What happened to Apple!? Here's why iOS 18.2 is BROKEN!
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My iPhone does not work. I'm sorry. I'm just going to say it. Okay. I don't know what happened in... You upgraded your software. What happened? You're on iOS 18. It doesn't work. After three years, I upgraded to the newest phone. I upgraded to the newest OS.

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

But it's really bad. You're not the only person. People are freaking out about the interface changes on photos. Crashing is a major thing. And Apple intelligence just doesn't work. So it does seem, Keith, that Apple has gotten off their game of making polished stuff to race to try and, I guess, catch up to their perception of, you know, AI being a disruptive force at the interface level, i.e. your phone or desktop. What are your thoughts on that?

This new story about them doing more chips, they've obviously had great success with the processors and phones, and now the M4. Incredible if you haven't tried the Mac Mini, best computer for the dollar in the world right now. But what are your thoughts on Apple? So the most important thing about Apple is to remember it's vertically integrated. And vertically integrated companies, when you construct them properly, have a competitive advantage that really cannot be assaulted for a decade, 20, 30, 40, 50 years.

And so chips, classic illustration, go all the way down to the metal. Build a chip that's perfect for your desired interface, your desired use cases, your desired UI, and nobody's going to be able to compete with you. And if you have the resources, because you need balance sheet resources to go in the chip direction, it just...

gives you another five to 10 year sort of competitive advantage. And so I love vertically integrated companies. You know, I posted a pin tweet. I think it's still my pin tweet about vertically integrate is the solution to the best possible companies. But it's very difficult. You need different teams with different skill sets and you need probably more money, truthfully, more capital.

but Apple is just going to keep going down the vertical integration, software, hardware, you know, all day long. And there's nobody else who does hardware and software together in the planet, which is kind of shocking in some ways. Is there a world-class company, a company that's world-class, it's both software and hardware. Tesla.

Yeah, maybe. NVIDIA? Google? Well, not really. Could they do a world-class UI? Maybe. Maybe there's a foundation, but you have to have a different vision, maybe a different team. Not clear. Tesla's close, I guess. I'd say the software's good. If you define software as it touches a consumer, Tesla, Apple, in some ways, Google, maybe Meta with the Meta glasses.

Trying. Attempting. You can't say NVIDIA because I think NVIDIA touches the consumer through an app that then sits on top of CUDA, which I think that's a brilliant strategy for them. It would be Apple, then Tesla, and then a long tail of people experimenting. Right. So anyway, this is the point. Apple has a lot of competitive advantages that they've been actually leveraging for about 15 years now. And even back then, Steve, there's some old great Steve videos. I'll see if I can find you a clip.

where he talks about this very intentionally from the 1990s.

You know, he came back to Apple. He said, we're doing vertical integration, basically using those words of software and hardware, and there's going to be nobody else that can compete with us. I think it's in an interview he did, and it's published in the company of giants, I believe. And he's perfect on point. He just followed that strategy for, you know, the next 25 years. Now, you're seeing some of the manifestations, though, of a competitive strategy that gives you incredible advantages is you get very sloppy in other places, especially over time.

Because you have such great competitive modes that you don't have to compete at the cutting edge of this. Like the photos app is completely unusable. I'm the biggest Apple fanboy in the world. Like I remember interviewing once with a job for Tim Cook and I walked in and I said, he's like, why, you know, why are you interested? And I said, well, you know, I own every SKU of every product you've ever produced, except I don't have every color of each, you know, iPod.

And he was like blown away. And but now like my photos app is completely unusable. So I totally understand, you know, the frustration and they are showing like the decay function, you know, culturally and otherwise, that eventually somebody will figure out an angle to rip them out. Yeah, I'll tell you, we talked about dictators at the beginning of this. And obviously this is your wheelhouse as a dictator yourself is, you know, there has to be a constant fear that some a-hole is going

going to come to your office and be like, what did you do to the photos app? And that fear does not exist inside of Apple. It's not like the mobile me. You ever hear the mobile me story where he brought the mobile me team in and said, how is mobile me supposed to work? They said, well, it's supposed to back up everything. When you buy your new phone, you get everything. You never have to worry about losing the phone. Slammed his hand down and said, well, why the F doesn't work that way?

fired the person, brought the next person in and said, now make it the way he said it's supposed to be game over. I don't think Tim Cook's doing that. Johnny Ives not there. And obviously, Steve Jobs not there to terrorize people.

Well, I don't think you look, you don't need to necessarily terrorize people. But I do think you have to go through UAT. So I think it's pretty reasonable when you have a large footprint of consumers using an app to go through user acceptance testing is like first base. And typically what happens is you can do a process of a few months where several hundred thousand people get it all over the world. And as long as you do an OK job of getting a decent distribution of people, this would have come out.

But I want to just talk about what Keith said as well. It's literally not just photos. It's like the phone doesn't work. So there are just core structural issues with this operating system now that makes the iPhone maybe 10% to 30% less usable. And that's really frustrating. The command center, you know, when you pull up your little command center to change the brightness and your AirPods, it's just like, what are they doing here? I mean, by the way, so do you need a chip

Do you need a machine learning chip to do inference to figure out that when you constantly run your phone at a certain level of brightness, you should just allow the phone to be at a certain level of brightness? Yes. Stop changing the damn brightness. Why does it read? This is not this is not complicated software engineering, guys. No, but this is my point. There's no arbiter of taste anymore. Taste is the backstop. Who says? Well, no. Yeah. Let me let me pause. Double click on that for a second.

So I think taste is great if you have it, but there's only so many people on the planet that are going to have cutting edge taste and be right. If you don't have taste, what most tech companies do is they use data. Data is something that's approachable and leverageable because Apple has the antibodies to using data to measure success with the user experience, to measure whatever success.

If you subtract taste even by a bit, you don't have the scaffolding that every other company would use. And so you see the worst of both worlds. That's a great take. That's a great take. I mean, you just go off the rails, right? You go off the rails. So Keith, you think that what happened is like when Steve Jobs isn't there and Johnny Ive isn't there,

There's still a bunch of folks that probably think they have taste, but the real taste folks left and there's really no scaffolding left to be more methodical. The scaffolding you had at Facebook Meta, obviously, or that Google uses would catch some of this stuff. Totally. Without a doubt. No doubt about it. You know that users are less thrilled and they'd use things less and you'd fix it. And maybe even you take that to a stream, you never develop taste. I could argue that about Google or Meta. They don't really have taste. Yeah. Yeah.

You can argue the paradigms, but fundamentally, if you don't have that backstop, if the taste subtracts even 10%, not all the way down, you're just not going to catch this stuff. And I think there's only... How many people in the world really have cutting-edge technology user experience taste? I don't know too many. I would fund them right away. Brian Chesky might have it. It's an incredible point because if I'm being really insecure...

I would want to say, oh, yeah, no, we had a lot of taste at Facebook back in the day. But actually, we had so much scaffolding around data, probably because intuitively, we knew that that was way more reliable for us.

It's more predictable scale. It's certainly more scalable, right? Like you take Steve out, you don't need a dictator, but you do need a taste and taste is artistic. The same thing with venture, like, you know, like scaling venture funds is really, really challenging because early stage investing is more like taste than data driven. And later stage, you can use data and scale it and scaffolding. So I think there's just fields. It's a little bit also you see like these sports teams, like this happened at Stanford when Jim Harbaugh left.

It took years for the decay function for like the next coaching regime to show they were completely incompetent. Like the next year, they're pretty good. Next year, they lost one more game. They should have next year. They lost two more games. They should have a lot. And then eventually they became like horrible.

And there's a decay function with an organization when you take out the person who is the original thinker or the leader or the dictator or whatever. And so I think some of this is showing up now and then playing on a field that's not favorable to them, which is there are advantages Apple has in AI.

but there's some significant organizational structural disadvantages. And that's the field that people are going to be competing on for the next five years from a consumer perspective. And they're playing on a field where they don't have all the advantages in their favor. Yeah.