RadixJournal - Think Different

00:00:00.000 this is just a rundown from chat gpt when cook took over in 2011 apple was already large but

00:00:11.520 still heavily tied to the iphone cycle apple's market value rose from about 350 billion

00:00:18.360 that's something to four trillion the market value is the total amount of equities out there

00:00:29.180 If you were to purchase Apple through buying up stock, you would have to gather together $4 trillion.

00:00:37.160 The iPhone still accounts for around 60% of revenue, but Comp expanded services, Apple Music, TV+, Apple Pay, and to major second pillar.

00:00:49.220 They have a massive installer base of $2.5 billion supporting services growth.

00:00:55.520 uh stock is up uh one uh 1200 percent over cook's tenure i mean there are some

00:01:06.020 remarkable things um tim cook came from the world of logistics

00:01:12.400 he's not a design guy he's not a software guy um he is younger than steve jobs and thus wasn't

00:01:23.920 not that much younger but younger than steve jobs he he wasn't really one of these tech kids

00:01:31.220 doing some of the hijinks that was and steve jobs were up to making free long distance phone calls

00:01:39.600 and trying to hack banks through the telephone network and building computers in your garage and

00:01:46.560 all of that kind of stuff. I think he did maintain Apple at a very good rate. It increased at about

00:01:56.420 the same level of growth as Google. Now, it didn't increase anywhere close as something like

00:02:04.860 Nvidia, though Nvidia might be in a huge bubble, it had some real problems that I think are worth

00:02:16.800 pointing out. The Apple car, actually, it was called Project Titan, and that took up

00:02:29.140 billions of dollars um they were first trying to make a car that would have the original idea

00:02:41.580 was radical it would have and this was actually steve job's idea it would have no steering wheel

00:02:47.860 it would have no acceleration pedal it would have no brake pedal it would be totally autonomous

00:02:54.140 affordable for a middle-class family and you just hop in and it would take you where

00:03:00.720 places and they worked on this and worked on this they spent billions on this and they wrote it all

00:03:09.940 off which that alone makes me a little bit skeptical in terms of the tesla model now the

00:03:22.360 Tesla the Apple car would have been an electric car presumably but the Tesla model of autonomous

00:03:30.240 driving I have actually tested this out with three people who own Teslas that I happen to be in and

00:03:41.440 it was pretty interesting it was very neat the car was driving on its own and it was using

00:03:49.200 cameras to gain information from cars around it um you also had to be paying attention

00:03:58.360 so the dream of you can just sit back tell your car where you want to go and it will take you

00:04:07.040 there i think is still very very far away because it might be a bit relaxing to kind of let the car

00:04:15.700 go through traffic but you can't really take your mind off the road and it will actually tell you

00:04:24.700 to pay attention if you start looking down or fiddling with things or things like that so

00:04:28.940 we'll see maybe this is a stepping stone towards total autonomous driving or maybe not but

00:04:39.040 But notions that were talked about, even in like 2010, of, for instance, Uber purchasing fleets of Apple cars, and they're just like moving around Austin or New York City or wherever, and I still think we're far away from this.

00:04:57.940 Now, there are some autonomous Ubers, taxis in Austin.

00:05:02.000 I've yet to take one.

00:05:04.660 But we'll see about all of this.

00:05:09.840 It's very interesting.

00:05:10.820 But at the very least, Apple failed there.

00:05:13.560 Apple failed to jump on the AI bubble.

00:05:16.820 I mean, one thing that I've noticed with Siri is Siri was released in 2011.

00:05:22.200 And I'm not sure that Siri has really improved that much since the beta stage.

00:05:28.880 The idea of Siri set a timer for three minutes, that she is very good at that.

00:05:34.500 Siri play U2's The Joshua Tree.

00:05:38.920 She can do that.

00:05:40.320 She's integrated with Apple Music.

00:05:44.220 More than that, I'm not sure Siri's capacity has increased all that much.

00:05:51.440 and Apple sort of lost out on the AI game

00:05:55.400 and they're now integrating with these third parties.

00:05:58.040 They're integrating with ChatGPT.

00:06:00.060 I think they're actually moving to Google Gemini

00:06:02.660 for AI, you know, LLM basically.

00:06:05.880 So they haven't done it themselves

00:06:08.120 and they had billions upon billions of dollars to burn.

00:06:12.100 Now, Apple did get in during with Tim Cook,

00:06:15.600 they got into the movie business

00:06:17.520 And Apple never produced music.

00:06:22.040 I think there were a few Apple originals on iTunes where you could, you know, a band would play live at an Apple store or something.

00:06:33.140 I'm using this as an exception to prove the rule.

00:06:35.620 Basically, they never produced original content.

00:06:38.100 They now are.

00:06:39.660 And some of that content is pretty decent, actually, streaming content.

00:06:44.280 I've watched a lot of it.

00:06:45.820 um they're using existing hollywood studios i think sony produced pluribus um f1 someone

00:06:55.180 mentioned in the chat is an is an interesting example um there are others example i i other

00:07:02.100 examples i saw that presumed innocence um sort of uh it was a remake of a harrison ford movie

00:07:09.560 which was a remake of a novel from the 1980s and i actually enjoyed it it was good um

00:07:14.760 but i i don't think they've really rethought anything in that direction

00:07:23.440 um and they have lost billions of dollars with apple tv ultimately even if they are bringing

00:07:30.740 in revenue streams uh they have not really covered the cost in that direction the apple watch don't

00:07:40.160 you think that i don't want to insult anyone on this program but don't you think the apple watch

00:07:47.560 is a bit cringe am i right here you know when you see in 2007 if you had an iphone

00:07:58.060 that really meant that you were an early adopter ahead of the game or you were part of the cult of

00:08:04.120 mac which i i will talk about in a little bit i'm not sure you think that about an apple watch

00:08:11.520 now some people might really like it and it's good for exercise or what have you but i find it a bit

00:08:20.740 cringe to be honest i've only seen like working like kind of like middle class type of people

00:08:28.420 like average people with them i've never seen like a rich guy with an apple watch

00:08:33.260 yes they're still wearing a swiss watch i presume if they're a rich guy um i think they i think they

00:08:42.500 use it for health data basically which is a huge market but not the creative side which is where

00:08:49.100 apple kind of made its name which which was more with the creative audience and they never they

00:08:54.840 did miss the boat on all of the generative ai things and music and film things like that where

00:09:01.280 they could have made a difference they kind of totally dropped the ball on that they could have

00:09:06.200 just purchased the disney company in cash and they didn't do something like that i i and i think apple

00:09:17.400 would probably the thing that they are good at is being stewards of middle class classy

00:09:24.440 entertainment uh i think that would have been a good move actually why do you are you producing

00:09:30.780 original content that you're just farming out to studios anyway why don't you just buy disney

00:09:36.160 and integrate apple stores into disney world and so on maybe they tried to do this and disney

00:09:45.880 wouldn't sell i don't know but um i i think that would have probably been a more interesting move

00:09:52.780 than what they ultimately did uh the iphone i can't tell a difference between variations on the

00:10:01.620 iphone um it has reached peak we have reached peak iphone and i think we probably reached it

00:10:08.220 more than 10 years ago now that doesn't mean it's not going to be a profitable business

00:10:15.360 profitable business it's out there it still does have a little bit of that cachet a little bit of

00:10:22.520 status signaling this left but it also has been democratized to the degree that i don't know if

00:10:30.120 it's really a status signal as much as it was say in 2007 through 2014 maybe um i i don't know i i

00:10:42.820 think tim cook i don't want to bash him i mean someone who increased revenue to this degree

00:10:48.820 how can you really bash him he did his job but i i think apple has changed i mean i i remember my

00:10:58.360 father owned a macintosh it was not the original mac but it was very early and i eventually

00:11:06.740 inherited it i believe it was a mac se and those were selling for something like four or five

00:11:13.560 grand which was it's probably the equivalent of like

00:11:18.820 12 or 15 grand now it's like a a uh honda a used honda at this point i mean pretty expensive is

00:11:26.540 what i'm saying and i remember even playing on it when i was eight or nine and it was pretty

00:11:33.480 magical doing mick paint and so on um that was real innovation and i i also remember when i was

00:11:43.940 a lot younger the mac versus pc wars where mac was just easier to use cooler we liked the products

00:11:55.040 etc pc was lame that that what became the mac versus pc ad campaign in the 2000s was prefaced

00:12:05.980 by organic arguments between mac users and pc users for like 15 or 20 years and the mac guy

00:12:15.980 looked like keanu reeves and he was like a creative director graphic designer just a cool

00:12:23.680 guy who like edited his own movies and it was cool itunes was very cool um steve

00:12:34.780 saw a problem

00:12:37.000 which was that the age

00:12:38.920 of CDs was

00:12:40.520 going away. Vinyl was way

00:12:43.020 dead. CDs were going away

00:12:44.960 because of Napster. You could just

00:12:47.080 download an mp3

00:12:48.540 at any point

00:12:50.280 and there's just no

00:12:52.840 reason to buy a CD.

00:12:55.240 He recognized that problem

00:12:56.780 and he offered corporations a

00:12:58.960 solution which was

00:13:00.820 we can offer a price

00:13:02.940 for a song that's so low

00:13:04.640 that it doesn't it's not worth your while to go steal it 99 cents for a song which also just

00:13:12.300 disaggregated music it changed the notion of an album where an album is sort of irrelevant even

00:13:20.520 though albums are certainly released and produced albums are sort of irrelevant now you could

00:13:26.020 download the song and corporations could make money and corporations those record labels were

00:13:30.400 reeling in the late 90s and early 2000s i remember this i mean i think i've mentioned this before

00:13:36.440 when i was at the university of virginia the computer lab would have it would be all pcs

00:13:41.860 because windows just dominated and it would be all pcs and there'd be like two macs in the corner

00:13:48.560 for the weirdos who wanted to use them but i also remember going to computer labs you know let's

00:13:55.360 let's say at like 10 p.m on a Thursday or something and everyone the computer labs were

00:14:02.160 packed because everyone there was just downloading stuff from Napster it was a disaster and Apple

00:14:09.080 sort of associated itself with cool pop music even alternative pop music cold play was sort

00:14:17.120 of the soundtrack of the iPod the iPod was using a solid state drive eventually it was originally

00:14:23.500 the original ipod was using a spinning hard drive they eventually got to the point where

00:14:27.660 they could use a solid state drive and it was um minuscule yeah someone said u2 was also part of

00:14:34.480 that it's this tiny little ipod with 500 songs that is so much more than a cd walkman or a cassette

00:14:43.060 tape from years past and it was just very cool and apple was cool but it was able to hang on to

00:14:52.440 its sort of alt nerdiness as well that it maintained throughout the 80s and 90s even

00:15:01.720 when Steve had been kicked out it was still interesting to use a Mac and I feel like post

00:15:10.640 Tim Cook Apple is just another company and it's not special or interesting to use a Mac

00:15:21.240 i think they still use it in studios buy aluminum macbook pros uh but it just wasn't special

00:15:29.660 now one thing that's very interesting steve was around during the development of the first i guess

00:15:34.620 like m1 chip which was the apple designed built in taiwan but apple designed microchip for the

00:15:41.700 iphone so they weren't using a off the shelf like an intel ship or something they were designing it

00:15:47.120 themselves and they eventually got to the point where you can put that into a mac and at this

00:15:53.700 point my mac now i guess is going on oh my uh four years and i there was i have no desire or need to

00:16:03.120 get a new one it is um i don't know what to say the we've might we might have reached peak laptop

00:16:12.940 where an aluminum chassis, minimalist,

00:16:18.140 Johnny Ive design is just it

00:16:21.580 and you don't need to buy a new laptop for 10 years.

00:16:25.500 And actually they introduced an interesting product

00:16:28.120 called the Neo that I have no reason to buy,

00:16:32.340 but I think it's like a 13-inch laptop.

00:16:34.840 It's $500.

00:16:36.520 And what they were seeing is that the MacBook Airs

00:16:40.140 and MacBook Pros,

00:16:41.640 MacBook Airs you can get for like $1,000.

00:16:44.460 MacBook Pros are probably two and a half or something.

00:16:47.100 But basically, no one was buying new MacBook Pros

00:16:51.460 because they lasted so long.

00:16:52.840 And so there was a huge market on eBay for used MacBook Pros

00:16:56.860 that you could buy for $500.

00:16:58.580 So they said, we got to get some of that money.

00:17:00.920 We're going to release a cheap laptop.

00:17:02.400 But it still is aluminum.

00:17:04.580 And that is, it's metal.

00:17:06.280 It's not plastic.

00:17:07.660 And it works great and has a high-definition screen.

00:17:10.820 and etc it's it's perfectly adequate for school you don't even need to ask your parents for money

00:17:18.660 you can finance it on a firm or clarina or whatever uh it's a very good product but it is

00:17:25.880 the total mainstreaming of apple so i don't know i i guess it's you know it's interesting it's a

00:17:31.720 success story and i don't really have anything against tim cook but i i would just say that

00:17:38.500 the magic is gone.

RadixJournal - April 24, 2026

Think Different

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript