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Marco Arment

πŸ‘€ Speaker
8819 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers

Well, it can in other platforms. It does, I think.

Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers

Well, it can in other platforms. It does, I think.

Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers

Well, right. And so the other things that Apple has historically been kind of bad at that are kind of big data or big infrastructure problems, things like search indexes. Apple is not a great search company in many ways. They kind of have their own search stuff going on in a few places. They're not great at search. They're not great at running consumer-facing web services.

Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers

Well, right. And so the other things that Apple has historically been kind of bad at that are kind of big data or big infrastructure problems, things like search indexes. Apple is not a great search company in many ways. They kind of have their own search stuff going on in a few places. They're not great at search. They're not great at running consumer-facing web services.

Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers

That's just not one of the things they are really good at. They're able to avoid those things being a problem for them in many ways. Maybe a bigger example is voice assistants. Apple is not good at making voice assistants. But they've been able to get by in part because of the massive lock-in they have that you can't make a competing voice assistant on iOS. You just can't.

Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers

That's just not one of the things they are really good at. They're able to avoid those things being a problem for them in many ways. Maybe a bigger example is voice assistants. Apple is not good at making voice assistants. But they've been able to get by in part because of the massive lock-in they have that you can't make a competing voice assistant on iOS. You just can't.

Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers

And also in part because it turned out voice assistants were not that important. They were not that big of a threat. If yours sucks as much as Siri has sucked for its entire life, it doesn't make people not buy your product. Well... LLM and LLM-based features are, I think, going to be somewhere on that spectrum. We don't know where yet.

Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers

And also in part because it turned out voice assistants were not that important. They were not that big of a threat. If yours sucks as much as Siri has sucked for its entire life, it doesn't make people not buy your product. Well... LLM and LLM-based features are, I think, going to be somewhere on that spectrum. We don't know where yet.

Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers

It's possible that it's going to be really important that people will start assuming these features will be there and will work better than they do on Apple's platforms. And if Apple never takes this more seriously and puts – and develops more –

Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers

It's possible that it's going to be really important that people will start assuming these features will be there and will work better than they do on Apple's platforms. And if Apple never takes this more seriously and puts – and develops more –

Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers

culture and engineering and infrastructure around this, the way they never got into web services and never got into voice assistants very well, if they miss on this, it might be more important to their customers. We don't know.

Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers

culture and engineering and infrastructure around this, the way they never got into web services and never got into voice assistants very well, if they miss on this, it might be more important to their customers. We don't know.

Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers

They will still have the lockout problem with locking out any competitors, which I think in their case will actually hurt them a little bit here because that will just make the iPhone work worse for iPhone customers in these ways. I don't know. I think this kind of shakeup in technology, we have seen this dramatically disrupt really established competitors.

Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers

They will still have the lockout problem with locking out any competitors, which I think in their case will actually hurt them a little bit here because that will just make the iPhone work worse for iPhone customers in these ways. I don't know. I think this kind of shakeup in technology, we have seen this dramatically disrupt really established competitors.

Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers

Look, when the iPhone first came out, it kind of sucked at a lot of things, but we loved it, and we used it anyway, and eventually it stopped sucking at those things, and we all loved them. And during that time, between sucking and not sucking at a lot of things, A lot of people talked a lot about iPhones on PCs, Windows PCs even. Many people talked about their iPhone using their Windows PC.

Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers

Look, when the iPhone first came out, it kind of sucked at a lot of things, but we loved it, and we used it anyway, and eventually it stopped sucking at those things, and we all loved them. And during that time, between sucking and not sucking at a lot of things, A lot of people talked a lot about iPhones on PCs, Windows PCs even. Many people talked about their iPhone using their Windows PC.

Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers

And many other people talked about on their Windows PC, we're fine. We have 90% of the market. What's the problem here? And then phones massively disrupted the entire computer industry. And Microsoft was screwed because they weren't taking mobile seriously enough. That can happen to Apple.

Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers

And many other people talked about on their Windows PC, we're fine. We have 90% of the market. What's the problem here? And then phones massively disrupted the entire computer industry. And Microsoft was screwed because they weren't taking mobile seriously enough. That can happen to Apple.

Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers

They seem impossibly big and established at this moment, but there's this huge area of technology that's disrupting a lot of things and that has pretty big promise for the future that Apple has shown no core competency in and not much competitiveness, not really taking it seriously. Clearly, they were caught off guard. Clearly, they started their AI efforts way later than everybody else.

Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers

They seem impossibly big and established at this moment, but there's this huge area of technology that's disrupting a lot of things and that has pretty big promise for the future that Apple has shown no core competency in and not much competitiveness, not really taking it seriously. Clearly, they were caught off guard. Clearly, they started their AI efforts way later than everybody else.