Siracusa Says

John
This whole thing is a good example of the limits of Apple’s strategy, because Apple’s strategy with the Trump administration both times has been essentially appeasement. Try to make nice with them. Try to make them not mad at you, because when they’re mad at you, they they are. You know, it’s a corrupt administration and they will do things to harm your company individually in a vindictive way because they because they’re just, you know, mobsters and bullies. Right.

They will specifically hurt your company and we want them specifically not hurt our company. So we’re working within a corrupt system to try to get favors, blah, blah, blah. The problem with that strategy is the strategy is not to make them mad. And you can blow that whole strategy. Appeasement stops working and becomes pointless the second you push back at all and make them mad at you. Because then it’s like, well, what did you do all that appeasement for?

So it leads to like the sunk cost fallacy of saying, well, we already made nice with all these things. We already did all this stuff. When they ask us to pull the ice block out, if we say no, they’ll be mad at us. And it’s like, well, then what did we do all that appeasement for? What did we sell our souls for before? And so you’re inclined to say yes and say yes to the next thing and say yes to the next thing. And it’s a slippery slope of appeasement.

The word comes up in the context of World War II all the time. Appeasement looks great right up until you have the rise of Hitler. And then it doesn’t look so good anymore, does it? Because you’re like, anyone who is on board with that appeasement thing tends to look bad in the eye of history of saying you are appeasing this monster.

John
In particular, like setting aside when they screwed up the GPU thing by under-resourcing some buffer or something, the fact that they insist on building their Ultras out of two Maxes is, it’s a clever idea if it had worked out for them, but I think that hurt the scaling more than anything else. Whereas if they had made a dedicated chip, it wouldn’t.

But if they made a dedicated chip, they can’t justify the expense. That’s been the whole thing with the Extreme, you know, with the Quad thing. They can’t justify the expense. We’re not going to sell, we’re going to sell this many of them and it’s going to cost this much to make. It’ll be our most expensive, you know, like Intel had this problem to some. degree but not really because they were sold to server farms and everything like this chip this whatever this high-end chip is going to cost the most and be the most complicated chip that we make and we’re going to sell a tiny tiny fraction of the number we sell of our other chips like why are we doing this again?

and i would point them to my case for a true mac pro successor article and saying you’re you know mount everest you’re climbing because it’s there blah blah blah but apple doesn’t apple doesn’t have that they don’t they don’t have that in them they can’t justify it someone comes down and says cost benefit no

Marco
I am not confident enough to be Mr. AirPods translation before it becomes commonplace for people to do this while traveling. So I’m hoping, hey, everyone else go do this, please. So then I can feel more comfortable doing it when I need to.

John
I feel like you’d have to wear a T-shirt or a sign or something that says, this is what’s happening here. My AirPods are trying to translate you, but there’s a time delay and it’s muting your actual talking, which I can’t understand anyway. and then it’s playing back what it thinks you said after some delay. So if it looks like I’m just waiting after you talked and saying nothing, I’m waiting for my phone to like, it would be a long t-shirt. But like…

John
I’m talking about the M2 Vision Pro in 2025. This is old news, I know, but it’s not old news for me. But anyway, you’ve heard people complain that when they demo, it’s hard to demo things because when you try to get somebody to watch video and you’re mirroring what they see on your laptop screen or something, it blacks out because of stupid copyright stuff.

Casey
It’s the worst.

John
It’s so frustrating. Here’s the thing that I didn’t fully understand or have forgotten. when you do that and by the way the reason we’re mirroring what they see on the screen because otherwise try explaining it’s like playing charades. Try explaining to somebody who’s never used vision pro what they’re supposed to do without being able to see what they’re seeing.

John
I’d only use it for like a day before i gave my wife a demo so it’s not like i’ve memorized every pixel that’s going to be on the screen but it really is like describe to me what you see it’s like trying to do tech support over the phone with somebody because they can see stuff but you can’t see it so that’s why apple provides this great feature where you can see a version of what they’re seeing on your laptop screen or whatever.

John
That’s really helpful because then you can see what they’re seeing although you also see their foveated rendering so a lot of times it’s blurry you’re like go look over there look over there anyway as soon as you bring them to like okay go to the tv app go to this thing you know run the play this immersive demo uh you can’t see it on your laptop screen laptop screen goes black because it’s immersive video goes around everything

Casey
which that is that is totally fine and i’m not that aggrieved by that

John
well it’s stupid but okay. But also i mean inside the headset they only see blackness too but it still plays the video so they hear the sound they’re like it took me a while to even realize it’s just like am i supposed to be seeing something i’m like but i could hear the audio playing because she didn’t have headphones using the the speakers and the straps and she’s like i’m supposed to be seeing something.

John
like she just sees blackness but it tries to play it anyway that is insane like i get that you can’t show it on two screens it once showed on one and then as we said in the past when we talked about Apple, it’s your own video.

John
Like, break the law, Apple. This is a rare case where I’m saying, Apple, just break the law. Civil disobedience. Literally implement this thing that violates the HGCP standard. Break the law. See if somebody comes for you. No one’s going to care because nobody has Vision Pros. No one is pirating things by mirroring the foveated rendering of a Vision Pro on a laptop and then screen recording it. We have way better ways to pirate things. Nobody would want that.

John
Just break the law. All right? And see if somebody comes through. You’ve got so much money. I believe you could defend this lawsuit. Maybe we’ll change the HCCP standard. Apple, you need to break the law. Because this is so stupid.

Casey
Do you have any intention on relocating before both kids are graduated from college?

John
No.

Casey
Do you have any intentions before both of you are retired?

John
Probably not.

Casey
To be clear, you’re never allowed to retire because…

Marco
I was going to say, he kind of already is retired.

Casey
Well, I’m trying to take the happy path, but Marco’s not wrong. But I don’t think that I can handle replacing either of you, really. So you two are stuck with me forever. I hate to break it to you.

John
I’m irreplaceable.

Marco
I mean, yeah.

John
don’t worry about it i got uh you know one whole kid to put through college

John
and one one-fourth of a kid to put through college i’m not going anywhere yeah

John
uh growth the hard way so many of things that we talk about are like oh they need apple needs growth and the iphone is leveling off and so they need services revenue because that’s growing and look at the service revenue graph has been going up up up for years and years and years

John
this is the source of apple’s growth and as you know every company needs a source of growth because they’re like cancer and that’s what the stock market loves is cancer

John
constant growth

Casey
wow

John
constant growth in the entire until the entire planet has been turned into paper clips that’s what the stock market wants so they need growth

Casey
There’s a conversation between Patrick Collison and Johnny Ive. I guess it’s some Stripe thing recently. And I’m only about halfway through it so far. But, hey, guess what? It’s really freaking good.

Casey
And for all of the things that I blame on Johnny Ive, of which there are many, including but not limited to the butterfly keyboard, he’s really smart and really good at what he does in the broad scheme of things.

Casey
So both of these, I think, are worth your time.

John
But he’s a slow talker. Oh, my God. He’s so slow.

Marco
He really needs an editor and smart speed.

John
I don’t know. Johnny Ive, obviously, his resume is basically… It will never be equal, probably, in terms of how important… Amazing work, right?

John
But every time I see him talk, I’m like, yeah, this is why I wouldn’t let an unencumbered Johnny Ive anywhere near a product that I wanted to make.

John
Because he’s got amazing talent, and he’s got great ideas, and he’s got good instincts, but he’s also got some really bad instincts and ideas.

John
I feel like, I don’t know if that has changed about him as he’s aged, or it was always like that and he was always constrained, but he is a powerful force, let’s put it that way. And you’ve got to be careful when you’re employing a powerful force to do anything.

John
But yeah, it’s a good interview, and I’m glad he’s not at Apple anymore.

Casey
But anyway, if you have Vision Pro, go check that out. It’s worth six and a half minutes of your time.

John
How did you miss this one? The link that I just put in there. They also are doing some kind of immersive documentary film based on Bono’s autobiography book thingy.

Casey
Cool.

John
You’re watching people Arctic surfing and doing a rodeo, but you’re not going to listen to Bono do his weird narration of his own life?

Casey
I’m sorry, John. U2 has never done anything for me.

John
It’s not. I guess there probably will be some music part of it. All the stuff you’re watching, you’ll watch anything except for something that you might have some familiarity with.

Casey
I’ll watch it. But, I mean, again, I have.

John
This one has a narrative, supposedly. I don’t know. I guess they will play U2 music. I don’t know if you’ll survive.

Casey
No, I mean, I’ve seen U2 in concert. They were fine.

John
But they’re no rodeos or Arctic surfing.

John
Your Apple ID is an email address. Is it an Apple email address? Sometimes, but not always. It’s like, ooh, it’s rough.

So, but why is it Apple ID? Well, it’s always been Apple ID, and it’s just easy to be consistent. And at a certain point after several decades, I think it is wise. Again, I’m not even putting any stake in this rumor. I don’t even know if this is going to happen.

But I think it should happen because Apple account is so much better than Apple ID, especially since now they’re all forced to be email addresses. And Google account is also an email address, and so is an Apple account, and so is a Microsoft account.

And you see how it works here? And Apple ID has always been weird. So much so that I, you know, as a developer of software in the Apple ecosystem, way too many times I have tried to communicate with a customer about something, and they’ve said to me in response to me asking them questions to help debug a problem, I’m not giving you my Apple ID because it sounds like a secret thing, and it sounds like I’m trying to pump them for secret information.

It’s like, no. it’s just your email address. Why Apple? Why do you do this to us?

John
It’s one of the things that always worries me about hybrids and we’re so worried about Marco’s i3’s range extension is like, if you don’t ever use the gas engine, A, you’re just, you know, wasting electricity hauling this big heavy thing.

Casey
That is true. Yeah.

John
And B, if you don’t run a gasoline engine for long periods of time, it gets cranky. Like you do have to occasionally start it. And you are like you’re it’s clearly turning on. And although I auto stop start also makes me have empathy for the engine.

Casey
Yes.

John
I know they’re designed to auto stop start. I know all the things they did to change the engine so they can do that and more robust starters and yada yada. It’s still not good for the engine still.

Casey
Right.

John
So I do worry that I mean, you’re at least answer who cares. But like it’s one of the strange compromises about hybrids is, you know, depending on how you use them in like the quote unquote best case scenario where you’re basically on EV almost all the time. It’s inefficient to hug the line, lug the engine around and be that engine is having a sad, difficult life.

John
That’s probably not being run enough. It wants to.

John
It’s like, you know, you know, a thoroughbred horse. It wants to get out there and run. And you’re just like, nope, electric motors got it.