He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector,
John Ternus Welcome to Primary Technology,
the show about the tech news that matters.
Obviously, massive news this week.
Tim Cook officially stepping down as CEO and John Ternus taking over
on September 1st. We're get into all of that,
Tim Cook's legacy, what to look for in a John Ternus led Apple and other news like
ChatGPT 2.0 images came out. Jim and I.
Howard Siri was teased actually at Google Cloud.
Threads have a live chat event feature coming out or something
and people are actually using Jason's app out in the wild and we're gonna
get into that as well. This episode is brought to you by Framer,
Granola, Claude and you the members who support us directly.
Thank you for that. I'm one of your hosts,
Stephen Robles joined by developer Jason Aten.
How's it going Jason?
Developers doing a lot of work there,
but I'm fine. Okay. Is that like common law?
If I say three times, it's true.
If three times in a row. Yeah,
Okay. All right.
that's right. That's what happens.
No,
that's ~ Jason's app. I'll let you reveal the name later.
It's exciting. I'm running it right now on my Mac.
And we're to talk about it. And you have people testing it,
awesome. do. I do have people testing it,
like out there in the wild. Yeah.
That's super fun. Okay. Last week,
yes.
the quote, the movie quote that I opened the show with was,
sense injuries. The data could be called pain.
Do you know what movie that's from?
See, you always make this face.
It's not even familiar to me.
All right, that one was Terminator 2.
Terminator 2. I was trying to find Robo.
Okay, it has probably
been 30 years since I've seen Terminator 2,
just to be honest.
I
was like, it hasn't come out 30.
wow. Yeah, it has come out. Definitely more than definitely more than 30 years.
I don't know when it came out,
it's been that long since I've seen it.
And I kind of tweaked today's quote.
He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector.
I didn't say the last part of that phrase because it would give it away.
I don't know.
The last part of the quote is a dark night,
which is the name of the movie.
Oh, he's the hero that Gotham needs but doesn't deserve.
Not that Gotham deserves the knees or something,
Blah blah blah. Yeah.
which I'm not saying that's John Ternus but he is a silent guardian
of watchful protection.
Maybe it is
that that part of the cool. I would have for sure known it.
That's what I'm saying, that's what I'm saying.
yeah. All right, a couple five star reviews before we get into all
the cook turn this news. Jim Manist at 1000 from the USA.
He asked if the review gets to me faster with my seven gigabit download speeds.
Yes, it does. I actually got the review immediately and battery percentage
on phone dominant pocket front home screen dots.
dominant pocket front home screen dots
Dominantfroggit, ~
God, sorry. I was like, yeah, I had a stroke there.
Cosion27 from the USA, he corrected his review from four to five stars when
I added background music and then I forgot to add it in last week's episode.
But I'll remember this one, so thanks for that.
We're his second favorite tech podcast outside of Waveform,
which ~ I'm down for that. If we're your second favorite tech podcast,
I mean, we prefer to be the favorite.
We wanna win a Webby,
Yeah, I mean, second favorite nothing wins a Webby my goodness.
But we have to figure out how to
but you have to pay like $500 to enter.
say that fast. We want to win a Webby we want to win a Webby.
We know how to say it.
We just have to pay $500 just to enter or something.
you know, when I worked at Riverside,
I would always look into like the podcast awards and be like,
how do I enter my podcast to be in the awards?
And it's always like, well, you to enter,
fill out this 20 page application and pay $750.
I'm like, oh, okay, I see what you guys do.
Yeah, every awards. Yeah, I can't say anymore because I work for a company
Yeah, yeah, we know.
that has an award program, so I should just stop.
See,
this is like the... Listen, ladies and gentlemen,
anytime you travel, if you ever read one of those magazines where
it talks about like the top 10 places to eat in Venice or whatever,
it's all sponsored. It's all sponsored content.
Yeah, the
top 10 places that gave us $1,000.
That's the thing. People knock on creators and sponsorship
and disclosures and there's so many industries where it's
all sponsorship and there's no disclosures.
Travel industry being one of the most heinous.
But anyway, this podcast will not pay to get an award.
If we get an award, we probably won't because we're not paying to be in.
We
won't get an award, but if we do,
it won't be because we paid. It'll be because someone made a mistake.
That's right.
The podcast 728 from the USA he I corrected that I messaged the person
on social media with they're like I can't see the transcript anymore because
we added video on Apple podcast Yes,
it's a total Apple thing. I'd actually did an entire video on the best podcast apps
and talked about all these distinctions I'll link that video in the show notes,
but he still gave us five stars and I appreciate that and Shahab from Canada said
horizontal tabs and That's at the top right?
That's at the top. That's normal.
Yeah, okay.
Okay. That's the way it was intended.
Yeah, that's right. Okay
and also Apple TV. Sorry, I was just poking on there.
It's fine. I also use horizontal tabs across the top in one profile.
Nah, I know, know.
I just use the vertical tabs in a different one.
Yeah,
All right. And last couple of things.
I launched another podcast last week.
I kind of soft launched it and I just told people.
But I just I wanted to start another thing.
I don't know why. I had some do I got a good domain and I was like,
no, that wasn't the domain was the first thing I bought.
I mean, that is a good domain.
But I did have the idea first.
It is a good domain. Top five dot tech is the domain which those could.
But no, I wanted a reason to write a regular newsletter.
And then I was like, I should make this like an audio podcast too.
And then I was like, well, I should just do a video series.
And so it's all the things. You can either watch this,
listen to this or read it. And yeah,
every Friday, I'm just gonna share five things,
something to read, watch, listen to,
download and something deep about tech.
I already know what I'm gonna be talking about tomorrow.
But yeah, if you wanna hear me again,
it's a five minute show. Like it's just,
if you wanna hear me again.
If you want to hear me again.
~ No, but it's...
I'm trying to pick the five interesting things not just like
new things like tomorrow I'm gonna be talking about something like
an older podcast episode But not something that you might have heard of
so anyway if you want to sign up for that newsletter or get it as a podcast
or watch it as a video it'll all it'll be everywhere and then also Will canard
we talked about hey there might be a industry for people who check vibe coding apps
and Yeah, apparently it's an industry already will can art send me a link
he has a blog which will link in the show notes where he talked about
and how to optimize your vibe coded projects and what to watch for.
And yeah, it was a great article,
but also apparently this is an industry that is literally being created
in real time. And that's pretty wild.
Yeah,
because there are a lot of people who work at companies that are just going
to start using cloud code and they're going to not have a job.
And this is actually a great thing for them to do.
So yeah, that's happening. So it was great.
We'll link that in the show notes as well.
Well, I don't know if there was really any news this week.
Just kidding. I want it to be sarcastic at least once.
So it is official. Tim Cook stepping down as CEO as of September 1st.
John Ternus to become CEO. Tim Cook will move to the chairman of
the board of directors of Apple.
Johnny Soruji will be elevated to a position of his chief.
hardware officer, that's right,
Hardware Officer again.
chief hardware officer. And every hot take has been said.
And so what do you call a hot take that's well thought out,
it's deep, it's not hot, but it's not cold.
It's a, I don't know, a dish best served hot take.
It's a meh, thank you.
A marinated take.
This is, we have.
I don't know.
It's been sitting on the counter for a couple days in its juices.
That's right,
but I feel like, you know, everybody recorded emergency podcast.
We did not. And, you know, a lot of people I think have been thinking about this
for a long time. And we've talked about Apple CEO and Tim Cook,
what is a product CEO. But the last few days,
I've been thinking about it a lot.
And I don't know, I wanted to talk about it several different ways.
You know, I want to talk about Tim Cook and a little bit of his legacy
and how it's kind of being seen and shaped.
Now that he is officially stepping down a ceo I did a video about john Ternus
and kind of his history at apple Which the video is doing pretty well,
which is nice, but I learned some things about john Ternus.
I did not know before and I'm excited i'm optimistic about him being ceo
And so i'll link my video in the show notes and jason has a couple articles.
We're going to get to as well and then german Can I just say bloomberg?
Bloomberg I was paying for bloomberg some amount
But apparently it wasn't enough because I couldn't read some of it.
I couldn't read some of week. They German was literally Bloomberg
Or like, give us more money, please.
You ran out of credits.
was literally like, hey, give us more money.
And I was like, for real? Like,
do we really have to do this? But German has been writing a ton
and he actually posted a photo.
So after the announcement, there was an internal Apple town hall
and German literally posted a photo that someone took inside the town hall.
of Tim Cook and John Turness on stage addressing the Apple staff.
And I was like, bro, I feel like some AI or detective,
whatever, can like, what angle is this photo taken at what zoom level?
And they could find out like what person inside Apple is sending German photos
of their town hall that this felt like,
I don't know, another level in like the leak culture.
I don't know. So clearly someone inside Apple,
so much so that they were at this town hall.
Talking about the transition, sent German a photo.
That seems crazy. That seems crazy to me.
Yeah, it does kind of seem crazy,
Yeah, I don't know. Please,
you're right. Before we get into it,
I have a question.
yeah.
Where were you when you found out?
And how did you find out?
I think... was it you texted me?
My text
message? Okay, I was just curious.
Yeah, you texted me. It was Monday at 4 45 p.m.
And you texted me the Apple Newsroom article with the word,
holy and nothing else. And I was literally
in the middle of something.
I forget what it was. And I was like,
I'm OK, this is huge. I need to finish what I'm doing because the next
two days are just this like whatever it is,
it is this.
And I also thought like, I want to make a video about this.
I don't want to do a hot take video.
I'm not going to try and make a five minute video right now.
And so I finished what I was doing.
I looked at your text. I was like,
okay, it's happening. no,
This is not a drill.
this is not a drill. And I thought,
let me make a short slash reel slash TikTok of just saying the thing.
So I did that. And then I spent Monday evening doing some research.
We're to talk about that later.
and made the video just about John Ternus and went from there.
But it was you. How did you did you get the notification from the Apple Newsroom?
So
no, I've never been more angry in my life.
No, that's not true. But I was driving and my editor texted me and I
yeah.
was driving an hour to a soccer game,
which I love going to our kids to soccer games,
but our daughter had a high school soccer game.
The timing.
And I didn't even have my backpack with me because I'm going to a soccer game.
Like, like, I don't take my computer with me to soccer games,
Fair. That's fair.
especially like, so I'm driving,
I got the text message.
I texted you at 445. I had just gotten the text message.
I was like just starting my trip for a fleeting second.
Mmm.
I was like, do I just go back home?
And I'm like, no, I'm going to the soccer game.
So I ended up writing the article on my phone when I got there,
Yeah.
like in the 30 minutes of the warm up,
I listened. I listened to the verge cast when I like the live one because
This is like the Neelay Patel story,
writing about St. Louis.
Live, Yeah.
it had just wrapped up. And so I was I didn't listen to a live.
I listened to the replay like shortly after that,
but the YouTube stream.
and wrote the first article which was about Tim Cook keeping his most important
job and then later that night I got home and I wrote but I did text my wife
I'm like listen hon Tim Cook just retired or he just knows he's retiring when
I get home from this game I'm gonna have to work gotta work so
I'm going to be locked, locked down,
locked down.
Do you remember where you were when you learned that Steve Jobs had passed?
I don't exactly remember where I was,
but I do remember it. And I viscerally remember the like the
the person who posted the Apple logo with the Tim with Steve Jobs profile.
Yeah, Steve. Yeah. Yeah,
And I remember their home page.
I don't remember where I was, but I do.
yeah, yeah.
I will always remember where I was when I found out Tim Cook
was retiring because it's I know people think this is crazy,
but like honestly, a change in CEO at a company like Apple.
who has only had eight of them,
well, will have eight with Ternus and only three that anybody knows about.
Right? And it is basically the biggest business news
Correct. That. That point is important.
and very big tech news at every level of the stack.
Yeah. Yeah.
And I'm like, and I'm driving in a car.
That
is the perfect storm of situations.
I think I
got a tweet to you or a text to you and I posted it on threads and that,
and then I had to keep driving.
Right, was it.
I still remember where I was when I heard about Steve Jobs passing.
And at the highest level, Tim Cook was named,
I think it was either interim CEO or full CEO before he passed.
He was named CEO in August and he passed in October.
and Steve
passed in October. But it was clear that when Tim Cook was appointed CEO,
it was because of Steve Jobs' health.
And there was a bunch of news in the years leading up to him passing about
Yes.
his waffling out. And if you read the Apple 50 Years David Pogue book,
he talks about internally and those close to Steve,
they knew a lot was going on and they did not reveal a lot of it to
the public in the...
years leading up to his death.
He'd been sick for seven years.
He missed it for a long time, And so I think,
and feel, like this transition just at the highest level feels
so different because that transition was obviously clouded by this CEO,
Steve Jobs, did not leave on his own accord.
Steve Jobs had to leave because he was literally about to die.
that just, the first part of Tim Cook's legacy that...
I think is the most positive and we should all take notice.
Like he took over from that, not from a CEO voluntarily stepping down
and handing the reins to him. While Jobs did hand him the reins,
it was out of necessity. And while Steve Jobs obviously chose the right
guy because he has grown Apple tremendously and however you feel about
Tim Cook's in the services revenue and the little things like he did his job.
And one of the things in a lot of leadership situations in businesses
when there's a beloved leader or CEO and they have been loved and the CEO
for a long time, which Steve Jobs was before he died,
and he released all the iconic products like the iPod,
the iPhone, the iPad, to take over as the leadership role from that
is typically untenable. And a lot of times in business situations,
like it just doesn't work. Like whoever's CEO after that will
be short-lived and will be seen as a failure and then there'll be a
another CEO that might last a little longer.
The fact that Tim Cook was able to take over and has been CEO for 15 years
is pretty astonishing. like,
whether he filled the shoes, I don't know if that's the right analogy,
but he did his job, which was to take over as CEO of Apple,
make it successful, grow it, and then hand it off to the next person
to innovate for the next 15 years.
He did that. Does that, I mean,
Yeah, yeah, Tim Cook
he did that.
is easily, I don't think you can make the argument,
maybe, maybe Sachin Adela, but Tim Cook is easily the most successful
CEO of all time. Like now,
he did bet some of that success is owed to Steve Jobs because
100%.
the most successful product in history is the iPhone and Tim Cook reaped most
of the benefit of that, right?
Apple became the most valuable company in the world shortly after Tim Cook took over
as CEO. And it has mostly been the most valuable company in the world during
the entire his entire time. There have been like right now it's like third.
It was the first company to 1 trillion.
It was the first company to 3 trillion.
Like it is I can remember thinking like that is incontinent to think that where
are these we're done. The time is over.
This is it.
because once you've reached a trillion,
That's it.
it was unfathomable that companies would reach a $4 trillion market cap.
And there's like three of them now that maybe four,
Right. Right.
I don't even know where Google is right now.
So Tim Cook is without question the most successful CEO I think of all time.
Like I don't know who you would say is more successful just in terms of
all of the ways you would measure it.
And I just wanna be clear, there are a lot of people who I've heard argue,
Okay, sure. If you go by Tim Cook's standard of the numbers.
Well, first of all, like you're the CEO of a public company,
that is the measurement. Like just to be clear,
that is how you define success.
But also the fact that he just didn't break anything.
I think you can, other than maybe some developer relations,
but I think he had the wherewithal,
and this might've been his biggest strength.
He had the wherewithal to recognize what had been set up before him.
And he had the wherewithal to follow his strengths and some of that some
of his weaknesses caused some interesting interim inter interstitial problems,
you know, with like we get the butterfly keyboard,
red.
whatever. But I don't I think if you had replaced Steve Jobs with a product guy,
Apple would be basically not a thing we think about much.
I think, well, they still had the iPhone.
I think they would not have been successful and may have not have...
Like, let me say this. So the timing was interesting because this
has long been rumored. German has been talking about it for like the last year.
I think the Financial Times or the Information,
they predicted it would happen earlier.
And, you we even thought maybe after DubDub,
they'll make the announcement or whatever.
And so it does feel like...
maybe a little sooner than a lot of people expected.
during the town hall, and these are remarks that were reported to Gurman,
I'm gonna put the nine to five Mac article in the show notes so
you can actually read it. But he said that Tim Cook knew it was the right time
to step down because three things had to be true.
Apple's product roadmap needed to be incredible.
Okay, we don't know what that is,
but I guess it's incredible. Right?
Vision Pro 3.
Apple's financials needed to be going,
doing great, check.
And turn this had to be ready for the role again Tim Cook would know that most
of all and so it seems like those three Plus being 65 years
old retirement age like it was he made a decision like it was time time
to go and obviously this has been Extremely calculated probably over
the last five to ten years like this transition good
Well, I was gonna say and Ben Thompson makes a good point.
That was not a part of that. But I think is worth mentioning,
which is that Apple is at a point where it has to make decisions today that will
affect the business in 10 or 12 years.
So Tim Cook should not be the person making those decisions.
Once you reach a point in your tenure where the critical strategic decisions that
have to be made are clearly going to play out after you're gone,
you shouldn't be the person making those decisions.
That's a good point.
you it's
it's in so when it comes to things like AI,
when it comes to how that whether Apple is going to decide to invest
in building foundation models,
or if it's just going to be the device where everybody runs out like
all of those things. That is a critical piece of this that I think
is worth mentioning that Tim Cook probably recognized that Apple is heading into
a direction where he will not be able to see it through.
And so
he in he probably has some firsthand experience.
Steve Jobs set things in motion that obviously Steve Jobs wasn't able
to see through. And Tim Cook had the first hand experience of being
the person who had to simply figure out what did he mean by this?
Like, I guess we're doing this thing.
So
Right.
And one thing, so about Tim Cook's legacy,
when Steve Jobs was CEO of Apple in the years of the iPhone and the iPad,
iPod, he was the nucleus of Apple.
And it felt like Apple was synonymous with Steve Jobs.
Like it was almost one in the same,
like the Venn diagram. You just thought of them together.
And you saw that in every keynote.
mean, Steve Jobs was the one on stage for 80 to 90 % of every keynote.
demoing the products, talking about the products,
Steve Jobs was Apple. And it's,
I feel like I hope they get back to in-person events as a side note,
maybe with John Turnis now in the CEO seat.
And while there were big names that you were familiar with in the Steve Jobs era,
like you saw Johnny Ive in the videos where he was in the white room
and you saw Scott Forstall on stage talking about software,
Bob Mansfield talking about hardware,
and obviously Phil Schiller was there.
They all felt peripheral.
And I do feel like one of the benefits of Tim Cook not being
the charismatic leader that Steve Jobs was is that it has allowed other names
and faces to bubble up to associate with Apple as a brand,
which I think is positive. Like when one company hinges on a singular person,
that's why it felt like such a huge deal when Steve Jobs died.
It was like, this might be it.
Like who else, who else can do it?
But over the last 15 years,
Since Tim Cook is not the guy to be the one on stage demoing every product
and doing it, now we know like,
~ Craig Federighi. Like, I was not as familiar with Craig Federighi before Tim Cook.
He was there doing stuff. But now he's like a character,
a face of Apple. Same with Greg Joswiak.
Like, people post about him on social media and take pictures with him.
And we have Johnny Srouji. It's like,
you know, I just, I knew Bob Mansfield's name,
but I wouldn't even be able to tell you what he did or whatever.
But like, we now see this like,
team of people and every keynote that's been pre-recorded,
like you see all these faces and names associated with the products,
and I think it's positive that you can now see all the people that
are making these incredible products and who make up Apple,
not just the CEO. And now, I think we're getting a CEO that is closer
to the product person of Steve Jobs,
and hopefully we do see on stage more often,
maybe even in in-person events.
and we have this amazing team around him.
So that's one of the things I feel like that makes me optimistic.
Now, while Tim Cook might have not had the charisma to be that onstage guy,
but he had the business mindset,
now we do have someone that could probably be the onstage guy and has been.
When I made my John Turnis video,
he was the one that introduced the Apple Silicon transition.
He was the one that introduced the Mac Studio and Studio Display.
He was the last person to introduce the Mac Pro.
John Turnis has been the guy in all these keynotes talking about stuff.
And I don't know, I'm excited to see him be that guy.
Why, I don't want to go too far down this,
because there's a lot of things to talk about.
But that has always been a weird thing.
Yeah.
Steve Jobs was singular. He's just Steve Jobs.
Correct.
So it made sense that he was the person who was on stage.
I don't know why people think that it has to be the CEO.
Why were people disappointed that Tim Cook wasn't that guy when there were other
people? I hope we still get to see Craig Federighi.
Hmm. yeah, absolutely. Right.
I hope we still get to see John.
I don't care if we see any more or less of John Ternus.
I think it's because when you know the person leading
I don't know why that matters.
the company cares so deeply about the products and how customers will
use them that they are talking about it in the announcement keynote,
I feel like there's a ~ weird sense of trust that is developed in the background.
You're like, this person is leading the company and this person
is introducing this product and this person knows how I'm gonna use the product.
and is literally showing me what I'm gonna do with this product.
Okay, and they're leading the company,
which means like the next few years,
the next thing they ask, I feel like there's some kind of maybe even subconscious
thread that goes along with that.
~ So maybe that? I don't know.
I just think that
is an arbitrary requirement that you're good at talking publicly.
I agree with the other parts. I actually think I would push back.
for sure.
Tim Cook may not be someone who was like a product designer.
I don't know that there was anyone at Apple who cared more about
the experience that people had with products.
I don't know that he knew how to articulate that necessarily.
True. Right, that's fair. Right.
I don't know. But I think he like watching that Wall Street Journal with
I think Ben Collins like he wasn't great at talking about them.
I think he sincerely cares that people be delighted by the products.
And I think it's fine that he also not be really great at communicating
it because he was smart enough to put people up that is I actually think that's
a more important quality than talks good on camera.
Hmm.
And so going to be on stage all the time.
Steve jobs did that. But again,
Steve jobs and Steve jobs, people give him all the credit as being a product guy.
Steve jobs is product sense was sort of a yes,
like a feel.
he wasn't the one who was even the original like,
Yeah, was intuition.
I mean, I wasn't around when they made the Apple one but like he didn't make that
thing was did right like
No, no,
but he had the intuition of, and again,
Pogue uses this example a lot,
the iPod Mini was selling like crazy,
the most popular iPod yet. And when Steve Jobs,
when they introduced the Nano,
they killed the Mini, even though it was their best-selling product.
And everybody around him said,
this is dumb to cancel the Mini for this product that is not proven.
But Steve Jobs was right, and the Nano sold even more,
the iPod Nano.
And so I feel like that intuition,
whatever it is, while he didn't make the product with his hands,
he knew how people would respond to the products.
And it feels like Turnus has that air about him.
And obviously, Tim Cook trusted the people around him and he did
put good people around him to make good products.
I mean, that's why Turnus is here.
know, like Turnus was responsible.
That's one of the things I said in my video.
Turnus was responsible for like the entire iPad lineup all the way up
to like the new one and the entire AirPods lineup.
And in recent years, the iPhone,
like he has been leading those teams.
But actually, Tim Cook, I want to go to your article,
because if you read anything, you know,
the newsroom article with the announcement is fine,
you know, it's interesting. The community letter from Tim,
which we were talking about him articulating about products and like,
I feel like this letter from Tim is one of the best things,
the best communications he's ever given.
And it's like, it's a shame that it's on his way out,
because it feels like the most transparent.
And I believe it. I believe that.
feel like it's earnest. And in this letter,
he talks about how every morning he reads emails from Apple users around the world.
And he feels like he feels that he feels the connection
to them and the importance of what they are doing and how it affects people.
And you said it more eloquently.
And so I'll put your article in the show notes.
This is the ink.com. I'll put the Apple Newsroom article.
You talk about the farewell letter,
but you have a line in this article.
I just want to point out because I think it's really good and I think
it does relate to leadership of all kinds.
says you have to you say Jason Aitin says quote you have to admit that whatever
system you built to protect your time could also be filtering out
the exact signal you need. Otherwise you end up slowly disconnected from
the business. built a career on refusing to be disconnected from
the people sending those emails.
And I think that's really salient point because leaders and people who have
are very time constrained because they're the CEO or whatever,
they will limit or eliminate some of that connection.
Like I'm not going to read emails from just random people
who put timcookatapple.com in the two field,
but he didn't. So yeah, you said it more eloquently.
Yeah,
well, and I think we knew this is actually I'm glad he put it.
I'm glad he wrote the letter. I agree.
It's one of the best pieces of communication from Tim Cook.
But I think that this is some people are better writers and talkers.
It's fine. right. Probably some people think that I'm one of them.
That's me. Yeah.
That's fine. But I think that it was an important thing.
You
And he has actually talked about this before.
And this is why we see those Apple Watch commercials at the beginning of.
of a keynote or whatever, not commercials,
films at the beginning of keynotes is because of this sort of thing.
Yeah, yeah.
And he made a point of, of not just allowing them to show up in his inbox,
but internalizing those things.
And we can see that like, features and decisions and the way that Apple
has talked about it have come from some of these emails.
And I do think that staying closely connected to your,
your customers is extremely important,
especially for someone like Tim Cook.
who maybe doesn't have that innate sense of like,
and I don't know that Tim Cook has less of an innate sense than Steve Jobs.
I think Steve Jobs was just far more confident in his opinion,
that his opinion about a thing was right.
Sure.
And so everyone just did it. And it turns out that most of us who like Apple agreed
with that opinion most of the time,
right?
Right.
one of the distinctions that German talks about in one of his Bloomberg articles,
which yes, I paid $35 this month so I could read all these articles because
I wasn't paying enough before.
People inside Apple described Tim Cook in meetings where there was
a decision to make or they were at an end pass on trying to decide something.
Tim Cook would defer. He would ask the people around the table,
what do you think about this? What should we do about this?
And
the similar people would say when John Ternus is in a meeting,
he will be much more decisive.
And he will say, this is like,
let's do this and go from there.
And I guess if you, if you want to take any trait and say,
this is closer to Steve Jobs than that,
that probably feels like the thing that they will do the most of that makes them
more like jobs. When Tim Cook defers to others,
which is a good quality, like I do think collaboration and delegation.
are great qualities of a leader.
And when it's not your strength,
you're a better leader if you delegate those questions than if you try
to make the decisions yourself and you make poor decisions,
you know, if you don't have that.
So he was probably correct in asking the room.
He put great people around him and they made the decisions.
But we're getting a new CEO, John Ternus,
who has been at Apple for 25 years,
has literally built and led the teams that built the iconic products that
are there today.
of all the things that people say,
like, the software is one thing about the Apple devices today,
and you could say what you want about iOS 26,
a liquid glass, or whatever, but the hardware is always universally agreed
to be the best. The new M5,
the new MacBook Pros, the iPhone 17 Pro,
everything is incredible. And that was Ternus.
That's been Ternus for the last however many years.
He's led the hardware teams for that.
And so having someone that is closer to the Steve Jobs CEO who will
be decisive and here's the thing,
sometimes you make a wrong decision and we're gonna get in a minute about what
Tim Cook has said his failures have been.
When you are that decisive, you do run the risk of making a mistake
and something happening like the iPhone 4 antenna gate or whatever.
And you might have to backtrack like what Steve Jobs gave out free bumpers
or whatever. But I do think that kind of
decisiveness and forward motion lends itself
to more innovation than not. And so that is why guess I'm hopeful that John Turner
is now being the CEO for however many years.
Some things might break or not might not be great,
but I think we'll see more innovation because there's going to be
a decisiveness to say, yes, let's do that.
Like, let's do the folding iPhone.
Who knows if anybody wants this,
but let's do it. Let's do the AR glasses.
Let's push it.
And you know, let's get it out there and let's see.
I feel like Steve Jobs was a bit like Steve Jobs kind of had the confidence
to say like, we're going to put this out there because I know
the customers were wanted. I don't know if John Turnis is that confident.
You know, I don't know if he has that kind of Steve Jobs in like,
I know people like we tell what people what they want.
You know, that's literally what Steve Jobs would say that we want.
You know, we tell them what they want.
You have to show them what they want.
And maybe Turnis has that too.
But that is one of the reasons why I'm optimistic about the innovation
at Apple going forward. I think Turnis will bring that with the decisiveness,
with the direction.
Yeah, I just hope they don't become Samsung.
Right? Like you just described.
No, they wouldn't know.
Well, you just described. Let's just put the stuff out there.
I actually think that Apple's biggest strength has been that they are very,
very conservative about what they're willing to put out there.
Yes, yes.
Sometimes maybe to their detriment,
sometimes maybe but like they put the vision pro out there.
Not exactly a resounding success.
Incredible piece of hardware. Incredible software.
Right. Right, yeah, exactly, yeah.
Right.
Not a thing that anyone cares about except for me.
I still use it every day but
I just think that like, don't know.
I think Steve Jobs, when he says we told people what they want,
he doesn't mean you will like this because we told you to what he means
is he could see around the corner.
He knew how people would experience something and how they would feel about
right.
it before they did because it was new to them and they didn't have it.
So when he says he would tell people what they should think or what they should
like, what he just means is like he could see it before people
who had never experienced it could.
And so they moved in that direction and they told people they didn't just
ask you because what he knew is that if you just ask people what they want,
it's what if the Henry Ford we just want faster horses like right?
We we don't want the automobile.
We just want faster horses. I guess.
But you've never seen an automobile.
promise you it's better. Like you have to just trust us on it.
So I don't know. First of all,
I'm being contrarian to some extent.
think Turner's will be a great CEO.
I think he was the obvious choice.
I think that that's great. I think expectations are way too high on
him and people are pinning all of the things that they thought were
Hmm.
Deficits of Tim Cook as hopes on John Ternus and I don't think that that's fair
and I think it sets him up for a real bad situation Because John Ternus
That's fair, yeah.
has worked with Tim Cook for 15 years.
He calls him his mentor I don't think we're gonna see a dramatically different,
Reverend.
you know, and John Ternus was not a product designer He's a hardware engineer.
No.
He was the guy who figured out huh?
The MacBook Air is gonna be this then how does it all work together?
What where do we source the stuff from he wasn't the
I mean and also like he was the butterfly keyboard guy
That's a point.
And he was the one
who thought the MacBook Pro should only have USB-C ports.
I'm pretty sure he was the one that engineered that,
Was that him or Johnny Ive?
But yeah,
but Johnny Ive was still there calling a lot of shots.
So that's my point is like that those are product design decisions.
So
Right. I'm not like, obviously,
Ternus is Apple DNA through and through.
He's been there for 25 years. of like Tim Cook for 15 years.
I don't think he's going to be a radical change,
to be clear. But I think the needle will move.
I don't know how much it will move,
but I think it will move slightly away from hyper conservative,
maybe, to like release innovation,
like artificial intelligence, I think is the clear example.
Apple has been
way on the conservative side and now have fallen behind because of it.
Maybe, and this is just an assumption,
but maybe with someone like Ternus at the helm,
they will move slightly faster in these new areas and might make
for more innovation going forward.
It's a hope. I'm not saying, listen,
their product roadmap, like Tim Cook literally said in that town hall,
our product roadmap has to be incredible.
So it makes it clear the roadmap is set for at least some time.
You know what I mean?
We probably won't know the effect Ternus has had on the products for
two to three years. listen, iPhone 18,
that's in the can. Like, that's done.
Well, but it's also Ternus. He just wasn't CEO.
It is a still tiller. Right, right,
That's what I'm saying. All the products they're going to set out in
right, right, right, right. And it just turned us.
the next couple years, that was all Ternus anyway.
Right, but things like the AI,
like I think about the interview that Joanna Stern did with Craig Joswek
and Craig Ferrigi, like I'm sure the two of them and Tim Cook talk a
lot about AI and they were like,
no one wants a chat app. And now all the rumors are that the next voice assistant
on the iPhone, Kamaios 27, will be a chat app.
And so something is happening there where they are shifting to maybe just accepting
the world and what people actually want,
but I'm hopeful that Ternus has more of that bent.
Not that it's a-
180 turn but just a slight bent toward like all right,
let's move a little faster, you know,
and he's young he's 51 He's the age Tim Cook was when Tim Cook became CEO and so,
you know, we have another 10 10 15 years
Yeah, again, I think it was the right decision.
I am optimistic. I just want us to be careful that we don't put all of
our hopes on John Ternus because because first of all,
Hopes and dreams. No, no, no.
I mean, you shouldn't put your hopes and dreams and Steve Jobs either.
But John Ternus is still not Steve Jobs.
Right. And John Ternus is coming out of the Steve Jobs era and
the Tim Cook era. And he will define the era that comes after very differently.
I think he set up for success much better than like Bob Chapek was it.
Hmm.
Disney, right, which we're gonna talk about Tim Cook sticking around a little bit.
But I but I think, like, I don't think we're gonna have that kind of a situation.
Yes.
I think he's in a better situation than than that.
And I think it's because Tim Cook's main priority,
I think john gruber said it really well,
Tim Cook's main priority was just Apple,
like, just you know, if Tim, if Steve Jobs is greatest product was Apple,
Right, right.
the company, Tim Cook did the best job anyone could have done of just letting that
flourish, right? And we'll see maybe the products within Apple will flourish more
Yeah.
under John Ternus. And I think that that's good to have somebody who
has that kind of a sense. But people are like,
well, they're gonna bring back in person keynotes now because John Ternus
is I'm like, I don't know that that makes the thing.
Well, I don't know. I don't know.
Yeah.
But interestingly, when the MacBook Neo,
there was an event in New York,
and there was one person on stage doing stuff live,
and it was John Ternus talking about the MacBook Neo.
And there's some interesting photos.
After that event in the press area,
people who were there, there's like pictures of John Ternus by himself standing
by the MacBook Neo, and John Gruber pointed out like,
that's the last time that will ever happen.
Because now whenever John Ternus is in room,
there's gonna be a swarm of people.
And I think the one word I feel like to describe Tim Cook's era,
he was the best steward Apple could have hoped for.
He stewarded the company, made it what it was today.
Absolutely.
And I think John Ternus will continue to steward it and,
and something. I think there will be something else there.
Yeah. Well,
the reason that's such a good word is Stuart means to manage something that belongs
to someone else. No, really, that's what it means.
That's fair. That is fair.
And Tim Cook, in two ways did that he managed something that in his mind,
I think still belonged to Steve Jobs and belong to shareholders.
Yeah. Right, right,
No, like for real, like I mean that sincerely,
right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think Tim Cook was the single best at that.
And john Stuart, I think john Stuart.
John Ternus.
John Turnis
is a steward. think what he will do is continue to steward the company
in a very different way in some ways.
Yeah, yeah.
Like he's going to be managing something that is much bigger than him.
Right. He came up in a very different way at Apple.
Right, right.
And I think it'll be, I think,
but I don't think like no one should expect Apple to have the same kind
of exponential growth over the next 15 years than it did today.
Well, I don't think that would even be possible just from a practical,
Just from math.
from math, the amount of people in the world and the products that actually
are ubiquitous, namely the phone.
I mean, AI is taking all of our jobs and we're all going to have universal basic
I don't know.
income anyway, so it doesn't matter.
Well, on that note, I do want to talk about Tim Cook,
~ what he's staying on to do, the failures that he admitted to,
and Johnny Saruji's being around.
I'm glad he's sticking around.
I'm glad they elevated him to do that.
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All I want to talk about your second article,
which Tim Cook, he's moving into the chairman of the board at Apple.
So he's still going to be around.
He's still going to be doing things.
And mostly this line, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company,
including engaging with policymakers around the world.
And this was one of the reasons why a lot of journalists and people
in the tech space, we were like,
maybe Tim Cook's not going to leave until the administration changes because
Tim Cook has been, you know, heavily involved with doing things.
and kind of smoothing things over with tariffs or whatever so maybe
he won't leave well. Now he can continue to do those same things but doesn't have
to be CEO. He can do that as chairman of the
Yeah, I think Neelay Patel said it best on the first cast where
he talked about like, you just can't introduce the current president to a new guy.
You just he's not going to learn a new guy at this point.
That's the thing.
He just it's going to have to still be Tim.
And I do think like it is his most important job.
It's just gotta be Tim.
I don't know that he wants to do this,
but I think what it does is set up John Ternus for the best amount of success.
I imagine that Tim Cook is going to show up at board meetings and then
go talk to policy people. And I don't think you'll see him a ton
at Cooper in Cupertino for a while to give John Ternus as much runway as
he can in as much opportunity to put his own impression on it.
And then when it's kind of like it's it's kind of like when this
is a terrible analogy. But it's like after was it Hurricane Katrina when George W.
Bush sent ~
Bill Clinton and George HW Bush,
I think it was to go like raise money for him or something like that.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
It's like, you're gonna call in the other statesman and be like,
Tim, ~ I keep getting calls from the White House.
I haven't been answering them.
Do you think you could get on a plane right now and go to Washington DC?
Can you?
Why are you still here? Could you please go to Washington DC?
Just go over there.
And so, I mean, I think it's great for Ternus that Tim Cook will
be around still handling those things.
And just in the general running of Apple,
like this is again, a difference between Tim Cook taking over CEO and Ternus.
Tim Cook could not go to Steve Jobs and ask him a question.
Like, what should I do in this situation?
Or, where did you hide my Vision Pro inserts?
Where is the toilet paper in the executive bathroom?
Because I can't find.
Why are there just boxes of Vision Pro in this office?
Like, why are there thousands of them?
Exactly. I thought we sold a couple million.
Why are they all in your old office?
Why are they? That's
right. So that is an advantage that John Turnus has is that if
he has a question or needs help with the supply chain or whatever,
like Tim Cook is literally here going to be the chairman of the board probably
for years, like Turnus has that resource.
And that's something to Tim Cook's credit.
He didn't have that opportunity to be able to ask Steve Jobs and
yet was as successful as he was.
So that speaks to think Tim Cook's ~ just being a great CEO,
but also optimistic for the next phase because he's around and gets to
Yeah,
do some of the dirty
less than five years, that's my guess.
Less than five years as chairman of the board.
Yeah, why would he be around longer than that?
The guy wants to retire.
If he just,
if he wants to be, I don't know.
guess it's up to him, right?
I
bet I bet. I mean, I bet it's less than five years.
I don't think that this is a permanent decision of like,
Okay.
we should just do this for a long time.
Right. Right, right.
I think eventually he'll go spend money or get involved
in philanthropy or something. I don't know,
That's true.
like, but I just don't think I you can mark it down five years from now.
My guess is that it'll be
Okay.
Maybe he'll be in Nike commercials.
You know, he loves Nike. You know what mean?
Maybe, maybe
him and Jeff Williams are gonna go start like an athletic,
~ you know, wear clothing brand.
~ Isn't
Tim Cook on the board of directors at Nike too?
I don't know, but I
think Jeff Williams is on the board of director of somewhere,
right? Didn't he just join a board?
~
maybe yeah he's served on the board since like 2005
~ Anyway.
Disney, Disney, Jeff Williams just joined the board at Disney,
that's right.
See,
these guys are gonna be around.
They're gonna be around. But also,
so the last thing about Tim Cook,
and it'll cover Suruji and some other lightning round news.
In the town hall that Tim Cook did at Apple,
and I'm gonna show this article because I paid $35 just so could read it.
I literally paying.
So if you want to
join our membership program, ~ join the primaritech.fm slash join,
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Join.primarytech.fm.
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That'd be great.
So Tim Cook, this is in the town hall,
he talked about some of the failures during his tenure.
One, not a failure, but he fondly remembers the Apple Watch as probably like
his high point. know, he did get,
that was a main product he got to introduce.
The Apple Watch in 2014, which was the introduction,
and then it went for sale in 2015.
But Tim Cook was on stage, he got to do that announcement.
He sees that as a huge win.
Then also he remembers the Apple Maps launch and missteps like AirPower,
the wireless charging that which never came to be,
and also the decade long self-driving car project,
which also never came to be. But when he talks about Apple Maps,
which again, I think is a good mark of a CEO,
said, you know, we apologize, this is him talking,
quote, we apologized for it, Apple Maps,
and literally said, go use these other apps so they're better than ours.
And that was some humble pie.
but it was the right thing for our users.
And so it's an example of keeping the user at the center of the decisions we make.
I think that goes to your point.
Like Tim Cook, you he reads those emails every morning.
He did care about users and heard how they were using it and what they should do.
But now he says, Cook said, quote,
now we've got the best map app on the planet.
We learned about persistence and did exactly the right thing,
having made the mistake. So now we're adding ads.
No, he didn't say the last part,
but.
I do think it's a little ironic.
He's like, we have the best map app on the planet and we're gonna monetize it.
Yep, we have accumulated a large enough base of users now that we
can get eyeballs into money.
That's right, we're gonna show him ads.
But no, was him talking about,
and you know, I still kinda wanted to see air power.
I wish I could get some kind of air power prototype on eBay,
but you know. And then Johnny Suruji,
who I think it is hilarious that Mark Gurman reported that he was almost out,
and then Johnny Suruji leaked the memo that no,
he's not going anywhere, and now he's been elevated,
maybe to help him stay around,
maybe to encourage him to stay,
but Apple's chief hardware officer.
So he's gonna be around for a little while making those great ~ chips
and all the like. So that's good.
Yeah, I mean,
Chinese Ruiji is one of the most important people at Apple because Apple Silicon,
Apple Silicon, Apple Silicon, whatever,
Yeah, yeah,
is such a critical piece of their strategy.
I mean, I'm sitting here with a MacBook Neo.
It's running full blown Mac OS on an iPhone chip and not even a new iPhone chip,
That's right. That's right. Yeah.
an old iPhone chip. And it's phenomenal.
Right. Yeah.
Like it's incredible. So yeah,
keep the guy around as long as possible.
Heave the guy around. And I will link Gruber's article as well.
He talks a lot about Tim Cook and Ternus.
And one of the points he makes,
a part of Tim Cook's legacy that will probably not get a lot of air time,
is that there were no recalls or major product failures under his tenure.
And there's a great video from the Artemis II moon flyby where they took
a photo of the Earth with the iPhone.
And it was the zoom. And two...
Tim Cook, Greg Jaspiak, they didn't tweet about the iPhones being
on the spaceship until they came back and were safe.
And as soon as they got out of that pod in the Pacific,
they hit tweet. And they sent a tweet like,
hey, we're so glad they took the iPhones on this trip.
Which, again, smart, just optics or whatever.
Yeah, you don't want the
thing to burn up on reentry and have been touting how cool it was that you
got to be a part of it.
That.
That. And so, you know, they were smart with that.
But I think part of the reason NASA put iPhones on that spaceship
is because while Samsung makes great products and for a long time has
not had these kind of issues, there were a couple of Samsung phones that like blew
up. I think one even on a plane like caught a fire.
Also, this
just occurs to me that the biggest scandal surrounding Samsung's cameras
is that if you took a picture of the moon,
Right. Oh,
it just replaced it with a generic photo of the moon.
I didn't even think of that. Now I wish they had brought it to see like,
it generate an AI photo when we're literally right next to it?
What is it gonna do?
Oh, that would have been hilarious.
I do think that this does explain the timing.
If you're Tim Cook, and NASA just published pictures with your most recent product,
your flagship product, the entire world is watching and paying attention to this.
I don't know that there's anything more you can accomplish in your role.
I'm done. I did it.
That's fair.
That's fair. Yeah, the iPhone literally went to and around the moon.
So anyway, I'm optimistic about the next phase of Apple.
I don't expect some kind of crazy like innovation.
This like I don't think you're going to have AR glasses in September.
You know, I don't think we're going to see that.
But I'm bullish on Apple moving a little quicker,
maybe in areas like AI and to,
you know, try to do some new stuff like let's innovate on some
new product categories and
Yeah, I'm excited to see what Ternus does.
That's it.
Yeah, I will say the keyboards.
Those were recalled multiple times.
Well, yeah, they fixed it and then it's like,
with Butterfly Keyboard.
oops, and then they fixed it and it's like,
oops, and then they just had the whole keyboard replacement program for like years.
Yeah
I don't have any inside information on this,
but I'm gonna just blame Johnny Ive and say Johnny Ive required something
and so turned his head to make it happen,
but I
I'm just saying you said there was no recalls on and I think the keyboard
is a pretty big exception to that.
It's a fairly important piece of I mean,
Sure.
as someone who uses keyboard all day long,
is pretty important.
Yeah, that's fair.
That's fair. But of all, but it didn't blow up.
You know what mean? No one had a keyboard blow up.
No keyboards caught on fire. All right.
Touche.
Let's do a lightning round of stuff and then we got to talk about your app.
I do want to mention Chad GPT and OpenAI announced GPT images 2.0 and
say what you will about image generation.
You know, I'm not all that, but every once in a while I do put
a thumbnail through an AI system to see like how it can adjust the image.
And so I did a test with 2.0 and I will say it is markedly improved.
so this was a shortcuts thumbnail that I never used this thumbnail to be clear.
I used a different one, but this was what ChatGPT gave me as an image before.
So before images 2.0, which looks a little like a little crazy.
Like, let's be honest, I don't look great in this image,
but I gave the same image and the same prompt to GPT images 2.0.
And I got this, which was much better.
The text is sharper and clearer.
It didn't garble any text. I don't look very shiny or round.
like Paul Giamatti.
Exactly. Like I look real,
like more real. so GPT images 2.0 debatted.
This was the original image for what it's worth.
And it's me with just some shortcuts overlaid.
And there was the prompt. If you want to see what I did,
I gave it pictures of Gambit and my picture and told it to do with the thing.
And yeah, GPT images did a much better job than whatever was before it.
just had the AI image,
just weird things with a face,
makes it super smooth and like,
yeah, it's weird.
You have to tell it to use accurate skin textures.
That's a real thing. I mean,
is that a thing? You just tell it that?
Well, I, okay.
I'm not saying it would have made this picture better,
but it is a real thing.
Okay, well you can see like even in this one like the messages bubble
and the search all messages It's like what happened there It's like
a boxing glove and then it broke this paper clip for the URL
and it misspelled transparency Like it it took the time to misspell transparency,
even though I had it spelled right but in the new one It's spelled correctly
and there's no garbled messages icon.
So
I
mean, that is how I feel sometimes when I get a message that I just want
to punch it.
Maybe that was it. It was subconscious.
Yeah, so that's GPT 2.0. Also Google had its and also chat
GPT announced codex powered workspace agents I was a little hesitant about this news
because apparently this is replacing custom GPTs And that's one of
the main reasons why I use custom GPTs is because I've trained one to help
me with YouTube titles and descriptions and so custom GPTs go away in favor
of this kind of like business workspace agent use case
I might just move away from chat GPT entirely,
but that's just my thought on that.
So do you still use your custom GPT?
So it stops. Yeah. Okay.
Yeah, I mean, I do.
All right. Anyway, that's cause that that Google teased the Gemini powered series.
So they had their cloud keynote,
Google cloud. And in the keynote,
they literally put the Apple logo on the screen and says work.
And they said, quote, we're collaborating with Apple as their preferred cloud
provider to develop the next generation of Apple foundation models based
on Gemini technology.
and they said that later this year we should see the Gemini powered Apple
Intelligence features. So it seems like iOS 27,
we're gonna see this stuff. Hopefully.
Yeah, they
That is interesting that Apple allowed them to announce.
I mean, that's an announcement,
right? There's two pieces of that announcement.
There's an announcement here.
One, develop the next generation of Apple foundation models based
on Gemini technology, which is different than just we're going to just slap Gemini
into Siri, right? I don't exactly know what it means,
That is true.
but that is a distinction that is that is more than I think what we have assumed
was going to happen. They are developing foundation models based on Gemini.
Right.
Now maybe that just means they're going to like white label Gemini
and they're going to call it whatever.
The other one is Apple doesn't typically allow other companies
to pre-announce that they're going to release a thing this year.
Now I think we all assume that that was going to be the case,
but Apple has not said specifically,
I don't think that they were coming to Siri this year.
I think they just said it's coming.
I think
in the deal that Apple let Google tweet about earlier this year,
I think they said later this year.
I think that was the
Maybe you're right. That may be true.
And I think you're you're right,
because everyone assumed that that meant like 26 dot three dot one was going
to have Gemini and I was like,
not going to come before but BWC.
I remember we had that conversation on this podcast.
Yes, yeah,
yeah that we did. So yeah, anyway,
google said it again. So later this year really feels like ios 27.
We'll see that amazon is investing another 25 billion dollars in anthropic
as part of its infrastructure deal again anthropic sponsored earlier
in this episode as claude, but amazon getting more invested there
Listen, Jeff Bezos,
Yeah
I have an app now, if you want.
huh.
If you want 25, I'll give you a discount.
Yeah?
I don't even need 25 billion.
Well, look at that. OK. Well, yeah.
They're just saying, just saying.
to saying.
Also, SpaceX is apparently landed a deal to acquire Cursor,
which is something that developers and people use.
It's a kind of competitor to Cloud Code and OpenAI Codecs for developing apps.
And so they struck a deal. They might not go through or sign the deal until SpaceX
hits IPO, which apparently this deal might delay that.
So they're going to wait on it,
maybe hit IPO first and then it
Finally acquire... ~ yeah.
Cursor? It's weird.
I don't know. This is weird
because I mean, cursor is literally just like a fork of VS code,
which is an open source piece of software you can use for free.
Like, I don't understand why you would pay that much money for this other than
Why didn't they just fork it themselves?
it has a user base. You're just paying for a user base of people who are using.
the name.
I don't I don't feel like there's a lot of stickiness there.
It's probably just to say it is part of SpaceX,
which SpaceX is now like the parent company,
right? XAI and X are underneath it,
Correct.
and SpaceX is like the thing. Okay,
the other's that. And then finally,
before we get to Jason's app, Therese is adding a live chats feature to the app.
Listen, I did think Clubhouse when I first saw this announcement,
but what it is...
happens is like certain creators is not going to be open to everyone
but certain creators and influential names can basically start what looks like
a group message like a group chat in threads and a certain number of people
can join and participate in this group chat by sending images or text
can react to messages with emoji and then after a certain point it would
cut it off so you can't actually interact but you could just watch it i listen
Meta is clearly good at engagement and getting people to engage with their
platforms. And frankly, I think this might be a great feature.
Not great as in like, I want to use this feature,
but great as in like getting people engaged in live events on their platform.
Because that is one thing where even during like live events like the Oscars,
which nobody watches, but like the Super Bowl or whatever,
like those kinds of events.
There's still a bifurcation of like where people go to post about it.
And I still find a lot of people default to X,
especially people like news anchors or sports people and athletes.
Like there's still that and there's not as much activity during those live events
like the Super Bowl on threads.
It has grown for sure. But I think this is a play where threads is wants
to be the place where when there's a big cultural moment happening,
like the NBA championships.
or the World Series or World Cup is coming up.
And so probably all those things is trying to become that live event platform.
And I think it probably has a good chance to do it,
if this is any good.
I don't know, you want to start a live chat,
Jason?
I really don't. And I think that
the way you explained it, this is not your fault.
But it made no sense. And I was thinking you're what you're about to
Really?
say after that is meta is very good at making product decisions that just make
no sense. Like I don't actually understand what's happening.
If you look at
this image, which I'll put as the chapter art,
and you'll see in every app except Apple Podcasts,
or if you support the show, join.primarytech.fm.
But if you're watching on the video,
you see this middle screenshot where,
my word, what just happened? TechCrunch just freaked out because I hit Command+.
This center screenshot, I feel like,
shows what this thing is going to be.
Yeah, so people
are just going to be able to watch you have a group chat on threads,
which is already a thing you can do on threads.
but it's gonna be hosted by someone.
So if they get someone like, I don't know,
Stephen Curry or Shaq, like if they could get Shaq.
Rebbets death curry
and Shaq can just post together on threads already.
But if threads gives them a bunch of money,
Well that's the thing.
that's the thing. Then they can do that or like some music artist doing this during
the Grammys. Maybe, you know, maybe,
maybe that's something. So I don't know.
We'll see. We'll see if this turns out to be a thing.
you know, men always want to figure out how to engage people more,
get people on the services.
Meta
is always willing to spend money to get you to spend more of your time
on a platform so it can make more money.
That is true.
That is true. All right, I'm going talk about how I got scammed
in the bonus episode, which I did like literally get scammed
and literally paid somebody money I wasn't supposed to.
And it has nothing to do with my app,
No, it has nothing to do with Jason's app.
I just want to be clear.
But I'm literally running Jason's app right now.
I'm using it for a couple of days.
I'm going to share it. This is a live picture of Jason's app.
Jason, tell me about the app. How's this experience gone?
You're actually testing this. People have downloaded this and tested it.
I don't actually love your layout,
Why not? What do I need to do?
that's okay. That's okay.
I would make the notes a little bit narrower so that you could see more
of your note. I'm sorry, the note.
Oh, sure, sure, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Yeah, that list. There you go.
That's a little bit better. So yeah,
that's fine. Okay.
I mean, listen, I explained this before and I actually wrote an article this morning
that talked about how every note app I've ever used is like missing
the most important thing, which is notes apps are basically been designed
to capture all the information,
but they don't.
come with context, right? Which is for me a really important thing.
If you take notes in as many meetings as I do,
having the context of syncing it with your calendar is super useful.
I don't want to have to my calendar open over here,
my notes app over here, my to-do app over here,
whatever. I want to be able to take notes.
And so I spent a lot of time using a lot of notes apps,
and a lot of them are very good.
A lot of them are beautifully designed.
I use Ulysses as a writing app.
That doesn't change. That's where I'm going to write stuff.
VAS.
But what I wanted is, OK, when I sit down in a meeting,
sit down on a call. I want to just like click my calendar,
make a new note from this. Now I've got all that context and then I
can write all the note, whatever I want.
And then I could just, now Steven has not unlocked the pro features,
which he should have a code to do that.
I know, I should, yeah.
But ~ you can just click the, the little summarize button and it'll give
you a ~ summary, an Apple intelligence.
I finally found the one thing Apple intelligence is good at.
And it is to summarize your notes and then give you all the action items from that.
So it'll go through and it'll look and be like,
~ it looks like you agreed to follow up on this.
And it looks like this person agreed to do this and it'll show them to you.
And then you can just send them to things or reminders or OmniFocus or Todoist.
Yes.
Like literally just with one click,
it'll just do that for you. it's so that sort of like that flow through from your
And you can.
calendar to your meeting notes to the action steps.
And it's so cool, like you just give it access to your calendars.
And so all my events are here on the right.
You can customize what calendars are viewed,
which I was about to send it as a feature request,
but I was like, let me make sure I could just do this in the settings.
And I could, which was ideal. So I turned off all the calendars.
Yep. Yep. Turn them on or off.
Yep.
You can right click an event and create a new note linked to that event
or link that event to whatever note is open live,
like in your viewer. Now I just seeing all the Apple intelligence
and summarize features. I think this is really cool.
I already had a couple of feature requests,
but you've been like, there's a test flight that exists.
You have some people on it. what is it,
like, some of the feedback if you can share,
like, good feedback, questions?
Yeah, I will.
Let me one thing I was going to say that I missed the other feature.
Yeah, yeah.
This is the one that's the hardest right now is you can actually then just chat with
your notes and it's all on device.
Hmm.
So, for example, I can ask it,
when is my next recording? Well,
because I can see my calendar,
my notes, it's like, you're recording tomorrow morning primary tech at this time.
Or I can say, ~ so I was I was producing a podcast on Tuesday and I
had made some notes.
feedback I needed to give the person who was hosting it,
I didn't, wasn't, we didn't have a conversation afterwards.
So I could literally just say,
what did I need to, what did I need to talk to so and so about?
And it's like, here's the note,
here are the three things you said you needed to talk to them about,
and it just surfaces that information for you.
So that's really useful as well.
So your question, what has been the feedback?
Well, it took me a while to figure out iCloud sync.
So it will sync across your devices now.
That was super broken at first,
was very complicated, was able to figure it out.
~ It also the other feature requests were like importing all of your
to do's and that's not going to happen because I don't that's I'm not going
to like this is not a very good to do app.
This is a very good app to help you figure out action items from your notes
and then put them in your to do app.
Now it does actually have a to do section.
Like if you have to do is if you've either created them as like a checklist item or
had the Apple intelligence summary create them for you.
It will show them all in a window you can open.
Like that's fine. You can look at those.
And the reason that's useful is you could right click on them and create
a new note from that to do. And it'll actually create a new note link back to the,
to the original note where you created that to do.
And it goes both ways. So like if you pull up the original note,
it's like, yeah, you made a note about this to do over here.
So that's really useful, but it is not meant for like managing your task list.
It's not going to be great at that.
Right, right, right, right.
So no, I'm not going to let it import all your reminders notes.
or reminders because I just feel like it's not very good at that.
That's not the point.
That's not what it's for.
But you've also sent me a screenshot.
I won't show the screenshot, but of an iPhone app also running.
there is an iPhone app that exists.
So have you got an iCloud sync to work?
You're still working on it.
Yeah, it
syncs from the phone. It syncs between that Macs.
It'll sync from and the thing about the iPhone app is it is designed to make
it much easier to just quickly do notes.
So it's like I'm in this meeting and I just want to record it for example,
because this will let you record.
It is not it's not like an app like granola or auto auto where that's
its primary purpose is like recording but
Yeah,
it will record audio and it uses the Apple speech recognition,
which is actually
really good, you don't even need to use whisper kit.
If you use that and transcribe it for you in real time,
or you could just be like I took him with the note,
you know, the audio, what is it called?
Memo's audio memos, voice memos.
Voice memos.
Yeah, and drop that in there and it'll just transcribe it for you.
~ But the on the phone, like what I imagine is you're more likely to just
be like set this thing down, let it record,
then it'll just drop right into a note on your Mac and it still has
the the calendar sync, it still has the same features.
Weirdly, the ask your notes feature works better and faster on the iPhone.
It's using the same stuff. I don't really know why that is,
Interesting.
but I gotta sort that out a little bit first,
so.
So are you going back and forth with Claude?
Like if you find a bug or you want to tweak something,
like are you going back to Xcode and asking Claude to do a thing,
having it do it, build it again,
test it again? Like are you doing that process?
Yep. so yeah, most of what I've built in this,
I've used Claude code to help me do because I don't know Swift or Swift UI.
I've learned a ton of it. I've learned to troubleshoot it.
Right? Right? Yeah. That's good.
It has done an amazing job of basically everything I've asked except
for the iCloud sync. had to figure most of that out on my own.
~ I've been using so I've never used Claude code in the terminal.
I've only ever used it in the app and it works fantastic to do that.
But there are definitely times when it's like,
okay,
this is done, this is done, this done,
go ahead and build and run and I'll get the same error.
And I literally just take a screenshot,
drop it in there and be like, still broke.
That's the, and it'll fix it. It'll fix it.
Yeah, that's what I'll do. Yeah,
yeah, yeah.
Like I don't even have to, I don't even know what's wrong.
I don't know how to explain what's wrong.
I just drop it in there. So I have had someone who's looked at basically
the entire code base for me. Well,
really?
I just want to make sure that as you go through and you make all these changes,
are you creating weird edge cases that could cause other,
Right.
listen, there's like,
no malware, like this is a notes app,
No, no, Yeah.
right? And it doesn't send your notes anywhere.
I went back and forth on that a lot because there are much more capable
LLM tools that you could use,
Hmm.
but I don't want to send people's notes to OpenAI because then I got
to deal with the fact that you're sending your notes to OpenAI.
All That's good, yep.
I have considered, and this is something that I may do down the road where
you could give people the option of downloading a better local model.
Like so Gemma 3, one of the small,
Right.
you know, the 2 billion parameter one.
It probably won't be significantly faster than Apple intelligence
and Apple intelligence is like three months is going to just be Gemma.
Like I might as well wait and see what happens at WWDC before I decide what to do.
That is true, yeah. Just wait.
Yeah.
~ but when I've used like either open AI or,
~ Gemini through the API,
it actually does a much, much better job,
but that's what you would expect,
but you have to send your notes to those places to do it.
And I feel like it's, it is good enough for what people would expect,
which is
identifying to do's and summarizing meetings,
that it's the benefit of being able to say,
I don't have access to any of your stuff.
No one has access to any of your stuff.
It's all happening on device is a much more useful way to do that.
Good. Yeah.
This is good, man, I'm excited for you and for this.
two other things, the name and availability.
So the name, you want to mention some of the names you're going between,
you just want to say the name of
Did we say the name already on this episode?
Maybe it was in the pre-show. Yeah.
I don't think we said it, we said it in the pre-show,
we said it in the pre-show, but not yet.
Let's save the name. If you're a member,
Okay. Okay.
you can go back and listen to the pre-show.
I'm 99.9 % sure I'm going to stick with the name.
Go listen to the unedited feed,
by the way, that sounds good.
So that's fine. I I've bought a domain.
Okay, okay, okay, good. did you?
I've done all those things. But I'll tell you about it when we're done recording.
that's great. Wait, was the dot com available?
Okay,
okay, okay.
But, ~ and then I, and I've built the website for it,
all of that stuff. I just have to figure out,
I'm hoping that it'll launch pretty soon.
Like I'm hoping to be able to launch,
but what I need to do is get a little bit more feedback from beta tester.
So if you're on the beta, use the heck out of it.
If you would send me a lot of feedback.
Yeah.
So I make sure to know like what actually is,
or is not working out other people's devices.
My hope is to be able to release both apps at the same time.
Yeah. We'll see if I, we'll see if I feel like that.
with the iPhone app.
Do you want more
beta testers?
I can send you the beta. Yeah,
do I want more beta testers in general?
~ If everybody who signed up to be on the beta started using it,
I would be in a good shape. I do not need hundreds of people sending
me feedbacks on these types of things,
You don't? Okay, say okay.
but I have a good number of people on the beta.
So I appreciate all of that. ~ But I may need to have the iPhone app beta tested
as well. So we'll see about that.
But I'm probably going to just use the same group of people because it's just easier
Okay.
to not have to onboard people who haven't used it.
Yeah.
I had to
create a like a welcome flow so that people would know what to do because it's going
to ask you. It has to get one of the nice things is that it doesn't.
You don't have to log into your calendars.
I don't want to mess with any of that.
So it just uses if you're logged into an account on your Mac,
Right, right.
it'll just share that information with event kit.
It'll just use it. Right.
I think it's called where it'll just let you say,
do you want to give access to your calendars and it'll just show your calendar,
right? You don't have to give me any credentials,
any of that kind of stuff. The other thing it'll do,
it'll ask you permission to let it get information from other apps.
The only reason it asks you that is you can just import out,
import your notes. Like you can export all your notes from the notes app
Right.
or Bayer or Craft or whatever.
And then you can just import all those so that you like,
it's not super useful to have to like,
I have all my new notes here. All my old notes are over there.
No, need your own ones.
You can just have them all in one place.
And then you can do all the same features,
get summaries, get to do's, get like ask the app what you wanna know.
Yeah.
It's this super fun
And availability I'm hoping like soon.
I'm really excited for you. This is cool.
And so because you already got the test flight through Apple
I assume actually submitting it to the app store would be like you can
do that like you're you're right there
Yeah, it's
all it's so the test flight, you have to upload the app to App Store Connect
in order to do a test flight. You just don't have it submitted
Right. Yeah.
for distribution at this point.
It does have to go through App Store review in order to go through a test flight,
but it is a less rigorous App Store review.
I believe they're just I don't know if they're just like making sure it's
Right.
not malware or making sure that it doesn't significantly copy some kind
of feature or something like that.
Like, I don't know. to do the biggest barrier for me at this point was OK.
I have to think through like app screenshots,
marketing language, all that stuff to get it ready.
Yeah.
And that's the thing I'm working on pretty hard right now so that I
can get it available. And I think the other piece is like,
I need people to have confidence.
To be clear, I only made this app because I needed an app.
And then I was like, this is super better than I thought it was going to be.
And a lot of people were like,
Yeah.
could I try your app? And I was like,
sure. And it's like, well, can I make it available?
Well, the standard between I just needed a thing and
Yeah.
make it available for other people,
there's a huge gap between there.
And Cloud Code was absolutely able to get me to make the app I wanted to use.
red.
There's a little more work I needed to do for make this available to other people.
Yeah.
so depending on how long it takes to get through that,
then I'll release it.
Man, I'm excited. This is gonna be super fun.
We will both have an app in the App Store.
Me, my coffee finder. But yours will actually be useful.
That's right.
I think it's cool. I'll be using it.
I asked you for a bare notes import.
also, could you build an MCP connector for Claude Cowork so Claude could just
do stuff to inside the app? I don't even know.
Maybe ask Claude about that.
MCP connector.
because
one of the things I actually, so I exported all my bare notes,
I imported them into the app, I almost said the name,
but I imported them into the app.
I love the name, by the way, love it.
I mean,
by the way, I'm pretty sure that when you showed a screen,
no, maybe, maybe not when you showed,
No, no, no, no, no.
okay, okay.
Well, when I clicked the pro thing,
~ it did say it there. Okay,
It's fine. It's not a secret. It's fine.
I'm just reserving
okay.
the right that there is a small possibility I may choose to go with something else.
So if you were watching, yeah,
I'll let you know. It's fine.
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, only certain to listen,
It's not a big deal. I'm not trying to be cagey.
okay.
There are a lot of people. Here's the thing.
People are like, well, you shouldn't talk too much about your
app yet because somebody could steal your idea.
Fine. Steal it like I could stop working on it.
Yes.
If someone else would make the only reason I'm doing this is no one else seemed
to care enough to build this in.
Right. Right.
What I wanted was I've been using the notes app.
Apple's
Stock notes app has been my default notes app for a very long time.
Yeah.
I've tried every notes app. If Apple had built these features in,
we wouldn't be having this conversation.
So it'd be a more boring podcast,
Alright.
but if my life would have been easier,
I wouldn't have spent two weeks.
Like I probably have 50 hours into this right now,
Yeah.
which I know for a developer is like,
Right, we're working on it. That's not all I thinking.
that's like nothing, dude. But I've realized that like the key to making a good app,
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
like I'm going to make some people mad.
Fine. But we had this conversation when we talked about like
the way Apple works, right? The key to making a good app is having a very good idea
and knowing what the edge cases are of like,
no, it shouldn't behave this way.
No, it should behave this way.
Right. Right.
No, this is what someone would expect it to do here.
No, stop doing it that way. I don't know that the key to making a good
app is being able to write a lot of code,
right? Because I could have just paid a person to write some code,
but all I wanted was an app for myself,
Right, right.
right? Now, like I said, before it goes out to the world,
Yeah, yeah,
I'll make sure someone who knows what's happening has looked at this app.
looks at it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's good.
All right. Well, I'm super excited for it to be out there,
but you'll hear about it again soon.
You'll about it again soon. So we're going to go record a bonus episode about
how I got scammed. And if you want to hear the bonus episode,
our pre-show where we talked about Jason Zappen,
talked about the name there too,
ad free version of this show, Primary Tech Daily.
You get all of that when you go to join.primarytech.fm.
I'll put a link down in the description.
If you want to get a discount,
$250 a month or $25 a year for that.
If you would like...
And can also watch us either on Apple Podcasts,
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Even if you don't watch it, just go over there and subscribe.
It'd be fun. And I'll leave us a five-star rating and review in Apple Podcasts.
I don't know. Just tell us something.
Tell us something about how you use your Apple stuff.
And we'll figure that out. But anyway,
I'm going go talk about how I was gamed.
But thanks for listening. Thanks for watching.
We'll catch you next time.