Ask Paul: May 23 (Premium)

Well, that was quite the week. But we have a three-day weekend to recover. And I don’t know about you, but I need it But first, another great set of reader questions. You’re all wondering about the same things I am, and that makes sense. But we do live in interesting times.

? Mr. Mojo Risin’

David-Fake asks:

Has Apple kind of lost its mojo? Don’t get me wrong, the iPhone is an undeniable juggernaut and they are the only company that makes a tablet worth buying…but, they have had a lot of failures and abandonware/vaporware recently. I am not an Apple hater but I have to think back to 2013 and the “can’t innovate my ass” quote. Kind of…

P.S. Apple remains the, or one of the , most valuable companies in the world. So there is that.

I just finished a book called Apple and China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company that I’ll be writing about soon. It’s the best business book in maybe a decade and the first to dive deep into Apple as a company in the modern era. It’s incredible. Like the recent book Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, which is about Facebook/Meta, it explains how this company not only bowed down to the totalitarian regime in China but in fact gave the country the tools it needs to defeat and then obsolete U.S. technologies. In this case, enabling companies like Huawei and OPPO to make technically superior smartphones. Apple is so central to this, I feel that it’s literally treasonous. But I’ll get to that when I write about that book.

For now, I’ll just say that Apple had a historically unique run of success from the iPod to the iPhone and, to a lesser degree, to the iPad, and that it was inevitable that future hardware products would experience diminishing returns. Apple Watch is successful but has a lower ceiling than iPad and Mac, which have a much lower ceiling than iPhone (units/revenues, however you care to measure these things). Same with AirPods, Apple TV, Vision Pro, and whatever other devices. To keep growth going, it has expanded into services, which are higher margin and dependent on the iPhone as a halo product. And it has demanded ever more efficiency/higher margins from the human rights-abusing factories and supply chains in China, while looking the other way. It cannot make the iPhone or anything else anywhere but China. Everything in the iPhone comes from China. You can assemble the thing in India, I guess. But that phone and all its components are not coming from India, ever. Or the US. That is laughable.

But in some ways, looking to Apple to make another iPhone-level success is unreasonable and unfair, this is a once in a lifetime-type halo product, like Windows was for Microsoft. But that’s what we do. The key to Apple’s reputation is its routine way of delighting customers, whether it’s through adding unique value to existing products or cross-device experiences, or whatever. You open a box and it’s amazing. They’re really good at this.

The failure of Apple Intelligence, to me, isn’t the technical side or that conversational Siri has been delayed, it’s that Apple went off script and marketed something they didn’t have yet. This is unusual, but not unprecedented: It often promotes a few features that don’t arrive in the original release. But the scope of it was unique, and it’s easy to see desperation there. It understood that it was behind, its privacy posture made moving quickly like Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft do impossible, but it had to do something. It’s under pressure from regulators to open up its platforms, but the locked down ecosystem is key to its success, and that’s fragile in many ways. If you could just replace Safari with Chrome, really, everyone would. If you could just replace Siri with ChatGPT, everyone would. So they steer users with the promise of better experiences. Which they do often deliver, but at the expense of choice, which limits innovation.

So I don’t know. Even if Steve Jobs was alive and running the company, Apple would have stumbled with new hardware, that was never going to last. It certainly wouldn’t be as financially successful, Tim Cook is rather relentless about the business part of the business, if that makes sense. He compromises where Jobs would not, and he holds firm on things Jobs wouldn’t care about. If you look at Microsoft continuing to use the Windows model with other offerings way past the time it made sense, you can see some of the same things happening with Apple. You get used to doing things a certain way because it always worked. And then it doesn’t.

Apple, like Google, is so dominant that it’s easy to get comfortable. But Apple, like Google, is a one product company that is suddenly under attack from all sides, and you can see the vulnerability there. Things change. Apple’s incredible wealth means it can coast for basically forever and stay afloat. The key is finding the next big thing and changing. Microsoft did it with the cloud. Apple has yet to do. But neither has Google. In both cases, they have plenty of time. And for Apple, especially, a very loyal user base. It just made $95 billion in a non-holiday (non-iPhone launch) quarter. It’s going to be OK.

? We’re all creators

wmurd118 asks:

Hi Paul, this may be a silly question. But will all PCs be copilot PCs? My use is primarily for email and wandering around the net and I don’t see the need for AI even though I do use Gemini a little on my iPad. I do have a single subscription to 365 but my primary use for that is OneDrive. If there’s a huge price difference between copilot PCs and non is there really a reason to spend the extra?

Hm. I’m not sure that there is a huge price difference, but the initial models were premium laptops, and maybe that skewed things a bit. Since then, Qualcomm has introduced lower-price Snapdragon X Plus (8-core) and then Snapdragon X processor models to address the mid-market, meaning laptops that cost $600 to $900. And while we didn’t write about this (yet)–to be fair, things were more than a bit busy between Build and Google I/O–HP, Lenovo, and others announced new mid-range Snapdragon-based PCs at Computex this week too.

You may be thinking of the AMD and Intel-based PCs, however. And yes, in those cases, the PCs are generally premium laptops. For example, Intel still sells Core processors for lower prices than the Core Ultra versions that are Copilot+ PC compliant. But the advances we see in these processors will come down-market in time, as they have on the Qualcomm side already.

We can think of this like the automobile market, where initially expensive or luxury features appear first in high-end models but then that stuff filters down to other parts of the market in time. This was true of safety features like airbags, too.

To answer your question, yes. Eventually, all PCs will have the components and features that are today exclusive to Copilot+ PC. This is inevitable. Today, for your use cases, no, you don’t “need” a Copilot+ PC, though the battery life, efficiency, and performance of Snapdragon X-based PCs is really nice to have and worth the money. As is the raw and gaming performance of the latest AMD Zen 5-based PCs. Modern computers are incredible. Need is a strong term, few need the latest and greatest. But want is a strong term, too. I could never go back to a non-Copilot+ PC, personally. I see great value in these products, and real-world advantages. But needs/wants vary.

? Make the web great again

j5 asks:

Hi Paul, have you heard about the Dead Internet Theory? What are you thoughts on it? Personally, I miss the old days of the internet before social media and smartphones “siloed” everything to apps, social media sites, and aggregation sites? It was fun, exciting, what cool things am I going to find actually “surfing the web” (finding what’s out there). Now it’s like getting online is just using social media and everything is AI bot generated slop.

Hm. The early web was unprofessional and ridiculous in some ways, and the arrival of high-quality/professional content from major publishers helped overcome that. I guess we all have different web/online experiences. I use social media apps on mobile, but never on desktop. I do a lot of reading in apps and on the web, and across devices. Surfing the web isn’t really a thing now, but that speaks to the maturity of the market. In the early days of TV, you’d have to walk up to the thing and spin a nob, stopping at each channel to see what was on. That was surfing then. We got TV Guide, a paper-based schedule that was that era’s Yahoo and mailed to our house each week. Then we got more channels through cable TV and an onscreen guide. And then services. And search. And now there are an infinite number of places to find content. Was that TV with a nob better than cable TV today? No. We can be nostalgic about it. But it was tedious.

I think it’s clearly obvious that there’s hardly any genuine and sincere websites out there anymore. Thank you thurrott.com! Everyone is focused on capturing your attention, gotcha headlines, FOLLOWING what’s popular, etc.

Not to defend that, but this is a business. At some point, it has to be sustainable. The original sin, so to speak, of the web was that there was no business model and so it turned into being ad-based. Just like TV. And as the number of options grew–a good thing in isolation–the need to be aggressive in attracting eyeballs got more intense, and so we have what we have. A bad thing, in some ways. But there is good content out there, too.

I remember how fun and interesting it was checking people’s personal Geocities websites was. I can still remember this one guy’s StarCraft Geocity site, had the main theme song playing when you went to the homepage, his guest book and checking everyone’s personal sites out, his blog geeking out about StarCraft and making custom maps and mods. There’s nothing like that anymore. There’s mod sites but EVERYTHING is behind having to create logins and sign-ups, all the crazy paywalls.

Well. Yes. But I don’t think anyone would want to go back to that era per se. The good news is that one could put up blogs like that now if they wanted to–there are services like Substack that are free to you as a content publisher–and many do. In fact, there are probably more now than ever, It’s just that they’re competing with many millions of other sites. That guy with the StarCraft GeoCities page probably wasn’t making a living off that.

You’ve been a tech journalist for awhile, do you see the lack of genuine and original content online?

Yep. Every single day. This is why I make fun of terrible headlines on Twitter/X, etc. Sites like Neowin just regurgitate original content in broken English and will be replaced soon by AI because it’s both better and cheaper. If you want to see a lot of crap in one place, just look at the news feed in Widgets in Windows 11. It’s everywhere.

This is the other side of the democratization of technology. It’s amazing that anyone can publish anything online right now. But it’s also terrible because most people aren’t good at it, have fringe/extreme ideas, etc. The ability to curate content to our interests means that’s all we see, and that’s true whether you do it on purpose or some news app pays attention to what you do read and then only shows you that. So we have to work at it a bit. Finding the good stuff in all the crap can be difficult. This is why Artifact was such a great app until it disappeared–there was no way to make money doing that, go figure–and why Apple News (if you’re on that side of the fence) is so good today.

I have to remind myself sometimes that it’s always been this way. When I came to Windows NT Magazine in 1998/1999, a lot of the writers and editors there looked down on me because I was from the web, was what we later called a blogger. That publication is long gone. As are all those jobs. What we got on the other side is both good and bad. And I look down on what came after me, whether it’s the YouTube idiots or whatever other modern content creators. The barrier for entry keeps lowering, but so does the quality bar. Not always. Again, there is good content, too.

All the political and legal red tape on influencing the web? And of course AI dominating the tech headlines. And AI written articles, posts, and even YouTube channels all AI generated stuff. Sorry, I know I kind of went on a rant and tangent. But dang nab it (old man yelling at the sky) I want my original “web” back!

You don’t though. You really don’t. But what you do want, I think, is good content. And it is out there.

? Proton drive engaged

AnOldAmigaUser asks:

I know that you are using Proton Pass as a password manager. Do you see yourself moving more into their suite of products over time? Have you tried Docs?

Yes. I pay for a Proton subscription specifically to entice me to use more of their stuff, but so far, it’s still in the experimental stage. I use Proton Pass every day on every device, and it’s amazing. I don’t think I ever wrote an article with this title, but I meant to: Proton Pass is the gateway drug for the Proton ecosystem. Or what I might today call the Little Tech ecosystem. It works so well.

Beyond that, I don’t use too many of the other Proton products regularly, at least so far. I’ve been using Proton Drive a bit, though I feel like the Synology Drive stuff on the NAS I just got may negate that need. Mail and Calendar are solid, but Gmail/Calendar are borderline perfect, so that’s a tough switch. Proton VPN sometimes, always in Mexico. But for anyone looking to edge away from Big Tech, this is the ideal company and the products and services they do offer are generally excellent. They can be expensive. That’s part of the draw with Big Tech, right? You don’t pay for a lot of this stuff directly. You pay indirectly.

Regarding Proton Docs, they have to do this. It seems fine. But the issue with any writing tool, for me, is that it has to work with my workflow. And that begins and ends with WordPress, which we use to host the site. And if I write something in a word processor, a Markdown or text editor, or whatever it is, native, web, whatever, it has to paste into WordPress cleanly, or I can’t do it. Notion is perfect at this, Obsidian is terrible, and there are literally no clean HTML output add-ons, so I can never use Obsidian. With Proton Docs, I get what I see with Google Docs, which is unclean HTML code on the backend, so I cannot use it.

But that’s just me. For most people, this is not an issue. I strongly recommend that everyone try these products, just take a look.

On an unrelated note, are you watching Andor?

I haven’t had the time, sorry. This is happening a lot lately, and not just with TV, also audiobooks, podcasts, whatever. I need to figure that out.

? This time it’s personal

train_wreck asks:

The judge in the Apple case has mentioned criminal contempt charges for Apple executives. Do you think this, or any other criminal charges, could actually happen?

I’ve been writing about antitrust and Big Tech since the late 1990s, and while this was an unfamiliar topic to me at first, Microsoft’s two big antitrust trials were all the grounding I needed. And so I’m pretty well versed in all that now. But when Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers came down on Apple for its abuses in Epic v. Apple, I was taken aback by how angry she was at the company, which was deserved. And I have never seen a judge refer an individual to an attorney general for criminal charges. That was new to me.

So I’m right back where I was 25 years ago when I was trying to figure out the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and how or if it might apply to Microsoft’s anticompetitive behavior. I’m in uncharted territory here. If you read her order, you can see for yourself that she specifically called on Apple to name the individual responsible for the decision to block Fortnite from the App Store. And given her criminal charges referral in the previous order, the threat there was as clear to me as it was to Apple: She would absolutely refer that individual to the attorney general to investigate and potentially charge criminally.

Without understanding the law there, this seems smart to me. Apple has behaved with impunity and no sense of responsibility, here and in the EU, and the worst thing that’s happened is a fee that it can pay with petty cash. Threatening the individuals responsible for the behavior may be the only way to get Apple to do the right thing. It certainly worked in this case. Apple suddenly and silently approved Fortnite right after she threatened them. This is a good blueprint for other antitrust cases. This judge found a way to get Apple to wake the f up and move.

? High impact

lvthunder asks:

What do you think is the most impactful announcement from Build?

I started writing about this on Sunday, and it was so busy this week, I never had time to get to far into it. And then Google I/O happened, and I started thinking about both companies and what was happening with AI, and I figured maybe I could expand that into something bigger. And when I started to work on that on the first plane yesterday, I instead found myself writing what became Fear and Loathing in Seattle (Premium), which is what happens sometimes. These things take on a life of their own.

Which I’m OK with. But I do want to address my key takeaways from Build (and I/O). And at a high level, I see some key themes there.

• I often write about the need for orchestration, and while many may not understand what that means or why it’s important, you can see why easily enough by looking at all the stupid model choices you get with any AI chatbot: Why the frick are we picking models? The AI should just do that.

• Microsoft previously described wave two of its AI push as being agentic, these are services that go off on our behalf and do things for us, reporting back as needed. But Build introduced the notion of multiple agents, working with each other on our behalf, and that’s as obvious a need to me as orchestration.

• For that to work, we need standards, and that means that every AI and every service need to be able to communicate with each other the same way. This system can’t work otherwise, but it also means that these competitors–Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, whatever–have to agree on those standards. And they have. That’s what MCP and A2A are all about.

• For that to work we also need access to content. AI to date has been scraping the web, basically, but in the way that HTTP and HTML standardized the publishing of content on the web, NLWeb accomplishes two things related to AI and web-based content. You as a website owner can use NLWeb to give your customers a natural language way to access your content (a sort of replacement for search). And you can optionally agree to allow AI agents to access that content and then include that in the work they’re doing on behalf of people.

And it is all those things combined–agents, agent to agent interaction, MCP/A2A, and NLWeb–that speak to the maturation of this platform and, to your point, the most impactful announcements to come out of Build. I feel like AI, generally, is the technology that can makes sense of the vast body of information that’s out there on the Internet. And that this stuff is what makes that more real.

This morning, I was writing the above answer and I wanted to link to whatever I had written previously on that topic. And I was reminded for about the millionth time how terrible my site search is. And that I usually just Google it instead of using my search. And that this is a problem I cannot fix, at least not easily. And when I see something like NLWeb, I think there is this potential answer out there. It’s an answer that doesn’t require WordPress to improve or for Robert to write some custom code. It will just work (assuming I’m correct about how it works). And this is exciting to me. I want to fix that. I’ve always wanted to. Suddenly, that feels realistic. And that’s what the big thing I got out of Build.

? Ludicrous speed

gg1 asks:

It’s looking to me like the floodgates of AI-enabled functionality coming out of Microsoft and Google have been opened wider than ever, and it’s hard to even keep track of all features available or coming.

I have rarely felt as overwhelmed as I did this past week. I was pre-briefed by both Microsoft and Google, but in the latter case, the company did not divulge its most impressive advances, and watching the I/O keynote unfold, I couldn’t believe the back-to-back revelations. It was incredible. I am not sure how or when I will ever catch up.

On the one hand, MSFT and Google seem to be operating at a speed that is unsustainable and chaotic. On the other hand, Apple’s more measured approach now comes across to me as just standing still and ineffective.

Same. I’ve defended Apple’s measured approach, but I had a similar reaction, with two immediate thoughts. Apple can side-step its privacy requirements by working with multiple AIs and just throwing up a disclaimer when users opt-in to absolve it. And Apple should work with Microsoft specifically on AI because only it has the data and privacy protection concerns that Apple does, and it may have a similar level of trust. To be fair to Apple, I feel like they get all this, and see the threat. And that explains the pre-announcing of Siri and other Apple Intelligence features, a rarity for Apple.

This may seem like a weird comparison, but if you think back to the early 2000s, Microsoft came under a lot of criticism when Apple shipped Mac OS X with all those innovations. And so it worked to get hardware accelerated graphics, database-back search, and whatever other features out the door because customers were asking for that. But when it finally did ship the graphics bit in Vista, those same customers all complained because their existing PCs didn’t have the graphics capabilities to run it. They did what people wanted and no one was happy.

In Apple’s case, there was a similar pressure. And they announced Apple Intelligence. And then everyone complained when one of the many features it announced was delayed. Given the confines of its privacy promises, Apple could not have moved quicker than it did.

What are your thoughts on the current situation? Do you still believe Apple is the more responsible party here? What do you believe the long-term ‘normal’ will be?

Apple is in a tough spot, but this was self-inflected. its holier-than-thou marketing has put it in a corner. As noted above, it can get around that, and it does so with ChatGPT integration today. So the answer could be to do more of that. It could be to just open up the platform, which we know it will never do. Or it could be to stay the course.

But there are some who have insisted that AI was nonsense, a fad or a bubble, and the hope or expectation there was that this would just pass and then Apple’s “strategy”–its inaction–would be proven correct. All you have to do is watch the Google I/O keynote to see why that is incorrect. AI is real, it’s happening quickly, and Apple, by moving so methodically and slowing, is behind. And it’s getting further behind every day. This is a real threat to its business. And I am curious to see how it responds (at WWDC, presumably), in part because its missteps with Apple Intelligence will inform how it markets whatever comes next. It’s going to very interesting.