422: ‘A Monkey on a Rock’, With Stephen Hackett

And now the show—somehow you have never been on this podcast, and the only person to blame is me. Let me start with the obvious: your home base is 512pixels. Where does the name come from?

Thanks for having me. 512pixels honors the original compact Mac. People remember five twelve by three eighty four, but the Mac’s screen was actually five twelve by three forty two. I have one on the shelf—a family gift. Great little machine. All computers should have handles.

I love that. On retail, I was just linking the classic claim chowder that Apple Stores would flop because Gateway failed and Best Buy would be mad. Meanwhile Apple retail wound up number one by revenue per square foot. I grew up with Silo and sad Macs in dark corners, and here in Philly Bundy Typewriter—now Bundy Computer—still does excellent authorized repairs. Anyway, give us the Dr. Drang G4 Cube story.

He went to CompUSA to see if the fanless G4 Cube ran hot, hovered his hand over the top, and it overheated and shut down. He swears he did not touch it—and then he kept going back and doing it, a little cat-and-mouse with the Cube.

I believe him, but I suspect those demo units were already cooking. One more pre-show topic: I barely tracked Google I O this year. Did you watch it?

I did. They cleared Android news a few days early because the keynote was wall-to-wall AI—new image and video generation, developer tools, and paid Gemini tiers. There is a standard plan and a seriously expensive tier meant for heavy use.

Right—ChatGPT Pro is twenty bucks a month, and Google now has a two hundred fifty dollar tier. Wild from a company that historically gave consumers everything free. But between cloud, selling software to enterprises, and the ad business under antitrust threat, paid access fits. Meanwhile I am still on a free Gmail from forever, and iCloud is somehow still five gigabytes. Apple kept base iPhones at sixteen gigs for ages. I am also sitting on the two Apple ID mess and nervous about merging even though they finally allow it.

Two things at Google: ads could get broken up, and running these models is insanely expensive. Locally I have been covering XAI building massive sites here—the utilities are not ready, they are rolling in gas turbines—and the community is rightly worried. On the Apple side my family sits around one point nine terabytes. I could not truly merge my IDs, so I put my old purchase ID in Family Sharing as Legacy Stephen and share purchases that way.

On to the other I O: OpenAI plus Jony Ive. I do not love the lowercase styling, but the name works—input and output at both the most basic and the most abstract levels. Ive just did a fascinating interview where he basically said he is uneasy about how much time we spend on phones. Chat as an interface is terrific; the problem is the doomscroll swipe swipe swipe that leaves you hollow.

Humane pitched the same screen-time angst, and I feel it—personally and as a parent. But AI brings its own messes: data, power, water, and social harms like body image issues or radicalization. Covering this is the most complicated thing I have done—friends who never ask me about tech are asking about AI—and when it is in your backyard, like those turbines here, the tradeoffs get very real.

Energy is a real concern, but context matters. And there is an Amazon precedent: lose money while you build uncatchable infrastructure, then profit for years. OpenAI reportedly expects to lose forty four billion dollars through twenty twenty nine. Eventually the bill comes due, and the question is who is left standing.

It will not be everyone. OpenAI leads, Anthropic is interesting, and now we are seeing the turn from tools to products—ChatGPT on your phone. Also, as a small-business founder, I am allergic to the burn-cash-for-years model. We had to make money or go get real jobs.

Why I O is not Humane: Humane tried to replace the phone—that was hubris. Altman says this should be to the phone what the phone was to the laptop—complementary. And this is a true partnership, not a rented API. He even framed current AI as the terminal era and teased building the GUI of AI—the Macintosh moment. My hunch is a companion you talk to, not a pin, which makes the upside big and the risks bigger. We have already seen people project sentience onto chatbots.

There are ugly abuses—people asking models to undress photos—and potential good, like companionship for isolated folks or help for people with hearing loss. Whatever they ship, it is heavy stuff, and I want to hear their reasoning as much as see the product. Also, yes, their San Francisco love letter looks nicer than my experience.

Meta’s glasses are just cameras, and Vision Pro is ambitious but maybe aimed the wrong way for mass desire. What gives me confidence here is the talent: a who’s who from the iPhone era. Apple still has great people, but we see fewer names, and I miss when keynotes nerded out on subpixels or the unibody.

Design used to sit higher on the pedestal publicly—remember Johnny on stage explaining how we milled MacBook Pros from a solid block. Now we see more diverse faces across teams, which is good, but the design process gets fewer spotlights.

On Apple leadership, I liked Syracuse’s piece because it was not a hit job. Rather than fan fiction about replacing Tim Cook, I want Cook to change his mind on a few big things and write Thoughts on the App Store the way Jobs wrote Thoughts on Flash. Meanwhile, politics intrudes: Trump posted that Apple should pay a twenty five percent tariff unless iPhones are made in America. On Truth Social—his blog, really.

I read it on Truth Social while the site kept throwing errors. Setting aside the politics, it is impossible. Even the low volume Mac Pro assembled in Texas struggled to source parts domestically. With iPhone, every tiny screw and subassembly lives in the Chinese supply chain.

China also has a vast vocational pipeline of semi-engineers for this intricate work, often on twelve-hour shifts. And the scale is bonkers: just for the United States you need roughly one hundred and four iPhones a minute, twenty four hours a day, all year. Building that stateside would take years and hundreds of billions, and no sane company would start on a whim of a tariff tweet.

On TSMC and the Chips Act, the scale and culture differences are real. In Taiwan, if a critical machine dies at one in the morning, the engineer just goes in. Here, it is, I will come in early. Reasonable, sure, but different. Now, tariffs: Trump keeps saying foreign countries pay, then tells Walmart to eat the tariff, and even calls it a twenty five percent fee Apple will pay. You cannot have it both ways.

You cannot. A friend who runs a small product company literally cannot source one metal part in the U.S.; it has to come from China. When tariffs spiked, he thought he would go out of business. Retailers pass tariffs to customers. It is not China or India paying; it is us.

Apple is in a more precarious spot than big box stores. Those guys can just raise prices if product shows up. If Apple cannot get iPhones in, that is existential. You can see the India push and even today’s short term trade‑in boosts as pressure valves.

I am seeing spending pulled forward. Apple Stores are slammed. People who might have waited a year are buying now because they want today’s price and a known camera, not a maybe better camera at a higher price in the fall.

That anxiety is rational. Year‑over‑year camera gains are incremental, but a jump from one thousand two hundred dollars to one thousand four hundred or one thousand five hundred dollars is not. Why gamble on pricing when you can lock it in now?

And if the next iPhone keynote opens in total darkness with Joz, we will all know what is coming.

Bonus round: Fortnite is back in the App Store. What is your take?

I cannot believe it has been five years. The injunction opened web payment links, but Epic still broke the developer agreement. Apple sat on the resubmission until the judge said, work it out or see me. It is good that it is back. Families with ask‑to‑buy still funnel some purchases through Apple, and Apple makes something again. I wish Apple had just approved it without the judicial nudge.

Apple said nothing publicly and stayed on solid legal ground since the twenty twenty one trial: kicking Fortnite was fine, but anti‑steering was indefensible. If Apple had conceded linkouts and basic user messaging years ago, they would have had a clean win. Instead, they tried that scare‑sheet path with twenty seven percent, seven‑day tracking, and audits. That never matched the plain language of the injunction, and the court called it.

That scare design was petty and over the top. The judge saw through it. And opening the web does not erase App Store revenue. Data shows you lose conversion when you push people to the web. Plenty will stick with in‑app purchase.

I doubt services revenue moves more than a pixel on the chart. People like the convenience of in‑app purchase. Epic’s dual‑button flow puts choices on equal footing, and a lot of folks will still pick the familiar Apple flow. Honestly, Epic’s UI is fairer to in‑app purchase than Apple’s original scare screens were to linkouts.

Epic kept it neutral. Apple’s earlier copy used a developer’s legal name to spook users. That was gross.

As a developer, I have lived that legal‑name confusion. The Slack messages exposed in court made it worse: people expected leadership would love a scary approach. Slack invites flippancy and leaves a permanent record of it.

That, culturally, is what bothers me. Making something scary to please a boss does not match the Apple I picture. There are tons of great people there, but this was off.

Benedict Evans nailed it: Apple delights customers and squeezes suppliers. They treated developers like suppliers. Developer sentiment is the worst I have seen. Goodwill is hard to price, but it is real, and Apple has burned a lot of it.

Look at VisionOS. There are many reasons it is quiet, but if the deal is the same, why would big companies invest? The last time Apple got a platform to scale, it used that leverage hard.

Squeeze too hard and things break. The line between competition and anti‑competition blurs fast.

A simple move like ninety‑ten would help immediately. Money matters, but so do respect, tooling, and tone. They need to unwind a lot.

Do it pre‑WWDC so you do not bog down the keynote. Apple can message a cut as an innovation in online payments, and overnight it would feel like the ship is turning.

It would make them competitive with the web and keep more business. From the outside, it seems obvious. The wait is frustrating.

Kindle is the user‑hostile example. For fifteen‑plus years you could not buy a book in the app or even see how. Tens of millions probably blamed themselves. Apple’s DNA is to make that kind of thing simple. This was the opposite.

Same with refunds: Apple controls them, but users email the developer, cannot get help, and leave a one‑star review. In a normal shop you would just give the money back.

Exactly. Indie devs are like neighborhood shopkeepers. Let them make it right for a customer.

The rest of the world manages this and it works fine.