David Pearce

This is the answer I find very frustrating, right?

Because this is also the answer that leads to every other phone looks like the iPhone because once something becomes sort of the image in people's minds, anything you do that is different becomes a huge swing that you have to make people...

think differently about, right?

Like if Apple were to introduce the iBook now, it wouldn't work.

Like I'd really earnestly believe that.

And so when you get something like the MacBook Neo, what Apple does is take the rough outline of a MacBook,

add some nice colors, change a couple of little things, right?

Like you tweak the trackpad to make it a little cheaper.

But like that thing is still a MacBook.

Nobody is going to look at that thing and think it's anything other than a MacBook.

Whereas if you introduce the iBook, which is this big, round, plastic, sort of transparent thing with a handle, you'd get a lot of people who are like, what on earth is that?

And even if it was objectively better,

it would still be this huge uphill battle to convince people that it's better because we have all this history with this sort of lowest common denominator device that people are more or less happy with.

It's the same with phones, right?

I think this has been a really interesting challenge with foldable phones and going back to flip phones.

We just converged on the idea that a phone should look like this.

And so every phone looks like this.

It's a candy bar phone.

You either have something that looks like an iPhone or something that is an iPhone.

And those are essentially the two phone ideas in the world right now.