 ["Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy"] ["Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy"] Thank you. Thank you. Wow. Wow, really? For me? You shouldn't have. Hi. Thank you for that. That was amazing. Welcome to On the Verge. I'm Josh Dupolsky. I'm the editor-in-chief of theverge.com. It's a website you maybe have heard of. And I would love to thank you guys for being here. This is our second show. And we've made it to the end of the year together as a family. And I think that's very exciting. This is a big show. We're really stoked about it. We've got an amazing guest. John Gruber is here from Daring Fireball. I thought that might be a mixture of booze and cheering. But you guys were really polite. That's nice. Joanna Stern is here. She's going to do some cool stuff. We have a bunch of segments for you guys. Neely and Paul are here. There may be some giveaways. It's going to be a lot of fun. We also have our house band, Trent. Yeah, according to the census, he's now an entire band. It's pretty amazing. It's pretty fantastic. I wanted to say thanks to Sony. They're sponsoring this show. So give a round of applause to Sony because we wouldn't be here. None of us would be here in America if it weren't for Sony. But it's true. It's a fact. But our first guest, I'm going to bring him out in a second. But I wanted to say that Apple has obviously been, that company has been a huge topic of conversation for the past few months. Steve Jobs passed away recently, as all of you know, I'm sure. And that's on top of the new iPhone and iOS 5 and all the controversy with Samsung and other companies about patents. So I was really excited about getting John here to talk about this stuff because I feel like you may agree with him or disagree with him, but he's got a definite opinion about the company. And I think he's got a lot of insight. So I'm excited to have this conversation. So I think we should just get him out here. Please welcome John Gruber. You made it. Wonderful. Nice introduction. Rock the set. How's that feeling? It's great. Is that good? Watch that arm. It's a little broken. I think this is going to be our thing where I warn people about the arm. I don't ever want to fix that. It gives me an icebreaker. Isn't this nice? We got, John requested that he asked for a mug. Yeah. And we couldn't find mugs, so we have plastic cups. I think this is, but if you ask for an Android tablet, they've got like plenty of Android tablets here. Was that annoying to you to see those? Did that bother you? No, it doesn't bother me. So John, before we get into talking about the industry that we both write about, I want to talk about John Gruber, the man. I want to get to know you intimately. I thought you said the couch is broken. I think you know how it got broken. Where did you come from? Where did John Gruber come from? I mean, Daring Fireball is a massive, as far as sites that people are either, man, I hate that and I have to read it every day, or I love that and I have to read it every day. You're way up there in our space. People love Daring Fireball. They love you. So tell me where Daring Fireball came from, where you came from, and how this phenomenon began. I don't think I have a good sense of that. That's a terrible answer. No, but what I mean though is that when I started, I started the site in 2002. We can go back further than that, but that's when I started Daring Fireball. Let's go back further. Well, I went to college in the 90s. I worked on this student newspaper at Drexel University. I thought, you know, writing is what I like to do. I studied computer science, but I spent all my time at the newspaper and that was the direction I wanted to go, but didn't really pursue it. It just seemed like all the jobs you could get, like what do you do? Go to journalism school and get more school and then you get a job covering, I don't know, local politics at a newspaper. None of it seemed like something I wanted to do, so I just built websites and did other stuff. I always had in mind that writing was what I wanted to do, but then a couple of years go by and I realize, you know, I hadn't done any writing. It's like, hey, time's moving on, but somehow in my mind I felt like I was still getting better at it and I couldn't really think about why. This is maybe 2001 or so. At the time I was working for Barebone Software, the people who make BB Edit. At the time they had a mail client for the Mac called MailSmith. A customer asked on a mailing list for the, is there a way that I can figure out, get a word count for all the email that I've written with MailSmith? I thought, well, that's a neat little thing. I'll do that for him. I ran it against my own thing and I figured out how much email I had written over the last couple of years. It was this huge number. I forget what it was. I thought, wow. Then I Googled what's the average word count of a book? I don't forget exactly how that came up. I think it's 50,000. Yeah, something like that. It ended up that just through email I had written mailing lists and stuff like that. I had written three or four books worth of email. I thought, well, that's why I feel like- Not a narrative though. No, not one single thing. You were people who were like, I don't understand this email. Chapter four, I don't get this John. Right. At the same time I was following other people who had personal web logs, people like Jason Kotke. There were others. I thought, I could do that. The thing I always wanted to do is in the newspaper parlance or magazine parlance is I don't want to be a reporter. I wanted to be the columnist. I wanted to be the guy on the back page. I wanted to be the guy on the ad-op page who just gets to say what he thinks. The cranky- Well, I just want a columnist- It's a cranky role though, right? It can be. It could be funny. It could be like a Dave Barry type, but you have personality. You're not writing from this pseudo-objective voice of the newspaper. You're writing from your own voice. Again, like I said, the way it looked to me though is to get those cool columnist jobs you had to put in 20 years as a crap reporter. That just didn't appeal to me. Then I saw these with web logs. I thought, well, you could just skip that and just go right to being a columnist. That to me is how I've always seen Derrick Fireball. It's my column on the stuff that I'm interested in. It took me a couple of years to get it off the ground. I thought about it for a while and just started writing. Do you think of yourself as a blogger? Are you a journalist? Are you a blogger? What is your role right now? I don't know. I don't know what that means. A blogger, I think, or let's say a columnist, like you said, you could voice your opinions. You're not necessarily responsible for delivering news to people, right? No. You're not breaking news stories. You do break news stories. But I don't have to. I never feel obligated to cover anything. You don't really cover that. You write about your observations from things or about things. Do you not consider yourself a blogger? Is that not the right term for you? I honestly don't know what that means. To me, a blog is a medium, not a verb. I write. To me, I'm just a writer. It could apply to anything that needs to be written. It could work in a newspaper. I could write stuff that is read on a television show. It's writing. New columnist is kind of... NU with umlauts. Columnist. That's interesting. You don't identify with... If there's a blogger up or something, you don't go, hey, I'm one of these guys. No. Although, I do identify with the independent media. I think you're clearly part of that, too. Obviously, The Verge is a larger head count operation than Daring Fireball, but it's... Daring Fireball is just you, right? It is just me. We are slightly larger. I think it's still of a piece, though. It is the idea that... I still think, even though you're big compared to me, but it's still, I think, a very lean and mean operation where pretty much everybody you're hiring is doing something that's actually like readers and viewers get to see and read and feel and touch. Whereas, newspapers and magazines and TV networks over the last decades of the 20th century grew into these huge conglomerates with massive, massive internal bureaucracies and structures and all sorts of people doing all sorts of things and a focus on the content just got lost. I definitely identify with that, but it doesn't have to be the word blog or the verb blogging. Right, but when people ask you, you just say, I'm a writer. Yeah. Okay. You're not just covering all aspects of technology. You have a definite focus, and you focus on Apple, primarily. I do, but it was a conscious decision not to name the site, you know, Daring Mac Ball or... Yeah. What is Daring... What are the origins of the phrase Daring Fireball? That just sounded cool. That's it? Yeah. You were sitting down trying to figure it out, and you just thought Daring Fireball, those words that go together? Well, I thought of it many years before, and then I just thought, I'll keep that and use that later. You just popped into your head, Daring Fireball? Right. And you thought, this is a part of an email. No. It's just, I didn't tell anybody. I didn't want anybody to steal it. But you do write a lot about Apple. Right. And is that something... Have you always been an Apple? I mean, did you start... You know, your first computer was an Apple, and you've been kind of into the company since the... Yeah. It always appealed to me. I mean, I didn't have a computer, though, in the house growing up. The only thing we had, we had Atari, but my parents wouldn't buy me a computer on the grounds that if they did, they said I'd never leave the house. Were they right? Yeah. I actually think they were right. It was very frustrating to me at the time, but I think in hindsight, they were right. I think I did more socially than I would have otherwise. Right. But then you ended up getting a computer and then going back in the house. Right. So it was all for naught. Yeah. I haven't left the house since October. That's amazing. Is that true? Yeah. It's very true. Yeah. I mean, I was actually saying before the show, but we have only ever spoken in person at Apple events. That's true. So this is the first time outside of an Apple event that you and I are communicating face to face. I believe so. Is that exciting to you? It's very exciting. It's exciting to me as well. So I think you've got a very special relationship when it comes to Apple. You are considered kind of a fanboy, an Apple fanboy. Would you say that's accurate? I'm not saying that the term is fair, but people do consider you to be a bit of a fanboy. Yeah, but I think that that's... Honestly, I don't use that word to describe anybody who is a fan of anything. What's my quip on that? It's that... You have a prepared statement for that. I forget. Oh, I know what it was. It was when Mark Cuban switched to a Mac. This was a while back, maybe 2004, 2005, but he wrote a blog post about it. Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, billionaire, sold some piece of junk to Yahoo in the 90s. I think people know Mark Cuban. Also, a great guest star on Entourage. Yes, yeah. Really good actor. Mark Cuban had this thing about switching to a Mac and that, man, this is great. I can't believe it. This is so great. I'm no Mac fan. I'm no Apple fanboy, but this is the way to go now. Then I realized what Apple fanboy meant was somebody who began using Apple products before you did. Oh, yeah. In that sense- But now it means something else, don't you think? I think there are people who... The accusation is that I blindly say good things about Apple products and figure out ways that actions Apple takes are good ideas or smart or whatever because I'm rooting for them. They're my sports team. Not blindly, but I think you do. Well, but I think that's what the word fanboy implies. Right, but you are rooting for Apple. Only in the sense that I appreciate what they're trying to do. I'm glad that somebody is doing it and if it were not for Apple, the industry would be in a far different state. I think when the iPod came out, the first iPod MP3 player, you didn't see a rash of copycat products from other companies. You didn't see other people do that. People didn't get it. It took a long time also for it to become a big seller. That's the one thing people forget. Everybody knows the iPod was a big hit for Apple and turned the whole company around, but it was a Mac only product for a year and a half. It required FireWire, which people with Windows PCs almost never had. It didn't even have a FireWire port. Whereas now Apple comes out with say the iPad and how long did it take before things that looked an awful lot like an iPad started coming out from other companies? A year and a half maybe? Pretty much, yeah. You're saying that you're a fan of what they do because they do it better than a lot of other people. I don't disagree with you. They do lead the industry in a lot of ways. I think the thing where people would take issue is there are times it seems, and I read your site every day, big fan of your work, but there are times when it seems like you'll take a review. I can't remember. I think one of our guys did a review recently. It was a pretty positive review about a non-Apple product. You'll find the one negative line from the review. Some of your reviews on Android phone, they're like, it's great. The launcher was a little sluggish. The launcher was a little sluggish. It's like so and so on, whatever this Android phone is. The launcher was a little sluggish and you're like, glad I'm not buying this thing. If you're a daring Fireball reader, your exposure to that review is literally like this piece of crap I would not touch with a 10 foot pole. You definitely don't do that with Apple products. I don't think though that there are... I think the things that I focus on, and I'm cognizant of that. I don't think though... If I do that, I try to pick things that to me exemplify major differences. A recent one, I think just this week, was somebody on the verge reviewed some piece of crap LG Android phone. I think this is the Nitro. Right, the Nitro. It was actually a fairly positive review. It wasn't a complete piece of crap. Right. What I thought was interesting was the part when he got to the LTE, which is 4G, real 4G, no if, ands, or buts about it, no quotes around it, and really fast. It's getting like 15, 16 megabits per second up and down, which blows away anything an Apple 3G product can do, but at the expense of significant battery drain. You can't turn it off. You can't say, I don't want to use LTE, I want to use 3G. Yes, that's the part I quoted from the review, but to me, that's because it shows that Apple is a company with a very different philosophy towards these products. At Apple... You see that view. You're looking at it from as an Apple versus that thing. You're not looking at that product in a vacuum. By the way, as a columnist, I think this is what you should be doing, because you've got your beat, and your beat is talking about Apple as it relates to the rest of the industry. I like it most of the time, but I do think you can see how people would get there. You have some people who really, you get under their skin. I guess. I'm not really all that aware of it, though. I really am not. Have you been on the internet? I know you don't have comments, so that's actually kind of, it helps, right? You have no comments on your site, so you're kind of less exposed to that. Right, but even on places where there are, like I will often read through the hacker news comments of something that I've written. Obviously, there's some people who seem to not be a fan of my work, or think that I'm biased, and that it's worthless because if I say something that's good about an Apple product, it doesn't count. Because of course, John Gruber's going to say that. Yeah, of course. But I don't know how... I mean, you can find people who will say anything. I have no idea what kind of a number that is. I really don't. You actually say negative stuff, too. I mean, you just wrote something pretty negative about Siri. You were talking about how you felt that Siri was, well, it's not that great. Well, it's half-baked. I mean, it is beta. I mean, they're right to call it beta, and it's unusual. It's very unusual. In fact, I can't think of another example where Apple both released something that clearly should be called beta, and they're highly touting it. I mean, it's the focus of the commercial. Yeah, I mean, that's the selling point of the iPhone 4S's Siri at this point. Yeah. And then I said, but I'm glad it's there. I think the phone is better for it. I use it. I find it to be very useful. I think they made the right move. And maybe Siri's a unique case because the way that they're doing the cloud-based voice recognition, and they need to collect all that. And collectively, by getting all that, it's making the accuracy better. Right. I've had emails from people who do real AI research that's saying, yeah, no amount of data is too much data for this sort of thing. They're trying to make the service better by getting lots of data now. But it is unusual. No, but my thing is that all I want to be, the only thing I'm obsessed with is being right all the time. And it's honestly... But you do agree that in certain cases, there can be varying degrees of right, right? No, you're either right or you're wrong. Well, I mean, the battery life to you is like, this is wrong. This is bad, right? Oh, well, that's different. Well, let me get back to that. All I'm obsessed with is being right. And so the way I look at it is I look back at like the last nine years I've been writing on Daring Farble, and most of what I've written about Apple has been very positive. Most of what I've written about their products have been positive. And when I have conjectured as to how I think things are going to go for the company, for the most part, I have said, I think they're going to keep succeeding in these areas. I look back at the last nine years, and I think I was almost always right. Have you calculated on a percentage basis? Something tells me you may have thought about it, right? Right. And I know the times... You've considered getting out some charts and graphs. And I know the times that I have been wrong, and they kill me. Sure. And I feel the same way. In fact, you and I have had rather public disagreements about stuff that I've gotten wrong, and you were kind of like, you're wrong, because that's obviously pleasing to you. So the only... It is never going to... To tell someone that they're wrong. You have to admit you do have delight in telling someone that they're wrong. I do. I do. Because it also means you get to be right in that moment. Exactly. It's a personal weakness that I do take delight in pointing out when others are wrong. And I look back, and I did, I look back on that one, the 11th hour one, and it was a little... It was unnecessarily mean at the end. We actually... Let's talk about this for one quick second, because then I have other stuff I want to... But a long time ago, when I was at Engadget, I had heard some stuff about the iPad 2 from a source that was pretty tested. Yeah, a long time ago. That's like 11 months. Well, it was a lot. In our world, hey, a lot has happened in 11 months. I mean, a lot has happened in 11 months. We're going to get some of that. So I said, look, it's going to have... I forget what it was, a higher resolution screen and this SD slot, which the person I had spoken to thought this is going to happen. And that person had been dead on with other things that you know of. Anyhow, we had a big conversation. You kind of called me out and said, this is BS. This is 11th hour. 11th hour my ass, I believe, was your expression. Because I said it had happened in the 11th hour. But we saw each other at that event for the iPad 2, and we talked. And I said, look, there have been other times that Apple has pulled something at the last minute, and the iPod touch camera was one of the things that I mentioned. And you agreed. Right. But I actually looked up... I looked it up after our rehearsal, and I went back, and I actually mentioned that in that 11th hour post that, yes, Apple does change things at the 11th hour. So I actually did mention that. Right. But you were still like, they're totally wrong. This is not possible. Right. Well... But even though you said it was, it clearly was. That was just a unique case though. I'm very hurt about this. I'm not going to let this go. You had a good source in January who you trusted and said it was a high resolution. But I had a golden source in January. And so I knew it was wrong. And you were right. And you were right. And I will just say, though, if you think about it, common sense wise, if you think about it, with the iPod touch two years ago... Are we arguing this now? Well, just real quick. I admit that you're right. They hadn't had a camera on it yet. And they had one that was going to have a camera, and then literally at the last possible minute they could make such a change. I still don't... I've never heard why. But for some reason they said, you know what, no camera. And all they did was retool the silver back to get rid of the camera hole, and boom, they start popping off the factory line. And then when the iFixit guys pop it open, low, there's a little spot for where the camera was supposed to be. You would agree that was an 11th hour change? Yes. But that's the sort of thing you could do at the last minute, is change the back to not have a hole in it. Whereas switching from iPad 1 resolution, pixel resolution display to double resolution one. I think maybe then it's a question of what you consider to be the 11th hour. Because my report was way before the announcement. But you doubled down on it on January 14th. I did double down. Did I double down? Are you sure? I thought that the January 14th report was right before it was announced. It was like it's not going to happen. That was the report. Your 11th hour post was in response to me saying, because this did happen. You were like, this is BS. But I talked to the same source. They said, you know what, it isn't happening. They're not going to do the screen. They're not going to do the SD. And then you were very upset about that. Because I was going to end up being right after all. Because I know that the iPad 2 was never going to have a retina display. You were right about that. I'll give you that. And I've been ruining that prediction ever since. But you said you had a golden source. So let's talk about your relationship with Apple. Because you have a relationship with Apple. And in fact, I don't know what your relationship was like with Steve Jobs. And I do want to talk about the post-Apple Jobs. But I know that you guys had talked at least one time. I was standing off to the side, I think, maybe when you met him. I don't know if you had met him before this. I think it was maybe the iPhone 4, after the iPhone 4 announcement. Was that the first time you met him? That was. So I was standing off doing some photographs or something. And I saw Jobs come over and be introduced to you. No, no, no. Jobs doesn't come over to you. They say, would you like to meet Steve? And then you're like, duh. You were brought to him. There was somebody drifting in one direction or the other. Katie Cotton asked me if I wanted to meet him. And I actually said to her, has anybody ever said no to that? And she said no. And I saw you guys rapping a little bit. Did that relationship go beyond that? Did you email with each other? Did you ever have any? No. Because Jobs actually cited you as a response to, what was this over? Was this Flash or... It was either the dev tools when they kind of banned third party dev tools. Yeah, it had something to do with Flash. And you had written a big... I don't know if you guys remember this, but there was a lot of controversy about the App Store and the kind of tools you could use, or Flash. It was one of their controversies about things we don't want on the iPhone. And you had written a big piece on Daring Fireball. And Jobs said, go read Daring Fireball's post on this, because we think this sums it up perfectly. We think John Gruber's take on this is insightful and not negative. Is that what he said? Yeah. How was the traffic on that post? It was crazy. I mean, it really was. By far and away, the most trafficked post. And all it was is one of those things where some random guy emailed Steve Jobs, some other guy, like a developer, somebody nobody had heard of, had emailed Steve Jobs. And Steve Jobs just wrote back this one line, we think John Gruber's take is insightful and not negative. And that was it. He responded in an email. And then the guy who did that got the email, where some people would get emails from Steve Jobs and then put it on their web log and say, Steve Jobs sent me an email. And everybody goes nuts. It's at the top of Tech Meme the next day. That happened. Yeah. So it's like second or third hand though. It's some random guy's site, which never got big traffic. I mean, you should have just been sending out those emails as Steve Jobs. It was easily like a 25% bump. If you look back at my month to month stats, it was easily like 25%, 30% higher than the month before. So let's talk about Apple now. Steve Jobs, I mean, clearly based on what everybody says and I think what we've seen over the last however many years, since he's been back at Apple, it does seem that he was, if not the sole person responsible for many of these amazing devices, the iPad, the iPhone, he was a real driving force. He was putting pieces together that other people weren't putting together. Do you agree or disagree with that? Yeah, definitely. I think he saw the world differently. And I don't think any of us can really understand that, especially where he saw technology going. And he was right about a lot of things. He really was. I mean, sometimes it's arrogant and obviously he had this binary view of everything was either, can we swear? Sure. Everything was either shit or the best thing ever. This is total shit or it's the best thing ever and there was no ground in between. It was like somebody's great or they're a bozo that's blowing it. And so, for example, when he said in 2007 at the iPhone introduction that we're five years ahead of everybody else, I was blown away. I was in the audience and I still, it was that one product. Were there tears of joy? No, no tears. But I was the one. Was anybody there near you crying? No, no. But people were having fits. Right. And it's a really good intro. If anybody here has not seen Steve Jobs introducing the first iPhone, it is kind of amazing. If you want to see how to introduce a product, this is like, it may never get better than that moment. It's the one product introduction that Apple did that actually was the one that everybody wants them to do every time where they blow your mind away. Right. You wrote something about that. Everyone before that was not like that and everyone since then has not really been like that. The Cube wasn't like that. Or even the iPad, which arguably just as important to Apple going forward as the iPhone. I thought the iPad launch was actually kind of weird and somber. And there was a period where Jobs was, I don't know if you guys remember, but the iPad, the first iPad launch, he sat down and he was just browsing. And there was a long period where he's like, now I'm going to go check out the New York Times. It was low key. Now I'm going to look at Flickr, just tap and go. Just like that. Him just talking about what he was doing and he was just browsing. Yeah, it was low key. And it went on for like 10 minutes. And the reaction afterwards was there was an awful lot of that's it. It's just a big iPod touch. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Whereas nobody was disappointed by the iPhone. That's right. I mean the iPhone thing was nobody was disappointed. Everybody was like, holy crap. And famously the RIM had a meeting like two days later where they went over it and they're like, they must be lying. That's not possible. Right? I mean that's... Well, there's a... Somebody who worked at RIM claims that... But the reactions from the industry, from other people in the industry around that launch were hilarious, right? Palm was like, I think Ed Colligan was like, you're not just going to come in here and make a phone. We've been working on this for a year. Everybody was like, come on. PC guys aren't just going to come right in. Right. Everybody's attitude in the industry who was making phones acted like, we're not worried about this at all. Right. And then in a couple of years everybody was like, we are now going out of business thanks to the iPhone. Right. Which is pretty amazing. Well, the Ed Colligan quote is one of my all time favorites. Probably the most quoted thing I've done repeatedly. I should reblog it right now. You should. Because it's such a classic. While you're sitting here. But it was right before, like a month before. It was like December 2006. Like a month before the iPhone comes out. Nobody knew what the iPhone was like, but the fever pitch of Apple's going to do a phone was at that point where you're like, well, they've got to do it now. Right. And Ed Colligan, who was then the CEO of Palm, said, we're not worried. PC guys aren't just going to come right in and whatever. But it's kind of interesting because A, he was so wrong. So wrong. But the most interesting thing is that he was wrong in a very important way, which is that the way phones have evolved since that day is that they're now computers. Right. There's no denying that all the top phones are computers. They're computers that are more powerful than our laptops from maybe eight years ago, eight, nine years ago. Yeah. And so you've got to be a PC guy. It was wrong not just that Apple was going to do well, but wrong about what it was going to mean to make a phone. They were always going to be these siloed devices that were meant to do one thing and not to do all this other stuff. Right. So where is Apple now? Because I think this is the question that everybody's asking. You can't deny that Jobs was this huge driving force. He wasn't just a salesman. He wasn't just a showman. He was intimately involved in the creation of those products. Right. The question I get from a lot of people is, is their design going to go to crap now or is it going to start slowly going to crap? And I don't think that's going to be the problem for Apple at all. You mean like industrial design? Well, across the board. UI design, industrial design, is the package for the next iPhone not going to be as nice? Right. I don't think you have to worry about any of those things. I think that's the least... To me, that's the thing that I would imagine is least likely to happen because they have designers in place. And he wasn't even a designer really. Right. I mean, he was like a director of designers. He was like a dreamer. Right. His job was basically to dream up stuff. I mean, really. And if anything, I actually think their design might even get better without him insofar as that there's no longer one guy, him, who when he's wrong can insist on having his way. Do you think we'll see less or more stitch leather? I think we'll see less. Less stitch leather? I think people laugh, but I think that that's Steve Jobs. No, no. I agree. Right. I mean, I had heard a story from somebody in the industry and they said, Steve, he's not really into the internet or computers. He's not actually really that into the idea of computers as a thing. I mean, maybe it's not true, but I think that if you see some of his design, it does feel in a way like, let's get as far away from the concept of the computer as possible. I think a stitch leather icon is... You're getting there. The ripped paper is you're getting to this, like, don't make it... I don't want it to feel like a computer. I think those details, I think that the designers Apple has are gonna do just as good, if not better, and they're still gonna attract attention. Where he's going to be missed is not on those details. Where he's gonna be missed, or we don't know if he's gonna be missed, but it is a big question. Well, this is what I wanna talk about. It's the big picture. When do you do the big new thing? Right? So the story of iOS basically is... A lot of this stuff is now on the record, thanks to Isaacson's book, and other stories from the last couple years. But long story short, they were working on a tablet in the mid-2000s, and wasn't really there yet, but they'd gotten a lot of the touch stuff, and they're working on it, and they wanted to make a phone, because all the other phones on the market were crap, and they had the iPod, and they thought, well, maybe we can parlay the click wheel iPod into a phone. And Jobs had this moment, and I really think this is the sort of thing that I think he was a genius for, is we've got this tablet over here with this touch screen, and we've got this phone project. We're not near a finished product over here. We'll take this tech, put it on a phone-sized device, and that's gonna solve all these problems we've had trying to get this phone interface to be good. And then, two, three years into that, let's go back to the tablet. Now's the time to go back and take what we've done with the phone and go to the tablet. And every company that has ever tried to ship a tablet computer before the iPad, it was at best a dud. Right. But so what I'm saying is he's not there. Right. Those kind of bursts of genius that led to products like the iPhone, where are they coming from? I mean, I think the question is maybe they've got the next five years of products in the pipeline. I mean, maybe they do. Maybe he dreamed up everything, or they collectively dreamed up these things were gonna be five years down the road. But Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs. Right. And I don't think any of the people there, they're all geniuses in their own right. Scott Forstall is a genius, there's no question. Right. Johnny is a genius. All these people are super smart, but they don't have these kind of the eccentricities and the idiosyncratic behavior of a Steve Jobs that's gonna lead to some of this stuff. Right. So is there a risk or danger with Apple that they become a company that is just, it's like diminishing returns on what they're doing? I mean, so the next thing everybody's talking about is ITV. They're gonna create some sort of home entertainment, I don't know, solution. They're gonna solve, in the book, Isaacson says that Jobs said something like, I cracked it or I cracked the TV problem. I mean, is that the next thing? And if it isn't iPhone level excitement, do you think that the future's not as clear for Apple? Oh, I definitely think it's not as clear. I think it wouldn't be as clear even if Steve Jobs were still around, though. I still don't know, I don't think it makes it any more or less likely that we could predict what their next major initiative would be. If Apple goes out of business next week, what does John Gruber do? I would just keep writing about the most interesting stuff that I see. That's a good segue to my next question, which is what are the other companies that are doing things that you like? I mean, what are companies that are, I would guess that if I asked you, is anybody executing the way Apple is executing, you would say no. I mean, I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but are there other companies that you think are doing great things, that are doing spectacular things, that are innovating? Well, who do you think is? I think Google is. I think. Yeah, but you know what, Google stuff, the stuff that Google does best doesn't really interest me that much. I mean, but they do a lot of stuff that's really good. I mean, Android I think is really good in a lot of ways. I think it's different and better in some ways, in some places than iOS, but different. And I think they can coexist happily. But when you look at their web offerings, I think it's hard to deny that things like Google Docs, Calendar, Gmail, the way they integrate, the way they live in the cloud, nobody has pulled it off with such fluidity before. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, and the fact that people rely on it, you know, shows it. I mean, people are happy. I mean, I... But you're hesitant, I feel like you're hesitant to say that they're one of the guys that are doing innovative stuff. No, they are, but it doesn't interest me. It's not, it's just not my cup of tea. But iCloud does interest you. You know what, I don't really write that much about iCloud. I mean, I'm glad that it works, but it... So, web stuff is not that interesting to you? Yeah, not really. All right, so who... Okay, so let's say Google out, Microsoft? I think so. I mean, I think Windows Phone 7 is really interesting. I think the Metro, the whole Metro thing on the phone and on the desktop is definitely interesting. Are they gonna... Do they have an opportunity to come back from where they are? I mean, their market share in mobile is very low right now. Yeah, and I actually think, I've been thinking about this for weeks, or months even, really, is this notion of traction in the market and how you can get it. And I think it's a mystery to anybody. I think it was a mystery even to Apple. I think it was like intuitive. I don't think there was a science to it. I don't think they really had exact numbers on how many iPhones they were gonna sell two years out. I don't think they were quite sure it was gonna be as big a hit as it was. And I don't think anybody can really explain why Windows Phone 7 phones are selling as poorly as they are compared to other ones. It's very strange to me. Well, I think we had a boom of smartphones, right? And the big winners in that boom were Android and iOS. I think you've gotta, at some point, the market is growing, but at some point everybody's got their device from last year, they're not ready to move. I mean, I think there's certainly market forces at play there. But it's gotta be something more than that. Yeah, I don't know. There's something about it that doesn't seem right to me though, because I think the worst thing anybody could say about Windows Phone 7 is that it's as good in most ways as Android. I mean, they're very different. The worst thing they could say. I don't see how you could say that. I don't see how anybody could say. I could see how somebody would say, I don't really care for the way it looks. I don't really like that. But I think if you took a thousand people who travel back in time to 2006, where you've never seen any of these touch phones, travel back in time and get a thousand people and show them an iPhone and a Windows Phone 7 and your, what's the Galaxy Nexus? Galaxy Nexus. My Galaxy Nexus. Well, the best, but that's the best Android phone to date. I think so. I don't think there's any doubt about that. I think it is, yeah. Because it's the only one with the ice cream sandwich, which is clearly a step up. Yeah, and it's got a higher resolution display. So, go back to 2006 with them and show them to a thousand people. I think that you would find a very different mix of which phone those people would pick than what the market today looks like. I think a bunch of them would pick Windows Phone 7. And if you told them some of the things that it does, like the way that Windows Phone 7 works better with a Microsoft Windows PC, just integrates with Outlook and all that stuff better than the iPhone or Android phones do, I think that would appeal to a lot of people. Right. I don't think they'd do that at all. I mean, they just have this tiny little sliver of the market today. My feeling is that the use of the word Windows in the name of the phone really hurt them. Yeah, I think so too. I mean, I think if they'd have called them Metro, like hey, we have these new Metro phones. Amazon, what do you think? Are they doing great stuff? Oh, I think so. Yeah, Amazon's a great company. You like Amazon? Yeah, I do. Have you played with the Fire? No, I haven't seen one yet. You really? No. You got to get a Fire. You know, they're not that expensive. With that 25% bump from the jobs that you think you could afford on it. I've got so many gadgets piled up on the shelf in my office at home. Don't talk to me about gadgets piled up. I'm living a true nightmare scenario. Facebook. You kind of dismiss, you don't talk about Facebook a lot. No, I don't even have a Facebook account. Are they an important company? Do you think they're important? Maybe. I think that they exist in the blind spot of my interest in technology. I've never seen the appeal of Facebook. You don't like to be social? I guess. I don't know. But I like Twitter. I think Twitter is very social. You do love Twitter. I just don't understand it. One of the things I love about Apple products and I love about the way Apple designs things is that it's very easy to get it. Oh, I get it. I get what you're supposed to do with this thing. That's why I like Twitter. When I first saw Twitter, it's like, oh, I get it. You get 140 characters at a time to make posts. And if you like what somebody else is Twittering 140 characters at a time, you can follow them. And if they start annoying you, you can unfollow them. And that's what you see and that's the whole thing. And I was like, well, I get it. You like that. Right. It's like kind of a single use thing. I mean, it's very simplistic. Right. Nobody can describe Facebook in a way that is that comprehensive. It's mushy. It allows you to connect with your friends no matter where they are. But that's, see that's... You're thinking about using it now, aren't you? But that's not real. See, to me the problem with that is it's not real. I won't friend you on Facebook. No. Well, I guess that's true. All right. We need to wrap up. I do think this. I'll say this about Facebook. I do think there's something very interesting going on there with the talent acquisitions that they're making. So I would say I'm more interested in Facebook now than ever before where they've hired... What acquisitions are you talking about? Well, they hired Mike Mattis and the... I forget who he was working with, but the guy who did... They did the e-book for Al Gore for the iPad and the iPhone. Okay. Yeah. Bought them, bought the company, but then threw away all the e-book stuff they'd been working on. It was just a talent acquisition. They hired a company called SOFA, a Mac and... I think they did iPhone and iPod apps, but I know they did a bunch of Mac apps. Really, really exquisite panic, like panic the people who make transmit. That level, even more painstakingly detailed user interfaces than even Apple does, type of independent Mac software. They bought SOFA, but didn't... So where do you think these acquisitions are leading? Do you have a theory, pet theory? I don't know. Phone, Facebook phone? It could be, but they're buying people who... They're buying companies staffed with designers and engineers who can implement these exquisite UI design stuff, the stuff that wins Apple design awards. Right. But on a scale of one to 10, 10 being very excited and one having no interest whatsoever, where would you rank your feelings about a Facebook phone? I would say... You're supposed to say one. No, I would say it's actually high because I can't help but think that that's what they're hiring these people to do. But you don't like the premise of Facebook. I can't help but think that they're working on something that is new. That is not... I'm not saying it's not gonna have ties to their existing social network, what we think of as Facebook, but I can't help but think with the talent that they're acquiring that they're doing something new. Because Facebook has a certain look to it, right? I've seen Facebook. It's very ugly. No, it is. I mean, have you ever looked at it? It's not attractive. It's very... But it's also consistently... Ugly. I would say plain. I wouldn't even say ugly, but it's very consistent though. It has a look. When you go buy something in a coffee shop and they're on Facebook, you can see they're on Facebook at a point in your life. Everything looks the same. You can't customize it like MySpace, that's true. Right. Unfortunately. There's no way they're hiring people who make these exquisitely crafted UIs to make something that looks like that. I think that they're working on something ambitious. No question, unfortunately, because I think we could talk all night. Is Apple going to do a TV? Is this happening? I honestly don't know. I don't have any... I need something more meaty than that. I have no insight into that. No, I don't. Does it seem like something Apple would do? Years ago, I thought... When they first did Apple TV and they unveiled it with a code name, they called it ITV, and then I guess they got rid of that because there's a cable network in Great Britain that has the name. They said it was $399, it had a hard drive and you'd store stuff on it. I thought, well, that's good. I'm glad Apple's getting into this. It's nice to be able to use my iTunes account to buy this stuff. Why would Apple, a company that has always been very focused on selling high profit, high revenue items, why would they be happy selling a $200 box that you hook up to a $2,000 TV? Common sense tells you, why not sell them the $2,000 TV too? I think the kernel of this whole rumor is that idea that everybody knows that that's true, that the most expensive thing in your living room, entertainment, is the TV set. Why not sell it? Why would Apple be selling the most expensive thing in the living room? It's a complicated story though because everybody... People don't replace their TVs that quickly. I think people replace their TVs less frequently than they even replace their cars. The people who are most likely to get excited about an Apple TV when it's new, like an Apple branded television set when it's new, people who come to shows like this, are also, because they're nerds and gadget geeks and they like tech specs, most likely to have bought a pretty nice TV in the recent past. You're not going to replace that. But not an Apple TV. My guess is if they're... Think about it. Here's my guess. If they're selling an Apple TV, you'd buy one. I don't know that I would. Really? Well, it would depend. My guess is that if they're going to sell TV sets, it would still be alongside a standalone Apple TV thing that you can hook up to an existing set. Maybe it slides into the side like a puck. No, but I think something that you... So you can take it out. If you have a Panasonic, whatever, 55 inch, whatever, with HDMI... Oh, so you think it'll provide the same thing. If they sell the TV, they'll have something that also provides the same... Right, because I just don't see how selling the TV sets could get them a big enough market quickly enough. Unless they're also selling boxes you can hook up to any TV set. So I'm going to put you down as, yes, they're going to make a TV. And we'll see if you're right about that. Boy, I'd hate if you were wrong. I'd hate if you were wrong. On that triumphant note, I'm going to say thanks so much for being here. Really appreciate it. Give him a round of applause, everybody. John Gruber. And we talked a lot about Apple, and Paul Miller actually went to the new Grand Central Apple store. Have you been there? No, it just opened today, right? Yeah, it opened today. But Paul Miller went a couple days ago. They had a press preview and he shot some video. So take a look at this and we'll be right back. Thanks again. It looks like I'm in Grand Central right now. But I'm actually in an Apple store. And you can see the hearts floating above my head. It's because I'm in love with the Apple store. The world's largest Apple store here in Grand Central. They have 350 employees. They took a whole wing of Grand Central. It was pretty wild. They had to work with the city. Like, this is hollowed ground in New York. And they just... Flash mob. So when you visit an Apple store, it's always important to check what the playlist, the current playlist is on the music devices, because then you know what's cool right now to listen to. Like, I've never heard of Azzam Ali, but his album, From Night to the Edge of Day, sounds really incredible. Now that... Oh, I think it's a girl. Is that a girl? It could be a man or a woman. But it's blowing my mind. Oh my gosh, this music. So good. Just working on a song about how much I love the Apple store. I think it needs a little bit of vocals. Apple store, Saint Grand Central. Oh yeah, oh yeah. So this is the accessory room, and as you'll notice, there's a lot of non-Apple products, which is why it's kind of hidden. It's kind of way back here. There's no windows, so nobody can see, but they're selling a lot of non-Apple products here. Which was left? Why does it say left? Someday these will all be Apple accessories, because Apple will own everything. It's a little prettier over here. It's a little less hidden, like the accessories room. This is Genius Bar land. Two Genius Bars, so the highest Genius Bar per store capita ratio. I have a Macintosh SE. It has the dual floppy drives, not the high density floppy, and I'm trying to run Cosmic Osmo, which came on CD. Is there a way to add CD drive to the SE? There is not on that computer. There's no? So I have another phone. I'm trying to get Jetpack Joyride on here, but I can't find it on the store. Well, I can tell you, I have a little familiarity with this phone itself. Maybe you can tell me more about it. I don't even know. It's the iPhone 3. I thought it was the iPhone 3G. I can assure you it is not. No? The Samsung logo to me gave it away. I thought Samsung made the iPhone. They do not. No? But you know what? We still have lots of great options to get the 4S. It's true. You know, I really feel like I'm coming around to the 4S here. If I'm learning anything from picking your brain as a genius, a certified genius, it's that I should get the iPhone 4S. Hi, are you guys in line for the iPhone? Are you guys in line for the new iPhone? So I can just start right here or should I get behind you guys? Start right here? Okay, alright, thank you. Guess I'm first in line. Did it. Adorable. That Paul Miller is just adorable, isn't he? You just want to put him in your lap and hug him and maybe that's just me. I don't know. We should actually bring Paul and Nilay out to talk about the news and talk about the story. So please welcome Paul Miller and Nilay Patel. Thank you. Did you get an iPhone 4S? Did you manage to score one? No. Really? You told me that the Galaxy Nexus is the best thing ever. It's coming out on Verizon tomorrow. That's not true. Oh, it's coming out for Verizon? I think you're getting some bad information. So you guys know Paul Miller and Nilay Patel, editors, dashing gentlemen. I think you're just telling me what you are. Sailors. Nilay is a sailor. So this store is massive, the Grand Central store. I mean, it's the biggest one in the world and they have two genius bars. It took a whole wing of Grand Central. Does that seem excessive to you? It's Apple. So happy. Do they have a train? They don't have a train. I think that's the one thing they're missing. They want to get the Apple Express. They drop you off into the store. It's just a one line. That'd be great. That'd actually be kind of convenient. It's called One Infinite Loop. Yeah. That's a little bit sadder. I think you just got booed, kind of. Here at that Gruber we get booed. It turns out it's Paul Miller. What I did really like about the story is when you're in the floor of Grand Central, it's like, oh, I don't even see that there's a store up there. They're really subtle. But once you're in the Apple store, you kind of feel like all of Grand Central was designed and built for Apple's sake. Yeah. That's how I feel about the world. You feel like it was before Apple existed, the guy who designed Grand Central knew someday Apple would exist. And he built Grand Central as a shrine to the company. He's like, people will buy phones here. Yeah. Well, first off, phones, because they don't exist probably. People thought he was crazy. They're like, what's a phone? And then, I don't know what Grand Central was built. It's probably like 1935 or whatever. There were definitely phones. And then, I'm not going to go down this river. This clearly didn't happen. So we saw today, yeah, we did it. But we saw today, the store was, it opened officially. And there were hundreds of thousands of people. I was here. There were hundreds of thousands of people trampling each other to get into. What's crazy to me is people show up for an Apple store launch, and it's not like they've got new Apple stuff. It's not like they don't have the exact same setup. You do get a t-shirt often. Oh, nice. Oh, really? You think thousands of people showed up to get a free t-shirt? I guess it's possible. But it's funny, since you could definitely go to Best Buy with a train and be like, I'm the same. You can't get the t-shirt there. You can make a t-shirt? Come on. Not resourceful? I think you're talking about pure fantasy at this point. Or guys make t-shirts. That's true. So not really very newsy, but it's kind of cool that they did it. But what is newsy, today there was some pretty huge news. I don't know if you guys have heard. HP made a big announcement. I want to ask Gruber about HP. Totally missed the window there. HP made an announcement. They're open sourcing web OS. Hold on, any web OS users here? There's got to be one. Where? One person, we put them in the nosebleed seats. You just can't win, can you? So HP's open sourcing web OS, and they're going to still make tablets, they say. I think they lied to you. I talked to the CEO, Meg Whitman, and Mark Andreessen, who is on the board, and you think they both lied to me? Well, you know, it's really interesting, because their first announcement, they put up an FAQ that said, we'll evaluate. Well, open sourced web OS, we think it's great. We'll evaluate it for future products, which is basically like, we think it's not very good. And we'll see if it gets better when random dudes in their basement make it better for us, because we failed to do that. I don't think that means that. I think it means... But they also said, we're going to build the tablets in 2013. Which is like, we're going to take a break, we sucked at this for too long. Meg said, maybe not this year, maybe next year. What do you mean? It's basically already 2013, when you think about it. Yeah, it's tomorrow. I mean, look... Close your eyes, Meg, wake up, you can try the touchpad again. Maybe she can meet the guy, the Grand Central guy, with the time machine, or whatever. I think they hedged. I think they made the first announcement, we're going to open source it. They were giving up, and they got the give up vibe, and they said, well, we're not going to give up. When I talked to her, she kept mentioning how affordable it was going to be for them. Which is not necessarily a good thing to hear, when you're making a big decision. When somebody says, I got this for you, it was affordable. You don't think, this is going to be great. You think, it'll be good enough, I guess. When they bought Palm, and they bought WebOS, all they talked about was, we have so much scale, we have so many resources. We're HP, we can do anything we want. We have all this cash, and it's in a box. Here you go, John Rubenstein. And they can do anything with it. Where was John Rubenstein today? Yeah, nowhere. It was Meg Whitman and Mark Andreessen, who were basically not there when they bought Palm. Mark Andreessen is famous for what? Netscape. The new face of WebOS. Yeah, the guy who made Netscape. Meg at Mark. And the lady who ran eBay. Mozilla. I mean, there's wind there. Are you using Firefox today? No. I would not touch Firefox. Open source wind, right? I am a Chrome user. Oh, another great Google product. Yeah. Gruber, by the way. Another killer. I bet you're interested in browsers. Where is he? I don't know if I'm talking to you. I'm like, scanning the audience. Gruber's just like walking around up there. He's a presence that haunts us. Yeah, really. It's haunting. A haunting presence. But yeah, I don't know. This just feels like... This is the end of the line for you. I just feel like this is really great for the homebrew guys. Yeah. WebOS internals are going to be so psyched. And the WebOS internals guys, they were already putting up pictures, screenshots of the Evo 3D, running hacked builds of WebOS. Like TC in our office, who still has a pre, was super excited because it was WebOS on real hardware. That's great. That's great for those guys. This is what? MeeGo. They killed MeeGo with WebOS, right? I mean, you're a lawyer. Given the open source of WebOS, does this mean that if Mattia Suarte wanted to, he could take cards? Yeah, he did. Put it in... No, but like real cards and put it in Android. I don't know. They didn't say what license they're going to do it. It could be a totally restrictive license. I mean, Mark said to me, they want a completely open source WebOS. I don't know what that means. There's all these levels, right? It's pretty straightforward what he said. No, but that term... It seemed to me like WebOS in its entirety in terms of as an OS. But actually, that's not what they're doing. They said, we'll do WebOS right now. We'll do Enyo later. Enyo is like the big application framework. And then we'll do the rest of the user space later. So there's three steps they're saying. What he was saying is there's parts that need to be tweaked so they can be open source. Yeah, you need to finish them. Yeah. We left that... Oh, the email client. Should have finished that. Look, I think that this is the end of the road for WebOS as a product. I think we'll see a bunch of maybe Chinese fans with it, other companies that want to build it into things. Maybe Google can take some of it and roll up some of it. But I don't think they need to. They have Matias. They have the brain behind WebOS by working for them. And I think he has new and different ideas. And I think if you're a creative person, you have new and different ideas. Yeah, put the cards going up and down instead of across. Side to side. Completely. So they'll donate it to RIM. They're like, look, you already took most of this. Just finish the playbook with WebOS. Oh, it's dark. It's dark. Very dark. My love affair with Palm is over. You know what? It died a long time ago, really. Wow, this has gotten really sad. It started beautiful. It really was like all relationships. There was hope that it would go on forever. And then they cheated on you with HP. They left me. They left me for HP. And then HP messed them up bad. And when I saw them again, it wasn't the Palm that I knew. No. Moving on. CES is coming up. And, you know, it's December in January CES 2012. We're the official tech news partner, which you may have heard. It's pretty exciting. Sure. Feel free to applaud at length about that. But we should talk about predictions, CES predictions. Let's go down the line. Paul, what do you think will be happening in CES? Well, I'd like to quote somebody else's prediction. Eric Schmidt said in 2012, the majority of TVs... He said this when? Just a couple of weeks ago. Okay. The majority of TVs are going to be running Google TV in 2012. He was drunk. Or high. Very possibly. Very possibly both. You know, actually I talked to Google about Google TV a few weeks ago, and they're very high on it. You know, they're like, we've really made some strides. Maybe you guys don't know, maybe at CES it's going to be every TV is going to have Google TV. Well, that's what I would think. It would be wild and crazy because currently there are so many different smart TV platforms. And every other TV now can tweet or check Facebook or something, but it's all completely proprietary. And it would be great if it's standardized, if Google TV was any good. You know, I think the problems that John Gruber was talking about that are like, you can't... Nobody's going to buy a new TV. It's not Android where everybody needs a phone every year. And you go and get one, and there's only one operating system that is a good competitor to the iPhone. It was Android. So everybody went and used it. I don't think TVs are like that. I think people want to turn on their TVs and watch television. I don't think so. I'm not so sure about that. I know I turn on my TV and I'm like, can I check Twitter? Yeah, that's the first thing I think. Using a giant keyboard remote. I have to do an update. I have to update Facebook right now. How many clicks on the arrow keys? No, you're right. People want to watch TV, and that's why everybody has cable. Right. But I mean, the whole idea, right, is that everybody wants cable to come to a close in some way. They want to like go around it. I'm talking about myself now, basically. Well, you want to go around your own locks. I want to go around my cable company. But you don't want to go around, well, because you have Time Warner. Everybody wants to go around Time Warner. Look, go to any city in America except where you can get Fios. Go to any place else, and everybody will tell you about how horrible their cable provider is. Comcast cities, Time Warner cities. I can't think of any others right now. Because that's all there is, because it's a big monopoly. Well, two. Yeah. A duopoly. I think what it is is we'll see this explosion of televisions. We saw a bunch of smart TVs last year. Last year was supposed to be the year of Google TV, and they all pulled out of the announcement. So wait, you didn't even say what your prediction was. Is it televisions? My prediction is there's going to be a million smart TVs, and I would be really interested to see some Google TVs. All right, what's your prediction? It's Android related, too. I think we're going to see the second wave of Android tablets, the second real wave. There's been this like minor wave, like, oh, look at these seven-inch ones. It was more like a light surf. Now this is going to be a tsunami, a tidal wave. A boat ride, right? And it was like a jet ski. Yeah, a jet ski wave. That's what it was. Yeah, one of those little, you know, yeah. I think we'll see, and they'll be really cheap. I think they have figured out that they can't compete with Apple at $499, and they need to go to $200. And I think that's where you're going to see a lot of action from all these companies. Because that's the only way they can do it. I think, you know, we talked about this earlier. I think there's going to be, well, we're going to see a lot of Ultrabooks. Lots of Ultrabooks. Right. And that's all Joanna's going to do. I just wish there was going to be, you know, we're going to hear a lot, I think a lot more about Windows, probably Windows 8. I mean, Microsoft is doing their keynote. We're going to hear a lot about Windows 8. And I have a feeling that we're going to see a lot of tablet people with like Windows 8. Like ARM tablets? Yeah, ARM tablets. Or maybe even Intel stuff. I mean, there could be both. But I think Windows 8 is going to be all over the place. I think that's going to be like this year's Android is Windows 8. Am I crazy? Maybe. It depends on how much Microsoft wants to show. Right. How much they've made the decision. Well, I mean, there's a dev version of Windows 8 out there. There's no reason why Asus can't come along and throw it on a tablet. Asus is crazy. They're talking about a public. They'll do anything. Do whatever they want. A public beta in February. Right. So they've got to have something to show. But Microsoft is really good at disappointing people at CES. That is true. You know, actually, I think the same as Intel. Yeah. Combined. I bet Intel will probably show a phone that they'll never ship. An Android phone. That's like their main move. They love to do that. Dow will wake me up at 8 in the morning to go and like wait. They're going to show you like a wood model. There's the Adamo 3. We've got it out for ten seconds. Look how thin this is. Yeah. This is a piece of balsa wood with Adamo written on it. I do feel like the one time I was really surprised and blown away at CES. Both surprised and blown away. Was WebOS. Yeah. No, that was WebOS. I don't want to get back to Paul. Don't take me down this door. Because that was when, really, when my love was reignited. It's just because a lot of CES stuff feels really inevitable. It's just re-upping the last year. I mean, WebOS and the pre was like a magical experience. Yeah. I'm not, we can't keep talking about this. Anyhow, we were talking about Microsoft and on that note, I would like to show you guys something that we did. We went to Microsoft. You guys have already seen a little bit of this. I went to Microsoft, to their campus, and looked at some of the research projects that they're working on. It was a pretty interesting trip. Take a look and we'll be right back. I never thought I'd see this with my eyes, with my eyeballs. I figured I'd have to get implants to see it. Building 92. There's 91 buildings before this. It's pretty amazing. Hey. Hi, Josh. How are you? Steve, how are you? Good to see you. This is Steve Clayton. He's going to show us around the campus and take us into the dark, deep chambers that no one else is ever allowed to see. That's what you promised me. Welcome to Microsoft. All right, let's do it. I'm excited I can get a cloud computing shirt, t-shirt. That's your color. It's my size too, small, lady small. What you need is some golf gear. Do you have golf gear here? Ballmer's a golfer, right? Does he golf? Or no? I think so. I've not played around with him. Are you allowed to refer to him as Ballmer? Steve. Because that's against rules. You can't say Ballmer. There you go. What a golfer. Yeah, but it doesn't say Microsoft on it. I'll bet it does. No, it doesn't. Look at this line. What are the savings like? Wait a second. Is this a line for Zunes? What do you mean? To use it. No, no, no. But is there any special reason why there's a line for Zunes? We got it stocked for a long time. And now they're back in stock. Zunes are back in stock at Microsoft and there's a line. This is insane. This is probably the only place where you'll see a line for Zunes actually, which is... They're going to move us out. Are they going to kick us out? Now this kind of makes me want to buy a Zune though. I might get in this line. How much is the 64? This is a visitor center. This is designed just to kind of show off what you guys are doing. Yeah, it gives a little sense of how you... A bit of the history of where we come from. Microsoft invented the typewriter. Yeah, I'm not sure... You invented the Atari. You have a General Electric television. Are you taking credit for the GE television? I feel like that's somewhat disingenuous. My job is to work with all of the kind of product groups, all of the research teams across Microsoft who are looking at trends like natural user interface and social computing and cloud computing and sort of help to tell the story of what Microsoft is doing across 90,000 people. Where are we right now? We are on main campus for Microsoft in Redmond in Building 99, which is the headquarters for Microsoft Research worldwide and the location of our Redmond research lab. Hey. So who are you guys and what are you working on? So I'm Brandon Lloyd. Are you? Nice to meet you. I'm Nikolaj Jagavanchi. Nice to meet you. And we both work in the Extreme Computing Group. It's kind of a lab within Microsoft Research. Extreme Computing? Right. Do you drink a lot of Mountain Dew? Yes. We have a simple mobile augmented reality system. So we have this image and the cameras on the tablets that you see here, and we've got this one fixed on the tripod, they are tracking that image. So this is tracking here and then you guys are tracking individually on these tablets. Right. By finding this image in the video feed, it can figure out where the camera is in space and then once it knows where the real camera is, it can render virtual objects from that same point of view and then overlay them on the background. Okay, so you guys have another mode on here that's called Connect Mode and we brought Steve in to help us out with this. Can you explain what's going on with this? We hooked up a Connect Camera to this and what we're doing is we're capturing whoever sits in front of the camera in real time. This is disturbing. So this is kind of a different kind of video chat. All right, let me try this out. Let me get a... There he is. Okay, spin him around. It is, I feel like this isn't right. People shouldn't be allowed to do this. You want me to look at where? Yeah, look at the Connect Camera. Here? Okay. Okay, and then we'll freeze it and now you can come and explore yourself with the tablet. That is something I enjoy doing, so... Oh wow. This is very upsetting. Very upsetting. This is horrific. I mean, this is a true horror. This is like a scene from a Saw movie. So we're making our way through the Microsoft campus here, but we're going to stop and take a look at this anechoic chamber they've got where they do sound testing, they test webcams there and it's supposed to be pretty cool. And I'm hoping I can get maybe a little nap in if I play my cards right. Hi. Hey, how are you? I'm Josh. I'm Dale Sieg. Oh, thanks. Thanks for letting us come in here, Dale. You betcha. And what are we going to look at? So we are going to look at one of our anechoic chambers here at Microsoft. Wow, this is really disorienting. Yes. This is...it's kind of making me a little nauseous. Is that normal? Depending on the person, it can be. And so if you guys get a little... I can barely hear you. Yeah. Is that normal? That is normal. Am I passing out? What if I just passed out right now? Has that happened before? That has not happened before. Has anybody freaked out from this? So we've had to escort people out really quickly. So we test all of our acoustic products, obviously, so our webcams and headsets. The Kinect was tested in here. We actually also test non-acoustic products like for our mice and keyboards and other devices that have some mechanical characteristics that might generate a sound. We'll put them in this anechoic chamber so we can actually characterize a sound and identify if it's a buzzing or a hum or the sound is coming from that sort of thing. Have you ever come in here and discovered Steve Ballmer asleep, taking a little, stealing away a little nap and had to wake him up? No. No. Really? Not yet. You can tell me. No. No, I have not. You know, when you think about it, with the lights off and this sound, it'd be kind of like sensory deprivation. Yes. You know, can you imagine what you'd see in that pitch black? Everybody gets very uncomfortable with Ballmer jokes around here, I have to say. Every time I mention Ballmer, people are like, I can't comment on that. It's like he's listening, watching. You know, it's what I've thought about it. I actually, could I go in here and just stand in the dark in the chamber? Sure. Okay, great. Oh my God. Wait a second. I might actually be having some kind of vision. I'm seeing Steve Ballmer napping. This is amazing. This vision of Steve Ballmer, I mean, flying. This is really cool. We're in the Microsoft model shop. This is where Microsoft's actual products are designed and built. We're talking to Carson Agard, who is your model maker here. And so if a new Xbox were coming, if there was a new version, which you can tell me if there is, it's no problem. Okay, I will. What are you looking at here? You've got a table full of... We're looking at basically a variety of what we do down here, broken down to everything from raw 3D printed parts to some CNC parts. This is a 3D printed wrench that you printed in one piece. Correct. And you can use it like an actual... Yeah, so that shows the ability to be able to print multiple parts together as an assembly. So we're here with Young Kim, who's one of the designers who worked on the ArcMouse, which is kind of an award-winning, pretty big product as far as mice go. Yeah. It all kind of started with nothing more than just hair bands and foam core, where we were playing around with pieces that bent and flexed. So you have to take this up to Ballmer, right, and say, look, this will work. You don't go right into his office. We didn't check in with Steve Ballmer this time. He doesn't approve all the early mice designs? No, no, no. That was my understanding. Let's make the right decisions. Okay, good. That's good. I really need to get something like this or this, because I'm using like an old... Every time I reach into my bag, there's like a ball there. What kind of mouse do you have? Yeah, it's one of these guys. It's like a classic mouse. Oh, okay. Okay? Have you ever seen anything this advanced? I think someone as stylish as you are, I think, deserves something like this. Well, that is shameless flattery, and I appreciate it. But you know what's cool about this is actually I don't like big mice. And this is a little bit... It's a little bit bigger of a footprint, but it feels almost non-existent when you're holding it in your hand, which is great. And the fact that it folds flat, so you can put it in your pocket. Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, this is just disgusting. This is sick. Do you have a hammer? Get it. Get the hammer. Let's go. This is... Ooh, very strong. Surprisingly... Surprisingly... It's cold. Logitech is going to love this, by the way. Yeah, there you go. By the way, you know you have to sell or give me a mouse now, okay? No, you don't... Oh, you don't have a mouse now, okay. No, I don't. Hey, thank you so much for this. Really cool. Thank you so much. That... Don't you want it? I just totally destroyed my mouse for no reason. And I still don't have a mouse replacement. Here's the really shocking thing. I discovered right after I smashed my mouse, which is a Bluetooth mouse, that the Arc Touch has a dongle. So it was pretty upsetting. You guys are probably wondering why Joanna Stern is standing next to me. The lovely and delightful Joanna Stern. Give her a round of applause. So you know, Joanna's kind of our resident Windows laptop expert. And I recently expressed a kind of a dislike for Windows, which was just haunting me. I said Windows feels like poison to me on a podcast. I didn't say that. And it really was affecting to a lot of people, a lot of Windows fans. And Joanna got this idea that she could provide a better Windows experience for me. That's what I'm hoping to do. And we were talking about this, and she was telling me, okay, well, if you get a laptop, here's what you need to do. And I thought, people are going to get these for the holidays. They're going to get a new Windows laptop, and it's going to have stuff on it that they're not going to like. Well, they'll have some stuff that they do like, but some stuff they don't like. Yeah, sure. I understand that. But it's going to have like bloatware. And you have kind of like put together a little guide to how to make your Windows. Yeah, deep poison Windows for you. Deep poison. The antidote. Yes. I'm hoping after this, you are going to be using Windows. I'm going to be a full-time Windows user after this. Full-time Windows user. Anything's possible. So let's walk through. What would you do? We've got a few different steps here. So this is a Samsung right out of the box. Hopefully we're getting that there. And one of the big problems is crop wear. You mentioned it before. Yeah, I hate it. Litter's the whole system. Have you met anybody who's like, you know what I really like? Crap wear. I like a computer to be really bloated when I get it. I bet actually this company that makes this software likes crap wear because they wouldn't have a product. They wouldn't have a business. They wouldn't have a business. Coming at it from a different angle. Yeah. So Slim Cleaner is the first thing you probably want to put on your system. And you can actually select different programs here. By the way, Slim Cleaner has not paid for an advertisement. Yeah, no. Never. Joanna just thinks this is a good tool to... I just found this. And this basically will find bloatware on your computer. Exactly. And what's actually interesting about this is like me and you, we know what to delete, right? We know like, oh, we probably should get rid of this wild tangent games. What I do is I just erase hard drive. And put on something else. I put it, and then I put it away. Okay. Well, some others in our audience know what to delete. So what you can actually do here is you can see reviews of things that people like said, oh yeah, you wouldn't want this. And you can come in here and people say... We're actually crowdsourcing. So on this piece of software, people will basically tell you you want to keep this piece of bloatware. Right. And there's comments. People leave comments. But the thing is you have to be careful because the Bing bar, for instance, 91 people said we like this. Well, I bet at Microsoft a lot of people like Bing bar. No, I mean, maybe it's great. I don't know. I'm just saying maybe you don't want the Bing bar. I personally don't want the Bing bar. Right. There you go. But so that's one way to do it. You could obviously also come into the control panel here. And this is a little bit nerdier is to actually just go find the applications. Exactly. And you can do it by hand. So like, you know, and then there's the step, the major step. This is the sledgehammer. This is the sledgehammer. You buy Windows 7, you install it. Yeah. You get rid of everything. I think that's what I would do. That seems easier, but it's like how much is it? It's going to cost you. $120? Yeah, it's $120. So that's like the sledgehammer. This is going to cost you. The doing it on your own is the scalpel. Yeah. And then what would you call the slim cleaner is like something in between. It's like a rusty knife. Yeah. You're doing one of these moves. A gun. A gun. It's a gun. It's a gun. Yeah. All right. So I've taken the blow-ware off of my computer now. Yeah. Crack, we're loose. Thank you, Trent. That's good. That's good. So this one here, you kind of, you might want to get rid of sort of the generic Windows desktop. I think that might not be, that might be what you don't like about Windows. I'm not crazy about, I am like, it's not, it doesn't strike me as particularly beautiful. Okay. You know, maybe like you don't like the icons all on the left side. You like them on the right. Maybe you want to add sort of a widget type of thing. So this is, this is, this actually looks really nice. Yeah. So this is really cool. So I have two different things here. One, I changed the desktop background, which is something you should always do. Great background. Great choice. First thing you should do, change the desktop background. Like this one has HP logo on it. So the other thing I did here was I installed Rain Meter. And Rain Meter actually lets you, it's sort of like a launcher pro, like Android launcher pro for Windows. You can put widgets up here. I've got battery. I've got time. And you can customize all these things. You can put your, I've got the Verge logo or the Verge feeds coming through here. That's good. Good choice. And then here you can, I'm using something called Fences where you can organize all your desktop icons. Do these, so these are just ALE-assist apps. Are these, do these Windows snap? These don't snap in place. So you can move these around. Well how are you, how do you get things perfect? You line them up. Like by hand. With a ruler. Oh you get, put a piece of tape on the screen. Yeah. That's great. I feel like snapping would be a really good feature here. It would be. Yeah. Maybe that's just one man's opinion though. That actually seems to like sort of lock in place. So it is snapping. It's snapping but it's not like. And what is that called? This is called Fences. Okay. So Fences and Rain Meter. Yeah. Again, not paid endorsements. Just things we like. Just software that we like. And so, and then on this one, on this computer which by the way is obscenely ripping off a Macbook. Awesome. I mean, no, no. Does your Macbook have this? No, no we saw. Look at this little Beats volume. Yeah, I wish it had a Beats volume control on the side. This is the new HP Envy for the center. Gruber showed it to his kid backstage and goes, look Jonas, a rip off. Which is amazing. This is freaking shameless. I mean, they should be ashamed of themselves. Look at this. Do you have this Beats audio thing? This is disgusting. Okay. I mean, how come Apple isn't suing HP? That could happen. I mean, to talk about IP rip off. Neelai, can we? I'm on the case. Yeah. You're on, you're going to handle this? Yeah. Okay, great. So back to Windows. But let's talk about what's happening on the screen. Yes. So right here, I think Windows has gotten sort of a bad rep for not having very good looking apps. I think people sort of figure Office, you're going to have Outlook, all that sort of stuff. And so here's some nice- Ribbons everywhere. Ribbons everywhere. So this is a few apps I like. This is Metro Twit. It's really nice looking, sort of looks like a Windows 8 or Windows Phone 7 app. Are you following Tom Cruise? Yes, I am. I didn't even know he had a Twitter account. He doesn't, you know, I really shouldn't follow him. No. I need to find him, so just keep following him because I need to follow him. It doesn't tweet much. I need to find out what's going to happen with Ghost Protocol. Is it going to be cool or not? Okay, so this is basically like a Twitter client, Metro style Twitter client. Exactly. Looks very nice. What else? Maybe you want to use it. Maybe. What is this? This is an email client. I wanted to find you an email client that you'd really like. What is wrong with you? Ross emailed me this. Ross emailed this to you? So I wanted to show you the GIF support, the animated GIF support here. That's great. This is an app called Postbox. It comes through OSX as well. But it's not the perfect Gmail implementation. I wanted to find that for you. But it's a good one. You can get labels in there. Yeah, you have also these little applets. What is this? Yeah, these little applets in here. So these are a little app called Pokey. And so you can install these down here to the taskbar. And you can actually just sort of reply from in here. Are you replying right now? I'm going to reply to Thomas Huston right here. This is great. You don't actually have to go out to the browser. So these are little applets, little appers. And all are free. I have to admit, I feel like this combination is somewhat compelling. Yeah, look at this desktop. Look how nice it is. Oh, I see it. Yes, so clean. You have the third one, too. Application installed. So you're going to use Windows now? No, no, no. So if I was, I think there's a laptop of mine that you... What would you recommend for me? This one, you seem to really like how it looks. This is great. This is great. I won't have to get used to a new look. I actually haven't tested this one yet. Yeah. And look, and then remember. Yeah, you have beads. That's great. Yeah, yeah. I would suggest, and I think I've got it over here. You do. This is the Lenovo IdeaPad U300S. We were talking about this before. And I have to say, as far as... And this should be... HP should take a look at what Lenovo's doing. Because there are some similarities, chiclet keyboard or whatever, to a Mac. But I mean, every computer has this now. But this is actually... The industrial design of this is really nice. I really like the design. You will miss the backlit keyboard. No backlit keyboard, but... Let's... Maybe the next one. That's an outrage. I know. And this is a Core i3? Yeah, you can get a Core i7, Core i5. All right. I mean, maybe I'll do it. I mean, maybe you've shown me the light. I doubt it, but I mean, it's possible. I will say that this is a much better... This desktop looks good. Yes, it looks very good. I know. I'm trying to... All right, here we go. Thank you very much. Join us during everyone. Not poison. It's de-poisoning. Try it. Do you want me to? Yeah, put it down there. Put that down there. And we actually have a word from our sponsor, believe it or not. And Sony. Okay. And we'll be right back with some very interesting thoughts from Nilay Patel. Stay tuned. Hi there, I'm Amy. And I'm Nick. And we're Carmen. And we just wanted to say how excited we are to be a new member of the Sony family. From signing with Epic Records to being part of the new Make.Believe marketing efforts, to releasing our first single, Crash Your Party, we can't wait to see where this new relationship takes us next. Be sure to watch out for our new video and discover the unexpected at Sony.com slash experience. Sony. Sony. Make.Believe. I am also happy to be part of the Sony family, and I'm excited about my new album, which is dropping in the fall. When you make.believe, what do you wish for? I mean, what don't you wish for? All right. So as you can see, Nilay is standing over here. And I'm sure you're wondering, why is Nilay standing over there? You know, Apple and Samsung have had a lot of disagreements recently about patents. Apple feels Samsung is infringed. Samsung denies it. There have been motions, dismissals, motions to dismiss. I'm just listing court terms. I don't really understand what any of this means. But recently, Apple made some suggestions in a court document to Samsung about how they could alter the Galaxy Tab to make it look less like an iPad. And Nilay has gone to work with our crack team of legal experts and designers and put together how he thinks Samsung might get away from this Apple design aesthetic they feel is happening. Yeah, you know, Apple has some of the best designers on the planet. They've got a very aggressive legal team, I think you all know. And they also have a registration in the iPad. They think the Galaxy Tab looks too much like the iPad. And it's kind of true. I mean, we can just bring it up here. I mean, which one's which, right? So they made a lot of suggestions to the court. The one running Android is the Galaxy Tab. Probably. So they made a lot of suggestions to the court, pretty reasonable. We sat down and tried to think about how you would really implement this. So the first one, pretty basic, don't make it black. Use something other than black in the front. So we want kind of a classy dark red. So Apple said in this court document, I just want to be clear, don't have a black bezel. Yeah. So you're suggesting kind of a burgundy. I think you really want to step out, right? You want to go pattern. Like a pinot noir. Yeah. I think this is, I think that's really solid. You take it further here. Yeah. Well, I mean, you look at that. I think, well, you know, maybe Johnny Ive had a little too much. So you're saying go from a red to a pattern that will differentiate. A little bit. But they also said, well, the bezel, you know, it still kind of looks like an iPad. So they said, well, make the bezel smaller. And I think we all agree, bezel sizes are too big. Samsung has a really great processor, dual core Exynos in there. They've got LTE radios. We want to highlight that kind of stuff. So let's shrink the bezel. Let's show you what's inside the Galaxy Tablet. Let's really sell it. So that's great. I think, you know, you'd still might think, well, you know, Apple's proud of their internals. Their next suggestion was don't have horizontal speakers, right? And you can see why. You've got this all plain front speakers on the side. And we thought about where do you put the speakers? Where do you really enhance the sound quality of the tablet? Because you're watching a lot of movies. So we went with a triple stereo front placement. Center channel. I'm sorry, triple stereo? Yeah, it's 3D. Is that how many channels? I mean, that's left, right, and what's the other one? The middle one is just the center channel for vocals. The triple stereo. The triple stereo. The middle one is when you turn your head. Yeah, you turn it sideways and stereo. Okay, that's reasonable. So far, reasonable suggestions. Yeah, but you still think, well, you know, it's got an Apple vibe to it. I think we can all agree. So how do you really differentiate it? How do you say, well, you know, Apple's kind of this like, you know, latte sipping kind of nerdy guy. You want to spice this thing up. We had some texture to the front. Apple said don't make the front flat. We put some spikes on it. We make it really stand out, make it really aggressive. Did you... We just looked at my bracelet. I was going to say, was there a... You guys took it off the hot topic. We scanned the bracelet and put it right on there. Is that a handle? Yeah, the handle looks really... Yeah, the handle's great. I like that. It's useful. But then Apple said, well, it's still too thin, right? I mean, that was actually a suggestion. Make it thicker. Apple products are known for being really thin. And so if you're going to make it thicker, you don't want to just go halfway. You want to really, you want to push it. You want to know that you've got the power of Android behind you. So we went all the way. Just as far as we could. And I think this, this is a place where if you had 80% vision, you would stop. You would say, this is fine. We did enough. This is more, this is really good now. This is a Motorola move, I think. Yeah. I mean, this is where you stop. This is strong. If we really want to stand out, you know, Apple's last suggestion was we have a patent on rounded rectangles, right? But you don't want to square them off. You don't want to make them too sharp. You don't want this. You want something organic, something natural. And so we thought about it a lot. We spent a lot of money on designers. And we came up with this, the new Samsung Galaxy Tab. Very nice. That's very nice. High five. I mean, you call me crazy, but I still feel like they're kind of infringing here. Yeah, no, it's obvious. I feel like they're, it's a little bit iPad-like stuff. I don't know which is which. Yeah, which one again is the Samsung? That background looks familiar. All right, I think it's time for, I think we should do new thing. Let's do new thing. We're not really good at doing new thing yet. We're terrible. How is it? You sit on the stool again? I think you lay on them. Oh, look at that. So as you guys may or may not know, we're doing this thing on the show where we talk about something that we're really into right at this moment from the world of technology. So we're just going to do that. We're adding Joanna to the mix, which is exciting. I feel like her pick is really strong. So we're giving, what do we have, 15 or 20 seconds on the clock? It's 15. No, I think it's, is it 20? It's 20. Last time it was 15. I thought it was 30. We thought that we needed that extra five seconds. It was 30 in rehearsal. Yeah, we brought it further down. So we're going to have 20 seconds to talk about the thing that we like, that we're into right now. And I guess we're just going to get the countdown here and I'll start. Are we ready? Okay. Two, one. Okay. Yes, my new thing is the Galaxy Nexus. So as you know, on the last show, Matthias Duarte was here from Google and we talked about it and I stole it from him. I beat him and stole it from him. No, I finally got to play with it. I have a review unit which has to be sent back, unfortunately, but I'm probably going to buy it as soon as I get done with this. And that's it. That's all I have to say. I'm so jealous. Yeah, you have to go. This is my new thing. Come here. Come here. Come here. You can't talk to me. Yes, this is my shark. He's an air swimmer. You can buy him for $30. That doesn't include the helium. You've got to fill him up with helium. And then he comes with this and he can wag his tail. He's getting too far. And how much? $30? $30 just for this. No helium included. What a deal. What a deal. But usually it works. Come on, work. My new thing is the Pico Dolly, which looks really cool. It is a piece of metal with wheels. I'm very, very fond of it. It rolls. It takes really awesome video. It makes all of our videos on the site look great. And Chad bought one and I stole it. So it's mine now. I'm very, like, it's the coolest thing. It's 100 bucks. Here's your chance, Chad. It's a Kickstarter project, right? All right, Paul, go. So this week on eBay I bought an e-mate for $30, actually. What is an e-mate? It is Apple in the 90s made a laptop using the Newton operating system. It sells as a stylus, but it actually almost looks a bit like an iMac. It's got that sort of translucent vibe. But it's the early netbook. And I'm going to use it to write the great American novel. Oh, very nice. The great... I just want to note the great American novel, not a great American novel. It's all over after Paul. Did you take that early netbook thing as a diss, Joanna? Because that's like your... He was kind of directing it to you. I mean, I can get you a good netbook for $30. Is it a ViewSonic? Yes. It doesn't have a screen. It has a stylus. So we're almost wrapped up here. We have one more thing. We have a couple of giveaways that we want to hand out to some people in the audience. You don't have to come down and get it, but two people here are going to be leaving with a... Really? With a Transformer Prime. That's great. So we have two Asus Transformer Primes to give away. Joanna just reviewed this. She really liked it. Lots of honeycomb tablet. Android 3.2 right now, but it's going to get ice cream sandwich very soon. Yep. They say now early next year. What just happened? Yes. Okay. That went perfectly. The screen is really excited about it. So anyhow, so we're going to grab some... Paul and Nela have some numbers. Go for it. So we're going to grab some... Paul and Nela have some numbers. Do not rush the stage, all two of you. I hope it's the webOS guy, really. He deserves it. That's not you. Do you move? I have a touchpad. Oh. That doesn't really count. So row C, seat 120. Row C, seat 120. There you go. All right. Congratulations. All right, Nela, second Transformer Prime. All right. Row D, seat 10. You win. You win. You win. You win. You win. You win. You win. You win. You have done it. You have survived. Oh my God. Wow. Are you holding up Windows logos? Are they Windows logos? What? What are you... No. Are those balloons? From the Big Mado Gallery before. Really? You did not win. Wow. Very nice. You can pick them up after the show. That's awesome. We will pop your balloons later. Anyhow, that's our show. So House Band Trent, can you play us out? Yeah. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. All right. All right.
 ["Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy"]
 ["Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy"]
 Thank you. Thank you. Wow. Wow, really? For me? You shouldn't have. Hi. Thank you for
 that. That was amazing. Welcome to On the Verge. I'm Josh Dupolsky. I'm the editor-in-chief
 of theverge.com. It's a website you maybe have heard of. And I would love to thank you
 guys for being here. This is our second show. And we've made it to the end of the year together
 as a family. And I think that's very exciting. This is a big show. We're really stoked about
 it. We've got an amazing guest. John Gruber is here from Daring Fireball. I thought that
 might be a mixture of booze and cheering. But you guys were really polite. That's nice.
 Joanna Stern is here. She's going to do some cool stuff. We have a bunch of segments for
 you guys. Neely and Paul are here. There may be some giveaways. It's going to be a lot
 of fun. We also have our house band, Trent. Yeah, according to the census, he's now an
 entire band. It's pretty amazing. It's pretty fantastic. I wanted to say thanks to Sony.
 They're sponsoring this show. So give a round of applause to Sony because we wouldn't be
 here. None of us would be here in America if it weren't for Sony. But it's true. It's
 a fact. But our first guest, I'm going to bring him out in a second. But I wanted to
 say that Apple has obviously been, that company has been a huge topic of conversation for
 the past few months. Steve Jobs passed away recently, as all of you know, I'm sure. And
 that's on top of the new iPhone and iOS 5 and all the controversy with Samsung and other
 companies about patents. So I was really excited about getting John here to talk about this
 stuff because I feel like you may agree with him or disagree with him, but he's got a definite
 opinion about the company. And I think he's got a lot of insight. So I'm excited to have
 this conversation. So I think we should just get him out here. Please welcome John Gruber.
 You made it. Wonderful. Nice introduction. Rock the set. How's that feeling? It's great.
 Is that good? Watch that arm. It's a little broken. I think this is going to be our thing
 where I warn people about the arm. I don't ever want to fix that. It gives me an icebreaker.
 Isn't this nice? We got, John requested that he asked for a mug. Yeah. And we couldn't
 find mugs, so we have plastic cups. I think this is, but if you ask for an Android tablet,
 they've got like plenty of Android tablets here. Was that annoying to you to see those?
 Did that bother you? No, it doesn't bother me. So John, before we get into talking about
 the industry that we both write about, I want to talk about John Gruber, the man. I want
 to get to know you intimately. I thought you said the couch is broken. I think you know
 how it got broken. Where did you come from? Where did John Gruber come from? I mean, Daring
 Fireball is a massive, as far as sites that people are either, man, I hate that and I
 have to read it every day, or I love that and I have to read it every day. You're way
 up there in our space. People love Daring Fireball. They love you. So tell me where
 Daring Fireball came from, where you came from, and how this phenomenon began. I don't
 think I have a good sense of that. That's a terrible answer. No, but what I mean though
 is that when I started, I started the site in 2002. We can go back further than that,
 but that's when I started Daring Fireball. Let's go back further. Well, I went to college
 in the 90s. I worked on this student newspaper at Drexel University. I thought, you know,
 writing is what I like to do. I studied computer science, but I spent all my time at the newspaper
 and that was the direction I wanted to go, but didn't really pursue it. It just seemed
 like all the jobs you could get, like what do you do? Go to journalism school and get
 more school and then you get a job covering, I don't know, local politics at a newspaper.
 None of it seemed like something I wanted to do, so I just built websites and did other
 stuff. I always had in mind that writing was what I wanted to do, but then a couple of
 years go by and I realize, you know, I hadn't done any writing. It's like, hey, time's moving
 on, but somehow in my mind I felt like I was still getting better at it and I couldn't
 really think about why. This is maybe 2001 or so. At the time I was working for Barebone
 Software, the people who make BB Edit. At the time they had a mail client for the Mac
 called MailSmith. A customer asked on a mailing list for the, is there a way that I can figure
 out, get a word count for all the email that I've written with MailSmith? I thought, well,
 that's a neat little thing. I'll do that for him. I ran it against my own thing and I figured
 out how much email I had written over the last couple of years. It was this huge number.
 I forget what it was. I thought, wow. Then I Googled what's the average word count of
 a book? I don't forget exactly how that came up.
 I think it's 50,000.
 Yeah, something like that. It ended up that just through email I had written mailing lists
 and stuff like that. I had written three or four books worth of email. I thought, well,
 that's why I feel like-
 Not a narrative though.
 No, not one single thing.
 You were people who were like, I don't understand this email. Chapter four, I don't get this
 John.
 Right. At the same time I was following other people who had personal web logs, people like
 Jason Kotke. There were others. I thought, I could do that. The thing I always wanted
 to do is in the newspaper parlance or magazine parlance is I don't want to be a reporter.
 I wanted to be the columnist. I wanted to be the guy on the back page. I wanted to be
 the guy on the ad-op page who just gets to say what he thinks.
 The cranky-
 Well, I just want a columnist-
 It's a cranky role though, right?
 It can be. It could be funny. It could be like a Dave Barry type, but you have personality.
 You're not writing from this pseudo-objective voice of the newspaper. You're writing from
 your own voice. Again, like I said, the way it looked to me though is to get those cool
 columnist jobs you had to put in 20 years as a crap reporter. That just didn't appeal
 to me. Then I saw these with web logs. I thought, well, you could just skip that and just go
 right to being a columnist. That to me is how I've always seen Derrick Fireball. It's
 my column on the stuff that I'm interested in. It took me a couple of years to get it
 off the ground. I thought about it for a while and just started writing.
 Do you think of yourself as a blogger? Are you a journalist? Are you a blogger? What
 is your role right now?
 I don't know. I don't know what that means.
 A blogger, I think, or let's say a columnist, like you said, you could voice your opinions.
 You're not necessarily responsible for delivering news to people, right?
 No.
 You're not breaking news stories. You do break news stories.
 But I don't have to. I never feel obligated to cover anything.
 You don't really cover that. You write about your observations from things or about things.
 Do you not consider yourself a blogger? Is that not the right term for you?
 I honestly don't know what that means. To me, a blog is a medium, not a verb. I write.
 To me, I'm just a writer. It could apply to anything that needs to be written. It could
 work in a newspaper. I could write stuff that is read on a television show. It's writing.
 New columnist is kind of... NU with umlauts. Columnist.
 That's interesting. You don't identify with... If there's a blogger up or something,
 you don't go, hey, I'm one of these guys.
 No. Although, I do identify with the independent media. I think you're clearly part of that,
 too. Obviously, The Verge is a larger head count operation than Daring Fireball, but
 it's...
 Daring Fireball is just you, right?
 It is just me.
 We are slightly larger.
 I think it's still of a piece, though. It is the idea that... I still think, even though
 you're big compared to me, but it's still, I think, a very lean and mean operation where
 pretty much everybody you're hiring is doing something that's actually like readers and
 viewers get to see and read and feel and touch. Whereas, newspapers and magazines and TV networks
 over the last decades of the 20th century grew into these huge conglomerates with massive,
 massive internal bureaucracies and structures and all sorts of people doing all sorts of
 things and a focus on the content just got lost. I definitely identify with that, but
 it doesn't have to be the word blog or the verb blogging.
 Right, but when people ask you, you just say, I'm a writer.
 Yeah.
 Okay. You're not just covering all aspects of technology. You have a definite focus,
 and you focus on Apple, primarily.
 I do, but it was a conscious decision not to name the site, you know, Daring Mac Ball
 or...
 Yeah. What is Daring... What are the origins of the phrase Daring Fireball?
 That just sounded cool.
 That's it?
 Yeah.
 You were sitting down trying to figure it out, and you just thought Daring Fireball,
 those words that go together?
 Well, I thought of it many years before, and then I just thought, I'll keep that and use
 that later.
 You just popped into your head, Daring Fireball?
 Right.
 And you thought, this is a part of an email.
 No. It's just, I didn't tell anybody. I didn't want anybody to steal it.
 But you do write a lot about Apple.
 Right.
 And is that something... Have you always been an Apple? I mean, did you start... You know,
 your first computer was an Apple, and you've been kind of into the company since the...
 Yeah. It always appealed to me. I mean, I didn't have a computer, though, in the house
 growing up. The only thing we had, we had Atari, but my parents wouldn't buy me a computer
 on the grounds that if they did, they said I'd never leave the house.
 Were they right?
 Yeah. I actually think they were right. It was very frustrating to me at the time, but
 I think in hindsight, they were right. I think I did more socially than I would have otherwise.
 Right. But then you ended up getting a computer and then going back in the house.
 Right.
 So it was all for naught.
 Yeah. I haven't left the house since October.
 That's amazing. Is that true?
 Yeah. It's very true.
 Yeah. I mean, I was actually saying before the show, but we have only ever spoken in
 person at Apple events.
 That's true.
 So this is the first time outside of an Apple event that you and I are communicating face
 to face.
 I believe so.
 Is that exciting to you?
 It's very exciting.
 It's exciting to me as well. So I think you've got a very special relationship when it comes
 to Apple. You are considered kind of a fanboy, an Apple fanboy. Would you say that's accurate?
 I'm not saying that the term is fair, but people do consider you to be a bit of a fanboy.
 Yeah, but I think that that's... Honestly, I don't use that word to describe anybody
 who is a fan of anything. What's my quip on that? It's that...
 You have a prepared statement for that.
 I forget. Oh, I know what it was. It was when Mark Cuban switched to a Mac. This was a while
 back, maybe 2004, 2005, but he wrote a blog post about it. Mark Cuban, the owner of the
 Dallas Mavericks, billionaire, sold some piece of junk to Yahoo in the 90s.
 I think people know Mark Cuban. Also, a great guest star on Entourage.
 Yes, yeah.
 Really good actor.
 Mark Cuban had this thing about switching to a Mac and that, man, this is great. I can't
 believe it. This is so great. I'm no Mac fan. I'm no Apple fanboy, but this is the way to
 go now. Then I realized what Apple fanboy meant was somebody who began using Apple products
 before you did.
 Oh, yeah.
 In that sense-
 But now it means something else, don't you think?
 I think there are people who... The accusation is that I blindly say good things about Apple
 products and figure out ways that actions Apple takes are good ideas or smart or whatever
 because I'm rooting for them. They're my sports team.
 Not blindly, but I think you do.
 Well, but I think that's what the word fanboy implies.
 Right, but you are rooting for Apple.
 Only in the sense that I appreciate what they're trying to do. I'm glad that somebody is doing
 it and if it were not for Apple, the industry would be in a far different state. I think
 when the iPod came out, the first iPod MP3 player, you didn't see a rash of copycat products
 from other companies. You didn't see other people do that. People didn't get it. It took
 a long time also for it to become a big seller. That's the one thing people forget. Everybody
 knows the iPod was a big hit for Apple and turned the whole company around, but it was
 a Mac only product for a year and a half. It required FireWire, which people with Windows
 PCs almost never had. It didn't even have a FireWire port. Whereas now Apple comes out
 with say the iPad and how long did it take before things that looked an awful lot like
 an iPad started coming out from other companies?
 A year and a half maybe?
 Pretty much, yeah.
 You're saying that you're a fan of what they do because they do it better than a lot of
 other people. I don't disagree with you. They do lead the industry in a lot of ways. I think
 the thing where people would take issue is there are times it seems, and I read your
 site every day, big fan of your work, but there are times when it seems like you'll
 take a review. I can't remember. I think one of our guys did a review recently. It was
 a pretty positive review about a non-Apple product. You'll find the one negative line
 from the review. Some of your reviews on Android phone, they're like, it's great. The launcher
 was a little sluggish. The launcher was a little sluggish. It's like so and so on, whatever
 this Android phone is. The launcher was a little sluggish and you're like, glad I'm
 not buying this thing. If you're a daring Fireball reader, your exposure to that review
 is literally like this piece of crap I would not touch with a 10 foot pole. You definitely
 don't do that with Apple products.
 I don't think though that there are... I think the things that I focus on, and I'm
 cognizant of that. I don't think though... If I do that, I try to pick things that to me
 exemplify major differences. A recent one, I think just this week, was somebody on the
 verge reviewed some piece of crap LG Android phone.
 I think this is the Nitro.
 Right, the Nitro.
 It was actually a fairly positive review. It wasn't a complete piece of crap.
 Right. What I thought was interesting was the part when he got to the LTE, which is
 4G, real 4G, no if, ands, or buts about it, no quotes around it, and really fast. It's
 getting like 15, 16 megabits per second up and down, which blows away anything an Apple
 3G product can do, but at the expense of significant battery drain. You can't turn it off. You
 can't say, I don't want to use LTE, I want to use 3G. Yes, that's the part I quoted from
 the review, but to me, that's because it shows that Apple is a company with a very different
 philosophy towards these products. At Apple...
 You see that view. You're looking at it from as an Apple versus that thing. You're not
 looking at that product in a vacuum. By the way, as a columnist, I think this is what
 you should be doing, because you've got your beat, and your beat is talking about Apple
 as it relates to the rest of the industry. I like it most of the time, but I do think
 you can see how people would get there. You have some people who really, you get under
 their skin.
 I guess. I'm not really all that aware of it, though. I really am not.
 Have you been on the internet?
 I know you don't have comments, so that's actually kind of, it helps, right? You have
 no comments on your site, so you're kind of less exposed to that.
 Right, but even on places where there are, like I will often read through the hacker
 news comments of something that I've written. Obviously, there's some people who seem to
 not be a fan of my work, or think that I'm biased, and that it's worthless because if
 I say something that's good about an Apple product, it doesn't count. Because of course,
 John Gruber's going to say that.
 Yeah, of course.
 But I don't know how... I mean, you can find people who will say anything. I have no idea
 what kind of a number that is. I really don't.
 You actually say negative stuff, too. I mean, you just wrote something pretty negative about
 Siri. You were talking about how you felt that Siri was, well, it's not that great.
 Well, it's half-baked. I mean, it is beta. I mean, they're right to call it beta, and
 it's unusual. It's very unusual. In fact, I can't think of another example where Apple
 both released something that clearly should be called beta, and they're highly touting
 it. I mean, it's the focus of the commercial.
 Yeah, I mean, that's the selling point of the iPhone 4S's Siri at this point.
 Yeah. And then I said, but I'm glad it's there. I think the phone is better for it. I use
 it. I find it to be very useful. I think they made the right move. And maybe Siri's a unique
 case because the way that they're doing the cloud-based voice recognition, and they need
 to collect all that. And collectively, by getting all that, it's making the accuracy
 better.
 Right.
 I've had emails from people who do real AI research that's saying, yeah, no amount of
 data is too much data for this sort of thing.
 They're trying to make the service better by getting lots of data now.
 But it is unusual. No, but my thing is that all I want to be, the only thing I'm obsessed
 with is being right all the time. And it's honestly...
 But you do agree that in certain cases, there can be varying degrees of right, right?
 No, you're either right or you're wrong.
 Well, I mean, the battery life to you is like, this is wrong. This is bad, right?
 Oh, well, that's different. Well, let me get back to that.
 All I'm obsessed with is being right. And so the way I look at it is I look back at
 like the last nine years I've been writing on Daring Farble, and most of what I've written
 about Apple has been very positive. Most of what I've written about their products have
 been positive. And when I have conjectured as to how I think things are going to go for
 the company, for the most part, I have said, I think they're going to keep succeeding in
 these areas. I look back at the last nine years, and I think I was almost always right.
 Have you calculated on a percentage basis? Something tells me you may have thought about
 it, right?
 Right. And I know the times...
 You've considered getting out some charts and graphs.
 And I know the times that I have been wrong, and they kill me.
 Sure. And I feel the same way. In fact, you and I have had rather public disagreements
 about stuff that I've gotten wrong, and you were kind of like, you're wrong, because that's
 obviously pleasing to you.
 So the only... It is never going to...
 To tell someone that they're wrong. You have to admit you do have delight in telling someone
 that they're wrong.
 I do. I do.
 Because it also means you get to be right in that moment.
 Exactly. It's a personal weakness that I do take delight in pointing out when others
 are wrong. And I look back, and I did, I look back on that one, the 11th hour one, and it
 was a little... It was unnecessarily mean at the end.
 We actually... Let's talk about this for one quick second, because then I have other stuff
 I want to... But a long time ago, when I was at Engadget, I had heard some stuff about
 the iPad 2 from a source that was pretty tested.
 Yeah, a long time ago. That's like 11 months.
 Well, it was a lot. In our world, hey, a lot has happened in 11 months. I mean, a lot has
 happened in 11 months. We're going to get some of that. So I said, look, it's going
 to have... I forget what it was, a higher resolution screen and this SD slot, which
 the person I had spoken to thought this is going to happen. And that person had been
 dead on with other things that you know of.
 Anyhow, we had a big conversation. You kind of called me out and said, this is BS. This
 is 11th hour. 11th hour my ass, I believe, was your expression. Because I said it had
 happened in the 11th hour. But we saw each other at that event for the iPad 2, and we
 talked. And I said, look, there have been other times that Apple has pulled something
 at the last minute, and the iPod touch camera was one of the things that I mentioned. And
 you agreed.
 Right. But I actually looked up...
 I looked it up after our rehearsal, and I went back, and I actually mentioned that in
 that 11th hour post that, yes, Apple does change things at the 11th hour. So I actually
 did mention that.
 Right. But you were still like, they're totally wrong. This is not possible.
 Right. Well...
 But even though you said it was, it clearly was.
 That was just a unique case though.
 I'm very hurt about this. I'm not going to let this go.
 You had a good source in January who you trusted and said it was a high resolution. But I had
 a golden source in January. And so I knew it was wrong.
 And you were right. And you were right.
 And I will just say, though, if you think about it, common sense wise, if you think
 about it, with the iPod touch two years ago...
 Are we arguing this now?
 Well, just real quick.
 I admit that you're right.
 They hadn't had a camera on it yet. And they had one that was going to have a camera, and
 then literally at the last possible minute they could make such a change. I still don't...
 I've never heard why. But for some reason they said, you know what, no camera. And all
 they did was retool the silver back to get rid of the camera hole, and boom, they start
 popping off the factory line. And then when the iFixit guys pop it open, low, there's
 a little spot for where the camera was supposed to be.
 You would agree that was an 11th hour change?
 Yes. But that's the sort of thing you could do at the last minute, is change the back
 to not have a hole in it. Whereas switching from iPad 1 resolution, pixel resolution display
 to double resolution one.
 I think maybe then it's a question of what you consider to be the 11th hour. Because
 my report was way before the announcement.
 But you doubled down on it on January 14th.
 I did double down. Did I double down? Are you sure?
 I thought that the January 14th report was right before it was announced. It was like
 it's not going to happen. That was the report.
 Your 11th hour post was in response to me saying, because this did happen. You were
 like, this is BS. But I talked to the same source. They said, you know what, it isn't
 happening. They're not going to do the screen. They're not going to do the SD. And then you
 were very upset about that. Because I was going to end up being right after all.
 Because I know that the iPad 2 was never going to have a retina display.
 You were right about that. I'll give you that. And I've been ruining that prediction ever
 since.
 But you said you had a golden source. So let's talk about your relationship with Apple. Because
 you have a relationship with Apple. And in fact, I don't know what your relationship
 was like with Steve Jobs. And I do want to talk about the post-Apple Jobs. But I know
 that you guys had talked at least one time. I was standing off to the side, I think, maybe
 when you met him. I don't know if you had met him before this. I think it was maybe
 the iPhone 4, after the iPhone 4 announcement.
 Was that the first time you met him?
 That was.
 So I was standing off doing some photographs or something. And I saw Jobs come over and
 be introduced to you.
 No, no, no. Jobs doesn't come over to you. They say, would you like to meet Steve?
 And then you're like, duh.
 You were brought to him. There was somebody drifting in one direction or the other.
 Katie Cotton asked me if I wanted to meet him. And I actually said to her, has anybody
 ever said no to that? And she said no.
 And I saw you guys rapping a little bit. Did that relationship go beyond that? Did
 you email with each other? Did you ever have any?
 No.
 Because Jobs actually cited you as a response to, what was this over? Was this Flash or
... It was either the dev tools when they kind of banned third party dev tools.
 Yeah, it had something to do with Flash.
 And you had written a big... I don't know if you guys remember this, but there was a
 lot of controversy about the App Store and the kind of tools you could use, or Flash.
 It was one of their controversies about things we don't want on the iPhone. And you had written
 a big piece on Daring Fireball. And Jobs said, go read Daring Fireball's post on this, because
 we think this sums it up perfectly.
 We think John Gruber's take on this is insightful and not negative.
 Is that what he said?
 Yeah.
 How was the traffic on that post?
 It was crazy. I mean, it really was. By far and away, the most trafficked post. And all
 it was is one of those things where some random guy emailed Steve Jobs, some other guy, like
 a developer, somebody nobody had heard of, had emailed Steve Jobs. And Steve Jobs just
 wrote back this one line, we think John Gruber's take is insightful and not negative. And that
 was it.
 He responded in an email.
 And then the guy who did that got the email, where some people would get emails from Steve
 Jobs and then put it on their web log and say, Steve Jobs sent me an email. And everybody
 goes nuts. It's at the top of Tech Meme the next day.
 That happened.
 Yeah. So it's like second or third hand though. It's some random guy's site, which never got
 big traffic.
 I mean, you should have just been sending out those emails as Steve Jobs.
 It was easily like a 25% bump. If you look back at my month to month stats, it was easily
 like 25%, 30% higher than the month before.
 So let's talk about Apple now. Steve Jobs, I mean, clearly based on what everybody says
 and I think what we've seen over the last however many years, since he's been back at
 Apple, it does seem that he was, if not the sole person responsible for many of these
 amazing devices, the iPad, the iPhone, he was a real driving force.
 He was putting pieces together that other people weren't putting together. Do you agree
 or disagree with that?
 Yeah, definitely. I think he saw the world differently. And I don't think any of us can
 really understand that, especially where he saw technology going. And he was right about
 a lot of things. He really was. I mean, sometimes it's arrogant and obviously he had this binary
 view of everything was either, can we swear?
 Sure.
 Everything was either shit or the best thing ever. This is total shit or it's the best
 thing ever and there was no ground in between.
 It was like somebody's great or they're a bozo that's blowing it.
 And so, for example, when he said in 2007 at the iPhone introduction that we're five
 years ahead of everybody else, I was blown away. I was in the audience and I still, it
 was that one product.
 Were there tears of joy?
 No, no tears. But I was the one.
 Was anybody there near you crying?
 No, no. But people were having fits.
 Right. And it's a really good intro. If anybody here has not seen Steve Jobs introducing the
 first iPhone, it is kind of amazing. If you want to see how to introduce a product, this
 is like, it may never get better than that moment.
 It's the one product introduction that Apple did that actually was the one that everybody
 wants them to do every time where they blow your mind away.
 Right. You wrote something about that.
 Everyone before that was not like that and everyone since then has not really been like
 that.
 The Cube wasn't like that.
 Or even the iPad, which arguably just as important to Apple going forward as the iPhone.
 I thought the iPad launch was actually kind of weird and somber. And there was a period
 where Jobs was, I don't know if you guys remember, but the iPad, the first iPad launch, he sat
 down and he was just browsing. And there was a long period where he's like, now I'm going
 to go check out the New York Times.
 It was low key.
 Now I'm going to look at Flickr, just tap and go. Just like that. Him just talking about
 what he was doing and he was just browsing.
 Yeah, it was low key.
 And it went on for like 10 minutes.
 And the reaction afterwards was there was an awful lot of that's it. It's just a big
 iPod touch.
 Yeah.
 Right?
 Yeah.
 Whereas nobody was disappointed by the iPhone.
 That's right.
 I mean the iPhone thing was nobody was disappointed. Everybody was like, holy crap. And famously
 the RIM had a meeting like two days later where they went over it and they're like,
 they must be lying. That's not possible.
 Right?
 I mean that's...
 Well, there's a... Somebody who worked at RIM claims that...
 But the reactions from the industry, from other people in the industry around that launch
 were hilarious, right? Palm was like, I think Ed Colligan was like, you're not just going
 to come in here and make a phone. We've been working on this for a year. Everybody was
 like, come on.
 PC guys aren't just going to come right in.
 Right. Everybody's attitude in the industry who was making phones acted like, we're not
 worried about this at all.
 Right.
 And then in a couple of years everybody was like, we are now going out of business thanks
 to the iPhone.
 Right.
 Which is pretty amazing.
 Well, the Ed Colligan quote is one of my all time favorites. Probably the most quoted thing
 I've done repeatedly. I should reblog it right now.
 You should.
 Because it's such a classic.
 While you're sitting here.
 But it was right before, like a month before. It was like December 2006. Like a month before
 the iPhone comes out. Nobody knew what the iPhone was like, but the fever pitch of Apple's
 going to do a phone was at that point where you're like, well, they've got to do it now.
 Right.
 And Ed Colligan, who was then the CEO of Palm, said, we're not worried. PC guys aren't just
 going to come right in and whatever.
 But it's kind of interesting because A, he was so wrong.
 So wrong.
 But the most interesting thing is that he was wrong in a very important way, which is
 that the way phones have evolved since that day is that they're now computers.
 Right.
 There's no denying that all the top phones are computers. They're computers that are
 more powerful than our laptops from maybe eight years ago, eight, nine years ago.
 Yeah.
 And so you've got to be a PC guy. It was wrong not just that Apple was going to do well,
 but wrong about what it was going to mean to make a phone.
 They were always going to be these siloed devices that were meant to do one thing and
 not to do all this other stuff.
 Right.
 So where is Apple now? Because I think this is the question that everybody's asking. You
 can't deny that Jobs was this huge driving force. He wasn't just a salesman. He wasn't
 just a showman. He was intimately involved in the creation of those products.
 Right. The question I get from a lot of people is, is their design going to go to crap now
 or is it going to start slowly going to crap? And I don't think that's going to be the problem
 for Apple at all.
 You mean like industrial design?
 Well, across the board. UI design, industrial design, is the package for the next iPhone
 not going to be as nice?
 Right.
 I don't think you have to worry about any of those things.
 I think that's the least... To me, that's the thing that I would imagine is least likely
 to happen because they have designers in place.
 And he wasn't even a designer really.
 Right.
 I mean, he was like a director of designers.
 He was like a dreamer.
 Right.
 His job was basically to dream up stuff. I mean, really.
 And if anything, I actually think their design might even get better without him insofar
 as that there's no longer one guy, him, who when he's wrong can insist on having his way.
 Do you think we'll see less or more stitch leather?
 I think we'll see less.
 Less stitch leather?
 I think people laugh, but I think that that's Steve Jobs.
 No, no. I agree.
 Right.
 I mean, I had heard a story from somebody in the industry and they said, Steve, he's
 not really into the internet or computers. He's not actually really that into the idea
 of computers as a thing. I mean, maybe it's not true, but I think that if you see some
 of his design, it does feel in a way like, let's get as far away from the concept of
 the computer as possible.
 I think a stitch leather icon is... You're getting there. The ripped paper is you're
 getting to this, like, don't make it... I don't want it to feel like a computer.
 I think those details, I think that the designers Apple has are gonna do just as good, if not
 better, and they're still gonna attract attention. Where he's going to be missed is not on those
 details. Where he's gonna be missed, or we don't know if he's gonna be missed, but it
 is a big question.
 Well, this is what I wanna talk about.
 It's the big picture. When do you do the big new thing? Right? So the story of iOS basically
 is... A lot of this stuff is now on the record, thanks to Isaacson's book, and other stories
 from the last couple years.
 But long story short, they were working on a tablet in the mid-2000s, and wasn't really
 there yet, but they'd gotten a lot of the touch stuff, and they're working on it, and
 they wanted to make a phone, because all the other phones on the market were crap, and
 they had the iPod, and they thought, well, maybe we can parlay the click wheel iPod into
 a phone.
 And Jobs had this moment, and I really think this is the sort of thing that I think he
 was a genius for, is we've got this tablet over here with this touch screen, and we've
 got this phone project. We're not near a finished product over here. We'll take this tech, put
 it on a phone-sized device, and that's gonna solve all these problems we've had trying
 to get this phone interface to be good.
 And then, two, three years into that, let's go back to the tablet. Now's the time to go
 back and take what we've done with the phone and go to the tablet. And every company that
 has ever tried to ship a tablet computer before the iPad, it was at best a dud.
 Right. But so what I'm saying is he's not there.
 Right.
 Those kind of bursts of genius that led to products like the iPhone, where are they coming
 from? I mean, I think the question is maybe they've got the next five years of products
 in the pipeline. I mean, maybe they do. Maybe he dreamed up everything, or they collectively
 dreamed up these things were gonna be five years down the road.
 But Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs.
 Right.
 And I don't think any of the people there, they're all geniuses in their own right.
 Scott Forstall is a genius, there's no question.
 Right.
 Johnny is a genius. All these people are super smart, but they don't have these kind of the
 eccentricities and the idiosyncratic behavior of a Steve Jobs that's gonna lead to some
 of this stuff.
 Right.
 So is there a risk or danger with Apple that they become a company that is just, it's like
 diminishing returns on what they're doing? I mean, so the next thing everybody's talking
 about is ITV. They're gonna create some sort of home entertainment, I don't know, solution.
 They're gonna solve, in the book, Isaacson says that Jobs said something like, I cracked
 it or I cracked the TV problem. I mean, is that the next thing? And if it isn't iPhone
 level excitement, do you think that the future's not as clear for Apple?
 Oh, I definitely think it's not as clear. I think it wouldn't be as clear even if Steve
 Jobs were still around, though. I still don't know, I don't think it makes it any more or
 less likely that we could predict what their next major initiative would be.
 If Apple goes out of business next week, what does John Gruber do?
 I would just keep writing about the most interesting stuff that I see.
 That's a good segue to my next question, which is what are the other companies that are doing
 things that you like? I mean, what are companies that are, I would guess that if I asked you,
 is anybody executing the way Apple is executing, you would say no. I mean, I don't wanna put
 words in your mouth, but are there other companies that you think are doing great things, that
 are doing spectacular things, that are innovating?
 Well, who do you think is?
 I think Google is. I think.
 Yeah, but you know what, Google stuff, the stuff that Google does best doesn't really
 interest me that much.
 I mean, but they do a lot of stuff that's really good. I mean, Android I think is really
 good in a lot of ways. I think it's different and better in some ways, in some places than
 iOS, but different. And I think they can coexist happily. But when you look at their web offerings,
 I think it's hard to deny that things like Google Docs, Calendar, Gmail, the way they
 integrate, the way they live in the cloud, nobody has pulled it off with such fluidity
 before.
 Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, and the fact that people rely on it, you know, shows it.
 I mean, people are happy. I mean, I...
 But you're hesitant, I feel like you're hesitant to say that they're one of the guys that are
 doing innovative stuff.
 No, they are, but it doesn't interest me. It's not, it's just not my cup of tea.
 But iCloud does interest you.
 You know what, I don't really write that much about iCloud. I mean, I'm glad that it works,
 but it...
 So, web stuff is not that interesting to you?
 Yeah, not really.
 All right, so who... Okay, so let's say Google out, Microsoft?
 I think so. I mean, I think Windows Phone 7 is really interesting. I think the Metro,
 the whole Metro thing on the phone and on the desktop is definitely interesting.
 Are they gonna... Do they have an opportunity to come back from where they are? I mean,
 their market share in mobile is very low right now.
 Yeah, and I actually think, I've been thinking about this for weeks, or months even, really,
 is this notion of traction in the market and how you can get it. And I think it's a mystery
 to anybody. I think it was a mystery even to Apple. I think it was like intuitive. I
 don't think there was a science to it. I don't think they really had exact numbers on how
 many iPhones they were gonna sell two years out. I don't think they were quite sure it
 was gonna be as big a hit as it was. And I don't think anybody can really explain why
 Windows Phone 7 phones are selling as poorly as they are compared to other ones. It's very
 strange to me.
 Well, I think we had a boom of smartphones, right? And the big winners in that boom were
 Android and iOS. I think you've gotta, at some point, the market is growing, but at
 some point everybody's got their device from last year, they're not ready to move. I mean,
 I think there's certainly market forces at play there. But it's gotta be something more
 than that.
 Yeah, I don't know. There's something about it that doesn't seem right to me though, because
 I think the worst thing anybody could say about Windows Phone 7 is that it's as good
 in most ways as Android. I mean, they're very different.
 The worst thing they could say.
 I don't see how you could say that. I don't see how anybody could say. I could see how
 somebody would say, I don't really care for the way it looks. I don't really like that.
 But I think if you took a thousand people who travel back in time to 2006, where you've
 never seen any of these touch phones, travel back in time and get a thousand people and
 show them an iPhone and a Windows Phone 7 and your, what's the Galaxy Nexus?
 Galaxy Nexus. My Galaxy Nexus.
 Well, the best, but that's the best Android phone to date.
 I think so.
 I don't think there's any doubt about that.
 I think it is, yeah.
 Because it's the only one with the ice cream sandwich, which is clearly a step up.
 Yeah, and it's got a higher resolution display.
 So, go back to 2006 with them and show them to a thousand people. I think that you would
 find a very different mix of which phone those people would pick than what the market today
 looks like. I think a bunch of them would pick Windows Phone 7. And if you told them
 some of the things that it does, like the way that Windows Phone 7 works better with
 a Microsoft Windows PC, just integrates with Outlook and all that stuff better than the
 iPhone or Android phones do, I think that would appeal to a lot of people.
 Right.
 I don't think they'd do that at all. I mean, they just have this tiny little sliver of
 the market today.
 My feeling is that the use of the word Windows in the name of the phone really hurt them.
 Yeah, I think so too.
 I mean, I think if they'd have called them Metro, like hey, we have these new Metro phones.
 Amazon, what do you think? Are they doing great stuff?
 Oh, I think so. Yeah, Amazon's a great company.
 You like Amazon?
 Yeah, I do.
 Have you played with the Fire?
 No, I haven't seen one yet.
 You really?
 No.
 You got to get a Fire. You know, they're not that expensive. With that 25% bump from the
 jobs that you think you could afford on it.
 I've got so many gadgets piled up on the shelf in my office at home.
 Don't talk to me about gadgets piled up. I'm living a true nightmare scenario. Facebook.
 You kind of dismiss, you don't talk about Facebook a lot.
 No, I don't even have a Facebook account.
 Are they an important company? Do you think they're important?
 Maybe. I think that they exist in the blind spot of my interest in technology. I've never
 seen the appeal of Facebook.
 You don't like to be social?
 I guess. I don't know. But I like Twitter. I think Twitter is very social.
 You do love Twitter.
 I just don't understand it. One of the things I love about Apple products and I love about
 the way Apple designs things is that it's very easy to get it. Oh, I get it. I get what
 you're supposed to do with this thing. That's why I like Twitter. When I first saw Twitter,
 it's like, oh, I get it. You get 140 characters at a time to make posts. And if you like what
 somebody else is Twittering 140 characters at a time, you can follow them. And if they
 start annoying you, you can unfollow them. And that's what you see and that's the whole
 thing. And I was like, well, I get it.
 You like that.
 Right.
 It's like kind of a single use thing. I mean, it's very simplistic.
 Right. Nobody can describe Facebook in a way that is that comprehensive. It's mushy.
 It allows you to connect with your friends no matter where they are.
 But that's, see that's...
 You're thinking about using it now, aren't you?
 But that's not real. See, to me the problem with that is it's not real.
 I won't friend you on Facebook.
 No. Well, I guess that's true. All right. We need to wrap up.
 I do think this. I'll say this about Facebook. I do think there's something very interesting
 going on there with the talent acquisitions that they're making. So I would say I'm more
 interested in Facebook now than ever before where they've hired...
 What acquisitions are you talking about?
 Well, they hired Mike Mattis and the... I forget who he was working with, but the guy
 who did... They did the e-book for Al Gore for the iPad and the iPhone.
 Okay. Yeah.
 Bought them, bought the company, but then threw away all the e-book stuff they'd been
 working on. It was just a talent acquisition. They hired a company called SOFA, a Mac and...
 I think they did iPhone and iPod apps, but I know they did a bunch of Mac apps. Really,
 really exquisite panic, like panic the people who make transmit. That level, even more painstakingly
 detailed user interfaces than even Apple does, type of independent Mac software. They bought
 SOFA, but didn't...
 So where do you think these acquisitions are leading? Do you have a theory, pet theory?
 I don't know.
 Phone, Facebook phone?
 It could be, but they're buying people who... They're buying companies staffed with designers
 and engineers who can implement these exquisite UI design stuff, the stuff that wins Apple
 design awards.
 Right. But on a scale of one to 10, 10 being very excited and one having no interest whatsoever,
 where would you rank your feelings about a Facebook phone?
 I would say...
 You're supposed to say one.
 No, I would say it's actually high because I can't help but think that that's what they're
 hiring these people to do.
 But you don't like the premise of Facebook.
 I can't help but think that they're working on something that is new. That is not... I'm
 not saying it's not gonna have ties to their existing social network, what we think of
 as Facebook, but I can't help but think with the talent that they're acquiring that they're
 doing something new. Because Facebook has a certain look to it, right? I've seen Facebook.
 It's very ugly.
 No, it is. I mean, have you ever looked at it? It's not attractive.
 It's very... But it's also consistently...
 Ugly.
 I would say plain. I wouldn't even say ugly, but it's very consistent though. It has a
 look. When you go buy something in a coffee shop and they're on Facebook, you can see
 they're on Facebook at a point in your life. Everything looks the same.
 You can't customize it like MySpace, that's true.
 Right.
 Unfortunately.
 There's no way they're hiring people who make these exquisitely crafted UIs to make something
 that looks like that. I think that they're working on something ambitious.
 No question, unfortunately, because I think we could talk all night. Is Apple going to
 do a TV? Is this happening?
 I honestly don't know. I don't have any...
 I need something more meaty than that.
 I have no insight into that. No, I don't.
 Does it seem like something Apple would do?
 Years ago, I thought... When they first did Apple TV and they unveiled it with a code
 name, they called it ITV, and then I guess they got rid of that because there's a cable
 network in Great Britain that has the name. They said it was $399, it had a hard drive
 and you'd store stuff on it. I thought, well, that's good. I'm glad Apple's getting into
 this. It's nice to be able to use my iTunes account to buy this stuff.
 Why would Apple, a company that has always been very focused on selling high profit,
 high revenue items, why would they be happy selling a $200 box that you hook up to a $2,000
 TV? Common sense tells you, why not sell them the $2,000 TV too?
 I think the kernel of this whole rumor is that idea that everybody knows that that's
 true, that the most expensive thing in your living room, entertainment, is the TV set.
 Why not sell it?
 Why would Apple be selling the most expensive thing in the living room?
 It's a complicated story though because everybody... People don't replace their TVs that quickly.
 I think people replace their TVs less frequently than they even replace their cars. The people
 who are most likely to get excited about an Apple TV when it's new, like an Apple branded
 television set when it's new, people who come to shows like this, are also, because they're
 nerds and gadget geeks and they like tech specs, most likely to have bought a pretty
 nice TV in the recent past. You're not going to replace that.
 But not an Apple TV.
 My guess is if they're...
 Think about it.
 Here's my guess.
 If they're selling an Apple TV, you'd buy one.
 I don't know that I would.
 Really?
 Well, it would depend. My guess is that if they're going to sell TV sets, it would still
 be alongside a standalone Apple TV thing that you can hook up to an existing set.
 Maybe it slides into the side like a puck.
 No, but I think something that you...
 So you can take it out.
 If you have a Panasonic, whatever, 55 inch, whatever, with HDMI...
 Oh, so you think it'll provide the same thing. If they sell the TV, they'll have something
 that also provides the same...
 Right, because I just don't see how selling the TV sets could get them a big enough market
 quickly enough. Unless they're also selling boxes you can hook up to any TV set.
 So I'm going to put you down as, yes, they're going to make a TV. And we'll see if you're
 right about that. Boy, I'd hate if you were wrong. I'd hate if you were wrong.
 On that triumphant note, I'm going to say thanks so much for being here. Really appreciate
 it. Give him a round of applause, everybody. John Gruber.
 And we talked a lot about Apple, and Paul Miller actually went to the new Grand Central
 Apple store. Have you been there?
 No, it just opened today, right?
 Yeah, it opened today. But Paul Miller went a couple days ago. They had a press preview
 and he shot some video. So take a look at this and we'll be right back. Thanks again.
 It looks like I'm in Grand Central right now. But I'm actually in an Apple store. And you
 can see the hearts floating above my head. It's because I'm in love with the Apple store.
 The world's largest Apple store here in Grand Central. They have 350 employees. They took
 a whole wing of Grand Central. It was pretty wild. They had to work with the city. Like,
 this is hollowed ground in New York. And they just...
 Flash mob.
 So when you visit an Apple store, it's always important to check what the playlist, the
 current playlist is on the music devices, because then you know what's cool right now
 to listen to. Like, I've never heard of Azzam Ali, but his album, From Night to the Edge
 of Day, sounds really incredible. Now that... Oh, I think it's a girl. Is that a girl? It
 could be a man or a woman. But it's blowing my mind. Oh my gosh, this music. So good.
 Just working on a song about how much I love the Apple store. I think it needs a little
 bit of vocals.
 Apple store, Saint Grand Central. Oh yeah, oh yeah.
 So this is the accessory room, and as you'll notice, there's a lot of non-Apple products,
 which is why it's kind of hidden. It's kind of way back here. There's no windows, so nobody
 can see, but they're selling a lot of non-Apple products here. Which was left? Why does it
 say left? Someday these will all be Apple accessories, because Apple will own everything.
 It's a little prettier over here. It's a little less hidden, like the accessories room. This
 is Genius Bar land. Two Genius Bars, so the highest Genius Bar per store capita ratio.
 I have a Macintosh SE. It has the dual floppy drives, not the high density floppy, and I'm
 trying to run Cosmic Osmo, which came on CD. Is there a way to add CD drive to the SE?
 There is not on that computer. There's no? So I have another phone. I'm trying to get
 Jetpack Joyride on here, but I can't find it on the store. Well, I can tell you, I have
 a little familiarity with this phone itself. Maybe you can tell me more about it. I don't
 even know. It's the iPhone 3. I thought it was the iPhone 3G. I can assure you it is
 not. No? The Samsung logo to me gave it away. I thought Samsung made the iPhone. They do
 not. No? But you know what? We still have lots of great options to get the 4S. It's
 true. You know, I really feel like I'm coming around to the 4S here. If I'm learning anything
 from picking your brain as a genius, a certified genius, it's that I should get the iPhone
 4S. Hi, are you guys in line for the iPhone? Are you guys in line for the new iPhone? So
 I can just start right here or should I get behind you guys? Start right here? Okay, alright,
 thank you. Guess I'm first in line. Did it. Adorable. That Paul Miller is just adorable,
 isn't he? You just want to put him in your lap and hug him and maybe that's just me.
 I don't know. We should actually bring Paul and Nilay out to talk about the news and talk
 about the story. So please welcome Paul Miller and Nilay Patel. Thank you. Did you get an
 iPhone 4S? Did you manage to score one? No. Really? You told me that the Galaxy Nexus
 is the best thing ever. It's coming out on Verizon tomorrow. That's not true. Oh, it's
 coming out for Verizon? I think you're getting some bad information. So you guys know Paul
 Miller and Nilay Patel, editors, dashing gentlemen. I think you're just telling me what you are.
 Sailors. Nilay is a sailor. So this store is massive, the Grand Central store. I mean,
 it's the biggest one in the world and they have two genius bars. It took a whole wing
 of Grand Central. Does that seem excessive to you? It's Apple. So happy. Do they have
 a train? They don't have a train. I think that's the one thing they're missing. They
 want to get the Apple Express. They drop you off into the store. It's just a one line.
 That'd be great. That'd actually be kind of convenient. It's called One Infinite Loop.
 Yeah. That's a little bit sadder. I think you just got booed, kind of. Here at that
 Gruber we get booed. It turns out it's Paul Miller. What I did really like about the story
 is when you're in the floor of Grand Central, it's like, oh, I don't even see that there's
 a store up there. They're really subtle. But once you're in the Apple store, you kind of
 feel like all of Grand Central was designed and built for Apple's sake. Yeah. That's how
 I feel about the world. You feel like it was before Apple existed, the guy who designed
 Grand Central knew someday Apple would exist. And he built Grand Central as a shrine to
 the company. He's like, people will buy phones here. Yeah. Well, first off, phones, because
 they don't exist probably. People thought he was crazy. They're like, what's a phone?
 And then, I don't know what Grand Central was built. It's probably like 1935 or whatever.
 There were definitely phones. And then, I'm not going to go down this river. This clearly
 didn't happen. So we saw today, yeah, we did it. But we saw today, the store was, it opened
 officially. And there were hundreds of thousands of people. I was here. There were hundreds
 of thousands of people trampling each other to get into. What's crazy to me is people
 show up for an Apple store launch, and it's not like they've got new Apple stuff. It's
 not like they don't have the exact same setup. You do get a t-shirt often. Oh, nice. Oh,
 really? You think thousands of people showed up to get a free t-shirt? I guess it's possible.
 But it's funny, since you could definitely go to Best Buy with a train and be like, I'm
 the same. You can't get the t-shirt there. You can make a t-shirt? Come on. Not resourceful?
 I think you're talking about pure fantasy at this point. Or guys make t-shirts. That's
 true. So not really very newsy, but it's kind of cool that they did it. But what is newsy,
 today there was some pretty huge news. I don't know if you guys have heard. HP made a big
 announcement. I want to ask Gruber about HP. Totally missed the window there. HP made an
 announcement. They're open sourcing web OS. Hold on, any web OS users here? There's got
 to be one. Where? One person, we put them in the nosebleed seats. You just can't win,
 can you? So HP's open sourcing web OS, and they're going to still make tablets, they
 say. I think they lied to you. I talked to the CEO, Meg Whitman, and Mark Andreessen,
 who is on the board, and you think they both lied to me? Well, you know, it's really interesting,
 because their first announcement, they put up an FAQ that said, we'll evaluate. Well,
 open sourced web OS, we think it's great. We'll evaluate it for future products, which
 is basically like, we think it's not very good. And we'll see if it gets better when
 random dudes in their basement make it better for us, because we failed to do that. I don't
 think that means that. I think it means... But they also said, we're going to build the
 tablets in 2013. Which is like, we're going to take a break, we sucked at this for too
 long. Meg said, maybe not this year, maybe next year. What do you mean? It's basically
 already 2013, when you think about it. Yeah, it's tomorrow. I mean, look... Close your
 eyes, Meg, wake up, you can try the touchpad again. Maybe she can meet the guy, the Grand
 Central guy, with the time machine, or whatever. I think they hedged. I think they made the
 first announcement, we're going to open source it. They were giving up, and they got the
 give up vibe, and they said, well, we're not going to give up. When I talked to her, she
 kept mentioning how affordable it was going to be for them. Which is not necessarily a
 good thing to hear, when you're making a big decision. When somebody says, I got this for
 you, it was affordable. You don't think, this is going to be great. You think, it'll be
 good enough, I guess. When they bought Palm, and they bought WebOS, all they talked about
 was, we have so much scale, we have so many resources. We're HP, we can do anything we
 want. We have all this cash, and it's in a box. Here you go, John Rubenstein. And they
 can do anything with it. Where was John Rubenstein today? Yeah, nowhere. It was Meg Whitman and
 Mark Andreessen, who were basically not there when they bought Palm. Mark Andreessen is
 famous for what? Netscape. The new face of WebOS. Yeah, the guy who made Netscape. Meg
 at Mark. And the lady who ran eBay. Mozilla. I mean, there's wind there. Are you using
 Firefox today? No. I would not touch Firefox. Open source wind, right? I am a Chrome user.
 Oh, another great Google product. Yeah. Gruber, by the way. Another killer. I bet you're interested
 in browsers. Where is he? I don't know if I'm talking to you. I'm like, scanning the
 audience. Gruber's just like walking around up there. He's a presence that haunts us.
 Yeah, really. It's haunting. A haunting presence. But yeah, I don't know. This just feels like...
 This is the end of the line for you. I just feel like this is really great for the homebrew
 guys. Yeah. WebOS internals are going to be so psyched. And the WebOS internals guys,
 they were already putting up pictures, screenshots of the Evo 3D, running hacked builds of WebOS.
 Like TC in our office, who still has a pre, was super excited because it was WebOS on
 real hardware. That's great. That's great for those guys. This is what? MeeGo. They
 killed MeeGo with WebOS, right? I mean, you're a lawyer. Given the open source of WebOS,
 does this mean that if Mattia Suarte wanted to, he could take cards? Yeah, he did. Put
 it in... No, but like real cards and put it in Android. I don't know. They didn't say
 what license they're going to do it. It could be a totally restrictive license. I mean,
 Mark said to me, they want a completely open source WebOS. I don't know what that means.
 There's all these levels, right? It's pretty straightforward what he said. No, but that
 term... It seemed to me like WebOS in its entirety in terms of as an OS. But actually,
 that's not what they're doing. They said, we'll do WebOS right now. We'll do Enyo later.
 Enyo is like the big application framework. And then we'll do the rest of the user space
 later. So there's three steps they're saying. What he was saying is there's parts that need
 to be tweaked so they can be open source. Yeah, you need to finish them. Yeah. We left
 that... Oh, the email client. Should have finished that. Look, I think that this is
 the end of the road for WebOS as a product. I think we'll see a bunch of maybe Chinese
 fans with it, other companies that want to build it into things. Maybe Google can take
 some of it and roll up some of it. But I don't think they need to. They have Matias. They
 have the brain behind WebOS by working for them. And I think he has new and different
 ideas. And I think if you're a creative person, you have new and different ideas. Yeah, put
 the cards going up and down instead of across. Side to side. Completely. So they'll donate
 it to RIM. They're like, look, you already took most of this. Just finish the playbook
 with WebOS. Oh, it's dark. It's dark. Very dark. My love affair with Palm is over. You
 know what? It died a long time ago, really. Wow, this has gotten really sad. It started
 beautiful. It really was like all relationships. There was hope that it would go on forever.
 And then they cheated on you with HP. They left me. They left me for HP. And then HP
 messed them up bad. And when I saw them again, it wasn't the Palm that I knew. No. Moving
 on. CES is coming up. And, you know, it's December in January CES 2012. We're the official
 tech news partner, which you may have heard. It's pretty exciting. Sure. Feel free to
 applaud at length about that. But we should talk about predictions, CES predictions. Let's
 go down the line. Paul, what do you think will be happening in CES? Well, I'd like to
 quote somebody else's prediction. Eric Schmidt said in 2012, the majority of TVs... He said
 this when? Just a couple of weeks ago. Okay. The majority of TVs are going to be running
 Google TV in 2012. He was drunk. Or high. Very possibly. Very possibly both. You know,
 actually I talked to Google about Google TV a few weeks ago, and they're very high on
 it. You know, they're like, we've really made some strides. Maybe you guys don't know, maybe
 at CES it's going to be every TV is going to have Google TV. Well, that's what I would
 think. It would be wild and crazy because currently there are so many different smart
 TV platforms. And every other TV now can tweet or check Facebook or something, but it's all
 completely proprietary. And it would be great if it's standardized, if Google TV was any
 good. You know, I think the problems that John Gruber was talking about that are like,
 you can't... Nobody's going to buy a new TV. It's not Android where everybody needs a phone
 every year. And you go and get one, and there's only one operating system that is a good competitor
 to the iPhone. It was Android. So everybody went and used it. I don't think TVs are like
 that. I think people want to turn on their TVs and watch television. I don't think so.
 I'm not so sure about that. I know I turn on my TV and I'm like, can I check Twitter?
 Yeah, that's the first thing I think. Using a giant keyboard remote. I have to do an update.
 I have to update Facebook right now. How many clicks on the arrow keys? No, you're right.
 People want to watch TV, and that's why everybody has cable. Right. But I mean, the whole idea,
 right, is that everybody wants cable to come to a close in some way. They want to like
 go around it. I'm talking about myself now, basically. Well, you want to go around your
 own locks. I want to go around my cable company. But you don't want to go around, well, because
 you have Time Warner. Everybody wants to go around Time Warner. Look, go to any city in
 America except where you can get Fios. Go to any place else, and everybody will tell
 you about how horrible their cable provider is. Comcast cities, Time Warner cities. I
 can't think of any others right now. Because that's all there is, because it's a big monopoly.
 Well, two. Yeah. A duopoly. I think what it is is we'll see this explosion of televisions.
 We saw a bunch of smart TVs last year. Last year was supposed to be the year of Google
 TV, and they all pulled out of the announcement. So wait, you didn't even say what your prediction
 was. Is it televisions? My prediction is there's going to be a million smart TVs, and I would
 be really interested to see some Google TVs. All right, what's your prediction? It's Android
 related, too. I think we're going to see the second wave of Android tablets, the second
 real wave. There's been this like minor wave, like, oh, look at these seven-inch ones. It
 was more like a light surf. Now this is going to be a tsunami, a tidal wave. A boat ride,
 right? And it was like a jet ski. Yeah, a jet ski wave. That's what it was. Yeah, one
 of those little, you know, yeah. I think we'll see, and they'll be really cheap. I think
 they have figured out that they can't compete with Apple at $499, and they need to go to
 $200. And I think that's where you're going to see a lot of action from all these companies.
 Because that's the only way they can do it. I think, you know, we talked about this earlier.
 I think there's going to be, well, we're going to see a lot of Ultrabooks. Lots of Ultrabooks.
 Right. And that's all Joanna's going to do. I just wish there was going to be, you know,
 we're going to hear a lot, I think a lot more about Windows, probably Windows 8. I mean,
 Microsoft is doing their keynote. We're going to hear a lot about Windows 8. And I have
 a feeling that we're going to see a lot of tablet people with like Windows 8. Like ARM
 tablets? Yeah, ARM tablets. Or maybe even Intel stuff. I mean, there could be both.
 But I think Windows 8 is going to be all over the place. I think that's going to be like
 this year's Android is Windows 8. Am I crazy? Maybe. It depends on how much Microsoft wants
 to show. Right. How much they've made the decision. Well, I mean, there's a dev version
 of Windows 8 out there. There's no reason why Asus can't come along and throw it on
 a tablet. Asus is crazy. They're talking about a public. They'll do anything. Do whatever
 they want. A public beta in February. Right. So they've got to have something to show.
 But Microsoft is really good at disappointing people at CES. That is true. You know, actually,
 I think the same as Intel. Yeah. Combined. I bet Intel will probably show a phone that
 they'll never ship. An Android phone. That's like their main move. They love to do that.
 Dow will wake me up at 8 in the morning to go and like wait. They're going to show you
 like a wood model. There's the Adamo 3. We've got it out for ten seconds. Look how thin
 this is. Yeah. This is a piece of balsa wood with Adamo written on it. I do feel like the
 one time I was really surprised and blown away at CES. Both surprised and blown away.
 Was WebOS. Yeah. No, that was WebOS. I don't want to get back to Paul. Don't take me down
 this door. Because that was when, really, when my love was reignited. It's just because
 a lot of CES stuff feels really inevitable. It's just re-upping the last year. I mean,
 WebOS and the pre was like a magical experience. Yeah. I'm not, we can't keep talking about
 this. Anyhow, we were talking about Microsoft and on that note, I would like to show you
 guys something that we did. We went to Microsoft. You guys have already seen a little bit of
 this. I went to Microsoft, to their campus, and looked at some of the research projects
 that they're working on. It was a pretty interesting trip. Take a look and we'll be right back.
 I never thought I'd see this with my eyes, with my eyeballs. I figured I'd have to get
 implants to see it. Building 92. There's 91 buildings before this. It's pretty amazing.
 Hey. Hi, Josh. How are you?
 Steve, how are you? Good to see you.
 This is Steve Clayton. He's going to show us around the campus and take us into the
 dark, deep chambers that no one else is ever allowed to see. That's what you promised me.
 Welcome to Microsoft. All right, let's do it.
 I'm excited I can get a cloud computing shirt, t-shirt.
 That's your color. It's my size too, small, lady small.
 What you need is some golf gear. Do you have golf gear here?
 Ballmer's a golfer, right? Does he golf? Or no?
 I think so. I've not played around with him.
 Are you allowed to refer to him as Ballmer? Steve.
 Because that's against rules. You can't say Ballmer.
 There you go. What a golfer.
 Yeah, but it doesn't say Microsoft on it.
 I'll bet it does.
 No, it doesn't. Look at this line. What are the savings like? Wait a second. Is this a
 line for Zunes? What do you mean?
 To use it.
 No, no, no. But is there any special reason why there's a line for Zunes?
 We got it stocked for a long time.
 And now they're back in stock. Zunes are back in stock at Microsoft and there's a line.
 This is insane. This is probably the only place where you'll see a line for Zunes actually,
 which is...
 They're going to move us out.
 Are they going to kick us out? Now this kind of makes me want to buy a Zune though. I might
 get in this line. How much is the 64? This is a visitor center. This is designed just
 to kind of show off what you guys are doing.
 Yeah, it gives a little sense of how you...
 A bit of the history of where we come from.
 Microsoft invented the typewriter.
 Yeah, I'm not sure...
 You invented the Atari. You have a General Electric television. Are you taking credit
 for the GE television? I feel like that's somewhat disingenuous.
 My job is to work with all of the kind of product groups, all of the research teams
 across Microsoft who are looking at trends like natural user interface and social computing
 and cloud computing and sort of help to tell the story of what Microsoft is doing across
 90,000 people.
 Where are we right now?
 We are on main campus for Microsoft in Redmond in Building 99, which is the headquarters
 for Microsoft Research worldwide and the location of our Redmond research lab.
 Hey. So who are you guys and what are you working on?
 So I'm Brandon Lloyd.
 Are you? Nice to meet you.
 I'm Nikolaj Jagavanchi.
 Nice to meet you.
 And we both work in the Extreme Computing Group. It's kind of a lab within Microsoft
 Research.
 Extreme Computing?
 Right.
 Do you drink a lot of Mountain Dew?
 Yes.
 We have a simple mobile augmented reality system. So we have this image and the cameras
 on the tablets that you see here, and we've got this one fixed on the tripod, they are
 tracking that image.
 So this is tracking here and then you guys are tracking individually on these tablets.
 Right. By finding this image in the video feed, it can figure out where the camera is
 in space and then once it knows where the real camera is, it can render virtual objects
 from that same point of view and then overlay them on the background.
 Okay, so you guys have another mode on here that's called Connect Mode and we brought
 Steve in to help us out with this. Can you explain what's going on with this?
 We hooked up a Connect Camera to this and what we're doing is we're capturing whoever
 sits in front of the camera in real time.
 This is disturbing.
 So this is kind of a different kind of video chat.
 All right, let me try this out. Let me get a...
 There he is.
 Okay, spin him around.
 It is, I feel like this isn't right. People shouldn't be allowed to do this.
 You want me to look at where?
 Yeah, look at the Connect Camera.
 Here? Okay.
 Okay, and then we'll freeze it and now you can come and explore yourself with the tablet.
 That is something I enjoy doing, so...
 Oh wow.
 This is very upsetting. Very upsetting. This is horrific. I mean, this is a true horror.
 This is like a scene from a Saw movie.
 So we're making our way through the Microsoft campus here, but we're going to stop and take
 a look at this anechoic chamber they've got where they do sound testing, they test webcams
 there and it's supposed to be pretty cool. And I'm hoping I can get maybe a little nap
 in if I play my cards right.
 Hi.
 Hey, how are you? I'm Josh.
 I'm Dale Sieg.
 Oh, thanks. Thanks for letting us come in here, Dale.
 You betcha.
 And what are we going to look at?
 So we are going to look at one of our anechoic chambers here at Microsoft.
 Wow, this is really disorienting.
 Yes.
 This is...it's kind of making me a little nauseous. Is that normal?
 Depending on the person, it can be. And so if you guys get a little...
 I can barely hear you.
 Yeah.
 Is that normal?
 That is normal.
 Am I passing out? What if I just passed out right now? Has that happened before?
 That has not happened before.
 Has anybody freaked out from this?
 So we've had to escort people out really quickly. So we test all of our acoustic products, obviously,
 so our webcams and headsets. The Kinect was tested in here. We actually also test non-acoustic
 products like for our mice and keyboards and other devices that have some mechanical
 characteristics that might generate a sound. We'll put them in this anechoic chamber so
 we can actually characterize a sound and identify if it's a buzzing or a hum or the sound is
 coming from that sort of thing.
 Have you ever come in here and discovered Steve Ballmer asleep, taking a little, stealing
 away a little nap and had to wake him up?
 No. No.
 Really?
 Not yet.
 You can tell me.
 No. No, I have not.
 You know, when you think about it, with the lights off and this sound, it'd be kind of
 like sensory deprivation.
 Yes.
 You know, can you imagine what you'd see in that pitch black? Everybody gets very uncomfortable
 with Ballmer jokes around here, I have to say. Every time I mention Ballmer, people are
 like, I can't comment on that. It's like he's listening, watching. You know, it's what I've
 thought about it. I actually, could I go in here and just stand in the dark in the chamber?
 Sure.
 Okay, great.
 Oh my God. Wait a second. I might actually be having some kind of vision. I'm seeing
 Steve Ballmer napping. This is amazing. This vision of Steve Ballmer, I mean, flying.
 This is really cool. We're in the Microsoft model shop. This is where Microsoft's actual
 products are designed and built. We're talking to Carson Agard, who is your model maker here.
 And so if a new Xbox were coming, if there was a new version, which you can tell me if
 there is, it's no problem.
 Okay, I will.
 What are you looking at here? You've got a table full of...
 We're looking at basically a variety of what we do down here, broken down to everything
 from raw 3D printed parts to some CNC parts.
 This is a 3D printed wrench that you printed in one piece.
 Correct.
 And you can use it like an actual...
 Yeah, so that shows the ability to be able to print multiple parts together as an assembly.
 So we're here with Young Kim, who's one of the designers who worked on the ArcMouse,
 which is kind of an award-winning, pretty big product as far as mice go.
 Yeah. It all kind of started with nothing more than just hair bands and foam core, where
 we were playing around with pieces that bent and flexed.
 So you have to take this up to Ballmer, right, and say, look, this will work. You don't go
 right into his office.
 We didn't check in with Steve Ballmer this time.
 He doesn't approve all the early mice designs?
 No, no, no.
 That was my understanding.
 Let's make the right decisions.
 Okay, good. That's good. I really need to get something like this or this, because I'm
 using like an old...
 Every time I reach into my bag, there's like a ball there.
 What kind of mouse do you have?
 Yeah, it's one of these guys. It's like a classic mouse.
 Oh, okay.
 Okay? Have you ever seen anything this advanced?
 I think someone as stylish as you are, I think, deserves something like this.
 Well, that is shameless flattery, and I appreciate it. But you know what's cool about this is
 actually I don't like big mice. And this is a little bit... It's a little bit bigger
 of a footprint, but it feels almost non-existent when you're holding it in your hand, which
 is great.
 And the fact that it folds flat, so you can put it in your pocket.
 Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, this is just disgusting. This is sick.
 Do you have a hammer? Get it. Get the hammer. Let's go. This is... Ooh, very strong. Surprisingly...
 Surprisingly...
 It's cold.
 Logitech is going to love this, by the way.
 Yeah, there you go.
 By the way, you know you have to sell or give me a mouse now, okay?
 No, you don't... Oh, you don't have a mouse now, okay.
 No, I don't. Hey, thank you so much for this. Really cool.
 Thank you so much.
 That... Don't you want it? I just totally destroyed my mouse for no reason.
 And I still don't have a mouse replacement. Here's the really shocking thing. I discovered
 right after I smashed my mouse, which is a Bluetooth mouse, that the Arc Touch has a
 dongle. So it was pretty upsetting.
 You guys are probably wondering why Joanna Stern is standing next to me. The lovely and
 delightful Joanna Stern. Give her a round of applause.
 So you know, Joanna's kind of our resident Windows laptop expert.
 And I recently expressed a kind of a dislike for Windows, which was just haunting me. I
 said Windows feels like poison to me on a podcast.
 I didn't say that.
 And it really was affecting to a lot of people, a lot of Windows fans. And Joanna got this
 idea that she could provide a better Windows experience for me.
 That's what I'm hoping to do.
 And we were talking about this, and she was telling me, okay, well, if you get a laptop,
 here's what you need to do. And I thought, people are going to get these for the holidays.
 They're going to get a new Windows laptop, and it's going to have stuff on it that they're
 not going to like.
 Well, they'll have some stuff that they do like, but some stuff they don't like.
 Yeah, sure. I understand that. But it's going to have like bloatware.
 And you have kind of like put together a little guide to how to make your Windows.
 Yeah, deep poison Windows for you.
 Deep poison. The antidote.
 Yes. I'm hoping after this, you are going to be using Windows.
 I'm going to be a full-time Windows user after this.
 Full-time Windows user.
 Anything's possible. So let's walk through. What would you do?
 We've got a few different steps here. So this is a Samsung right out of the box. Hopefully
 we're getting that there. And one of the big problems is crop wear. You mentioned it before.
 Yeah, I hate it.
 Litter's the whole system.
 Have you met anybody who's like, you know what I really like? Crap wear.
 I like a computer to be really bloated when I get it.
 I bet actually this company that makes this software likes crap wear because they wouldn't
 have a product.
 They wouldn't have a business.
 They wouldn't have a business.
 Coming at it from a different angle.
 Yeah. So Slim Cleaner is the first thing you probably want to put on your system. And you
 can actually select different programs here.
 By the way, Slim Cleaner has not paid for an advertisement.
 Yeah, no. Never.
 Joanna just thinks this is a good tool to...
 I just found this.
 And this basically will find bloatware on your computer.
 Exactly. And what's actually interesting about this is like me and you, we know what to delete,
 right? We know like, oh, we probably should get rid of this wild tangent games.
 What I do is I just erase hard drive.
 And put on something else.
 I put it, and then I put it away.
 Okay.
 Well, some others in our audience know what to delete. So what you can actually do here
 is you can see reviews of things that people like said, oh yeah, you wouldn't want this.
 And you can come in here and people say...
 We're actually crowdsourcing. So on this piece of software, people will basically tell you
 you want to keep this piece of bloatware.
 Right. And there's comments. People leave comments.
 But the thing is you have to be careful because the Bing bar, for instance, 91 people said
 we like this.
 Well, I bet at Microsoft a lot of people like Bing bar.
 No, I mean, maybe it's great. I don't know. I'm just saying maybe you don't want the Bing
 bar.
 I personally don't want the Bing bar.
 Right. There you go.
 But so that's one way to do it. You could obviously also come into the control panel
 here.
 And this is a little bit nerdier is to actually just go find the applications.
 Exactly.
 And you can do it by hand.
 So like, you know, and then there's the step, the major step.
 This is the sledgehammer.
 This is the sledgehammer. You buy Windows 7, you install it.
 Yeah.
 You get rid of everything.
 I think that's what I would do. That seems easier, but it's like how much is it?
 It's going to cost you.
 $120?
 Yeah, it's $120.
 So that's like the sledgehammer.
 This is going to cost you.
 The doing it on your own is the scalpel.
 Yeah.
 And then what would you call the slim cleaner is like something in between. It's like a
 rusty knife.
 Yeah.
 You're doing one of these moves.
 A gun.
 A gun.
 It's a gun.
 It's a gun.
 Yeah.
 All right.
 So I've taken the blow-ware off of my computer now.
 Yeah.
 Crack, we're loose.
 Thank you, Trent.
 That's good.
 That's good.
 So this one here, you kind of, you might want to get rid of sort of the generic Windows
 desktop. I think that might not be, that might be what you don't like about Windows.
 I'm not crazy about, I am like, it's not, it doesn't strike me as particularly beautiful.
 Okay. You know, maybe like you don't like the icons all on the left side. You like them
 on the right. Maybe you want to add sort of a widget type of thing.
 So this is, this is, this actually looks really nice.
 Yeah.
 So this is really cool.
 So I have two different things here. One, I changed the desktop background, which is
 something you should always do.
 Great background. Great choice.
 First thing you should do, change the desktop background. Like this one has HP logo on it.
 So the other thing I did here was I installed Rain Meter. And Rain Meter actually lets you,
 it's sort of like a launcher pro, like Android launcher pro for Windows. You can put widgets
 up here. I've got battery. I've got time. And you can customize all these things. You
 can put your, I've got the Verge logo or the Verge feeds coming through here.
 That's good. Good choice.
 And then here you can, I'm using something called Fences where you can organize all your
 desktop icons.
 Do these, so these are just ALE-assist apps. Are these, do these Windows snap?
 These don't snap in place. So you can move these around.
 Well how are you, how do you get things perfect?
 You line them up.
 Like by hand.
 With a ruler.
 Oh you get, put a piece of tape on the screen.
 Yeah.
 That's great. I feel like snapping would be a really good feature here.
 It would be.
 Yeah. Maybe that's just one man's opinion though.
 That actually seems to like sort of lock in place.
 So it is snapping.
 It's snapping but it's not like.
 And what is that called?
 This is called Fences.
 Okay. So Fences and Rain Meter.
 Yeah.
 Again, not paid endorsements. Just things we like.
 Just software that we like.
 And so, and then on this one, on this computer which by the way is obscenely ripping off
 a Macbook.
 Awesome.
 I mean, no, no.
 Does your Macbook have this?
 No, no we saw.
 Look at this little Beats volume.
 Yeah, I wish it had a Beats volume control on the side.
 This is the new HP Envy for the center.
 Gruber showed it to his kid backstage and goes, look Jonas, a rip off.
 Which is amazing.
 This is freaking shameless.
 I mean, they should be ashamed of themselves.
 Look at this.
 Do you have this Beats audio thing?
 This is disgusting.
 Okay.
 I mean, how come Apple isn't suing HP?
 That could happen.
 I mean, to talk about IP rip off.
 Neelai, can we?
 I'm on the case.
 Yeah.
 You're on, you're going to handle this?
 Yeah.
 Okay, great.
 So back to Windows.
 But let's talk about what's happening on the screen.
 Yes.
 So right here, I think Windows has gotten sort of a bad rep for not having very good
 looking apps.
 I think people sort of figure Office, you're going to have Outlook, all that sort of stuff.
 And so here's some nice- Ribbons everywhere.
 Ribbons everywhere.
 So this is a few apps I like.
 This is Metro Twit.
 It's really nice looking, sort of looks like a Windows 8 or Windows Phone 7 app.
 Are you following Tom Cruise?
 Yes, I am.
 I didn't even know he had a Twitter account.
 He doesn't, you know, I really shouldn't follow him.
 No.
 I need to find him, so just keep following him because I need to follow him.
 It doesn't tweet much.
 I need to find out what's going to happen with Ghost Protocol.
 Is it going to be cool or not?
 Okay, so this is basically like a Twitter client, Metro style Twitter client.
 Exactly.
 Looks very nice.
 What else?
 Maybe you want to use it.
 Maybe.
 What is this?
 This is an email client.
 I wanted to find you an email client that you'd really like.
 What is wrong with you?
 Ross emailed me this.
 Ross emailed this to you?
 So I wanted to show you the GIF support, the animated GIF support here.
 That's great.
 This is an app called Postbox.
 It comes through OSX as well.
 But it's not the perfect Gmail implementation.
 I wanted to find that for you.
 But it's a good one.
 You can get labels in there.
 Yeah, you have also these little applets.
 What is this?
 Yeah, these little applets in here.
 So these are a little app called Pokey.
 And so you can install these down here to the taskbar.
 And you can actually just sort of reply from in here.
 Are you replying right now?
 I'm going to reply to Thomas Huston right here.
 This is great.
 You don't actually have to go out to the browser.
 So these are little applets, little appers.
 And all are free.
 I have to admit, I feel like this combination is somewhat compelling.
 Yeah, look at this desktop.
 Look how nice it is.
 Oh, I see it.
 Yes, so clean.
 You have the third one, too.
 Application installed.
 So you're going to use Windows now?
 No, no, no.
 So if I was, I think there's a laptop of mine that you...
 What would you recommend for me?
 This one, you seem to really like how it looks.
 This is great.
 This is great.
 I won't have to get used to a new look.
 I actually haven't tested this one yet.
 Yeah.
 And look, and then remember.
 Yeah, you have beads.
 That's great.
 Yeah, yeah.
 I would suggest, and I think I've got it over here.
 You do.
 This is the Lenovo IdeaPad U300S.
 We were talking about this before.
 And I have to say, as far as...
 And this should be...
 HP should take a look at what Lenovo's doing.
 Because there are some similarities, chiclet keyboard or whatever, to a Mac.
 But I mean, every computer has this now.
 But this is actually...
 The industrial design of this is really nice.
 I really like the design.
 You will miss the backlit keyboard.
 No backlit keyboard, but...
 Let's...
 Maybe the next one.
 That's an outrage.
 I know.
 And this is a Core i3?
 Yeah, you can get a Core i7, Core i5.
 All right.
 I mean, maybe I'll do it.
 I mean, maybe you've shown me the light.
 I doubt it, but I mean, it's possible.
 I will say that this is a much better...
 This desktop looks good.
 Yes, it looks very good.
 I know.
 I'm trying to...
 All right, here we go.
 Thank you very much.
 Join us during everyone.
 Not poison.
 It's de-poisoning.
 Try it.
 Do you want me to?
 Yeah, put it down there.
 Put that down there.
 And we actually have a word from our sponsor, believe it or not.
 And Sony.
 Okay.
 And we'll be right back with some very interesting thoughts from Nilay Patel.
 Stay tuned.
 Hi there, I'm Amy.
 And I'm Nick.
 And we're Carmen.
 And we just wanted to say how excited we are to be a new member of the Sony family.
 From signing with Epic Records to being part of the new Make.Believe marketing efforts,
 to releasing our first single, Crash Your Party, we can't wait to see where this new
 relationship takes us next.
 Be sure to watch out for our new video and discover the unexpected at Sony.com slash
 experience.
 Sony.
 Sony.
 Make.Believe.
 I am also happy to be part of the Sony family, and I'm excited about my new album, which
 is dropping in the fall.
 When you make.believe, what do you wish for?
 I mean, what don't you wish for?
 All right.
 So as you can see, Nilay is standing over here.
 And I'm sure you're wondering, why is Nilay standing over there?
 You know, Apple and Samsung have had a lot of disagreements recently about patents.
 Apple feels Samsung is infringed.
 Samsung denies it.
 There have been motions, dismissals, motions to dismiss.
 I'm just listing court terms.
 I don't really understand what any of this means.
 But recently, Apple made some suggestions in a court document to Samsung about how they
 could alter the Galaxy Tab to make it look less like an iPad.
 And Nilay has gone to work with our crack team of legal experts and designers and put
 together how he thinks Samsung might get away from this Apple design aesthetic they feel
 is happening.
 Yeah, you know, Apple has some of the best designers on the planet.
 They've got a very aggressive legal team, I think you all know.
 And they also have a registration in the iPad.
 They think the Galaxy Tab looks too much like the iPad.
 And it's kind of true.
 I mean, we can just bring it up here.
 I mean, which one's which, right?
 So they made a lot of suggestions to the court.
 The one running Android is the Galaxy Tab.
 Probably.
 So they made a lot of suggestions to the court, pretty reasonable.
 We sat down and tried to think about how you would really implement this.
 So the first one, pretty basic, don't make it black.
 Use something other than black in the front.
 So we want kind of a classy dark red.
 So Apple said in this court document, I just want to be clear, don't have a black bezel.
 Yeah.
 So you're suggesting kind of a burgundy.
 I think you really want to step out, right?
 You want to go pattern.
 Like a pinot noir.
 Yeah.
 I think this is, I think that's really solid.
 You take it further here.
 Yeah.
 Well, I mean, you look at that.
 I think, well, you know, maybe Johnny Ive had a little too much.
 So you're saying go from a red to a pattern that will differentiate.
 A little bit.
 But they also said, well, the bezel, you know, it still kind of looks like an iPad.
 So they said, well, make the bezel smaller.
 And I think we all agree, bezel sizes are too big.
 Samsung has a really great processor, dual core Exynos in there.
 They've got LTE radios.
 We want to highlight that kind of stuff.
 So let's shrink the bezel.
 Let's show you what's inside the Galaxy Tablet.
 Let's really sell it.
 So that's great.
 I think, you know, you'd still might think, well, you know, Apple's proud of their internals.
 Their next suggestion was don't have horizontal speakers, right?
 And you can see why.
 You've got this all plain front speakers on the side.
 And we thought about where do you put the speakers?
 Where do you really enhance the sound quality of the tablet?
 Because you're watching a lot of movies.
 So we went with a triple stereo front placement.
 Center channel.
 I'm sorry, triple stereo?
 Yeah, it's 3D.
 Is that how many channels?
 I mean, that's left, right, and what's the other one?
 The middle one is just the center channel for vocals.
 The triple stereo.
 The triple stereo.
 The middle one is when you turn your head.
 Yeah, you turn it sideways and stereo.
 Okay, that's reasonable.
 So far, reasonable suggestions.
 Yeah, but you still think, well, you know, it's got an Apple vibe to it.
 I think we can all agree.
 So how do you really differentiate it?
 How do you say, well, you know, Apple's kind of this like, you know, latte sipping kind
 of nerdy guy.
 You want to spice this thing up.
 We had some texture to the front.
 Apple said don't make the front flat.
 We put some spikes on it.
 We make it really stand out, make it really aggressive.
 Did you...
 We just looked at my bracelet.
 I was going to say, was there a...
 You guys took it off the hot topic.
 We scanned the bracelet and put it right on there.
 Is that a handle?
 Yeah, the handle looks really...
 Yeah, the handle's great.
 I like that.
 It's useful.
 But then Apple said, well, it's still too thin, right?
 I mean, that was actually a suggestion.
 Make it thicker.
 Apple products are known for being really thin.
 And so if you're going to make it thicker, you don't want to just go halfway.
 You want to really, you want to push it.
 You want to know that you've got the power of Android behind you.
 So we went all the way.
 Just as far as we could.
 And I think this, this is a place where if you had 80% vision, you would stop.
 You would say, this is fine.
 We did enough.
 This is more, this is really good now.
 This is a Motorola move, I think.
 Yeah.
 I mean, this is where you stop.
 This is strong.
 If we really want to stand out, you know, Apple's last suggestion was we have a patent
 on rounded rectangles, right?
 But you don't want to square them off.
 You don't want to make them too sharp.
 You don't want this.
 You want something organic, something natural.
 And so we thought about it a lot.
 We spent a lot of money on designers.
 And we came up with this, the new Samsung Galaxy Tab.
 Very nice.
 That's very nice.
 High five.
 I mean, you call me crazy, but I still feel like they're kind of infringing here.
 Yeah, no, it's obvious.
 I feel like they're, it's a little bit iPad-like stuff.
 I don't know which is which.
 Yeah, which one again is the Samsung?
 That background looks familiar.
 All right, I think it's time for, I think we should do new thing.
 Let's do new thing.
 We're not really good at doing new thing yet.
 We're terrible.
 How is it?
 You sit on the stool again?
 I think you lay on them.
 Oh, look at that.
 So as you guys may or may not know, we're doing this thing on the show where we talk
 about something that we're really into right at this moment from the world of technology.
 So we're just going to do that.
 We're adding Joanna to the mix, which is exciting.
 I feel like her pick is really strong.
 So we're giving, what do we have, 15 or 20 seconds on the clock?
 It's 15.
 No, I think it's, is it 20?
 It's 20.
 Last time it was 15.
 I thought it was 30.
 We thought that we needed that extra five seconds.
 It was 30 in rehearsal.
 Yeah, we brought it further down.
 So we're going to have 20 seconds to talk about the thing that we like, that we're into
 right now.
 And I guess we're just going to get the countdown here and I'll start.
 Are we ready?
 Okay.
 Two, one.
 Okay.
 Yes, my new thing is the Galaxy Nexus.
 So as you know, on the last show, Matthias Duarte was here from Google and we talked
 about it and I stole it from him.
 I beat him and stole it from him.
 No, I finally got to play with it.
 I have a review unit which has to be sent back, unfortunately, but I'm probably going
 to buy it as soon as I get done with this.
 And that's it.
 That's all I have to say.
 I'm so jealous.
 Yeah, you have to go.
 This is my new thing.
 Come here.
 Come here.
 Come here.
 You can't talk to me.
 Yes, this is my shark.
 He's an air swimmer.
 You can buy him for $30.
 That doesn't include the helium.
 You've got to fill him up with helium.
 And then he comes with this and he can wag his tail.
 He's getting too far.
 And how much?
 $30?
 $30 just for this.
 No helium included.
 What a deal.
 What a deal.
 But usually it works.
 Come on, work.
 My new thing is the Pico Dolly, which looks really cool.
 It is a piece of metal with wheels.
 I'm very, very fond of it.
 It rolls.
 It takes really awesome video.
 It makes all of our videos on the site look great.
 And Chad bought one and I stole it.
 So it's mine now.
 I'm very, like, it's the coolest thing.
 It's 100 bucks.
 Here's your chance, Chad.
 It's a Kickstarter project, right?
 All right, Paul, go.
 So this week on eBay I bought an e-mate for $30, actually.
 What is an e-mate?
 It is Apple in the 90s made a laptop using the Newton operating system.
 It sells as a stylus, but it actually almost looks a bit like an iMac.
 It's got that sort of translucent vibe.
 But it's the early netbook.
 And I'm going to use it to write the great American novel.
 Oh, very nice.
 The great...
 I just want to note the great American novel, not a great American novel.
 It's all over after Paul.
 Did you take that early netbook thing as a diss, Joanna?
 Because that's like your...
 He was kind of directing it to you.
 I mean, I can get you a good netbook for $30.
 Is it a ViewSonic?
 Yes.
 It doesn't have a screen.
 It has a stylus.
 So we're almost wrapped up here.
 We have one more thing.
 We have a couple of giveaways that we want to hand out to some people in the audience.
 You don't have to come down and get it, but two people here are going to be leaving with
 a...
 Really?
 With a Transformer Prime.
 That's great.
 So we have two Asus Transformer Primes to give away.
 Joanna just reviewed this.
 She really liked it.
 Lots of honeycomb tablet.
 Android 3.2 right now, but it's going to get ice cream sandwich very soon.
 Yep.
 They say now early next year.
 What just happened?
 Yes.
 Okay.
 That went perfectly.
 The screen is really excited about it.
 So anyhow, so we're going to grab some...
 Paul and Nela have some numbers.
 Go for it.
 So we're going to grab some...
 Paul and Nela have some numbers.
 Do not rush the stage, all two of you.
 I hope it's the webOS guy, really.
 He deserves it.
 That's not you.
 Do you move?
 I have a touchpad.
 Oh.
 That doesn't really count.
 So row C, seat 120.
 Row C, seat 120.
 There you go.
 All right.
 Congratulations.
 All right, Nela, second Transformer Prime.
 All right.
 Row D, seat 10.
 You win.
 You win.
 You win.
 You win.
 You win.
 You win.
 You win.
 You win.
 You have done it.
 You have survived.
 Oh my God.
 Wow.
 Are you holding up Windows logos?
 Are they Windows logos?
 What?
 What are you...
 No.
 Are those balloons?
 From the Big Mado Gallery before.
 Really?
 You did not win.
 Wow.
 Very nice.
 You can pick them up after the show.
 That's awesome.
 We will pop your balloons later.
 Anyhow, that's our show.
 So House Band Trent, can you play us out?
 Yeah.
 I'm going to do it.
 I'm going to do it.
 I'm going to do it.
 I'm going to do it.
 I'm going to do it.
 I'm going to do it.
 I'm going to do it.
 I'm going to do it.
 All right.
 All right.