Pesky Human Issues
Casey:
So the two of us plucked out that $20 and we legitimately found $20.
John:
That's how the plague began to spread.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
It's a four-time better story than my previous story when I only found $5.
John:
I'm not sure that's how stories work.
Casey:
Alright, so let's get started.
Casey:
We are required by law to do some follow-up.
Casey:
Are we?
Casey:
A friend of the show, allegedly, a friend of the show, Guy Rambeau, has discovered an expansion slot utility app in Catalina, which is for the new Mac Pro.
Casey:
And I think we had seen a screenshot of this.
Casey:
I feel like I've seen this before somewhere, but this had more information than I'd seen previously before.
Casey:
Tell me, gentlemen, what this is about.
Casey:
I don't pay attention to the internals of PCs anymore or computers anymore because I just buy whatever sized laptop or desktop I want.
Casey:
I even had to worry about a tower since college.
Casey:
What is happening here?
Casey:
This is arranging PCI cards in the most efficient way possible?
Marco:
So first of all, this is version 2 of this utility because version 1 of this utility was made for John's computer.
Marco:
And actually the one right before it.
Marco:
Because it's a way... I don't know, John, was there even one before this for like G5s and stuff?
John:
There were similar things, but they only told you how you were doing.
John:
They would show you all your...
John:
expansion slots and memory slots and everything and show you what's in them and then it would scold you if you have put things in non-optimal places.
John:
And this is different though.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So there's a couple things going on here.
Marco:
Number one is when you have desktop
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And there's similar things that work a little bit differently with PCI Express lanes and PCI Express lane allocations for different slots and different parts.
Marco:
Now, we don't have to worry about PCI Express lanes on most Macs because they allocate the lanes when they design the computers and there's no slots and so you can't change how they're allocated.
Marco:
You occasionally will see like some part of the internal limitations or designs will leak out in ways like how...
Marco:
not all of the Thunderbolt ports on all of the laptops have equal bandwidth.
Marco:
Like, they'll have, like, there's, like, the K-based articles that say, like, on the 13-inch MacBook Pro with four slots, like, the left two will have more bandwidth than the right two or something like that, right?
Marco:
PCI Express, the communication protocol used between, you know, most high-speed peripherals and things these days inside computers, and actually Thunderbolt is basically PCI Express over a cable, PCI Express has a certain number of lanes that,
Marco:
that come out of the CPU.
Marco:
And every CPU family has a different number of these.
Marco:
One of the reasons why the high-end computers use Xeons is because Xeons tend to have more PCI Express lanes than the consumer chips and the laptops.
Marco:
The reason why the Escape only has two Thunderbolt ports and the bigger MacBook Pros have four
Marco:
and why the 12-inch only has one port, and it isn't even Thunderbolt, is all related to, like, each of those chips from Intel has a certain number of PCI Express lanes that it offers.
Marco:
And how you allocate those lanes to different parts, you know, it's up to the engineer or the computer.
Marco:
Anyway, the new Mac Pro has a lot of PCI Express lanes.
Marco:
I think it has, like, 32 or 48 coming out of the CPU, something like that.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
if you add up all the amount of PCI Express lanes that all of its slots and built-in peripherals need, it's way more than that.
Marco:
So they actually do a few tricks to allocate these things.
Marco:
The main thing is that they have a bridge chip in there.
Marco:
And I don't know the details of it, but I know there is one there.
Marco:
I was told they actually are using a bridge or some kind of switch or something like that, like a PCI Express multiplier, basically, that can...
Marco:
allocate, it can offer more lanes to peripherals than what the CPU actually has available.
Marco:
And then you can kind of allocate how those work.
Marco:
And I think what this is telling us with this utility, I think you can actually maybe dynamically allocate them as opposed to just like, oh, you have to move this card to this other slot every time.
Marco:
But there are also certain slots that have more lanes available to them than others.
Marco:
And so what this utility is telling us is like,
Marco:
like there's going to be certain configurations where like certain cards you put in there they don't need any kind of they don't need meaningful bandwidth things like you know a usb port card doesn't need much an audio card you know like just for sound internet now doesn't need much but like a gpu needs a lot certain other kinds of cards need more or less and so this this utility is there to basically tell you the user when you have plugged something into a slot that
Marco:
is not offering it the amount of lanes it needs and can make recommendations to you of where to move it.
Marco:
And it's like the example screen shots said, like, you know, move, move this card from slot five to slot three or something like that.
Marco:
And all this is to get around the fact that you don't actually have enough PCI express lanes in a Mac pro to allocate full bandwidth to all of its slots.
Marco:
And that's not Apple cheaping out in some way, that's simply limitations on the Xeon CPUs that Intel offers for this computer.
John:
And apparently there's two pools of bandwidth, again probably getting back to the switch type thing, where there's a bunch of radio buttons where you can change, you can't change the speed of the slots, an AX slot, a 4X slot, like they're labeled and it's fixed, but you can change which pool those lanes are allocated to.
John:
and presumably you're trying to strike some kind of balance there's also a checkbox that says automatic bandwidth configuration that will theoretically uh you know divvy stuff up into pools according to what the computer thinks is best but for most of the history of apple's most of the modern history of apple's slotted computers in the power pc era and later if you put something in a non-optimal
John:
slot whether it be ram or pci cards or whatever usually on the first boot some dialogue from a similar utility that this will pop up and tell you that you've put things in a suboptimal place sometimes you just dismiss that and it will never bother you again sometimes it'll pop up every time depending on how dire the situation is but this utility like everything else having to do with the mac pro is getting bigger and fancier
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, so big week?
Casey:
A little bit.
Casey:
So we got word, what was it, the day after we recorded last week, I think it was, as is off to happen.
John:
I was thinking about that, by the way.
John:
Our show is kind of sort of intentionally on Wednesday because Apple does lots of announcements on Tuesdays, but Apple announces good news on Tuesdays.
Casey:
Apple does not announce bad news on Tuesdays.
John:
So I think we struck the right balance, and I'd rather have the show right after the good news comes out.
Casey:
i'm fine with waiting you know almost a week to talk about the bad news so here we are so uh the news which may or may not be bad is that johnny ive is officially leaving apple he is going to start his own consultancy which is called what love from i believe or something like that um terrible name yes that's what it's called it is it is a truly terrible name but you know it is what it is it doesn't matter what the name is no it doesn't johnny ive's design firm that's it yeah design companies always have weird names anyway
Marco:
Yeah, it's a thing.
Marco:
Yeah, it's like ad agencies.
Marco:
These are not names that the public tends to see.
Casey:
Anyway, so he's going to start this new design firm, and Mark Newsome is going to?
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
I believe I read that somewhere.
Marco:
I believe that's right.
Marco:
And I think Richard Howarth also?
Marco:
Oh, is that right?
Marco:
It seems like Ive, Howarth, and Mark Newsome, it seems like they all might have left together.
Casey:
Interesting.
Casey:
So one way or another, Apple was quick to point out that Apple will be consulting with Love From or whatever it's called.
Casey:
You know, Apple will be a client.
Casey:
All is well, everyone.
Casey:
Don't worry.
Casey:
Don't worry.
Casey:
Everything's OK.
Casey:
Don't look behind the curtain.
Casey:
And then they have announced that Evans Hanke is going to be head of industrial design.
Casey:
And we'll talk about her a little bit more in a minute.
Casey:
And Alan Dye is going to be the VP of Human Interface Design.
Casey:
And we'll talk about him a little more in a minute.
Casey:
Before we discuss the two of them, though, what are your guys' initial impressions?
Casey:
I actually recorded an episode of Clockwise earlier today where this was one of the subjects.
Casey:
And I feel like if you look at the tea leaves...
Casey:
For the last several years, and I think Ben Thompson was the first one I noticed to get kind of in front of this.
Casey:
It sure seems like Ive has been moseying his way out the door for the last several years.
Casey:
And there was a semi-explosive piece from the Wall Street Journal, I believe it was, where they said basically Johnny Ive's a big turd and is blowing off meetings left and right.
Casey:
And, you know, he's caused strife and blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
And then Tim responded, Tim Cook responded saying, oh, no, none of that's true, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
So I don't know what's going on here.
Casey:
All you can do is guess.
Casey:
But it seems to me like this is mostly a non-event.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
One of you guys convinced me that I'm wrong.
Casey:
And let's start with Marco.
John:
Before we start with Marco, we were out in front of this.
John:
Don't give Ben Thompson credit for this.
John:
I went back and listened to him.
John:
We haven't talked about this in a long time.
John:
And it's mostly because back in the episode when he had his title change, we all basically wrote him off.
John:
He's like, well, that's it.
John:
He's he's on his way out in everything.
John:
But, you know, and it took a while for it to happen.
John:
I remember what episode that was, but I did go back and dig it out.
John:
And I think it's part of the reason we haven't really talked about other than, you know, occasionally invoking his name as an expletive when complaining about some piece of hardware or whatever, which is something that I think we'll talk about.
John:
Yeah.
John:
we've mostly not discussed him in the same way that we've discussed other Apple executives.
John:
Cause I think we collectively wrote him off back when we did that show and this hasn't come up again.
John:
I mean, you know, I, anyway, I went back and listened to the audio and that was, that was my impression.
John:
It was, and that was everyone's take really when, what was it?
John:
He got changed to like chief design officer CDO or something.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
Um, so anyway, go on, Marco.
John:
I didn't mean to interrupt you and your, your mute switch that you're fighting with.
Casey:
No, it's fine.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Thank you for your correction, John.
Marco:
This isn't nothing.
Marco:
I don't think it's as big of a deal as a lot of people think because, again, I do think, as John said, that this seems to have been in the works for years.
Marco:
We've heard bits and pieces here and there of Johnny kind of slowly backing away and being less and less involved in day-to-day.
Marco:
And I think the announcement of his promotion to the chief design officer, I think, was a very clear move.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
Johnny Ive, who is the head of industrial design, no longer is involved in day-to-day management from that point.
Marco:
It's like, okay, well, then what is he doing?
Marco:
If he's not day-to-day managing, that's usually... Yeah, that person's just not really working here anymore.
Marco:
And I understand from a lot of reports that it wasn't quite so severe in this case, but clearly it was a step in the direction of him ascending into the sky and slowly leaving Apple.
Marco:
It has seemed for a while that he was...
Marco:
probably experiencing severe burnout that he he might have been creatively bored and wanting to explore other areas he he was known to have played major roles in the design of apple park and a lot of the details of apple park like you know interior details i think he also designed like the desks and the chairs and stuff like he did a bunch of stuff you know he's he's a
Marco:
There's only so many iPhones you can design before you get bored and want to do other things.
Marco:
And he very clearly, for years, has been extremely interested in branching out into other areas of product design.
Marco:
He did that Christmas tree a few years ago, remember?
Marco:
I think also in collaboration with Mark Newsom, he did obviously the Apple Watch and a lot of the Apple Watch bands and stuff like that.
Marco:
There was a good discussion about this on the talk show this week with John Gruber, with Ben Thompson as the guest.
Marco:
They talked a lot about this stuff of like basically, you know, you have somebody like Johnny Ive, you know, a professional designer and a well-known, world-renowned designer.
Marco:
They want to do other things, and he especially seems very interested in the world of high design, I guess, if there's a thing like high fashion, but for design, I don't know what that world is called, but the world of high profile design, where you're not going to be able to hire him.
Marco:
he's his his studio is going to do like whatever he wants he doesn't need your money he's going to do like fun stuff that is shown off like in you know hoity-toity exhibitions and you know places like sotheby's and stuff like that's that's where his stuff's going to go it's not going to you're not going to be able to go to target next year and buy a johnny ive toaster like nope that's not at all the kind of stuff he's likely to be doing um
Marco:
So creatively, I think he clearly has wanted to do other things for years now.
Marco:
Apple was able to keep him going with things like the watch for a while longer.
Marco:
I think that extended his time there.
Marco:
But ultimately, it's kind of like when somebody is unhappy with a job.
Marco:
you can offer them more money and they might stay for a little while longer, but ultimately like they're going to leave, you know, as you're just like buying a little bit of time maybe.
Marco:
And so similarly, it's like Johnny Ive clearly both was suffering from severe burnout and also clearly wanted to design other things that Apple would never make, you know, things like, well, I was going to say things like cars, but maybe not.
John:
Maybe that was a bad example.
John:
That's one of the things that we talked about.
John:
I think when going back and listening to that episode was, uh,
John:
What kind of things would keep someone like Johnny Ive around after he's already made the iPhone and the iPod and the iMac and stuff like that?
John:
I don't think Apple Park was something we discussed because maybe that wasn't a thing on our minds at that point.
John:
But I think we did talk about the cars, and that's something you could do to keep – because he is into cars, and it's very unlike computers, right?
John:
But in the end, I mean, A, nothing car-related has shipped yet other than CarPlay.
John:
And B, like you said, Marco, that's extending your timeline for sure, but it's not really satisfying, whatever the itch is.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
And Johnny Ive had a high public profile for Apple.
Marco:
And it would have looked bad for Apple if he just all of a sudden left one day with no warning.
Marco:
And so his exit was designed.
Marco:
It was very carefully staged out over years.
Marco:
And this is... Apple clearly has...
Marco:
a way that they do succession planning back when steve was around like they knew when it became clear that steve's health was failing and that he might not make it i think they very carefully staged out the the public introduction of tim cook as the new ceo until it was time to actually execute the transition and then when steve ultimately died
Marco:
we were we like the public and the shareholders and the markets and the press we we were introduced to that transition gradually and so it wasn't as big of a shock uh and and like you know apple wasn't you know immediately quote doomed or anything like that like if for the most part like the market was okay the stock didn't totally tank you know like when when tim took over or when steve actually did die um it was mostly a smooth transition um
Marco:
Johnny Ive had such a high profile, not quite Steve Jobs high, but still very high.
Marco:
And so for him to leave had to be staged out very carefully with the press, with the markets, with public perception.
Marco:
It was clear he was going to leave or burn out at some point soon.
Marco:
So I think that was what this chief design officer thing was.
Marco:
Clearly, they knew then he was leaving.
Marco:
That was just part of it.
Marco:
I think we're also seeing this transition now.
Marco:
I think we're seeing that Jeff Williams is the backup for Tim Cook.
Marco:
Whether Tim Cook is going to retire or leave anytime soon, I don't know.
Marco:
I don't think this indicates that either way, but I do think we are seeing now...
Marco:
johnny ive was slowly escalated into the sky and now he's just poof disappearing and in you know and by the way this thing about like you know he's now a consultant to apple and apple's gonna be a customer of his that's nothing like nothing's gonna come out of that like maybe he might design like a watch band or something but like johnny ive is not going to be designing major apple products anymore like that's that's not what this is that's that's pr that's that's spin and it's it worked and that's great but like
Marco:
Johnny Ive is no longer designing things for Apple in the sense that any of us would expect.
Marco:
The whole thing about like, oh, now he's a consultant, that's a smokescreen.
Marco:
I was a consultant too.
Marco:
I never was a consultant.
Marco:
Anyway, so they have done that.
Marco:
They did that with Steve to Tim.
Marco:
They did it with Johnny to the Sky.
Marco:
And now I think they are also clearly preparing the public for Jeff Williams to be the next CEO.
Marco:
And
Marco:
And I don't know whether that's the official plan, like whether Tim actually does intend to leave in the next few years or whether they just want to always have a backup or in case something happens to Tim or in case he has to leave quickly, then they have somebody kind of
Marco:
ready to go like to the public uh you know they have they have a clear plan like you know like if tim cook decided he wanted to run for president or something he could just quit and jeff williams would take over now and it wouldn't be that big of a disruption it seems like to the public like we don't know how it works internally to the public it kind of seems anyway i don't think the way johnny left was a
Marco:
And ultimately, going back to the industrial design side of this, I actually don't think this is going to be that big of a change because it does seem... Tim's email can say things about how collaborative they are and everything else, but the reality is there's a lot of smoke behind the fire that he really wasn't that involved recently and that he really wasn't very hands-on in the last few years even in the actual products.
Marco:
I don't think he had zero influence.
Marco:
I think he had some
Marco:
but it certainly does seem like most of the design of apple's products over the last few years has been coming out of the people who are still there now not johnny ive personally himself they have a design team and actually and and evans hanky apparently we i've never heard of her before this it doesn't seem like she had any kind of public profile before this but in in the wake of this news
Marco:
we've heard rumblings here and there and stories here and there.
Marco:
She seems very well respected and she seems like she's been running stuff there for a while in industrial design.
Marco:
Like it seems like she's basically been running the team effectively for a while now.
Marco:
So this is more like making formal what was already basically happening.
Marco:
And so I'm guessing most of the change of like, what's going to happen when Johnny I have leaves Apple, leaves Apple.
Marco:
I bet most of that change has already happened.
Marco:
I bet we're already seeing what's going to happen when Johnny has left Apple.
Marco:
It wouldn't surprise me if much of the recent design coming out of Apple had little to no Johnny involvement.
Marco:
Like, how much of the new Mac Pro do you think he designed?
Marco:
Because we know that was designed entirely in the last two years.
Marco:
How much of that do you think he designed?
Marco:
I'm guessing nearly zero.
Marco:
Do you think he designed the newest iPad Pro that had a radically different shape than the previous ones?
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
Maybe he had some involvement, but probably not heavy involvement.
Marco:
You know, like the more recent designs.
Marco:
Do you think he designed much of the iPhone X?
Marco:
Maybe.
Maybe.
Marco:
But I bet a lot of the people who are still there now did a lot of that work.
Marco:
So I think we're already seeing post-Johnny Apple.
Marco:
We've been seeing it now for years, and it's fine.
Marco:
Because ultimately, the design team is a big... Well, it's not a big team, but it's a team of multiple people
Marco:
not just the guy like the one guy whose name we knew who we heard in videos and white worlds like there there was always it was always much deeper than that and it seems like the people who have been doing most of the design and most of the operating of that team for the last few years are now just formally in charge and before they were kind of been formally in charge that's kind of how it seems um
John:
so i'm not worried at all about this transition we should get to the uh the whole like reporting to ops thing the group brought up but um before we do uh john did i get most of this right so far i disagree with some of your assessments but it's hard to i mean it's just a gut feeling because neither one of us actually knows like we're not there talking to the design team but it's you know it's this age-old problem we talk about all the time it's hard to tell what exactly is going on inside apple one thing like the idea of
John:
Yeah.
John:
probably wants to be less closely involved and that would have been a nice smooth ramp over multiple years to him transitioning out except that in the middle there because these things are never like you can never plan out perfectly same thing with like jeff williams being a successor ceo like he might leave and go run jc penny like weird things happen you know anyway um during the after he became cdo
John:
There was a period where apparently Tim Cook or whoever convinced him to come back and take a more hands-on role because apparently he pulled too far back and maybe the transition wasn't ready.
John:
So it was kind of a bumpy ride on his way out.
John:
It wasn't like you'll just slowly fade away.
John:
It was like...
John:
I'm disengaging.
John:
I'm going to be the CDO.
John:
And then it's like, well, we need a little bit more from you.
John:
Okay, well, I'll come back.
John:
But no, actually, I'm out.
John:
So these things never quite go as smoothly as you would want them to.
John:
And as for what he'll do next...
John:
Sure, he likes to do those weird Christmas tree things and the super expensive stuff for rich people.
John:
And weird, certainly he'll end up doing weird things, like weird from the perspective of the guy who makes iPhones, right?
John:
Because, you know, he's done a lot of consumer electronics.
John:
I don't expect him to do immediately more consumer electronics.
John:
I expect him to do like a spatula or God knows, you know what I mean?
John:
But for everything I know about him, I don't think, I mean, you know,
John:
What do I know about him?
John:
I read a book on him.
John:
I've seen him in lots of videos.
John:
That's what I know.
John:
Anyway, based on that, I'm not sure he would be satisfied just doing weird designery stuff for rich people because there is a kind of...
John:
populist uh you know silversmith son man of the people angle where he wants to make things that people actually use like you know granted you got a weird christmas tree but like i think he would be equally excited about a really good pen that costs you know a dollar fifty
John:
Can you make a good pen for $1.50 or a spatula or whatever?
John:
No, he can't.
John:
I think that inevitably, if he continues to work at all, which is not a given because like you said, he doesn't need to work anymore.
John:
I think one of the things he may end up doing is more prosaic design that has a chance of being used by people other than his 0.001% rich friends.
John:
Because, you know, obviously going from a company where you make something that literally billions of people use, yeah, you're going to step back and make something that five rich people use, right?
John:
But inevitably, if he keeps doing that, it's going to be like, you know what?
John:
I'm kind of sick of making, you know, extremely expensive baubles that look really cool.
John:
I'd rather make...
John:
something that i think some people will actually use and appreciate in its use like it's not it's just he's not becoming an artist or a sculptor like he wants to be a designer and i really believe he is bought into the idea that uh design is about being functional for the intended purpose and all that stuff so
John:
Who knows?
John:
If he continues to work at all in the long term, I expect him to make boring things occasionally.
John:
Will we know that he made them?
John:
I suppose so.
John:
I don't even know how this works in the world of high-profile design, right?
John:
like we put his name on them they probably won't be in target you're right about that right but who knows like weirder things have happened and when you have somebody like him who doesn't have anything to prove first of all like you know his resume is set like he never needs to do anything else significant in his life ever again and he's fine right doesn't need money when someone is in that scenario
John:
they can end up doing weird things so if he wakes up one day and says you know what i want to make that spatula for target by god he's going to make that spatula for target because no one can tell him not to and you know it's not going to diminish anything that he's done like there's there's there's no thing that he can design that will diminish his past accomplishments so
John:
I'm ready for weird stuff, but I'm also ready for him to just... He's never been the most public person, and I expect to see him not be grabbing the spotlight at every opportunity.
John:
That's just the MO for anyone important who leaves Apple.
John:
If you look at all the people, even if they leave on bad terms like Forstall, he didn't run out and be like, I'm going to be on every cable news channel bad-mouthing Apple every time someone wants a comment for the next five years.
John:
That is not how things work, even when you essentially get fired and leave on bad terms.
John:
So...
John:
I really don't expect Johnny Ive to be appearing on every cable news show every time they need someone to talk about design.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Was it Tony Fidel who seemed to be very forthcoming with the bad mouthing of Apple once he left?
Casey:
Is that who I'm thinking of?
John:
Yeah, he definitely does that.
John:
But even he had a quiet period immediately after he left.
John:
And whether it's because people aren't interested in hearing what he has to say or he got involved in other things, it's not the usual MO for the big executives.
John:
And again, Tony Fidel is not leaving on the same terms as Johnny Ive, like going out a hero to the company or whatever.
Yeah.
John:
yeah um what i'm most interested in on this topic uh before we get to the new folks at apple is taking a little a bit of time now because if not now then when to look back at johnny ives uh
John:
work at Apple.
John:
What did he mean to the company?
John:
What did he mean to the products?
John:
The Johnny Ive era spans all of his career where he was a publicly known person, more or less, and all the products we know about.
John:
I think it's worth looking back at that.
John:
And I think it also...
John:
At least my view of looking back on it also influences how I think the company will go forward without him because it's sort of like, well, when he was there, what did he do?
John:
And now that he's not there, what will not be done or be done differently?
John:
And I want to start with what I think is an easy one, but I think it's worth saying explicitly, especially on this program, which is,
John:
Do we think that Johnny Ives' time at Apple has been a net positive for the company?
John:
Oh, yeah, definitely.
Casey:
Yeah, is that a legitimate question?
John:
Yeah, I just... The correct answer is yes.
John:
I just want to put that out there.
John:
And the reason I want to say that is because if you've listened to this show, especially if you only listened recently, the only time you ever hear us invoke the name Johnny Ive is when we're complaining that, like, the laptops are too thin or they don't have enough ports or the keyboard is bad.
John:
And, like, it's... You know, I said before, his name is used as an expletive, like, as the singular...
John:
personification of all the design we don't like at apple because he was in charge of all design at apple and therefore if there's some part of design at apple that you don't like you get to you know use that name as your little hook to uh explain who you're talking about but but let's be clear uh
John:
Second only to Steve Jobs, I feel like he has, you know, the two of them combined, which will I think is worth discussing that that team have done like the one of the biggest turnaround in U.S.
John:
corporate history, added tremendous value to the company made.
John:
not one, not two, but three, four, five, depending on how you count them, insanely popular, good products that sold really well, that were beloved, that did things that broke new ground, that defined entire product segments and industries.
John:
If you take any one of those things,
John:
The iMac, the iPhone, the iPod, the iPad, even I would say even the Apple Watch, the, you know, any of those things, pick any single one and any designer would kill to if it been remotely involved with a single one of those.
John:
And to be the head of design or personally responsible for major aspects of the design before he was elevated to that level for a single one of those is just, you know, an accomplishment of lifetime.
John:
And he has this ridiculous resume.
John:
And during that time, Apple went from a company that was basically going out of business because, remember, he was there before Steve came back.
John:
Right.
John:
He was at Apple.
John:
It was at the Apple that was going down the tubes, toiling away behind the scenes, making things that no one actually had him ship until Jobs came and said, look at all this great stuff.
John:
We should let the guy ship some of this stuff.
John:
I think it'll be cool.
John:
And then we got the iMac and all that other stuff.
John:
So, yes, Johnny, I've probably the best product designer that has ever existed as measured by anything that you can objectively measure.
John:
Like you could have opinions about what product you think is better or more elegant or whatever, but as measured by.
John:
uh beloved by the most people sold the most number made the most money uh turned around the company that he worked at was the most positive influence in the company he worked at he is head and shoulders above anybody else just because of the scale things we talk about this all the time but like great designers of the past who made things that are iconic you know the designers of the volkswagen beetle like it is so rarely has there been a singular name associated with it and so rarely has uh
John:
Have there been a series of them that have, you know, within the same company that have pulled that company from the brink of bankruptcy to the biggest company in the world?
John:
Like, it's a story that hasn't existed before.
John:
And Apple is so large that if you actually compare any of the numbers against anything that you can think of, except maybe the wheel, like, you know.
John:
The iPhone is the biggest, best selling, most influential like product ever made, especially when you consider that every phone on the market is now essentially an iPhone, like in terms of, you know, its influence on the world of products.
John:
And I'm not sure if he was involved in any of the laptops, but I always this is the old man segment of the show.
John:
Um, Apple basically defined what the modern laptop is too, when they decided to make a laptop where the keyboard is shoved up against the screen and below it is a pointing device, which started as a track ball and eventually became a track pad.
John:
That's what every laptop looks like now.
John:
Still before Apple made the power book line, that is not what laptops look like at all.
John:
So in the same way that before Apple made the phone, phones did not look like the iPhone.
John:
And then after Apple made the iPhone, now all phones are look like that.
John:
Like, I don't, I don't know if that was, uh, Johnny, I've even worked at the company at that point, but, um,
John:
And, of course, the Mac with the GUI.
John:
Apple's done that a couple of times, but Johnny Iveson has been involved with a lot of them, and especially all the most recent ones.
John:
So all that is a long-winded way to say that regardless of what we may think about his particular tastes versus our particular tastes as they relate to the details of individual products,
John:
uh i'm not gonna say we're nitpicking because it's not just nits they are fundamental differences but you can't argue with the results like you can't there is no arguing with his work as a designer he is uh one of the greatest designers to ever live probably the greatest designer we'll ever see in our entire lifetime
John:
Doesn't mean that he's always right.
John:
Doesn't mean that everything he did is perfect and without flaw and without argument.
John:
Doesn't even mean his design philosophy has not evolved over the course of that.
John:
But, you know, you can't argue with the numbers.
Casey:
So I am not a avid designer by any means.
Casey:
And I feel like as I get older and older, I appreciate design more and more, but I don't really know what I'm talking about when it comes to design.
Casey:
But I feel like I know enough to know that Dieter Rams is frequently cited as one of the best designers, if not the best designer who has ever lived in
Casey:
I don't know the answer to this question because I'm not familiar enough with Rams' work.
Casey:
But if you, John, I'm hoping you're at least slightly familiar with it.
Casey:
If you had to pick between him and Ive, would you still pick Ive?
John:
Yeah, based on objective measures, for sure.
John:
Because, yes, he did – it was very influential and he made some beautiful, elegant products.
John:
But did he take the companies that he worked for, his design studio –
John:
to the levels that, uh, that I've took Apple are his products in the hands of as many people as I've products have been are his products as beloved by as many people as Johnny's.
John:
It's just, it's just scale.
John:
Right.
John:
And I feel like you can, you know, you can judge an artistic merit and say, well, this, this one designer who made this one thing that five people have ever seen is really the best.
John:
But I'm saying like, all right, that's like judging on the level of art or whatever.
John:
But as a practical concern, if your goal is to make great things that are useful and beloved by people, the sheer scale of Apple, that's the only thing you can objectively measure.
John:
Everything else is just opinion.
John:
But if you say fact-based, are you a successful product designer?
John:
How do you measure the success of a product?
John:
And I feel like the way you'd measure the success is...
John:
you know, that everybody likes it, that the company you work for as a designer is successful because of your designs, and the products are successful at what they're intended to do.
John:
And, you know, I feel like Dieter Rams, you know, his scale is one bazillionth the size of Johnny Ives' scale.
Casey:
That's fair.
John:
So the other aspect of this, and we've talked about his legacy, and I've said all these nice things, because now I want to bring the more difficult question, which is... All right, so getting back to the idea that Johnny Ob is, you know, not designing these things personally, right?
John:
This is, and also the concept that we can't actually know what goes in the on-site Apple, we're just looking in from the outside.
John:
Those two things combined gets back to my rule that I always invoke whenever talking about Apple, which is that in the end, it doesn't matter who specifically decides that the laptop should be this thin or shouldn't have an SD card slot or the keyboard, they should stick to the butterfly keyboard or any particular design concern you might have.
John:
And frequently attributed to that darn Johnny Ive, he wants the things to be featureless with no buttons on them.
John:
We have no idea if that's not like a faction inside his design studio.
John:
And in fact, Johnny, I wanted to add tons more buttons, but, you know, was deferring to his design.
John:
We just don't know.
John:
But here's what we do know.
John:
Like we can never know those internals until they write their telebooks.
John:
But here's what we do know.
John:
He was in charge of design.
John:
And despite all the collaborative type of things where they're like, oh, we discuss it all together, whatever, the buck stops with the people who are in charge.
John:
So the bottom line is, if there's something that you don't like about Apple design during the time when Johnny Ive was the head of design...
John:
It's on Johnny Ive whether it was his design or not.
John:
And certainly it wasn't his design, but he was the person who made the decisions.
John:
He was the one who gave the thumbs up or thumbs down.
John:
And ultimately, what is produced design-wise by the company is his responsibility.
John:
That's what it means to be a leader, right?
John:
The buck stops with him.
John:
Even if he had nothing to do with it, even if he was against the idea but went along with it, like...
John:
That's that's the job of being the leader.
John:
It's not to design all the things.
John:
It's to have a position and a vision and make decisions that can't, you know, the people below you can have positions and argue for them or whatever.
John:
But in the end, like it's a hierarchy.
John:
And I feel like especially with the absence of jobs that Tim Cook was highly unlikely to override Johnny Ives design decisions.
John:
So if there is something you don't like, if you think the laptop should have an SD card slot, right?
John:
If you don't like getting rid of Touch ID to have the swipey home button, you know, if you don't like something about the Apple Watch, no matter what it is.
John:
I feel is entirely comfortable to not blame Johnny F. personally, but to say that is part of his legacy.
John:
Because during the time that he was in charge of design, Apple did certain things.
John:
Every single thing Apple did, I'm totally comfortable saying that's at his feet.
John:
Because he could have stopped that from happening.
John:
He could have made a different thing happen.
John:
Right?
John:
So, despite the fact that we know he's not doing anything personally, and despite the fact that we can't know what goes on inside there, I will continue to think about the legacy of Johnny Ive in terms of what the company produced when he was in charge.
John:
Not in terms of what he did personally, not in terms of, you know, his specific opinions, but like...
John:
Like, that's your legacy when you're at that level of an executive.
John:
Like, were we to get Johnny Ive on the program, I'm sure we could ask him lots of questions about his opinions about design.
John:
But ultimately, you can also ask him, say, during your tenure at design at Apple, here are some things that Apple did.
John:
Looking back on those, are the things that the company did during your tenure that you regret, that you are particularly proud of, that you wish could have been more like this and less like that?
John:
As a leader, you can have opinions on your legacy in that way without it being personal because you're like, well, I didn't.
John:
I didn't design the iPhone 5 personally and draw every line of it.
John:
I saw seven competing designs and picked one of them and herded it and refined it or gave a vision statement or whatever.
John:
But in the end, Apple ships a thing.
John:
And that's a thing that you said, yes, we're going to ship.
John:
So that I feel like is the most important lens through which outsiders can judge.
John:
uh johnny ive not so much as a designer uh but as a leader of designers as a as a leader of the design wing of the company best known for design and so that's why i will continue to invoke his name despite the fact that we all know that he's not drawing every single design and he's you know half the time he may be deferring to strongly held opinions by his collaborative group but in the end it's his responsibility
Casey:
Well, the thing with that that's very interesting to me is as I'm thinking about the things that the three of us love to complain about, things like the keyboard, things like the Apple TV remote, things like the touch bar, as I sit back and think about all of these things,
Casey:
I can't think of anything other than the keyboards that I really and truly believe is unequivocally bad.
Casey:
I will even go to bat for the Apple TV remote.
Casey:
I know I'm the only one on the planet that will.
Casey:
It has problems.
Casey:
I'm not denying that.
Casey:
But I don't think it's objectively bad.
Casey:
The touch bar to me is not objectively bad.
Casey:
It may not be for the three of us.
Casey:
but I don't think it's objectively bad.
Casey:
So many of the laptops and computers recently, I don't think that they're objectively bad.
Casey:
I want an SD card slot, but I don't think it is objectively wrong.
Casey:
that it's not a part of Apple laptops anymore.
Casey:
And I'm trying to think, is there anything, and I know you're going to light me up about the Apple TV remote, but is there anything other than the keyboards that we can say, no matter who you are or what you're doing with this device, this is actually bad or wrong or what have you?
Casey:
Is there anything...
John:
Yeah, the remote definitely qualifies.
John:
And here's why.
John:
You can have opinions about what features a product might have.
John:
Oh, I wanted to have this port.
John:
I wanted to have this battery life or whatever.
John:
But every product has a job to do.
John:
The job of the remote is to let you control what happens on a television while you're sitting on the couch.
John:
And you can measure how well the Apple TV remote does that job.
John:
And you can like I mean, bad.
John:
What does bad mean?
John:
You'd measure it against other remote controls and you'd have to come up with some criteria.
John:
How what criteria do we care about?
John:
You know, you pick pick anything.
John:
You just you're the person who's going to say, I'm going to judge remotes against each other and I'm going to have a bunch of tests to see if they fulfill the purpose.
John:
almost anything that you can think of the apple tv remote does worse than worse than the best remotes for sure which i feel like is the bar that apple should be judged against like is it worse than like the worst cable box remote maybe not right maybe it comes out you know as a wash and i think but against a good remote the apple tv remote gets destroyed and that's you know there's you can have lots of opinions about features and sort of the the product design but i feel like the
John:
the job to be done in the parlance of all the, uh, economic whiz kids, it's supposed to let you control your television.
John:
Uh, and it does that, but it does that very, very badly in almost all aspects.
John:
Um, that's, that's a great example of a thing that I put at the feet of Johnny Hive, whether he had anything to do with that remote or not.
John:
The bottom line is he was in charge and they shipped that.
John:
Now, all that said, back when jobs was there, it was clear to everybody involved that,
John:
that johnny i've got to have a say but in the end if steve decided something needed to be like stitched leather it was going to be stitched leather like it doesn't really matter what johnny i've or anybody else thought right so when he was there that's why i'm totally comfortable putting it at the feet of steve jobs everything and it's weird you know like i said before well then jobs goes and you don't put this all at the feet of tim cook yes kind of ultimately but
John:
My read on the dynamic inside the company is that, again, Tim Cook, unless there is some large economic concern, even if there is one like with the gold watch, it seems to me that Tim Cook is not inclined to override Johnny Ive when it comes to design or anything like that.
John:
Override him maybe when it comes to pricing and maybe when it comes to...
John:
What we should make and what we shouldn't like Johnny, I've had to pitch Tim Cook reportedly to say we should make a watch.
John:
Ultimately, Tim Cook said, sure, fine, go ahead.
John:
Again, perhaps another thing to get Johnny to stick around.
John:
Right.
John:
But I don't think Tim is the design decider in chief, despite the fact that rank wise, he could decide that.
John:
Especially if Tim ever did that, Johnny would have left long ago because I don't think he would stay at a company where that happens.
John:
Would he stay at a company where Steve Jobs overrides him?
John:
Yeah, sure.
John:
But that's probably the only person on the planet that Johnny would allow that to happen from at the point that he's grown to the level that he is.
John:
so yeah there are there are definitely i think objectively bad designs as measured by anything that you could objectively measured about the job that thing is supposed to do are they the worst no but it's like average or like somewhere below good and we want apples to be the best and the remote is so galling because it's obvious to almost anybody what the problems with the thing are like it's not like you need it's not some nuance or subtlety that you have to really understand the essence of a remote it's like
John:
no just it's it's hard to use uh you make mistakes all the time the thing gets lost it's not comfortable to hold like it's just you know i don't want to talk about the remote but that's an easy one touch bar you could argue that accidental input is more of a problem than they think but like you know and then of course obviously the keyboard the reason why you gave that as a gimme it's like its job is to type letters and if it doesn't do that right sometimes it doesn't make any letters and sometimes make double
John:
uh you know that's no good and you say well it still gets the job done it's just a little bit tricky how to backspace more like yeah but we're judging it against like average competence and it is below the average competence therefore we say it's bad
Marco:
We'll be right back.
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Marco:
The dynamic that you said a minute ago about Tim wouldn't really want to override Johnny on much because that was probably a very expensive fight to pick.
Marco:
I think the dynamic between what happens when Steve died and then there's a new CEO who's not a product person at all...
Marco:
And then there's this designer that everyone loves much the same way they love Steve, who is still there.
Marco:
And it created this weird dynamic where it seemed in some ways that Johnny was more powerful than Tim.
Marco:
Or at least...
Marco:
There were lines drawn that Tim probably didn't want to cross certain lines because it would cause friction with Johnny or override Johnny in ways that Tim thought that he should be empowered or things like that.
Marco:
And so what ended up happening...
Marco:
When Steve left, Johnny got elevated to, not like a dictatorship, but to a position of extreme power, more power than he had before, with very little editing going on.
Marco:
And look, many of the world's greatest creatives really benefit from some editing, and Johnny was that way too.
Marco:
But because of the...
Marco:
the politics and the stature of the higher-ups, because of how that all worked out over the last few years, after Steve died and everything, Johnny had seemingly a lot more power and influence than he probably should have had.
Marco:
And for various political reasons, with the public especially, and maybe with markets and whatever else, Tim basically turned Johnny into the new Steve in a power sense.
Marco:
He moved software design under Johnny.
Marco:
He seemed to let design dictate a lot more about the products than before.
Marco:
and so like like when gruber initially wrote the take um you know last week about like worrying that johnny wasn't replaced because the the new heads of design report directly to jeff williams i don't see that as a problem because i see the current situation like up till now as being a weird hierarchy where
Marco:
basically design has been in charge of all products like the head of products we you know we wondered like for the last few years like who at apple is the head of products really you know it was steve before tim never had that job and didn't seem to want that job or have the ability to do it he seemed to delegate it but it seemed like he delegated it mostly to johnny so effectively the head of products at apple the
Marco:
if you had to pick someone who it was it seemed to be johnny for the last you know x years and so now and i'm so mad that gruber wrote this article today because i was gonna i was i've been waiting for the last few days to come on this podcast what happens when when it happens uh the wrong day for our show
Marco:
Yeah, I've been waiting to come on this podcast and say exactly what Gruber wrote in his article today.
Marco:
So basically, for the last few years, Jeff Williams seemingly has been being slowly elevated into the role where now the question of who is the head of product design at Apple, the answer now seems to be Jeff Williams.
Marco:
and i have a lot of thoughts about that um and i most of it is a little you know a little trepidation because like we don't really know what jeff williams is like as a product uh as the head of product except that we can see the apple watch right like yeah it seemed it seems like he has effectively always been the head of product for the apple watch so we we have that example seemingly but
Marco:
We don't know much about Jeff Williams.
Marco:
He doesn't have much personality displayed to the public, and so it's hard to really get a read on him from our side of things.
Marco:
But it does seem like now, Jeff Williams is the head of product, whatever...
Marco:
Tim is the administrator above all of this, and Tim can probably set the direction of large initiatives like privacy or services, that kind of stuff, but it doesn't seem like Tim has any interest in product details, and that's fine.
Marco:
Well, he decides whether or not they're going to make a watch, for example.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, sure, exactly.
Marco:
That's his call.
Marco:
Yeah, that's probably right.
Marco:
But, like, it seems like before the head of products was somebody who kind of was on his own, you know, Johnny Ove was kind of on his own, kind of politically more powerful than Tim, maybe, or at least closer to equals, which probably made that relationship a little bit awkward or a little bit hard to, you know, to edit or administer.
Marco:
And also...
Marco:
if Johnny did indeed have this role of being kind of de facto head of products, and even if not, in his role as the head of design, it's kind of weird to have a head of design who's barely there or who is working out of his house in San Francisco when the rest of the company is an hour away working in an office every day.
Marco:
Even if only a little bit of that is true,
Marco:
When you have a manager who is very powerful, very respected, very opinionated, but is not always there, that makes it hard to make decisions.
Marco:
Or when you have that manager who is busy designing the building and the desks and stuff.
Marco:
For the last few years, they've had a half-absentee, highly distracted, highly burnt-out head of design.
Marco:
now they have moved the design organizationally back where it belongs in the ranks now they have some they have two people who are clearly officially in charge you have evans hanky as industrial design head you have alan dye as vp of human interface design which i think he is horrible oh god i i really don't like that he is the head of this but he has been you know since ios 7 so this is you know this is not new
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
I don't like Alan Dye's direction.
Marco:
But that's for another day.
Marco:
But now you have two clear heads of design, hardware and software, and they both report to the COO who is basically the head of product right now.
Marco:
That seems like an actual, functioning, healthy organization.
Marco:
And I don't think you need design to be...
Marco:
CEO level you don't need like the chief design officer like you don't need that if you have a functioning hierarchy where there is a head of product who is very empowered to do things and whether it's the CEO or not it should be I think an Apple should be somebody very close to the CEO like I think it only works here like with Jeff Williams being that that's probably only going to work because Tim is very happy to delegate that to him
Marco:
But you have design reporting to the head of product.
Marco:
That is the way it was under Steve.
Marco:
Steve was the head of product design reporter to him.
Marco:
So I think this now makes a lot more sense than the kind of weird, vague, you know, minefield of how things were before.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And because now we have actual full-time employees on site serving in these roles, I think things are going to be a lot more clear.
Marco:
And it's probably going to function better.
Marco:
So I think even though I don't know anything about these people really...
Marco:
The few things I've heard about Evans Hanke have been very good.
Marco:
I have high hopes that I think this is like cleaning up something that was kind of messy, putting it in a way, in a structure that is more likely to produce good, consistent results.
John:
So that mess is it's part of, you know, part of any group of people doing anything, but certainly part of corporate America or large companies like to think of it as, you know, they make products and we talk about their products and we judge the, you know, the
John:
The various political maneuverings and the org chart and their financials.
John:
But in the end, in the end, these are all this is just people.
John:
They're all just people.
John:
And people problems are always the biggest problems of any corporation, which is why.
John:
staffing hr all those sort of you know soft skills they call them or whatever like that's that's the whole ball game right so in in a situation like like how did apple find itself in this situation they they were so successful and they have these successful products and they have this team making them and eventually that success you know that you know your success as a company leads and
John:
to the elevation of individual people within the company to the point where, you know, you mentioned before that Johnny Ive had been elevated, but then, you know, later clarified, it's not like he had been elevated in the passive voice.
John:
Tim Cook elevated him.
John:
Tim Cook elevated him for, for several good reasons.
John:
One,
John:
he's the he was your meal ticket he brought made apple what it is today right two there is a public perception uh which was probably the truth that he is your apple's meal ticket and if you have if there's a fight between forestall and johnny ive and you pick ive that's probably the right call like as far as the stock market is concerned certainly but probably as far as you're concerned in terms of like what is fair who has meant more to the company who is more important to keep right
John:
and so and and you know these kind of decisions you think of them academically but in the end those are actual people so if you get to the point where you're in a situation where you are convinced and everyone around you is convinced and it may actually even be the right thing to be convinced that is really important for you to keep johnny ive happy and he wants to be in san francisco and be less engaged from the company you start doing things that if you had pulled back a little bit like
John:
is this actually the best for the company and the products?
John:
Or at a certain point, am I, you know, pig-headedly pursuing a goal that involves keeping a human happy?
John:
When really, like, that's great, and it is good to keep Johnny around, but I feel like the company probably passed the point where...
John:
they should have let him go.
John:
Like, if he wasn't engaged anymore, like, the goal of the company is not keep Johnny Ive employed and happy.
John:
Like, the company doesn't exist to serve Johnny Ive.
John:
Johnny Ive exists to serve the company, right?
Yeah.
John:
I don't know if from the inside it ever looked like that.
John:
From the outside, I feel like that may be the case.
John:
And again, trying to read the tea leaves and say, well, he's responsible for everything they ship.
John:
If there's something that characterizes the time after he was elevated to the head of everything, I feel like
John:
when it came time to make a product better the philosophy embodied by the product and the execution by the design team was to to you know attack it as designers and do things to it that had mixed success in the market let's say um and i'm contrasting this with and you go back to what marco was saying earlier in the show about like we already kind of know what post johnny ab looks like this i'm contrasting this to
John:
The philosophy, the product design philosophy as embodied by things like the Mac Pro and the iMac Pro and like the pro workflow team, like the idea of addressing that market and figuring out what their needs are and doing something that generally designed under both Steve and Johnny.
John:
which is like, let's ask the customers what they want, which is the antithesis of Apple design.
John:
If you ask them what they want, they say a faster horse.
John:
If you ask people what they want, you don't get the iPhone.
John:
You don't get the iMac or the iPod.
John:
That's not how great design works.
John:
But you can take the other approach too far, especially if you have a singular person with a tremendous amount of power who the entire company thinks is very important to keep happy.
John:
You can end up with designs like
John:
the apple tv remote and you know things like the touch bar whatever like whatever your pet peeve is or the very thin keyboard that ends up not being reliable right whatever you want to assign the blame for that it's clear that like the fault in those things wasn't that apple was uh was asking for too much customer feedback and just making what customers wanted like there's a there's a spectrum right if you go too far and you just make what customers want you will never make an innovative product you will never make a hit and you will end up making like mainframes right
John:
On the other hand, if you just do what one very powerful person wants to do at their whim, despite ignoring what the customers want, you might end up with products that are less successful than they could be, let's say.
John:
And I feel like towards the end of Johnny Ives' tenure, that's how things were going.
John:
And I feel like the whole pro-workflow team is like...
John:
Look, if Johnny Ive wanted to have something like that, he would have had that long ago.
John:
It came recently, right?
John:
It was a change in direction for the company.
John:
It has demonstrably changed the kind of products Apple produces and the way they produce them.
John:
And I would argue for the better.
John:
For the better as far as we're concerned, but certainly it has changed them, right?
John:
You know, and we were seeing the fruits of that change.
John:
We like it better.
John:
Some people also might like it worse.
John:
But I feel like, again, we can measure objectively how well loved are the new laptops compared to the history of all the laptops that Apple has ever made.
John:
I would argue that these are not particularly well loved in the pantheon of Apple.
John:
laptops for a variety of reasons right and so you can like them or not like them but you can judge them against history and you can look at why they may be less well loved versus for example how well loved was the iMac pro in the pantheon of all-in-one computers from apple pretty well loved by the people who that product is aimed at as far as i can tell like it's an all-in-one computer apple has made a lot of them some of them have been more loved than other everybody freaking loves the iMac pro like for the people who are who are in that market right and
John:
So there are ways to, to measure the success.
John:
And I feel like the, the, the pesky human issues of the individual person who has, you know, they're all their own feelings and emotions and accomplishments and ego and, uh, you know, just, uh, opinions and, and the amount of power they're given like that, that all, it's not a toxic hell stew, Tim, but it is, it is quite a stew.
John:
Uh, and yeah,
John:
even the biggest best companies in the end can be reduced to the decisions of a small number of people and those people problems can result in less than optimal situations and you know i'm not going to say they should have got rid of him sooner or he should have been allowed to leave sooner or whatever like there's lots of different ways this could have gone obviously the pro workflow team and everything happened while johnny was ostensibly still there so it's not like he was opposed to it or left because of its existence or felt like it was undercutting him but like
John:
And I totally believe in all the press releases about how they're collaborative.
John:
I believe that's true.
John:
Like, they are collaborative.
John:
They do bounce sides of each other.
John:
I bet even Tim is involved in some capacity, right?
John:
But there is a hierarchy of where the decisions get made, right?
John:
The hierarchy is clear.
John:
The fact that they're collaborative at the highest levels is the strength of the company.
John:
The fact that ideas can come from anywhere, that Phil Schiller, the marketing guy, can come up with the click wheel on the iPod, for example, and they don't just dismiss the idea because he's just the marketing guy, right?
John:
I believe all of that, that it is collaborative and it is true.
John:
But there are also lines of hierarchy, and that's how they resolve the collaboration.
John:
It's not designed by committee.
John:
It is collaborative design within the design group, in the leadership team of Apple, all the way down to the rank and file levels.
John:
That's how...
John:
You know, great things get made, but you do need those decision points.
John:
And in the end, Johnny, I feel like was elevated to the point where he had where his power and his engagement combined to allow some of his I'm going to say his worst instincts, but some of his instincts that were less optimal to Apple's product success.
John:
than they had been either when his opinions were different or when his opinions were – I'm not going to say moderated by or edited by.
John:
I'm going to say combined with a collaborator like Steve Jobs, right?
John:
Or even Forrestal or whoever, like whatever, if you want to be an antagonistic collaboration.
John:
This came up on a couple of our Slack channels, or maybe it was also in someone's article.
John:
The comparison a lot of people drew between Ive and Jobs was –
John:
John Lennon and Paul McCartney, which also at times was antagonistic, but also very fruitful collaboration of two very different people.
John:
One was not editing the other, or rather they were both editing each other, but that the collaboration produced more than the individuals could have done.
John:
And I feel like that's why Apple collaborates at the highest level.
John:
And that collaboration comes down to individuals, right?
John:
So how will...
John:
alan dye evans hanky and jeff williams collaborate together in the absence of johnny how will the pro workflow team be factored into that who runs the pro workflow team who decides that it's a thing that they should do or continue doing how will tim cook collaborate with them differently than he collaborated with johnny ive presumably tim cook is less concerned about keeping evans hanky happy than he was about keeping johnny ive happy
John:
concerned like he wants everyone to be happy but the power dynamic between evan tankey and tim cook is different than it was between johnny ive inventor of name and bazillion products that you know like that the dynamics the people are different the arrangement of people are different in the corporate hierarchy and the interpersonal dynamics are different um we're hoping that the new dynamic will produce
John:
you know, products that are more successful, that we like better, whatever, pick your criteria, right?
John:
But honestly, we don't entirely know.
John:
We know a little bit if we assume that Johnny Ives has been checked out for a long time, but in the end, he was there.
John:
And if there was something that he vehemently didn't like,
John:
He could have given him a thumbs down, which is why we have all those stories about, oh, you know, the team had to go out to San Francisco and wait around for Johnny to come.
John:
And in the end, he didn't even give us the decision we wanted.
John:
Why did they need his decision?
John:
Because he was in charge of design and they had like we have option A and option B and we have opinions in both directions.
John:
We need you to pick one because that's your job as the leader.
John:
We like we we bring you what we think are the best options and we have factions internally, but none of us can decide because you're the boss.
John:
And they were disappointed that no decision was made, which happens all the time.
John:
And it's not like slamming him for not making the decision.
John:
Sometimes you just need to think about it some more or whatever.
John:
But again, getting back to what I said before, in the end, everything that goes out the door when he's in charge is on him, whether it was his idea or whether he even, you know, maybe he just punched it and they just went with whatever they, you know, we don't know the dynamics, but we know it's his responsibility.
John:
Anyway, that's...
John:
That's how I feel about the tail end of Johnny Ive's tenure at Apple.
John:
It could have gone better is what I'm going to say.
Casey:
I think that's fair.
Casey:
But you said a moment ago, pick any one of the gazillions of products that Ive has done to cite as an example.
Casey:
But from what I understand, Evans Hankey has done a ton of products at Apple and has like hundreds of patents with her name on them or something like that.
Casey:
And so I was digging into, you know, who are Evans and Alan.
Casey:
And I came across an article, which, of course, I didn't save the link for, so I'm going to have to dig it back up.
Casey:
But that's okay.
Casey:
I came across an article.
Marco:
Professional podcasters.
Casey:
Yeah, there we go.
Casey:
Wherein they discussed, you know, who these people are.
Casey:
And they cited a tweet from Meili Ko.
Casey:
I hope I pronounced that right.
Casey:
who I saw speak at Layers several years ago and is tremendous.
Casey:
And May Lee wrote on Twitter, this is with regard to Evans, and she's been making shit run right for a long ass time, uncredited, undercredited, excuse me, in my personal opinion.
Casey:
So this is from someone who worked at...
Casey:
Apple design.
Casey:
In fact, on Meili's own website, she writes, in 2014, I left a long stand at Apple where I designed and prototyped new things to poke at with the human interface design device prototyping team.
Casey:
My work included blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, fundamental UI concepts for Apple's force touch and haptic engine, and my explorations helped justify and refine the development of the iPad mini, iPad Pro, and Apple Pencil.
Casey:
So Meili is someone who
Casey:
I would think, knows what the crap she's talking about.
Casey:
And she says that Evans is very undercredited.
Casey:
So that is kind of a big deal.
Casey:
And certainly it sounds like Evans has been running the design studio for a long time and is effectively the head of, has been the head of design for a long time as well, from what I can tell.
John:
Well, everybody in the design group is undercredited.
John:
Like, that's the whole point of having a figurehead.
John:
Johnny Hive is the figurehead.
John:
But and then literally everyone else is undercredited.
John:
He is overcredited.
John:
And everybody else, because of the conservation of credit, is undercredited.
John:
Like, that's just how it works.
John:
Like, I remember it used to be like they didn't even Apple didn't even want you to know who worked for them.
John:
in this secret room they didn't even want you to know those people's names let alone their faces because they're afraid of people getting poached and they would brag about how there was no turnover right yeah of course of course the actual work is done by the employees and the boss is just in charge and gets to take all the glory and credit because everyone can't be a figurehead so i'm not slighting the work of the people who are actually doing the design but there is a design direction and there is a head of design and that head of design makes decisions and again in the end we have to just judge the products that are put out
John:
No matter whose idea it was, it was Johnny's, you know, in the latter years, Johnny's decision to put it out.
John:
So that's another question, right?
John:
So all these designers who are there doing their design, design is having lots of ideas.
John:
Like, you know, if you read any of the books about the things the design team does, like when they were making the original iPhone, one of the original ideas they had was basically the iPhone 4.
John:
Looked kind of like an ice cream sandwich.
John:
You know, like we all know what the iPhone 4 looks like.
John:
That was one of the designs in the running for the original iPhone, right?
John:
they didn't pick that one they picked the design that we saw as the original iphone but eventually many years later they did the iphone 4 right and you know these designers all have lots of ideas about what a product could be like right they also probably have ideas about the features that the product could have and that shades into you know the the sort of there's designing the thing to do the job and there's deciding what the heck is the job right and that's all part of the same you know
John:
Part of the same stew when Johnny Ive is the head of everything, right?
John:
But with some more divisions, I feel like what will these designers do?
John:
What kind of ideas will they have when given direction from not just Evans Hankey, but also from...
John:
You know, Jeff Williams or maybe even from Alan Dye with the software idea like that when more people are combined, those same designers working in a different situation, maybe certain ideas that before wouldn't get past the, you know, here are a bunch of options stage could go farther or, you know, it really depends on.
John:
What what opinions the new bosses have about the work that is produced, because in the end, you know, this group of designers don't just dictate exactly what it's going to be and get it right on the first try.
John:
You try all sorts of things, you have all sorts of ideas and you discuss them and that discussion with those particular people, most particular bosses.
John:
it decides what actually makes it out the door.
John:
And so certainly with this new set of people, but the exact same designers, we're going to see different products.
John:
Uh, even if they wanted to, they couldn't make the same decisions as Johnny because I'm sure Johnny, like every other person is inscrutable and who knows what he would have picked.
Marco:
And I think that's actually a feature, not a bug.
Marco:
It seemed especially up to about a few years ago that Apple was kind of like running out of ideas of like how to move the products forward.
Um,
Marco:
And now by having a change in design leadership, whether or not this was like kind of what was happening all along or not, this I think will give almost like give them permission to do things differently.
Marco:
It'll certainly give the designers permission to do things differently because they won't have the fear of like, what if Johnny overrides this?
Marco:
Or like they'll be able to more explore new ideas without having to worry about like, what would Johnny do?
Marco:
So it's part of that, but also just like,
Marco:
i want to see like i want to see what happens when apple gets things shaken up a little bit because when you're in a rut and which it seems you know like it seemed for a while like the iphone was in a rut before the iphone 10 like you had like the six seven they were all kind of just a success like it was all kind of like here's the most boring phone you've ever seen and eventually like it got you know improved um with the 10 and
Marco:
The iPad was kind of in a lull for a while, and then the pros that came out last fall with the new industrial design are really cool.
Marco:
The laptops, I think, have been in a rut for a little while, and I really can't wait to see what this fall's one ends up being to see what direction that's taking, but...
Marco:
I'm looking forward to having the influence of new designers able to flourish and able to get products out the door with just someone else being in charge and someone else being the filter at the top of that group.
Marco:
And this is why to have Jeff Williams be seemingly the effective head of products –
Marco:
it seems a little weird to think about that because we haven't really thought about jeff williams that way uh up till recently you know very recently but he's somebody new and you know if to this role seemingly or at least new in in scope of the role i want to see what that what that brings that's kind of exciting to me it's kind of like and it isn't all going to be perfect you know not everything they do is ever perfect uh but it's it's new it's different it's some it's changed it's moving things forward
Marco:
forward you know it's it's just it's getting new blood in there you know into into existing roles i want to see what that brings and i'm kind of excited about that and i know i'm not going to like everything and that's fine you know we wouldn't have a podcast if i liked everything but
Marco:
But I'm very excited to just see something being shaken up and seeing some new blood and seeing some people who have been apparently working for a very long time being elevated into new power.
Marco:
I want to see what that brings.
Casey:
Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more.
Casey:
I really feel like, I don't know if stagnant's the right word, but it's certainly, I feel like Apple has been, and again, I don't think cruising is the right word, but I can't think of the word I'm looking for, but it's just been kind of business as usual.
Casey:
And I really am excited at the thought of having this new blood really allowed to spread their wings and do what they want to do.
Casey:
And this is going to be a very exciting time to be an Apple fan, which is good because
Casey:
And in my opinion, Apple's been pretty dominant for the last several years.
Casey:
I mean, they're occasionally, if not often, the most valuable company in America, if not the world.
Casey:
So it'll be interesting and cool to watch this all go down and watch this kind of work itself out, just like you said.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm right there with you, Marco.
Casey:
I'm really excited about where things are going from here.
John:
I wouldn't call it stagnation, but this is another thing that from the outside I tend to map onto Johnny Ive because I assume that he is the one making these decisions.
John:
If you're doing any job, especially a creative job, but really any job for a very long period of time...
John:
In the beginning, when you're just getting started in whatever your career is, you're very excited to attain the skills that those skills in the art have.
John:
Whatever the thing you're doing, if you're a baker to make your first wedding cake or whatever, just do the basics, do them with your own twist or flair, but become competent.
John:
And you can keep going along that ramp where then you start having your own style more and deciding what you like and what you don't like.
John:
But if you're doing this for a very long time and you're very successful...
John:
especially in creative endeavors i think people have a tendency both because as they age and get more experience but also as they become more skilled you're less excited by things that you've already done uh and you like whatever your philosophy is for your craft or your art
John:
I'm not going to say you make more extreme versions of it, but you pursue your muse more thoroughly.
John:
So in the beginning, when you're making your wedding cake, you may be like, well, in general, cakes tend to be layered with big layers on the bottom and small layers on the top, like a kind of thing, and they're made of this kind of material, and this is about how big they are.
John:
And you're constrained by the orthodoxy a lot because you're just learning, right?
John:
In the middle, you're like, I'm making a wedding cake that's a single layer and it's a cylinder straight up and down and it's the new design trend and now I've defined what wedding cakes are going to look like for the next 20 years or whatever.
John:
They're not pyramid-shaped.
John:
They're like skyscraper-shaped or something.
John:
And by the way, they're pink or whatever.
John:
Whatever your muse is, I feel like you do end up pursuing it...
John:
trying to get at the root of it.
John:
If you've seen Johnny Ives' videos in his white world over the course of the past decade or so, you see him talk about always trying to find the essential nature of the product, the essence of the product, to get rid of extraneous things.
John:
As expressed in those videos, his design philosophy is all about
John:
You know, it's not about ornamentation.
John:
It's about figuring out what is the essence of insert whatever the product is, whether it's a laptop or you would probably say a remote or a pencil or an iPad or a phone.
John:
Like, what is the essential nature of this product?
John:
What parts of it that we think are...
John:
integral to the product are actually superfluous.
John:
And can I get rid of those?
John:
Can I simplify the design?
John:
Can I use fewer parts?
John:
Can I remove ornamentation or extra things?
John:
And that he has...
John:
his under under his design leadership apple has pursued that philosophy in its products to an ever more extreme degree almost entirely across the board with the only only recently a slight change in direction with the the pro products and it made me think of something i saw recently uh this is a program on netflix it's like a sci-fi anthology series of animated little animated shorts it reminds me of like
John:
liquid television mtv back in the day um a particular episode called zima blue uh the series is called love death and death and robots it's on netflix uh every episode is standalone most of them are not that good some of them are kind of exploitive and extreme but i would recommend that everybody take a look at zima blue and it is a it's a sci-fi story it's animated and it's a story of an artist and this artist i won't spoil the thing for you you should watch it's like 15 minutes long like they're all very short uh pursues his
John:
uh his muse his passion his artistic intent to an extreme for inexplicable reason a more extreme than johnny because again it's a sci-fi story but i would encourage everybody to check out zima blue on netflix to see you know what what could have become of johnny ive if he uh if his life turned out a little bit differently and he was in a sci-fi animated show but anyway getting back to the uh apple
John:
I feel like that's the natural arc of someone's career.
John:
And by putting people in, you know, replacing him with people and other and, you know, those people we just discussed who are at different points in their career.
John:
None of those people made the iMac.
John:
Right.
John:
None of them made all of those products were like made, you know, were responsible for the for design when those products were produced or however you want to parse it.
John:
They're all at different parts in their careers.
John:
They all have their own personal design philosophies.
John:
Are they all subscribed 100% with the essentialism and all of the philosophy espoused by Johnny in all of his videos?
John:
Maybe, maybe not.
John:
I would imagine that the design group is filled with a diversity of opinion about what thing they should be pursuing in their products.
John:
I also think that the design group probably lacks...
John:
uh some opinions that are important for apple's products to be very good some of those opinions might be coming from the pro work group people like some of them might be coming from the software side right when johnny was the head of everything and he was so closely tied to the design group like there are aspects of successful laptops that may not be represented at all anywhere in the design group not because johnny i've expunged all contrary opinion but just because it's a
John:
Someone who is a professional in some market that products are sold into or a marketing person.
John:
There are other perspectives.
John:
And so having Apple's products now not only have a different decider in front of the design group, but have...
John:
What has to be more influence from things outside the design group, I think that's the better way to make a well-rounded, successful, pleasing product than to have even the diversity of opinion that may be present in the design group.
John:
You need more perspective than that because in the end, products are more than just the things that people in the little walled-off design group think about.
John:
They're also things that have prices and names and features and customers and jobs to do.
John:
And those, I feel like, are not well represented by the design group.
John:
And hopefully that will change for the better now.
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Casey:
Some Ask ATP.
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Let's do it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We start tonight with Marcus Ernst, who writes, how does the recommendation engine in Overcast work?
Casey:
Did you try multiple approaches?
Casey:
Is it some fancy neural network?
Marco:
I have tried multiple approaches.
Marco:
It is not a neural network or anything remotely fancy like that.
Marco:
primarily because I don't know how to use those things or understand anything about them.
Marco:
Use CoreML.
Marco:
Honestly, I thought about that.
Marco:
So as CoreML has evolved and other tools that are like CoreML that are more in the non-Apple world, I think TensorFlow is one of these things.
Marco:
Forgive me.
Marco:
This is a whole world, the whole world of ML models and everything.
Marco:
I really don't understand much about it.
Marco:
I'm not familiar with any of the tools or any of the
Marco:
real concepts of it um the main reason i haven't gotten into all this stuff yet is because i haven't really needed to because i have some data with overcast like i i try to keep as little data as possible about people and their behavior and everything but i do know the list of podcasts that each user subscribes to
Marco:
So I can do simple correlations like, you know, people who subscribe to this tend to also subscribe to that.
Marco:
That's stuff that you don't need fancy ML stuff to do that if you have decent data.
Marco:
And that's all the data you really need to do that.
Marco:
So the recommendation engine, man, the current one is based on Twitter stuff and
Marco:
And it's like what people subscribe to who you follow on Twitter.
Marco:
I will give you an exclusive news breaking heads up here.
Marco:
I'm removing that feature.
Marco:
I'm getting rid of the Twitter integration for lots of reasons.
Marco:
Number one, almost nobody uses it.
Marco:
So it's already on the chopping block for that.
Marco:
And there's a bunch of liabilities of having Twitter integration, and it causes a lot of confusion among users.
Marco:
I get a lot of support email about people who either don't understand it or wish it behaved differently.
Marco:
And I've actually just rebuilt...
Marco:
the recommendation engine over the last couple of weeks using an even better approach again just involving subscription data like nothing super fancy but I just I figured out better algorithms and so I'm going to ship an update soon
Marco:
Still for iOS 12, before the betas this fall, I'm going to ship an update soon that switches out the Twitter feature for my new recommendation engine.
Marco:
And I've been testing it with some testers here and there, and it has significantly better recommendations for podcasts you might like.
Marco:
So I think it'll be a positive change.
Marco:
And it also allows me to do things, which I don't think I'm going to have time to do for this update, but it allowed me to do things like on a podcast's individual page to be able to say, these podcasts are similar to this.
Marco:
Or people who like this also like this.
Marco:
It allows me to do all that stuff.
Marco:
And it's a way better engine than the one I had before.
Marco:
And it will allow me to integrate a lot more stuff more nicely into the app and not have to deal with weird interactions with an increasingly risky and toxic social network.
Casey:
Paul Wood III writes, what is the best way for you to enter the zone while programming?
Casey:
Do you have any tricks you plan yourself to help you focus?
Casey:
And why do you think that this trick works?
Casey:
For me, it's listening to Daft Punk's Discovery album because I listened to it at my first programming job.
Casey:
I don't have any great tips about getting in the zone, although I will say now that I don't have an office to go to in the traditional sense, I do like once or twice a week going somewhere else to get work done, and I think the change of scenery really does help me.
Casey:
And then, as I think I mentioned several times on this program in the past, I have my secret weapon, which I deploy extremely tactically, which is if I have a programming problem that I just can't figure out, Tools 10,000 Days has not yet failed in getting me through that problem.
Casey:
It usually takes one run-through or less to get me there, but if I deploy it very tactically, I can usually use that as my secret weapon to solve programming problems.
Casey:
John, how do you get in the zone?
John:
The only thing I've found that works for me consistently, because I think about times in my career when I have had a difficult programming challenge that I have put myself to dealing with, either because there was a hard external deadline or I was very motivated to do it because I was super into a project or something like that.
John:
I think the thing that I've used is...
John:
Not isolation, but removal of distractions.
John:
So to give some examples, at one point I was dealing with a particular – I think I've talked about this in the show.
John:
I was dealing with a particularly thorny thing having to do with the e-book site that the company I used to work for had to do with the complexities of –
John:
royalty calculations for bundled products for ebooks or whatever and it was a fairly complicated system and i'd taken a couple of runs at it and i just wasn't satisfied that we were solving the problem in an elegant way so i basically took a weekend and i said all i'm going to do this weekend is i'm going to rewrite everything having to do with royalty calculations
John:
right and everything having to do with product bundles or whatever and i'm just that's you know because i'd i'd thought about it for like weeks and weeks and months leading up to that point like the site was running it had a thing but it was like it was unsatisfactory like every time their new requirement would come in it would be a problem so i'm like i'm just going to tackle this right so i isolated myself for like a weekend just a thing i could do before kids or before kids who were older because i had one little tiny baby that moment just just two days and
John:
At home, on a weekend, me and the computer.
John:
Similarly, at an earlier job, I had another, like, it was a very complicated system designed by, like, product designers or, like, marketing people, essentially.
John:
It's like, here's how we want it to work.
John:
And they described in, like, this 17-page Word document, here's how we want this system to work.
John:
And I was like...
John:
there's no way I'm going to be able to make this thing if I just like come in every day and try to chip away at it.
John:
Right.
John:
So again, I set myself a task and this time it was at work, but I set myself a task of like, I'm not doing anything else.
John:
I'm just going to hide in my then actual office.
John:
Those were the days.
John:
And, and just for this week, I'm going to do, I am going to,
John:
turn that eight-page Word document written by non-technical people into an implementation that matches it exactly, clarifying all the ambiguities or whatever, and just spent that week doing it.
John:
So every time I feel like I've had to get in the zone and tackle a programming problem, I feel like I've had to...
John:
shut out distractions and remove contact switches i imagine that's true for most people because it's a common thing that people measure like the contact switches are bad or whatever but some people may be like oh i'd rather be in a cafe or whatever i'm like no i don't want to see or hear any other human i don't want to see see or hear any other noise it's just gonna be me and the computer absolutely no distractions absolutely no one else there no music no sound no things on in the background no people walking around nothing that's that's how i get in the zone
Casey:
Marco?
Marco:
Headphones and fish.
Marco:
Nobody saw that coming.
Marco:
Surprise!
Marco:
And I would also say, too, the way I work, I don't know if this is true to everybody, I think it might be, the way I work, I can't really create the zone at will.
Marco:
I can just recognize when I'm ready for it and encourage it and preserve the state as well as possible.
Marco:
It's like, the zone is here and I get a chance to harness it or not harness it.
Marco:
And so I choose whenever I can to harness it when the opportunity arises.
Marco:
When I have that motivation, when I have that focus, whatever causes that mode to happen, I try to recognize when that is happening and preserve that and harness it to get good stuff done.
Marco:
When I can tell that I'm in the zone or that I'm able to be in the zone,
Marco:
i'm not going to do things like read twitter or answer email like i'm going to want to harness that to i'm going to ideally apply that to like coding and and things that are like more substantial like that you know as opposed to just like administrative work or messing around but i'm not perfect at this but that is uh that is the the idea
Casey:
Leon Zanman writes, do you have any idea what should or could happen to Overcast and your other endeavors in the unfortunate event of you dying?
Casey:
Maybe a weird slash creepy question, but I'm just wondering if and how you as a one person's business with paying clients are handling this.
Casey:
And I...
Casey:
I thought this was fascinating in no small part because I just heard independence number 55, the single point of failure where this exact conversation is discussed.
Casey:
For me, I mean, it's not as big as and certainly not the financial powerhouse, let's say, that Overcast is.
Casey:
But for Vignette and all the other associated stuff with my business, I have written out kind of the instructions on, hey, if I disappear, where is everything?
Casey:
And that's true not only of the business but actually my personal life as well.
Casey:
And I've given copies of those documents to people I trust.
Casey:
And so in the unfortunate event that I pass away –
Casey:
then both Aaron as my wife and Aaron as probably the person who will end up dealing with my business's stuff should hopefully be squared away.
Casey:
And I've actually been thinking about writing a blog post about what sorts of information I've included on these documents because I think it would probably be helpful.
Casey:
So I'll probably get around to that one day.
Casey:
But Marco, what are you doing if, God forbid, something happens to you suddenly?
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, my family's taken care of with things like life insurance, but for the actual business, like for Overcast, I don't really have any plans.
Marco:
I'll be dead, so I won't care.
Casey:
Fair.
Marco:
I guess people can do whatever they want with it.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I have not put anything in place.
Marco:
I also heard that episode.
Marco:
And I also thought about, I wonder if I should put some process in place here.
Marco:
But I have found that transitions of app ownership...
Marco:
rarely really preserve what the app was about and what made it good and so i don't think it really matters like if i'm gone overcast is going to die with me or is going to be picked up by somebody else and change in a way that you're all going to hate so so like it kind of doesn't really matter honestly
Casey:
That's an interesting point.
Casey:
You know, a couple of years ago, maybe even several years ago now, a friend of the show, Underscore David Smith, went somewhere, and he didn't tell his friends that he was going anywhere, which is fine.
Casey:
Like, he doesn't have to report in to us that he's going on a vacation.
Casey:
But he went somewhere, and this was, I think, when Feed Wrangler was fairly new.
Casey:
And something happened.
Casey:
I don't know if you remember this, Marco, but something happened.
Casey:
I sure do.
Casey:
When Feed Wrangler basically took a dump.
Casey:
And this was fairly significant, and nobody could get in touch with Dave.
Casey:
And I can only speak for myself, but I was getting increasingly and increasingly and increasingly worried about what was going on.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
It turned out everything was fine.
Casey:
Well, in his world, it's just that some server had had an issue or something like that.
Marco:
Yeah, and he was on vacation at a cabin in the woods with no internet connectivity.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
But yeah, his server went down at the worst possible time, basically right after he left.
Yeah.
Marco:
and so like it was down for a while and you know and you know i've taken vacations where i've been offline and you just kind of assume like well i just hope that in the next couple days my servers don't break right and it you know his servers happen to break during that time and but yeah we all thought the worst
Casey:
Yeah, I was genuinely getting really concerned.
Casey:
Well, anyways, I bring all this up because there was a time when he went on a different trip later, and I genuinely don't know if this is still true or not, but there was a window of time where he had given me like –
Casey:
a, you know, 400 character password to use and like the bare bones of server information that I could use to basically like log in and just restart the thing and hope for the best.
Casey:
And I honestly am sure if I have it, it's in one password somewhere.
Casey:
And I don't even know if I do have this information anymore.
Casey:
And even if I do, I doubt it still works.
Casey:
But I thought it was an interesting point that, you know, it may not be terrible to take someone you trust and give them, you
Casey:
just in case something happens.
Casey:
Now, obviously, I wouldn't be able to properly debug whatever Dave's issues may be, but I could go in there, like I said, and restart the server and hope for the best.
Casey:
So that's another thing to think about as well if you ever go off the grid.
Casey:
In any case, John, what about you?
Casey:
Have you thought about any of this?
John:
I have no kingdom for which keys must be handed to someone.
John:
When I'm dead, nobody cares and there's nothing that needs to continue.
Casey:
I'll care.
John:
But there's nothing that needs to keep running.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Not hypercritical.co, is that right?
Casey:
It's not com, right?
John:
Nobody cares about that stuff.
Casey:
Well, you only write on it once a year.
John:
That's right.
John:
I mean, yeah, I don't have any ongoing endeavors like that.
John:
Other than the ones that actually involve me, in which case those no longer involve me.
Marco:
Fair enough.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Eero, Squarespace, and Casper.
Marco:
And we'll see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They did it.
Casey:
I so desperately want... I have a favorite spatula.
John:
Rubbermaid used to make utensils for some brief period.
John:
They no longer do.
John:
I have two Rubbermaid spatulas, one of which is my favorite spatula, and I cannot find one that is even remotely like it.
John:
It's not complicated.
John:
It's one piece of Rubbermaid plastic, but it's...
John:
It's exactly the right size and shape.
John:
Doesn't have any weird places where, you know, gunk gets stuck.
John:
Like, it's the right flexibility.
John:
It's, you know, it's a good spatula.
John:
Johnny might even like it, but I have to hope that it never breaks or, like, accidentally melts on something or whatever because I can't find a replacement.
John:
so yeah he should make a spatula it would be it's a perfect johnny ive thing because it should be basically like you know featureless and white and just like you know a simple solid with no moving parts and no ports not white though because then you like sauce would discolor it well mine's not white it's like uh you know an off-white kind of color and yeah it is a little bit discolored right but it's you know the amount of tomato sauce you make of course it's gonna be discolored
John:
well no it's not you don't use the spatula and tomatoes but anyway uh it is mostly like sort of discolored from like bernie stuff being on it so it's like a little bit of brown bernie stuff yeah like a little bit of a brown speckling like but it's not colored like purple or red or any kind of like food dye color uh ryber in the chat room not that that's a bowl scraper that's not a yeah not that kind of spatula
Marco:
you're talking about the pancake turner flipper if anything but yeah like it's shaped more like a hockey stick yes you could like get it underneath i gotta say the uh so the the what you're calling like a bowl scraper i have been using those more for eggs
Marco:
Just as the thing that you stir stuff in a pan with.
Marco:
Yeah, that's not the right tool for that job.
Marco:
Please stop doing that.
Marco:
Honestly, I used to be a wooden spoon person, but ultimately I find that a good flexible silicone spatula, what you're calling the bowl scraper kind of spatula, not the pancake turner with the slots, but the thing that you would...
Marco:
ice a cake with like that kind of thing i have found that is actually a much better tool for stirring stuff around in a pan during during most for most types of things that i'm stirring around in pans i really enjoy it i got converted to it a couple years ago by a friend and and i i am solidly in that camp now of like that is the better tool for that job
John:
It's the thing my wife does, and it drives me nuts, but it is still one step up from the worst thing, which is using silverware.
John:
Yeah, that's definitely the worst thing.
Marco:
Oh, goodness.
Marco:
Yeah, that's nice.
John:
Please do not use silverware for so many reasons.
John:
Yeah, that I agree.
John:
Using the wrong cooking tool is a step up from that, and then using the correct tool, of course, is what you should be doing.
Casey:
Aaron always used to use one of these things that you're describing, Marco, for scrambled eggs.
Casey:
And for the longest time, I was like, what the hell are you doing?
Casey:
That's why I use a spatula.
Casey:
And then I tried it once or I was like, she started them and left like the little scrapery, you know, plasticky, whatever thing right near the pan.
Casey:
And so I was like, oh, screw it.
Casey:
I'll just use this.
Casey:
I think both you and Aaron are correct for something along those lines.
Marco:
when you're making eggs you are in fact much of the time scraping the bowl essentially you know what i mean like so that actually is closer yeah especially if you're making like if you're making scrambled eggs in a non-stick pan like this thing is perfect because you really do want to get it all off the side yeah like it makes
John:
So if your pan is properly nonstick, you shouldn't need this, actually.
John:
This is to get things off the side that are sticking to the side.
John:
Really, you should be able to not even touch it with anything and just flip it, and it should slide right off, just like in those commercials.
John:
But as nonstick degrades, they become less nonstick.
John:
They become more stick, and so then you might need a scraper.
John:
Every pan eventually becomes a stick pan.
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
Except for the super-duper cast-iron thingies, supposedly.
John:
I've never successfully pulled this off, but the theory is the carbonization, long period of time, smooth, glassy surface, yada, yada.
Marco:
Yeah, I've never been convinced by the cast-iron lifestyle.
John:
It seems like it is... You need a grandma pan.
John:
You need a pan that someone's used for 100 years that has that glassy surface that no one has put their stupid metal utensils into and screwed up.
Yeah.
Casey:
John, click that most recent link in the chat.
Casey:
It's circa 1972 spatulas.
Casey:
That's right in your wheelhouse in terms of era.
John:
Hey, that's it.
John:
That's not the one that I like.
John:
That's the big one.
John:
The small version of that is my spatula.
John:
We also have the big one, and that's what we use for pancakes and stuff, but I'm not married to the big one.
John:
I feel like the big one is too big.
John:
The small one is maybe like half that width.
John:
That is my spatula.
John:
Okay, this is not at all what I thought you meant.
John:
It doesn't look like a Johnny Ive thing, other than obviously the giant Rubbermaid thing, which is why I know it's Rubbermaid, because you can't not know it's Rubbermaid.
John:
So you can't find anything as good as that?
John:
Nope, I cannot.
Casey:
I hear the skepticism all the way from here.
John:
And again, not the big one, the small one.
John:
God, if anyone sees the small one on eBay, I will buy it for a ridiculous price.
John:
I'm already running low on my grated cheese OXO thing, right?
John:
Oh, no.
John:
I remember you mentioned that in the past, right?
John:
You're holding on to an old cheese grater?
John:
I think I have one or possibly two left unopened, but they're a lifetime.
John:
And my current one, I'm just like, hang on a little bit longer.
John:
I'm trying to get the maximum life out of it.
John:
I have seen on television...
John:
a few more like commercial kitchens with electric ones.
John:
And that's totally what I want.
John:
I want to not do it by hand, but I haven't found a good electric one yet.
John:
So I'm always on the lookout for that.
John:
But in the meantime, I got to keep my hand ones.
Casey:
Oh, do you see this Etsy link?
John:
Is it really from the 70s?
John:
Yeah, that one in the middle.
John:
There you got it.
John:
Right there.
John:
That's my spatula.
John:
Boom.
John:
Is it from the 70s?
John:
I mean, we bought it after we were married.
Casey:
You can buy one for $74.99, John.
John:
We bought it after we were married.
John:
So it's not like this is... I mean, maybe they've made it since the 70s and yeah.
John:
oh 70 dollars hmm jesus you're actually thinking about it i would love so much for you to go back in time to the 70s and explain to your parents or grandparents whoever bought this that in 2019 you're gonna buy one for 75 dollars we bought it we bought it ourselves like after we were married when you're buying like stuff for your house you gotta buy a kitchen table and utensils and like plates and spatulas and we bought a spatula like we just probably went to you know whatever the
John:
kitchen store and bought a bunch of cheap you know we were like in our 20s we were just married we didn't have a lot of money this is not an expensive product god i i don't i've never seen that weird soup ladle i'm not really not on board with that probably but 75 for this piece of plastic good god big in the small spatula rubbermaid why did you stop making these
Casey:
Oh, and it's only available in black, apparently.
Casey:
Sorry, John.
Marco:
Black?
Marco:
Ugh.
Marco:
Yeah, you can pay $75 and get the Spatula Pro.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
Actually, now that I see it in black, it does look kind of Mac Pro-y.
Marco:
It also appears, if you go to the very last photo where it's the black one and it's showing the underside, it looks like it might be used.
Marco:
Do you see that leading edge?
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Oh, yeah, they're all they get scraped up like mine is like it's like a cast iron pan where it becomes like you get a patina and sort of like it has seen so much service because again, I've had it for like 20 years now that it is like, I don't know, I should take some pictures of it.
John:
It's it's a pretty good looking thing after 20 years.
Marco:
Now, the real funny thing here is that at the bottom of this listing, it says almost gone.
Marco:
There's only three left.
Marco:
I see that as they have three of these.
Marco:
That's great.
Marco:
You could spend $225 and have three backup spatula pros.
John:
John, you might want to consider it.
John:
What is this picture with a thing with like a spoon with slots in it?
John:
I'm not on board with their spoons.
John:
I'm also in the market for a good wooden spoon.
John:
I have a lot of good wooden spoons, including wooden spoons for my grandmother, which are my best wooden spoons.
John:
But wooden spoons eventually do start to check and crack a little bit, right?
John:
So a couple of my good wooden spoons have some cracks in them.
John:
Another advantage of using spatulas instead of wooden spoons, you can put them in the dishwasher.
John:
Oh, we don't put these in the dishwasher.
John:
Are you kidding?
John:
These never go in the dishwasher.
John:
The wooden spoons or the spatulas all wash my hand.
Marco:
Your things from the 70s probably would melt if you put them in the dishwasher.
Marco:
I don't think they would.
Marco:
They're probably leaching chemicals into your food when you use them.
John:
No, they go directly into hot pans.
John:
They don't melt.
Marco:
but i wouldn't put them in the dishwasher it's plastic from the 70s it's not from the 70s it's manufactured like in 19 the late 90s fine i wouldn't i wouldn't put plastic from the 90s into my food today don't worry about it it's fine it's not fine we know factually it's not fine not all plastic is toxic yeah but like only only the stuff they use for water bottles
Casey:
yeah right it's not a water bottle plastic like it degrades and leashes weird chemicals out of itself over time like that it's not a good like this is not good yeah in in john's defense i think i misread 1972 as a release year not a model number because apparently that is a model number there you go but it does say on this listing item details vintage from before 2000 which is now basically 20 years ago
John:
It's vintage.
John:
Yeah, it's vintage from when I was married in the 90s.
John:
It's 20 years ago.
John:
All three of us are quite vintage at this point by these definitions.
John:
Wow, that's good to go.
John:
Looking at the little codes in the back, I should look.
John:
Probably that code is in the back of mine.
John:
It's got the recycle symbol on you.
Casey:
So there you go.
Casey:
Rubbermaid 1971 spatula.
Casey:
Is it the 71?
Casey:
I can't tell.
John:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
You should go right now.
John:
I want those spatulas.
Casey:
You're really thinking about spending $75 on this thing, aren't you?
John:
I mean, like, here's the thing.
John:
My current ones are fine.
John:
They are not broken.
John:
And unlike my cheese gritter, they don't there's not like a shelf life where I know this is going to break in three years.
John:
They've never broken.
John:
But I fear one day, like, you know, something happening to it, someone leaving it on a burner and actually does melt or something like that.
John:
people are sending me links to other things on amazon that are not my spatula this is not my spatula i've seen these in the store this is not what i want i think you have you have to buy this you have to get spatula pro for 75 i think you might be right the only question is how many which utensil narrow spatula 74 99 no i'm not gonna do like i gotta i gotta uh keep my powder dry for the mac pro
John:
I mean, just think about how many of these spatulas you could buy.
John:
The white is sold out anyway.
John:
I would have to get the black one.
John:
Yeah, no, forget it.
John:
I'm not, I need, no.
John:
The pro one looks cool, but it clashes with everything else.
John:
It's not, I like to see the food stuff stuck to it.
John:
It's black.
John:
It's hard to see what kind of gunk is on there.