apple Insider things I really like exploring as a journalist so I hope everybody enjoys it too uh and uh Victor has been a treat having a proper chat with you thank you for this wonderful let's go have some tea excellent Sal I put the kettle on right now biscuits biscuits biscuits I need to let all of our listeners know that jamp now makes it easy to set up manage and protect your Apple devices so you can focus on your business there's no it experience needed with jamp now you can check your digital inventory distribute Wi-Fi email settings deploy apps protect company data and even lock or wipe a device as needed from anywhere and now Apple Insider podcast listeners can start securing your business today by setting up your first three devices for free forever add more for just $2 a month per device create your free account today at jam.com appleinsider that's jf.com slapple inssider I've got you on Slack\n"