Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What insights does Steven Sinofsky share about Apple's 50th anniversary?
Having lived through like a half dozen component shortage things, you just sort of wait them out and you don't let some local Macs or local men determine the future. This will all correct itself in short order. This world where you're all gated on dollars per token is a thing that's going to move to your own device, which is exactly what happened with all of computing.
Anytime there's a resource constraint that you have to pay for, it moves to your device and becomes free. AI introduces yet another opportunity to change that dynamic for the PC to have it be forward-looking, not backward-looking. And I think this is an incredibly important opportunity for Microsoft and for the industry as a whole.
Few people have had a front row seat to the personal computing revolution quite like Steven Sanofsky. Over nearly three decades at Microsoft, he helped shape products that defined the PC era, including Windows, Office, and Surface. Along the way, he also witnessed one of the technology industry's longest-running rivalries, Microsoft and Apple.
As Apple celebrates its 50th anniversary, questions about product design, platforms, hardware, software, and the future of computing remain as relevant as ever.
Chapter 2: How did Steven Sinofsky contribute to the evolution of personal computing?
Theo Jaffe speaks with Steven Sanofsky about Apple, Microsoft, and the evolution of personal computing.
I'm in the Situation Room with Steven Sanofsky, who might have been like the first ever guest on MTS back when we were still doing test streams, I think. He was the first person I interviewed on a test stream. He was the president of the Windows division at Microsoft. He created the Surface program at Microsoft, which we have some very interesting news about today. We're thrilled to have you on.
Steven, welcome to MTS. Welcome back. Well, thanks so much. Good to see you.
Chapter 3: What are the cultural differences between Apple and Microsoft?
Hi, everyone. First question would be, NVIDIA and Microsoft and ARM and a few other companies just announced something very interesting at Computex. What exactly did they announce and what does it matter? Sure, well, just so folks know, because it doesn't get in the news much, but Computex is this big, giant trade show in Taiwan.
And it's the weirdest show, because it's like this total inside baseball... you know, silicon supply chain show. And normally you never hear about it. Like, in fact, I never went to it even. I wanted to, but it actually turns out it was always right around the same time as a big Microsoft sales meeting. So I never went.
But you can think of it as the ecosystem show for everything it takes to build a computing device of any kind. Totally wrong, but Jensen in his keynote last night did this incredible slide where he walked up and down the whole length of the stage pointing to partners that he was very excited to be there. And I would bet anyone that
anyone watching would have no idea who the companies he was pointing at. Like these are, some of them, like half of the ones he pointed to as kind of being entertaining were just names of companies in traditional Chinese. And so you didn't even, like you don't even know what they are. But it's an incredible show.
It's just wild because it's such inside baseball about components and peripherals and chipsets and assembly lines and it's deals and deals and stuff. And every 10 years or so, it jumps into the mainstream, but never like the past 24 hours. Just, you never see that.
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Chapter 4: How is AI changing the landscape of personal computing?
And actually it was a lot like, I think it was two years ago, Jensen keynoted CES. And I've been to 40 CESs, and I'd never seen one with such a broad media reach. Yeah, Jensen's like Taylor Swift of the tech industry. So true, yeah. It's an incredible level of... It just speaks to the awareness of tech and then the awareness of AI and what NVIDIA has done.
Because, I mean, like, you know, it was bigger than, like, CES Xbox was, like, a sideshow compared to this. Wow. And he's huge in China, too.
Yeah.
Well, the show is always huge in Asia, broadly. Because most of the companies are there, whether they're in mainland or in Taiwan or in Vietnam or Singapore. And that's sort of the origin of the show. Like, this show is like... go there and speak an Asian language for forever. So, fascinating.
So, the big announce, though, I mean, look, there's a zillion things going on, but the one that rose to the top was NVIDIA announcing what they called the RTX Spark Super Chip, which is a mouthful. Before the show, it was broadly called N1X, and, like, that's sort of the, what it is, is just, it's an ARM chip,
CPU mated with NVIDIA parallel processing graphics, basically into one system on a chip that has a whole new memory architecture relative to the historic way that PCs had been built. And the target for it are the PC makers.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of NVIDIA's new Spark Super Chip?
And so it's very, very exciting. And if you, the mainstream press, the stock market press, the CNBC going on behind me, like they all looked at this as like NVIDIA entering the PC business. which is what's called the mainstream chip business, which is so weird because, you know, long before in the Stone Ages, which is now we're talking about 2011, we actually announced MVLA-milking PCs.
and making the Surface computer, the very first one. And it was a Computex gig announcement, and it was a CES announcement, and it was, you know, I remember very vividly the partner slide had NVIDIA and Qualcomm and Texas Instruments and all the chip makers and PC makers. So it has a ring of familiarity at, I would imagine, like 1-100th the scale.
I sent you the tech meme from that day when we announced the stuff. And it was a pretty significant role. So you'll be able to throw it up at some later date.
Yeah. So in what way is this laptop more like AI native?
So the big thing that's really changed is that the compute burden has shifted from the CPU to the graphics processor and then the associated neural processors, TPUs and those chips. And that's the thing that really changed. It's not unlike... 15 years ago, what had changed was the bulk of the interesting processing had moved from the CPU to the GPU just for rendering.
And where we are today is just an extension of all of that. And the difference, it's just insanely important because now that's the compute that we think everybody wants to do. Now, a lot of people will look at this and go, well, I use ChatGPT. I do it on my MacBook Air, my Chromebook, my phone. I don't really need, like, another thing.
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Chapter 6: What features set the new MacBook Neo apart from competitors?
The problem is, and this might be a word you guys have used or heard before, but the problem is tokens. And so the problem is that everybody is gated by the consumption of tokens, which cost money, where you can't get them if you're trying to use them for free.
And so the interesting thing about this device is how much of compute can it move to your local device where you basically have infinitely free tokens? And that is incredibly interesting and super important. Now, of course, you've all seen this run-up to where we are today with the stacks of Mac minis. Yeah. And everybody running their agents on minis. So why did they do that?
Well, there's a whole bunch of stuff about privacy and sandboxing them, but the primary thing was if you just want to let something roll for three days while it figures out your best travel itinerary, you really don't want to end up with a... $10,000 bill. So instead you buy, you know, three minis and let it crank away with like each mini putting something in isolation or whatever.
And so, but if you just fast forward, you know, six or nine months, it's abundantly clear. And I say that as a predictor of the future, not like as a, it's obviously intellectually clear. But like, it just seems to me that this world where you're all gated on dollars per token is a thing that's going to move to your own device.
Yeah.
Which is exactly what happened with all of computing. Anytime there's a resource constraint that you have to pay for, it moves to your device and becomes free. And I just don't imagine, I don't know how it can't happen.
So for someone who wants a more AI-native device in like a year when all of these products have shipped, do you think they're going to want like an NVIDIA Spark laptop or do you think they're going to want to stick with like MacBook Pro or the rumored MacBook Ultra, which is supposed to come out later this year, early next year?
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Chapter 7: How do gaming and operating systems play into the future of computing?
Well, this is just, I mean, this is the huge thing. And the way that I think this can play out is, well, of course you can play it out in like essentially status quo, which is, you know, the Fortune 500, you know, 80-20, 70-30 rule will be able to just fall to Windows devices running Intel or maybe Spark devices running ARM, but running with a Windows operating system.
And then, you know, the cool people, the bosses, the elites, or whatever you call it, running their MacBook Pros with Chrome or Safari, just connecting things, and phones. But there's another path where it becomes incredibly important to run highly optimized AI stack of software on your device. And whatever that stack is, is going to get optimized for a particular hardware base.
And that's a thing we've seen over and over again. Now, where we are right now is just so interesting because we don't have enough information to know where things are heading. At the announcement last night and the press releases and the commentary, Microsoft made it clear
much to my surprise, which we could go into, that the NVIDIA stack of CUDA will be available and supported and part of this Spark. Now, there are a lot of ways for that to become true. It could be a download that just runs. It could be a thing that's installed, pre-installed on a Spark device.
It could be a thing that's part of the OS and updated with Windows Update and administrative permissions and all of this other stuff. It could be a whole range of things. Nobody knows yet, in terms of public announcing, how they're going to do that. The same thing holds for Apple. And today, on a Mac, you can run all the models locally and stuff like that. You can't really do that on a phone.
And so an interesting question is going to be, what is Apple going to do at WWDC with respect to the CUDA APIs? Like, are they going to be native?
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Chapter 8: What lessons can be learned from the rivalry between Apple and Microsoft?
Are they going to be a thunking layer? Lots of stuff could happen there. Are they distributed? Is it an App Store app? Is it an OS component? Nobody has any idea. Now, for both companies, the past is very interesting, and most people didn't live through this, but NVIDIA has always been an outsider to the personal computer industry. It's always been an add-on.
So on the PC, if you ever wanted to use an NVIDIA graphics card, you bought the card and you downloaded drivers from NVIDIA. Or before that, they came on a CD or a floppy disk that came with your graphics card. And so for 30 years, this whole thing was like, do you have the latest NVIDIA drivers? Where do you get them?
And we went from, you know, getting a new CD to getting a new DVD to FTP to downloading them from the web. It was a whole cycle. But it was never a first-class part of Windows until we fixed that in Windows 7 and got them on Windows Update and all this other stuff. And the APIs on a PC to do graphics, you could always just download the NVIDIA library and call them.
But the official Windows APIs were DirectX. And they just did the same kind of thing, just completely differently. That the X is Xbox. And so Microsoft was all in on the DirectX APIs. They were a huge part of Windows release called Windows Vista when they first got integrated and then Windows 7 forward.
And then there were the NVIDIA APIs, which at first were just the NVIDIA APIs, then they became CUDA. Then for graphics, NVIDIA embraced this open thing called OpenGL. And then Apple went through the same exact thing. On the Mac, you could download drivers, you could install an NVIDIA card. But the APIs, and then they supported OpenGL for a while.
But they always wanted you to use their own stuff. And the phone did away with all of that, and Marable did away with all of that, and it was all in on Apple. Now, the good news for Apple was the native graphics were just outstanding, and they've always been great.
On the PC side, Intel was so far behind that it just kept pulling both NVIDIA and ATI slash AMD to be, you know, what you used if you used Photoshop or made movies or were just graphic intensive. And so in the next few weeks, we'll know what Apple is going to do for these APIs. And more importantly, the models themselves and the runtime.
I mean, NVIDIA has an enormous investment in the open source models and tuning them through their hardware. And the ecosystem has done a great job, as evidenced by the Mac minis, of tuning those APIs for the Mac. But that has nothing to do with the phones. And so that's an operating system difference. And the number of phone people is large, and as we know, the hardware was the same.
Now, it's not quite the same, blah, blah, blah, amount of memory, all that stuff. But it's very interesting to see the details of Microsoft and then what Apple chooses to do.
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