Apple’s Phil Schiller is set to have a seat on OpenAI’s board in an ‘Observer’ role, as part of the deal that brings ChatGPT to Apple Intelligence.

According to Bloomberg, Phil Schiller, responsible for leading the App Store and formerly the company’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, “was chosen for the position, according to people familiar with the situation. As a board observer, he won’t be serving as a full-fledged director, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter isn’t public.”

At WWDC 2024 in June, Apple announced a deal to implement OpenAI’s ChatGPT model into the iPhone, iPad, and Mac as part of the company’s Apple Intelligence features. This means users will soon be able to use ChatGPT through the new Siri, once iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia are made available later this year.

Schiller’s ‘Observer’ role means he won’t be able to vote on OpenAI’s board decisions, he’ll only be able to attend the meetings and nothing more.

Bloomberg didn’t report when Schiller would take his seat, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it coincides with the release of the upcoming software updates that feature Apple Intelligence and ChatGPT. Apple says that these updates, as well as tvOS 18 and watchOS 11, will be available later this year.

Which devices will Apple Intelligence support?

Although the upcoming software updates will feature Apple Intelligence, they will initially be available on a limited number of devices. For instance, both the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max will work with Apple Intelligence, as well as Macs and iPads that have an Apple silicon chip.

With Amazon Prime Day 2024 just two weeks away, we’ve compiled a few deals on devices that will support Apple Intelligence later this year, making them a great upgrade for your current setup.

More from iMore

• Apple Intelligence is a shining example of why Apple believes doing things right is better than being first and doing them wrong
• The iPhone's iOS 18 beta 2 update is now available to developers
• Still got an iPhone X? Apple has just classed it as vintage, alongside the original HomePod and AirPods

Twitter seems to have been in a whirlwind of controversies since Elon Musk bought it about three weeks ago. When it comes to controversies, most brands tend to shy away from them, and that has seen some uncertainty pop up around Twitter's future as an advertising platform as companies started pulling their ad campaigns from the website.

The chaos tax isn't just coming in with Twitter losing some adveritsers, but also with the company losing some users. The latest seems to be Apple's Phil Schiller, who has deactivated his Twitter account. While this doesn't automatically have to mean that Twitter is in trouble with Apple, it could signal that trouble may be on the way.

Poor content moderation could spell trouble for Twitter as Apple App Store chief deactivates account

Phil Schiller is the head of events and the App Store at Apple. While he wasn't too active on Twitter, Schiller deactivating his account is potentially a sign of trouble to come. Schiller had been on the platform since 2008 and had over 200,000 followers. In his latest Power On newsletter, Mark Gurman pointed out that it is possible that the lesser moderation on Twitter under the new owner could put it in an awkward situation.

While Apple hasn't yet made any official remarks about advertising on Twitter or about the change in moderation policy, the company might take issue with those things as the platform descends into further chaos.

Twitter has plans to increase monetization, and Apple as well as Google will be crucial in that journey. With the company's revamped Twitter Blue subscription coming later this month, it will be unfortunate if Apple takes objection to the new verification process and content moderation policy. We could potentially even see Apple removing the app from App Store, making the best iPhones unable to use the app.

It's no secret that Apple makes billions of dollars yearly on its iconic App Store. However, it might surprise you that the iPhone maker could be making much more if it weren't for Phil Schiller.

According to The Information, Schiller has taken a cautious approach regarding app promotion since taking over the App Store from Eddy Cue in 2016. The results have been a series of decisions that "balance what's best for developers, users and Apple's reputation, which can sometimes conflict."

Schiller, who joined Apple in 1987, was the company's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. He currently leads the App Store and Apple Events and is an Apple Fellow. 

A hands-on style

The App Store, which paid developers $60 billion on its way to generating record revenue in 2021, has seen a lot of changes in recent years. In 2020, for example, Apple implemented App Tracking Transparency, requiring apps such as Facebook to seek permission before collecting user data. It's the type of decision stakeholders have come to expect from Schiller — for better or worse. 

The new feature, which gives App Store users more control over their data, was heavily criticized by some app developers when it was first implemented. There was also criticism within some corners of Apple. Long-time executive Carson Oliver, for example, from Apple's business management team, told Schiller the move would cost the App Store billions of dollars in revenue. 

As The Information explains, Oliver felt this would cause advertisers to "(pull back) on spending on iOS apps, which in turn drove traffic to other iOS apps, and shifted to other platforms like Google's Android, where they could measure the impact of their ads more accurately."

Even though Oliver has become an influential force at Apple and regularly updates CEO Tim Cook on App Store's business, Schiller would have none of it. As noted by a person with direct knowledge of the matter, Schiller felt the privacy feature was the right thing to do for users.

There are also instances where Schiller has sought compromise with the business development team regarding the apps Apple promotes on the Store. For example, first-person shooter and social casino games have been scrutinized over the years. In each case, Schiller's thinking has likely led to less revenue for the company.

An Apple spokesman told The Information revenue has never been a primary goal of App Store editorial decisions.

Apple is often criticized for the enormous revenue it generates each year. But, at least with the App Store, clear decisions have been made that limit that revenue. In doing so, it has better protected its customers and still makes lots of money every year, mainly because of Schiller. 

What you need to know

• Apple Fellow and car enthusiast Phil Schiller has been talking to Lamborghini as the company celebrates the Countach.
• Schiller spoke about design, emotion, and the move to electric across two videos.

As Lamborghini celebrates its stunning Countach, the Italian car firm spent some time with Apple Fellow Phil Schiller — a big car enthusiast. The result is two videos in which Schiller talks about himself, Apple, and of course the Lamborghini Countach.

The first video involves Schiller talking to someone off-camera in a way that will be immediately familiar to anyone who has seen an Apple product announcement. Schiller talks about various things relating to design, including the way inventors can predict the future by creating it rather than sitting back and waiting to see what happens.

In the second video, Schiller faces a dozen questions about himself and Apple. We find out that Schiller is most proud of his work on the iPod, but that there's still more to come from him and Apple. Schiller, when asked about the move to electric cars, says that he would "always" choose combustion but that he's also "ready for electric." As car companies continue the move towards electric vehicles, Schiller also pointed out that "the world requires it of us."

You can see both videos over on the Lamborghini website and they're well worth a watch. If only for some gorgeous footage of one of the world's most unmistakable supercars.

Who doesn't love a Lamborghini Countach? Slap Apple CarPlay and an iPhone 12 into it and it'd be perfect.

What you need to know

• Greg Joswiak has been added to the Apple Leadership website.
• The executive recently assumed the role of Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing.
• Phil Schiller, who previously held the position, has been updated to Apple Fellow.

Greg Joswiak, who was recently promoted to Apple's Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, has been formally added to the Apple Leadership page on the company's website. Phil Schiller, who previously held the position, has been updated to Apple Fellow.

Joswiak's biography points out that the executive has had a thirty-plus year with the company, most recently as the Vice President of Apple Product Marketing where he managed the product marketing and product management teams.

Phil Schiller, who stepped away from the role to focus on running the App Store and Apple Events, said that the move was the right one for where he is in his life right now.

When the announcement was made back in August, Apple CEO Tim Cook praised Joz's impact on the company and expressed excitement for what he would bring to the table in his new role.

The day after the keynote, Daring Fireball's John Gruber took the stage at Mezzanine in San Francisco with not one, but two special guests from Apple: SVP Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller, and SVP Software Engineering Craig Federighi. Below is a full transcript of their remarks, and check out the full Talk Show audio and video on Daring Fireball!

KAFASIS

Ladies and gentlemen: Welcome to Mezzanine! Won't you please take your seats and silence your cell phones.

John Gruber

[chuckles]

KAFASIS

Daring Fireball Productions, in association with The Daring Fireball Company LLC, is delighted to welcome you to a Daring Fireball presentation of The Talk Show — Live from WWDC 2016! And now: Won't you please welcome your host, Johnnn Gruuuuber!

[applause]

John Gruber

Thank you Paul! I actually needed that reminder; my cell phone was not on silent. Thank you, Mike.

I will start by thanking our sponsors. This is the fifth year I've been doing the show, fourth time here at Mezzanine, and I think that Mailchimp has been sponsoring our bar all along, and if not that, then at least as far back as I remember. So, just in case it isn't clear, the bar is on the house, it's on Mailchimp. Mailchimp, if you guys don't know, they are — do email newsletters, like my friend Ben Thompson over at Stratechery, those go out through Mailchimp. They also have a bunch of new features, stuff that integrates with with online stores, and integration with just about any online store platform that you might be familiar with. And then you can get your customers to get email when products that they're interested in are available, or... whatever.

[audience laughs]

Great company! If you need to send email, go to Mailchimp.com. And, please, let's hear it for them for the open bar!

[applause]

Also back with us for the fourth consecutive year as a sponsor of the show is Microsoft. And at four years, it's not even like a "Whoa, that's weird, Microsoft sponsoring..." Nah! It's like awesome. And it makes total sense.

They have this website. It's going to give you so much more information than I have time to give you now. Anydevanyapp.com.

That's the message that they're trying to give: That any developer, whether you're working on mobile or the web, for any type of app — if you need cloud services, it's now called the Azure app service. If you need that kind of stuff, go check it out — their website has so much information.

Here's a funny thing: They had the same website last year, but instead of anydevanyapp.com, I said anyappanydev.com.

[laughter]

And we are, in fact, streaming this live. And, y'know, the show went on, and in the meantime, I gave out the wrong URL for a pretty pricey sponsorship! [laughs] And what happened was there was some kid in Australia who was watching the live stream who quick, like, jumped on and registered the domain.

[laughs]

True story! This is an absolute true story. If you guys see Matt Hansing, he's here representing Microsoft; he's about this [gestures] tall, him and [Craig] Hockenberry are gonna have a fight after the show's over. You can ask him, he'll vouch for this.

So they got in contact with him, were like — oh, man, that's Microsoft now — "We better get this domain," and it was already gone. And they contacted the kid, and they were like "Oh, man, this kid is gonna, y'know, he's really gonna let us have it." And he was like, "Well, one of those Xboxes would be nice!"

[huge laughter from the audience]

So they sent the kid like, a box with an Xbox and all the cool stuff that you could possibly imagine that goes with an Xbox, and they got the domain. So I think it's safe that you can just go check out the information from Microsoft. Go to Anyapp... or anydev... dot com. [laughs] No, anydevanyapp.com! Microsoft, great sponsor.

And then last but not least, we have one more sponsor, this one's new. And surprisingly, this is the thing, because we think Microsoft, how are you going to go bigger than that. But this is actually one of the few — I mean, I'm guessing maybe three or four corporations in the world with a larger market cap than Microsoft.

It's Meh.com.

[surprised laughter.]

Meh.com is the store that I would run if I were going to run, like, an online store. And let me be clear, I have absolutely zero interest in running an store. It seems like a [laughs] seems like a terrible job. And a lot of hard work, and I don't like either of those things.

So, yeah, I'm not going to run a store. But if I did, it would be like Meh. And here's the way Meh works. They have one product a day. That's it. You don't even know what it is. You have to, like, go there at midnight and find out what they're selling today. One thing, daily deal, usually at like, an unbelievable price. I've said this before: I'm half-worried that they're, like, stealing these things — and I don't know if me endorsing it like this makes me complicit in a crime, because when you're selling, like, a $120 stereo for $14... usually it's like that scene in Goodfellas, where they're selling cigarettes out of the back of the truck.

[laughter]

But what they really do, the other thing they do, is they concentrate on making everything real funny, the descriptions of the products are real funny, they have funny videos every day, and I really do get the feeling that they'd be happy if you just go there and check them out every day and you never buy anything.

That's like the gimmick, or the thing, it's like: Here's the product. Buy? Or meh? And you can just, like, type MEH, and then they're like, well, that guy didn't like that. So my thanks to them.

On the guests for Talk Show 2016

John Gruber

So, last year was a little different than in previous years, because we had an actual special guest. What happened was, the back story on it, is it was a week before WWDC, and I still hadn't asked anybody to be on the show. And I was putting it off, because I kind of had it in my head that I kind of wanted to see if I could get Phil [Schiller, worldwide marketing at Apple]. And I put it off, because I didn't want to hear no. And it was like, a week before, and I was all "Well, this is ridiculous. I'll just ask."

And so, I sent an email to Steve Dowling. And I said: "Look, this is probably ridiculous, and so just feel free to say no. But: I do this show every year, and I think it would be really cool, I think it would work really well if Phil Schiller came on, and the day after the keynote, and we could talk about it, and nerd out, and go into detail that you can't get into in a keynote."

And he wrote back, and all he said was "Not ridiculous. Let's talk tomorrow." And next thing you know, a week later, Phil Schiller was screwing around, not coming out behind the [laughs] curtain, and making me wonder whether, like, maybe he went to the bathroom? Maybe we miscommunicated on what the cues were going to be. And it was GREAT! I mean, I don't know how many people were here last year?

[big cheers]

It really was great. It was the best time I've had on stage in my life, and then I watched the video, and I didn't even really die watching myself. I was like, "Oh, this is actually pretty good!"

And it ended, and it was a big surprise, we kept it under wraps, everybody seemed pleasantly surprised and it just made it all the more fun. And then, the show's over, and I go backstage, and people are like, "Wow, that was great, I can't believe it, that was amazing, that was amazing." And I start meeting people, and it was about three minutes — three or four minutes after the end of the show — when the first person came up and said: "Well, you're really going to have a hard time topping that next year!"

[laughter]

Annnd, I thought "Wow! That did... not occur to me, because this... this week has been a blur, like, I really just asked a week ago, and then we set this up, and I've been thinking up questions, uh... and you're right!"

And there's only so far up I can go, you know, there's only so many different ways that we could go up. And so, one of these years, it is absolutely going to be the case that it is not as good a guest as the year before. I mean, one of these times, it really is going to be John Moltz coming out.

[laughter and some awwws]

And that'll be great! And we'll have a good show. I mean, there might be more people leaving to go to the open bar mid-show — which you can do by the way, please! Really, run up a good tab, we're good here.

But! This is not that year. This year, I think it's a little better.

So, this year, how do you top Phil Schiller? Here's how. Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to... Phil Schiller...

[bemused groans from the audience]

And! Craig Federighi.

[Huge applause and cheers as Federighi and Schiller enter, shake hands, sit on the couch.]

Craig Federighi

Wow!

[Audience hoots and hollers. Federighi laughs.]

John Gruber

True story. Got a text message about 45 minutes ago, an hour ago: "Do you guys have any food here?"

[Federighi chuckles.]

No. We don't. We have lots of booze, but... So when they get here, here's what Craig... Craig has a boxed lunch from WWDC.

[laughter and whistles]

And that's what he's eating! And friend of the show and announcer Paul Kafasis asked him, "Is that a WWDC boxed lunch?"

And the answer is:

Craig Federighi

It aged well.

[chuckles]

John Gruber

It was an old WWDC boxed lunch.

Craig Federighi

[laughing] Yeah.

John Gruber

So, let it be said — Apple does eat their own dogfood.

[Laughter, groans from the audience.]

Craig Federighi

True that.

Phil Schiller

I can absolutely validate that for over 20 years of doing surveys from WWDC, every single year, the number one complaint is the food. And so, we resigned ourselves to the fact that if that's the worst thing that comes out of WWDC, all is good.

[Craig laughs.]

It's tradition, so...

On the keynote

John Gruber

So I always start the show, I started it the same way last year: I always ask the guest "How do you think the keynote went yesterday?"

Craig Federighi

Good audience. [laughter] Great crowd.

Phil Schiller

Great presenters.

[wry laughs]

Craig Federighi

[gesturing to Schiller] We were missing one!

John Gruber

Once again, Phil Schiller was not on stage at the keynote. This is becoming a new tradition.

Phil Schiller

I was teasing with Tim that between Craig and Jeff Williams, and now Boz[oma Saint John, head of Global Consumer Marketing for Apple Music and iTunes], I don't meet the minimum height requirement to present.

[laughter]

John Gruber

But, Craig, I honestly thought — I spoke to you yesterday, briefly, and I told you I thought you did an amazing job. I mean, how many people thought Craig did —

[big cheers]

Because you — it's not just that you're up there and you're covering stuff, but you covered, like, three hours of stuff in 90 minutes, or however long you were on stage.

Craig Federighi

[pauses] Yeah.

[laughter]

It was a lot, yeah. I mean, the team did a tremendous amount of work, and we try to pack it all in.

John Gruber

Well, the article I saw on the Ringer did a — I don't know if you saw this — I'm not going to go into detail on the article, but the headline was "Apple's Craig Federighi is perfect."

[laughter]

Phil Schiller

I read that article, and I can only confirm that it's half-true.

[laughter]

On overriding themes

John Gruber

So, I didn't think about it yesterday, but today it occurred to me that there sort of was a recurring, overriding theme in the announcements yesterday. Which, in broad strokes, was that you guys have opened up a lot of stuff to third-party developers that was previously reserved for Apple's first-party code.

Craig Federighi

Yeah.

John Gruber

Quick list, and I might even miss some. CallKit, so that VOIP apps can get the same Lock screen privileges for incoming calls as the Phone app and FaceTime, which took years.

Craig Federighi

Yes.

John Gruber

Messages, so that WhatsApp can, you can specify a contact. When I text Craig, default by going to WhatsApp —

Craig Federighi

That's right.

John Gruber

— instead of iMessage?

Craig Federighi

That's right.

John Gruber

Siri API, iMessage apps...

Craig Federighi

Yeah.

John Gruber

Maps extensions.

Craig Federighi

Yep.

John Gruber

And even non-Mac App Store apps can now use CloudKit, and a bunch of other iCloud stuff.

Craig Federighi

Yep! That is true.

[big whoops for that]

John Gruber

Is that a coincidence? Or is that a strategic part of the plan for this year?

Craig Federighi

Well, with iOS 8, we started that with extensions, you know, opening up the Share Sheet, for instance. For awhile there, it was, if we didn't build it, it couldn't be in the Share Sheet. And so we had to build a Twitter interface ourselves, and a Facebook interface, and as of iOS 8, we started having extensions for extending the system with sharing, widgets... And so we built a lot of the technology with XPC services, if you folks know what those are, and autoprocess UI, and all the building blocks to make this possible.

And this year, we really felt like, uh, giving the developers more and more opportunities to let users do what they want to do across all these experiences. It was, y'know, a way that we could make the platform better for all of our users, so... yeah, it all came together nicely. With Siri, as well.

John Gruber

And a big part of it, it seems to me, as the platforms (plural) evolve — because it's definitely — especially iOS and Mac — what it means to have an app is more than [what it is] on a Mac: Okay, you launch an app, and a window opens up, and you are in this window, and it's yours as the developer. Where, on iOS, it's a little simpler. It's like, you get the screen.

But now, to be an app that's really taking advantage of the best and newest that the platform has to offer, you need to be inside other apps. Widgets inside iMessage.

Craig Federighi

Yup. I think that just makes sense for mobile. I mean, if you have an app, and the right place to interact is on the notification on the Lock screen, and you don't want the user to have to unlock the phone and launch your app in order to get something done — or invoking your app with Siri is going to be the quickest path to getting something done — we want to make that possible.

And so, I think that's what you're seeing here, as well as, what you say, inside of Maps. If you want to book a ride, or you want to get a restaurant, or any of those things, it's going to just be a quicker and smoother flow if you're integrated into the place where the user started instead of requiring switching around.

And so this is opening all that up, and I think developers are going to do a tremendous number of things with it that we didn't even envision. It should be an exciting year.

Phil Schiller

It's also just an evolution of the success of the app model, right? I mean, apps took off, been wildly successful, with this amazing software process, and then you want to have apps in your Maps, you want to have apps in your Siri situations, and you want to have apps in your messaging... and so we like apps, we like them everywhere, we want to use them in many places, so to me it's an evolution of what's going on with apps in general.

On XPC, bundles, and new technology

John Gruber

And you [Craig] mentioned XPC. And I know this is a fairly, fairly nerdy crowd. But I do think it's a years-long shift, where... in my layman's terminology, XPC is Inter-process communication, and it's a way for different processes that can be sandboxed and all of the privacy and "hey you, this process can't diddle with the data of this process without having it in a shared location" — that they can still communicate with each other in a rich way.

Compared to the old days, the Mac OS has always been extensible, and whether you want to go back to the Classic Mac OS with INITs), or the Nextstep days with...

Craig Federighi

Bundles, yeah.

John Gruber

Bundles, and input managers, and...

Craig Federighi

Mmmhmm!

John Gruber

Remember in the early days of Mac OS X, when we had the haxies, and the input managers....

Craig Federighi

Oh yeah.

[laughter]

John Gruber

And that was — in laymen's terms, the fundamental difference is those were ways to extend apps officially or unofficially, where the extension code was running within the process.

Craig Federighi

Yeah, and from a stability point of view, and a privacy point of view, really bad news. So, we started years and years ago, with Mach messaging, and on that, we built XPC as a form of remote procedure call, or an asynchronous messaging, structured messaging thing. But we then created what we internally called XPC Containers — which are really what you now think of as XPC services, which are the ability to package a whole bunch of code, and let the system manage launching that code, tearing that code down when it needed to, but exposing services in that way.

And that turned out to be really important — even internally within the OS! We were using it for quite awhile within the OS, before it was exposed as a mechanism for third-parties because it allowed us to set different security boundaries around different — this is really getting nerdy, but —

[cheers]

John Gruber

Nah, this is good!

Craig Federighi

— But around, uh, [laughs], because if you're going to go load some image format, even, or run a doc, run a Spotlight converter or something, that's going to run over all your documents, you want to make sure that if that thing crashes, it doesn't crash the overall process or Spotlight index or app, you don't want it to have any more access than anything but the one thing it's supposed to have to do the job.

So this was all part of our security and sandboxing architecture, but then, with iOS 8, we saw the opportunity to combine that with, essentially, remote views, the ability to say that the UI that you see on screen that looks like it's all from one app is actually composed from the main app, but also one or more XPC services serving UI into that, and we manage all that. And that gives you this single experience, but where all the stability boundaries, and the security boundaries are in place. And that's enabled us to take this extensibilty model from something that was really hacksy-prone in the Nextstep, and well, nit —

John Gruber

Yeah, nit was...

Craig Federighi

The old days. And make it much more stable. And so that's been, now, a building block for all these things that we're doing. And iOS 10 was just really stepping on the gas on the places where we could do that that made the biggest difference in user experience.

On the removal of stock (and Stocks) apps

John Gruber

One of the most surprising changes, and again, I think that this is in the spirit of openness, or flexibility on Apple's part, and relinquishing control that previously wasn't relinquished. And it surprised me, that you can now remove a whole bunch of the default apps on iOS from your home screen.

Craig Federighi

Though you would not want to.

[big laughs]

You have the freedom — just knowing you have the power that you'll never use, it's...

John Gruber

It's one of my favorite features on the What's New site. I love the page, because it even goes out of its way to say "Y'know, because of all the compression that we use, and the techniques that we use, and the shared frameworks, they only take up 150MB.

[laughter]

Craig Federighi

Yeah! Well, okay, so, this is true. This is true. We should be really, really clear on exactly what this feature is and what it's not. Because it's not everything you might think it is.

So what it is is, you are removing... when you remove an app, you're removing it from the home screen, you're removing all the user's data associated from it, you're moving all of the hooks it has into other system services. Like, Siri will no longer try to use that when you talk and so forth.

We're not actually deleting the application binary, and the reason is really pretty two-fold. One, they're small, but more significantly, the whole iOS security architecture around the system update is this one signed binary, where we can verify the integrity of that with every update.

John Gruber

Okay.

Craig Federighi

That there's no mixing and matching going on between all of these different pieces. And so, if you go and say, well, I don't like... what's an app that someone would really... I'm going to get myself in trouble here. Okay.

Phil Schiller

Hmm...

Craig Federighi

[fake smile] I can't think of one! I...

Phil Schiller

Stocks.

Craig Federighi

Stocks?

Phil Schiller

Stocks. Some people don't follow the stock market.

Craig Federighi

Fair enough. Some people do not follow the stock market, or there's not one in their country...

Phil Schiller

Which is good for them, yes.

Craig Federighi

And so they might remove that app. And when you do, it's hidden, and any user data and preferences and so forth associated with it is gone. If you want to get it back, we were thinking, well, how do we let you restore this. And we thought, "Well, people are naturally, when they want to go get it back, they're going to go to the App Store and search for it. And so, you go to the App Store and search for it, and it'll show up, and you'll say Get, and it will reappear [on your home screen].

John Gruber

'Cos that's how they know to install apps.

[laughter]

Craig Federighi

The download will be remarkably fast.

Phil Schiller

Exactly.

Craig Federighi

The compression technology... good stuff.

Phil Schiller

It's been... and it has lead some to mistakenly report that we're moving these apps out of the system bundle and into the store for downloading, and that's not really the case; we're just making that the easy mechanism for restoring, seeing it from the store side. But it's really still part of the system.

Craig Federighi

Good to set the record straight here.

John Gruber

That's interesting. Because that means there won't be, like, an update to Mail that comes through the App Store, it's just like it used to be: It'll be part of the system update.

Craig Federighi

That is correct.

On pre-announcing App Store changes

John Gruber

Well, speaking of the App Store, this last week...

[Craig leans precariously backward to reveal Phil, to laughter from the crowd]

A week ago...

Phil Schiller

There was a reason I sat on [the far] side! I just thought these two were going to totally nerd out, and I'm just gonna let them have fun. And I... have no problem with that.

John Gruber

A week ago, there were a bunch of changes, improvements to the App Store. And in a certain sense, one of them did not get mentioned in the keynote. But review times for apps submitted to the App Store are waaaaay faster than they used to be!

[huge applause and cheers]

Craig Federighi

We thought, this is one of those cases where we can address a problem before it starts to boil over.

[laughter]

Just in anticipation of potential future.

John Gruber

For the audience at the keynote, though, to not even mention and just take that applause is amazing, because you know that it's coming. And developers are pretty happy about that.

Phil Schiller

It would have been an easy way to get applause, but we didn't stoop to that trick.

[laughter]

So, yeah! It was exactly — people have all these awesome conspiracy theories, and they're fun to read, but it was exactly what we said, which was that we were working on the keynote, we actually thought about having a whole developer section to talk about the App Store and the Keynote, and looking at keeping it, we really wanted to get [the keynote] done in just under two hours if we could. And you couldn't really talk about that, and the subscription stuff, and the ad search stuff, and all that, in three minutes.

You really needed, probably, about fifteen minutes to explain, and it just wasn't worth losing fifteen minutes of product time to talk about that when if we could, instead, just talk it to people ahead of time.

And so we decided to do something we've never done before, which is before the keynote, explain some of this. However, it was kind of tough to do, because here we're talking to you and a few others, and saying "Here are things we're doing for the App Store," knowing that still had to come, a few days later, apps working with Siri, and apps working with Messages, and these are huge impacts on developers. And a new store for Message apps, we're going to come out with. So we couldn't really tell the whole picture of all the things we were doing.

So we told sort of half of it, and waited for the rest.

On App Store search ads

John Gruber

Well, part of it that goes together. So, one of the improvements last week was search ads. And...

Phil Schiller

I noticed — I don't know if any of you [gestures to audience] noticed before we came out, there was an ad that showed up first, as John, you did your ads before we started this session.

[laughter]

It was really nice, thank you!

[clapping]

And I found two of the three were relevant to what we were discussing!

[Craig cracking up]

I won't further — for the benefit of your advertisers, I won't mention which one I didn't find relevant to my interests, but...

[Gruber laughs]

John Gruber

I was going to be nice! I was going to say how there's a tie-in that you couldn't mention a week ago, where the idea of the search ads is that it improves discoverability. And there's a discoverability aspect with the iMessage apps, where if I send you a widget through an iMessage app —

Phil Schiller

That's right.

John Gruber

And you don't have it yet, there's a very subtle, y'know, I forget what exactly it says.

Phil Schiller

Yep.

Craig Federighi

Get.

Phil Schiller

Yeah. Two — couple of the very interesting things that the team did in working on these message apps is: #1, that if I send you something, if I send you a sticker, if I send you a JibJab, you get to receive it and experience it without having to download the app. And so, you can do that on a lot of these things. Where some other service, you're always being hit with a "Download this in order to see what someone is sending you!"

So the team really wanted to have a great experience for the receiver — you don't have to do that. However, there is attribution there, and you can choose to get it. If you're like, "Wow, those JibJabs are really cool, I want to download them too, and share them with friends." Hopefully that'll become a nice viral marketing, in addition to other ways for users to discover apps in messages.

John Gruber

On search ads: Make the case — when we talked last week, you did. On the phone call, I thought "Yeah, that makes sense." And then I went away, and looked at my notes, and I was like, I'm not sure I get it.

[laughter]

Make the case on this part, on this particular part, that the system that you guys have designed can, and should be, to the benefit of smaller indie developers and it's not going to be dominated by the biggest companies —

Phil Schiller

Mmhmm.

John Gruber

That, with the, y'know, budgets that are more than everybody here combined.

Phil Schiller

So, the two sort of priorties we set on the team as they were working on it was, if we're going to do this, we have to do it in a way that, number one, protects user privacy. There are many ways that companies do it where they're not protecting privacy and we need to understand that. And secondly, how do you do it in a way that gives advantages to small and indie developers, because it's easy to imagine a system that didn't do that.

And so, we set out to think of all the things we could do to make that possible. And there's a long list of things. And I won't go through all of them to bore you all, but there are many things.

Things like:

• First of all, there's no minimum bid. So we don't set a bar, if you have a very small amount of money, you can just do what you can with a small amount of money.
• The fact that we're going to work really hard to try to make relevance the top priority, over bid, for why something gets shown. That the users are the ultimate deciders of what gets shown, based on their clicks, they're a big input to what is relevant to the search result.
• The fact that we're going to work hard to try to police and improve the whole metadata system if we find, as it easily could be abused to hurt [small] developers.
• The fact that — and this has been a hotly-debated thing — the fact that you can do conquesting. You can use someone else's brand in your ad words that you want to use. As we thought about it, that is more likely to benefit the small developer than the big developer. Because the big developer isn't going to pick on a lot of small developer terms, but a small developer can try to latch on to a big developer's name. If I want to search for Angry Birds and your game, you can. Right? And so we think that that can help them.
• The fact that there's no exclusivity. So a large developer cannot say, "And I want to be the top bid, and I'm going to spend everything I can to buy out this term." There will be no exclusivity, there's going to be a rotation there, and as that rotation appears, the relevance will help drive it further.

We're trying everything we can, and I think one of the best things is, right now, once we're in beta throughout the summer, the downloads the users get from the ads are real downloads to benefit the developer, but we're not charging [for ads] during the beta time. So there's a chance for everybody to get in and try it out, help us learn from it, and drive real downloads and real business without any marketing spend.

So we're trying to think of things we can do, and we'll think of more. We'll take feedback and see what's happening, and where it works and doesn't work, and where it feels like they're getting stomped on, and we'll try to do all that we can to make it better.

[cheers and claps]

On App Store subscriptions

John Gruber

And the last bit of news with the App Store changes, y'know, big third of it, was an expansion of the categories that are allowed for subscriptions. I don't know if you noticed, but there was a little bit of confusion last week about the difference between apps from all categories versus "all apps."

Phil Schiller

Let me just, let me explain that. So, our intention is exactly as we talked about. Which is, we're opening up the subscription model to all categories, so what kind of an app you make doesn't directly have an impact on whether you can have a subscription model or not.

There are, we wanted to open up subscriptions to all developers of all apps. That is the hope. However, there are a couple of little "gotcha"s where we have to be careful. And so, that's why there's some caution here.

Number one: If you want to create a professional app, and you're going to to maintain it, and do updates, and you want to have an ongoing revenue stream, that's of course an intention of this.

[clapping]

Yeah, let's clap on that! But do users really want, and I'm sorry to pick on this category if somebody makes this app, because I'm sure there's examples where you would want it, but do you want a flashlight app to now be an app you have to pay for forever with a subscription model? Users probably don't want that.

And so, we have to be sensitive, first of all, to: Is there some minimum functionality where users now get pissed off, and say "Everything's turned to subscription, I don't want to buy stuff anymore, this is not okay," and now that's a drag on business on the App Store and therefore, we all lose. So we feel a responsibility. And I read your thing that says, "Hey, why don't you just let the market choose—"

John Gruber

Right.

Phil Schiller

Well, what if the market screws itself up and it does badly? And then we all lose. So we have to be able a little bit sensitive to not do something we think could backfire and hurt all of us. So we want to be careful about minimum functionality, so there will be some guideline around that.

Which we already have a guideline on minimum functionality for anything, you can't just wrap a website and call it an app. But there will be a little bit more minimum functionality for subscription.

John Gruber

I think the guidelines include, a longstanding guideline is that the App Store has plenty of fart apps already.

Phil Schiller

That is absolutely one of the rules.

[chuckles]

And then, there is a secondary issue. And we're working through this. There are certain states and governments where there are laws about creating a subscription revenue stream without a clear promise to the user of what they're paying for down the road.

And so, our legal team's been working with us on this, on trying to make sure we put in place in the store the right way for developers to make clear their intention to deliver value for that customer, or else they'll be breaking the law by asking for a subscription with no intention of delivering value down the road.

So we want to be careful of those things. So those are the kinds of reasons we have caveats on it, but the intention, I think, is what we all want.

John Gruber

Alright.

[cheering]

On the Mac App Store

John Gruber

The Mac App Store...

[chuckles from audience]

I'm not going to say it's been treated as the ugly stepchild, but maybe the slightly less attractive stepchild? And a couple of examples: TestFlight beta testing was in the iOS App Store. Craig [Hockenberry], is it in the Mac App Store yet?

Hockenberry

[from the audience] No, I don't think so.

John Gruber

I don't think so. Alright. So no TestFlight...

Phil Schiller

[dryly] Hi, Craig, how are you doing?

[laughter]

John Gruber

Video reviews. I know it seems like that really works, like there's just, instead of static screenshots to show your app on iOS, you can have a video that shows it in animation, and then lots of times, for developers who are doing the cinematic experience of really making the app feel great, the video can do so much more than a static screenshot.

Craig Federighi

Mmmm.

John Gruber

And all of the news last week applies to all of the App Stores.

Craig Federighi

Yes.

John Gruber

So that in of itself is a change, a change in the way that the App Store is distributing new features.

Craig Federighi

Yep.

Phil Schiller

So, we love all of our kids — I'm sure all of you do as well — equally.

[laughter]

And so, we love the Mac App Store, we want it to do well, we want to support the developers in it, we care a lot about it. We use it ourselves, it's a very important store for ourselves. We've moved all our software distribution into it, and are very happy with that. So, we're one happy software developer that's using it.

[scattered laughter]

And we still think, in the long view of all of this, it matters a great deal. We think it matters for privacy, we think it matters for security, we think it matters for quality on the store. We've all seen examples of apps that have been hijacked on servers, where people download stuff that have viruses injected in them, and we don't want any part of any of that, all of us.

So we think it's still an important solution, and we're dedicated to it.

There are things through the years in the Mac App Store that haven't been fully implemented because they didn't make as much sense on the Mac as they did on iOS, or the engineering effort was really high for a benefit that wasn't seen as as big, or whatever. Example: So, TestFlight. For the engineering involved there, people have felt that there are a lot of opportunities on the Mac from a website to download apps for test, and to distribute beta software, so the need wasn't as great. Right? It was a clear need on iOS, not clear on Mac.

So that's why some decisions were made and trade-offs, there. But, as you say, as I've been working more with the App Store team since December, I've really pushed the team to please make sure everything makes sense across all the stores as much as possible, and maybe there'll be some exception to that that we have to make, but we don't want to. We want to try to do everything the same on all the stores as much as possible, including the Mac App Store.

[applause]

On iPad app pricing and lack of pro apps for iOS

John Gruber

So, one thing the Mac App Store has been good for, and the Mac software ecosystem in general is good for, is that it seems to support higher prices of apps, for truly professional apps, deeper apps. And there's a consensus — or maybe not, consensus is the wrong word, maybe you'll disagree.

But there's a lot of people who think that one of the things that's holding back the iPad — especially now that it's the iPad Pro — from replacing a MacBook for someone who might want to, is that it lacks the same depth of deep apps for work that the Mac has. And the reason is that the pricing pressure is more like iPhone-style, couple of bucks, as opposed to Mac-style, where $50, $80, $100 software has long been the norm.

Phil Schiller

I think you see two things happening at the same time. Number one, the iPad's capabilities are growing as a PC replacement product for some people. I know some people have made some statements about that, I don't know who.

[laughter]

And so, we're trying to make it more and more powerful, making larger screens, keyboards, the more powerful processors, and all that's happening to drive it into a more capable product.

At the same time, you've started to see more professional applications begin to make their way onto it. And so, I think we're seeing changes there. We're seeing... certainly, apps that have a similar version on your iPhone that you want on your iPad will have similar pricing. But other apps that may be coming over from the Mac, or PC, are bringing on pricing models that are more like that.

And so you're going to see this duality with iPad, that there's a little of both happening. And we see an increase of the more professional apps happening. And we see stuff in flight with developers we're working on that's really impressive desktop-quality software, more and more coming to iPad.

John Gruber

Yeah, it's definitely not the hardware. 'Cos the iPad Pro stands toe to toe with the MacBooks on any technical measure you can give it. I mean, beautiful displays, powerful CPUs, and stuff like that. So it's not holding it back.

Craig Federighi

And I do think if you really look at some of the professional apps that are on the iPad, it's... I mean, some of them are really first-class. I think the iPad Pro's going to accelerate that, and we absolutely want to find any way possible to make deep investment by developers on the platform possible. Because, I think, we'll all win when that happens.

On passwords and macOS's auto-unlock

John Gruber

Alright. New topic. Privacy and security. I remember a couple of years ago, maybe more — I don't know how many years. But I was at WWDC, and I somehow wound up in a session on security. I don't even know why I was there. But it was interesting. I think I was talking to somebody, and he was like "I gotta go into this thing on security," and I was like, "Well, I'll go with you," and I went in and listened.

And at the end, it was when they were still doing Q&As, and I remember this very vividly. Somebody asked the question of somebody who was on the engineering team in charge of security, gave a rant about how passwords are terrible, and people pick bad passwords because they're easy to remember, and passwords that are hard to remember, or hard to crack, or hard to guess, are unusable, or less usable. "Have you guys given any thought to what's next beyond passwords?"

And there was this pause, and the speaker...

[Gruber intimates looking down toward the mic.]

"Yes."

[laughter]

And it was like, well that's an interesting — that's a very interesting and truthful answer. And we've seen, I think, in the intervenining years, some of the things that might have been circulating. Touch ID...

Craig Federighi

Yeah.

John Gruber

And now, one of my favorite features you guys announced yesterday, can't wait to use it, is...

Craig Federighi

Auto-unlock?

John Gruber

Auto-unlock.

Craig Federighi

Yeah! Yeah.

[big cheers]

John Gruber

So can you talk about how that came to be?

Craig Federighi

Which part of it? I mean, caring about security? Or, uh...

John Gruber

Well, no. With Auto-unlock in particular, the details of how — what are you guys doing to make Auto-unlock truly secure? That it's not, y'know, that I'm not over here opening Phil's MacBook because he's in the room.

Craig Federighi

Yeah. Yeah. Well, of course, this — it's a continuation of the work we did with Continuity to develop really low-power BTLE-based discovery protocol, so your devices could discover each other continuously with acceptable overhead from a battery point of view. And also, all the authentication mechanisms we put in place as far as having your devices know that they're your devices.

So that's kind of a foundation. The big challenge with Auto-unlock is you don't want a kind of, a relay attack, where Phil is actually, well far away from his office, and someone basically has a Bluetooth listener that's going to forward a signal to you, 'cos you're now by his Mac, and this Mac is having a conversation with Phil's watch over a very long distance.

John Gruber

Right.

Craig Federighi

And so, we're actually able to do time-of-flight calculation using peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, where we literally can measure how long (at the speed of light) it's taking for the signal to travel from your watch to your Mac and back!

[applause]

That's a very fast stopwatch! And so, because of that, if you interpose any kind of relay, it will introduce a delay that immediately would tell us, there's hijinks afoot, so.

John Gruber

Yeah, make sure they type in their password.

Craig Federighi

[laughs] Yes. Absolutely. And so, that piece is critical. But I think, y'know, on the bigger picture, Touch ID is one way that we've helped with passwords, but actually, on iOS, the Secure Enclave and that whole architecture, the fact that your device is not encrypted just with your passcode, which, honestly, whether it's four digits or six digits, it's short enough that if a brute force attack were possible, it would be — you readily could break into something.

But instead, it's entangled with a hardware key that only the Secure Enclave runs, and the Secure Enclave will only do its unwrapping when running Apple-signed software, and will only let you try ten times. And so, fundamentally, yeah.

[applause]

That was the first, yeah, very important step to saying you could have a practical-length passcode with really industrial-strength security. And so, we keep pushing on this.

On deep learning and photos

John Gruber

Continuing in the privacy vein, it's a good segue into Siri, "Deep Learning," AI, these sort of features that you guys... it was a big part of the presentation yesterday. Because a big part of your on-stage message about it was the emphasis on the way that the systems are designed to protect users' privacy, and the technical implications of that.

Craig Federighi

Yeah!

John Gruber

So one of my questions: When does deep learning happen? So, like, I'm on the phone and I'm taking a couple of pictures of the event and stuff like that — when does the...

Craig Federighi

That analysis occur? Yeah, so, if you upgrade your device to iOS 10, and you have your Photos library there with your 10,000 photos, or 100,000 photos on it, the analysis of that kind of backlog will occur when you're plugged in on AC overnight. 'Cos this is a considerable amount of computation that's going to occur that we would not have happen in your pocket.

But when you're out taking a fresh picture, at that point, we will instantaneously form the analysis on that hot photo as it's going into your photo library. We can do it that fast. It is, like scene classification, I mentioned yesterday — was it yesterday?

Phil Schiller

Mmhmm.

Craig Federighi

Yeah. [laughs] Long time ago. That it is, like about eleven billion calculations that have to occur to do that thing — "That's a horse! That's a mountain!" — but the GPUs on iOS devices these days really cook, so we can get through that essentially instantaneously with the photos.

John Gruber

And on the privacy part, my understanding — and correct me if I'm wrong — but my understanding from what I've learned is if you've got iCloud Photo Library, and I take a couple pictures with my iPhone, the photos will sync to the cloud, and then they will go to my iPad and my Mac, but the deep learning analysis doesn't go with them. Each machine performs its own processing on its own time when it's plugged in and appropriately. Is that true?

Craig Federighi

That is true right now. So each device does its own processessing. In the future, we could share the results of, like, the first one who does the work, just share, just to make that work go along for the ride. But today, it's gonna be each device doing it independently.

When you think about what's going to happen if we release iOS and OS X on separate days, everyone's iPhones will race to do all this work on their library first, and then the Mac will, it'll be fine at that point. So we wouldn't have saved the iPhones from doing the work if we'd had the Macs share their work, or share the work of the Mac.

Phil Schiller

And just to add on that view of someday they may not all have to do it, it's a view where we're not, Apple will never actually know that analysis ourselves. We won't see that data.

Craig Federighi

Right.

Phil Schiller

It's a way to do it, but we're out of the loop.

Craig Federighi

Yeah. To be clear, the photos themselves are, the architecture sets are encrypted in the cloud, and the metadata — any metadata about the photos that you create or that we create through deep learning classification is encrypted in a way that Apple's not reading it.

[applause]

On differential privacy

John Gruber

I wanna, I want to get... [laughs] I want to get nerdy on this differential privacy thing.

Craig Federighi

Yeah!

John Gruber

'Cos it's a phrase, it's like an official thing, I've learned a little bit more, it's not just a phrase you guys made up, it's like a...

[laughter]

Craig Federighi

[chuckling] It wouldn't have been the phrase we would have made up.

John Gruber

Right. [laughs]

Phil Schiller

We would have done a better name if that's what we did.

[more laughter]

John Gruber

But like, in the State of the Union yesterday, I mean there's real math behind it. This is not just a name that is applied to policies. This is —

Craig Federighi

That's correct.

John Gruber

A branch of statistical analysis —

Craig Federighi

Yes.

John Gruber

That, it... talk to me about it. Give me a little, I know you touched on it in the keynote. Give us like a slightly juicier layman's overview of differential privacy.

Craig Federighi

Sure. Yeah, of course the idea is that if we wanted to know what word, y'know, a new word that everyone was, that lots of people were typing, that we didn't know so that we would stop marking it as a spelling error. Or maybe we'd even suggest it on the keyboard.

Phil Schiller

Like "Meh." Or something.

[laughter]

Craig Federighi

Yeah, like now it's just, it's trending, it's hot, we want all our customers to be able to know that word, but we don't want to know you and Phil in particular are typing it. We want to have no way to have any knowledge of that.

You can imagine if what we're essentially assembling is a picture of little pieces of data, y'know, of the forest, but all we're getting is a little piece. And when we get that little piece, even each device will statistically, much of the time, even lie about its little piece. Right?

But those lies will all cancel out with enough data —

John Gruber

Right.

Craig Federighi

— and the picture will suddenly resolve, with enough data points, will resolve itself. And so, and yet, literally, if we were trying to learn a word, we would send one bit — we'd send a position and a single — we'd hash the word, we'd send a single bit from the hash, we'd say at position 23, Phil saw a 1. But Phil's phone would flip a coin and actually say, "Actually, I'm going to lie about that. I'm going to say zero even though I saw a one."

And that's the data that goes to Apple. And Apple, with enough of that data, can build a composite picture and say, "Holy smokes, we have a word here. And this many people roughly are seeing it." And that's typically what you want to know. You want to know what's happening at large, but we have no desire to know what, specifically, who is doing what.

John Gruber

Well, it's typically what you want to know. It's not typically [laughs] what your competitor would want to know.

Phil Schiller

And part of the reason that this is so important to get into is because, the theory that you can just anonymize the data and send it up, and all's good, and it's a bunch of crap —

[laughter and big hollers of approval]

Because I can send all this data, and say "Well, I don't know who you are, oh, but I happen to know the same location you go to every night, and I know the same place you go to work every day, I've got all this data, I just don't know your name, or ID. Boy, it's really hard to reverse-engineer that anonymous data!"

Right? So what you need to do is create a system that goes beyond anonymizing to really make it impossible to reconfigure who that user is.

[loud applause]

John Gruber

So the way I have it written down here is that if it works as you're describing it, it means it's not just that Apple doesn't use that information to reverse the anonymity, it's that mathematically you can't.

Craig Federighi

We can't.

John Gruber

It's — the design of the system is such that it's not even possible if new executives come in in a few years and maybe they would like to, y'know.

[Craig exhales, laughter]

Craig Federighi

[mumbles]

John Gruber

Well, companies change!

Craig Federighi

No, no! That's absolutely true. And the point of view, honestly, the point of view that someone says, "Hey, I know we know a ton about you, but don't worry! We're nice guys! And it's all good!"

Well, okay, maybe you're nice guys, ten years from now, who's running this thing? Or, what if someone breaks into your computers? Are they nice guys?

Phil Schiller

Right.

Craig Federighi

Right? So you just don't want to have any central source that has that kind of knowledge, because in the fullness of time, anything is possible.

And so, differential privacy is, I mean, there are mathematical proofs that will show that you cannot, with any confidence, determine anything about any of the people contributing to the data set. And we think that's important.

On Google and Facebook and cloud data-gathering

John Gruber

Alright. Speaking of companies that do collect some information about people, Google and Facebook —

[laughter]

— they're two competitors that, and I know a lot of times, when you talk about these companies, you might talk [vaguely] about search engines, and you might talk about social networks —

[more laughter]

Because you're gentlemen! But I will name names, and I'm going to just point out that Google and Facebook are both actively pursuing a lot of the same goals. I mean, just the image analysis, "That's a mountain, that's a horse" — those companies are showing similar things.

Craig Federighi

Yeah.

John Gruber

You guys are showing similar things. But it really is, I don't want to abuse the metaphor, but it's a 180-degree different tactic, where they're doing it with cloud servers, and doing the computing in the cloud on data that they've aggregated there, and your method is to do it, distribute it on the actual devices.

Critics are saying — and not me, I'm not saying this, I'm like, let's see —

[laughter]

No, I mean, I'm totally like "Okay, I saw your keynote, I'm looking forward to trying it, and let's see if it works for me!" I don't know. I think it might!

Craig Federighi

I think it will!

[laughter]

John Gruber

But critics are already saying, and they've obviously, since the keynote was just yesterday, I've seen it in a couple of articles that your strategy is doomed to keep Apple behind them, because the Google and Facebook way is the only way that works. And I'm not quite sure where that comes from, because...

Craig Federighi

Their PR department. I mean...

[huge laughter, clapping, Schiller makes a wry unintelligible comment]

[chuckles] of a prominent search engine or social network provider of... that we don't know about.

John Gruber

I think that part of it, in my mind, is maybe that there's an assumption on the part of some people in the press that a server farm has this massive amount of computational power, and that a puny little phone can't compete. But it's not like there's one person's iPhone who's trying to do the image analysis for all the photos on iCloud...

Craig Federighi

Like, there are a billion phones to throw at this problem.

John Gruber

Right, a billion active devices. So like, the billion active Apple devices that are out there in the aggregate have an enormous amount of CPU power.

Craig Federighi

That's right, that's right. The other thing is, there's this idea that, well, if you don't have the data, how would you ever learn? Well, turns out, if you want to get pictures of mountains, you don't need to get it out of people's personal photo libraries.

[laughter, clapping]

Like, we found out that we could find some pictures of some mountains!

[huge applause]

We did some tough detective work, and we found 'em.

[laughter]

So... [breaks down laughing] that's pretty good.

On Siri

John Gruber

So, moving on. Siri. Siri now has an API, and it's six categories. I don't know if I wrote any of them down. But it's like ride-sharing...

Craig Federighi

Messaging, photo search...

Phil Schiller

Voice calls.

Audience member

Payments!

John Gruber

Payments. And one more.

Craig Federighi

Sending money, yeah. No, we did payments. Alright. I can say it a few different ways, we can get past six.

[laughter]

John Gruber

Well, there's six distinct categories.

Audience member

Workouts!

Craig Federighi

Workouts!

Phil Schiller

Workouts!

John Gruber

There we go. Thank you. This is why I should have a live audience at all my shows.

Craig Federighi

This is crowdsourcing, right here, but it's totally anonymous.

Phil Schiller

And we don't know who said it, because...

[huge laughter and clapping]

John Gruber

So why restrict Siri to those six specific categories?

Craig Federighi

Yeah. It comes down to modeling the domains well. In order to understand what someone is saying — people are going to speak to Siri in a whole bunch of different ways, and even in a whole bunch of different languages. And when they say, when they want to say "Send a message to Phil" saying that "I'm going to be late for the interview," then we... I could have said that in dozens of other ways. I could have said "WeChat Phil that I'm going to be late for the interview," WeChat Phil using WeChat, telling him that, et cetera.

And I could say something like "WeChat Phil," and then I'd need to know, like, okay, well, what do you want to say to him? And Siri knows all of this because Siri understands the domain of messaging well. It understands all the vocabulary, it understands what the verbs are, what the objects are, and can collect them and can do so in a dialog.

And so, we want to make sure that when you're talking to your assistant, your assistant is consistently intelligent about understanding you and how flexible you can be in talking to it. To do that, we had to develop those domains.

And so, these are the domains that we've developed in a way that developers can plug in. We'll do more and more of that over time, and of course we'll search for more and more flexible ways to enable developers to do that time, but we want to make sure that what we do is preserve the intelligence of your assistant.

It would have been really super easy for us to say, "Hey, just tell us a trigger word, or the name of your app, and we'll hand you a string."

John Gruber

Right.

Craig Federighi

And good luck. And so you'd say something to Siri, and most of the time, you'd get back the app doing something crazy, and the user would say, "What in the heck, Siri doesn't understand me, I don't understand this."

In this case, we're able to be consistent about Siri's ability to understand you. And so, we'll make models more and more powerful, and we'll do more of them for more domains, but we start with a baseline and have a quality experience around what we cover.

Phil Schiller

And I think that this is an insight into how we... it's not right or wrong, how we approach things differently than some other companies do. We've all been seeing stories for awhile saying, "Hey, Apple, some other companies are doing some assistants, and they're allowing these other apps to be, these bots to hand off, and do things for them. You're not, you're behind."

Where, when we have thought about doing it for awhile, and we've thought about it since the very beginning of Siri, which is, we needed a solution to — how to keep Siri from being smart at one thing and stupid at another? That would be an inconsistent experience, and not what we want. We need Siri to be equally smart at all the things we do.

And as it gets expanded, that intelligence needs to extend, and so the team has been working hard at that, where others shoved in [trigger words] quickly to do things that don't translate that intelligence to third-party apps. And so, to do that means that you have to, with intention, add categories and domains. The hope is to add more and more so that users can ask anything they want over time, use any of their apps that they love, and it all works. It just takes time building domains. So we'd rather take the time to do it right than rush out just because it gets a good story to say you have something.

Craig Federighi

Yeah.

[applause]

On iMessage

John Gruber

One of the things I've — like, in the last year or so, maybe more, but I've noticed it, and I bang this drum a couple times a month on Daring Fireball, is why the industry as a whole doesn't seem to count iMessage as a messaging platform. And, y'know, the number that always gets thrown around is monthly active users, and WhatsApp has so many monthly active users, and so they're worth so many billions of dollars, and... iMessage has... it must have, it has to be right up there in terms of monthly active users, daily active users, hourly active users.

Craig Federighi

Yeah.

John Gruber

Users sending iMessages during the Talk Show...

[chuckles]

Is that frustrating?

Craig Federighi

I... I don't know. I mean. It's okay? [laughs]

Phil Schiller

No, because customers...

Craig Federighi

I mean, really...

Phil Schiller

Customers don't read those things. It's all inside the beltway kind of, like, who feels prouder that they made a list.

[laughter]

It doesn't matter to users.

Craig Federighi

Yeah. Messages is the most-used app on iOS, period. So, it's used a lot. And certainly, we saw that every time we'd add a couple new emoji, it would be the biggest thing. We work all year on, like, a new file system or something...

[laughter, cheers]

Craig Federighi

And it turns out the rest of the world outside this room was more excited about the two new emoji! So, we figured, y'know, if there's one place we can make a tremendous difference in how people experience iOS fundamentally, they're spending a lot of time in Messages.

And so, we put a ton of creative energy into it, and ultimately, through opening up to developers, I think the collective energy that will go into making Messages great is going to be phenomenal.

John Gruber

In the keynote, I was sitting in the middle of the floor. Halfway back, halfway in the center, just right in the middle. Really, it was a great place to hear the reactions. The biggest reaction I thought of the entire keynote was when you announced that emoji were going to 3x. [Laughter]

I'm not exaggerating. It was like a real, visceral buzz. Here's a crowd of people, you know, developers who are more technically minded, and are here to hear about technical details, and this thing that is really just, you know, just more fun, got this really powerful reaction.

Craig Federighi

Well, next year we're going to 4x. [Laughter]

Phil Schiller

See, this is why we don't let you out. [Laughter] Now we're going to be held to that and next year, when we don't, they'll be like "You said 4x! Apple, you're late, you're late!" and then it will be, "Finally, 4x!" [Laughter]

John Gruber

Coming down the home stretch—

Phil Schiller

There's a few competitors right now: "4x, let's beat 'em to 4x!" [Laughter]

John Gruber

The Onion story about the Schick CEO says "Screw this, we're going to 5 blades!" and, like 3-years later, she came out with a five-blade razor.

Craig Federighi

Yes!

John Gruber

Can't underestimate what people will stoop to.

Any of the other iMessage stuff that, I mean, clearly it's a lot of work, a lot of it is very fun, some of it is — you know, the developer integration — really turns it into a platform. It's not just a thing that people can text with any more, it's a thing that people in this crowd can write software for. Is there anything that stands out that maybe didn't get enough love in the keynote?

Craig Federighi

Well, we didn't talk about the way in which I think these apps can spread, kind of in a really great way virally, we didn't talk about that at all. I think that's going to be really powerful for developers and is going to make it worth developers' while to put some energy into it. We made them really easy to create, so if artists — we think there'll be a community of artists that will build sticker packs that are just really fun and they don't need to write any code to do it. So we think that will be really important.

Also, I think, the way that they are distributed — it's not just about the extension. The extension can be a part of your app and so, there's some cases where, you want a model where, the extension is sort of in cooperation with your larger app experience. I mean, one simple example would be like if you have your sports app, your sports app knows what your favorite teams are. Well, your extension in messages, that lets you share those clips, is going to know that as well. So, there's a connection there. We have one where something that people like to do a lot is share music. You hear something, you think, "wow, this is great" and you want to tell your friend about this awesome song. Well, if you go to the Apple Music extension, it knows what's now playing in your music, and it knows what you're listening to for your songs, so that's just one tap to share.

So, there'll be interesting integrations where the Message extension is sort of the tip of the iceberg for an experience you have in your app as well.

On watchOS

John Gruber

Moving on to watchOS. What you guys do year after year is make iterative improvements. You add features. You take what was slow and make it fast. You take what was ugly and you make it look better. But the performance improvement on app launch on watchOS 3 —

Craig Federighi

It's dramatic.

John Gruber

— Does not look like one year over year. It's crazy. And I really did, in the keynote, think "I gotta see this". And then, when I got a hands-on with a Watch running watchOS 3, it's for real.

Anybody in the audience, have you guys upgraded? [Applause]

Craig Federighi

It's for real.

John Gruber

How is that possible? [Laughter]

Craig Federighi

A couple of things. We actually had some RAM to spare.

John Gruber

Really?

Craig Federighi

Yeah! Turns out that if people are running… if they have their favorite ten apps, we can keep them mostly running. We can keep them mostly resident. We can halt them so they're not burning CPU, but we can keep them mostly resident. Which means you're not doing all the work that goes into launching an app when you take them live.

The other thing is, it turns out that when we first were coming out with watchOS we were being really conservative about understanding how people were going to be using the Watch and trying to make sure we could hit our goal of very solid all-day battery life. So that you could use it all day and charge it at night.

And we found that we actually really overshot the goal, which was an area of just massive focus and paranoia through the release. We needed to make sure we squeezed every little bit of juice out of the thing. So, realizing we had this budget, we said, look, we actually have enough to do background updates. We'd overshot enough that we could keep apps both in memory but also keep them up to date throughout the day. So, when you look at them, they're already there. It's not like, launch and then wait and have them get the information. It's, they already have the information.

So, those were two really vital techniques. The other thing is, as you build something new and different as the watch, you finish, and you live on it, and you figure out what's really the essence of this thing, and appreciate which problems are the most important to solve, we realized the watch is all about glanceability. It's useful to the extent that, okay, I can solve my task, I'm done. If I'm up here and I'm waiting and I'm fiddling around, my arm's getting tired, this is no fun anymore, I'm going to do this a different way. And with that as our obsession for the last year. We've taken all of those tasks and said you've got to be able to finish the task, end-to-end, in two seconds. Right? And that means the launch had better be instant part because now we need to let the user think and do something in two seconds and get it done. With that focus, you find a way. We chipped away.

John Gruber

What really struck me, once I got a hands-on with it and could really see it, was just how much the design changes to the navigation of the user experience are exactly coinciding with the engineering improvements to make it faster.

So, the fact that glances are no longer a separate thing is because the apps themselves in the dock can serve as glances because they're getting the background updates because you made the changes that let them stay resident in memory.

Craig Federighi

Yeah, it's nice when it all comes together.

John Gruber

It really is.

Phil Schiller

The other thing I'll add is that, once you start to use the new watchOS, in addition to having the apps come across faster and you can get access to them quickly, watch faces in a sense become apps themselves. In a sense that you change the ones you use, rearrange them, and change the complications. For example, I would normally keep the activity rings on my watch face, but now I can choose to make that the next [watch face] and swipe over to them and swipe back, because I use the activity watch face vs. needing the rings. And then I can have a different watch face for some other time of the day for when I need other actions and access to apps. So that becomes a much quicker and more useful way to expand the things you do with it. It's a really profound change throughout the interaction model.

Craig Federighi

Yeah, and really different complications too. So if you're going to be more in your workout mode, you would swipe over, and the complications that are relevant to that, and therefore the launchers that are relevant to that, are essentially right there. So you kinda go, here's what — I'm at work, and I'm going to be this way, I'm out with the family I'm going to go this way, and you have all the activities that are relevant to that, it's like you have almost a custom doc or custom launcher based on your watch face. So that's another element where I feel like it's really come together in a nice way. [Applause]

On Swift

John Gruber

Just wrapping up, coming down to the home stretch. Swift. Now, you were on my show a few months ago when Swift went open source. We had a good time.

Craig Federighi

Lot of dynamism.

John Gruber

And we talked about Swift use within Apple, and why you guys can't yet write the OS in Swift but that engineers are using it to write unit tests and things like that. It's getting used. But I saw in the announcement that the new Swift Playground app is itself written in Swift.

Craig Federighi

Yeah, well actually in OS X, like most of the Dock—

John Gruber

macOS?

Craig Federighi

—and most of Mission Control. Yeah, well, oh god. [Laughter]

Phil Schiller

Another dollar. [Laughter]

Craig Federighi

In our Sunday rehears—

Phil Schiller

Gee, when was that name first hinted at? [Laughter]

John Gruber

I don't know.

Phil Schiller

Last year, right here. I thought I was being so transparent, too.

John Gruber

I saw right through it.

Phil Schiller

I know. You were very polite.

Craig Federighi

In our runthrough for the show, when I say, "Oh, and we're changing the name to macOS" — and this is on Sunday — and my next slide is to say something about how we have these great new features in macOS. I literally go, "And so our new release is macOS. And so we have some great features in OS X." And I … it's tough. We spent a lot — 15 years — it's a long time and I think we all feel great about the new name.

Anyway, in macOS the Dock is substantially converted, and Mission Control, all those areas are using Swift a lot. So it's starting to spread a lot internally, there are some barriers, but I think this year the most important thing, and I think Chris Lattner really covered it in the State of the Union, is getting the source stability. And so we decided this year we're going to put that over all the priorities. Take what we've learned, y'know, when we first shipped Swift a couple of years ago, the objective was: Let's make sure that it's familiar from an API point of view. Y'know, minimize the kind of transition of, "Hold on, I've gotta learn all new method names for all the classes I already know?" And so we really bias toward that. Now people are so familiar with Swift, the priority is: Let's make sure those APIs are all very native to Swift in their feel. And so we've done all the hard work to update all the APIs, all the naming conventions, and take some major APIs like Core Graphics and libdispatch and make them just awesome for Swift. [Applause] Yeah, it's important stuff. But, what that means is we've achieved that level of source stability, so next year it won't be like, "Oh boy," y'know, as a developer. So that's the important thing.

ABI stability which means literally the Swift binary you built could be linked against the future libraries. That's one that we made a lot of progress, haven't gotten all the way there. But that's far more of an issue for us internally than it is for developers. It's important for developers, but I think the source stability one was the right priority and I feel really good about the progress the team made on that.

On topics from WWDC 2016 that deserve a little more attention

John Gruber

Last question: How about one thing that you guys announced yesterday, whether it was in the keynote or not, maybe something that missed the keynote, but one thing that you think deserves a little extra attention. And I'll let you guys think about it. I'll go first and your correct answer is probably new file system.

Craig Federighi

Is that right? [Laughter, Cheers]

John Gruber

I'm gonna say Universal Clipboard, because I've always wanted this. And for me it's links, it's like I'm on my phone, it's like, "Oh, I want to post this to Daring Fireball," but I'm in my office so why would I do it on a phone? I'll go sit down at my iMac and do it with a real keyboard, but how do I get this from here to there? Man, what I want to do is just copy it and go over there and hit CMD + V. And, again, the thinking through that you guys did of how to do this in a way that isn't going to surprise people in a bad way — there's like a two-minute timeout, so if I copy something on my phone right now and tomorrow I paste it in my Mac, I'm not getting that because it's really, like, a ways of detecting what's in your—

Craig Federighi

Well and even the communication is, like the other continuity features, peer-to-peer. So it's not like you're sending everything you copy up the cloud all of a sudden just so it can get down to the other device. It really is about [two devices right here] copy and paste, which I think is absolutely what people want. And it has the right privacy and performance characteristics. And, as you say, it gets rid of the surprises. And it just turns out to be the most … once you have it, it's the most natural way in the world to do these kinds of things. So I think the team did awesome work there. Yeah, I think that's great.

Do I have to say new file system again? [Cheers] No, I think the new file system is great. And by the way, I mean the prospect of … this is one you have to get right, let's say. [Laughter] And so we have an awesome file system team who really knew which problems we needed to solve for a world of flash storage and has done a super-solid job. And we're being conservative about how we're rolling it out as a developer preview, so people can kick the tires on it this year, but we look forward to making it part of the products going forward and I think it's going to great. And obviously we didn't talk about it, 'cause we don't talk about peer developer preview material there. But I think it terms of something that is important for the platform going forward, it's big.

John Gruber

What do you … so let's just say three years from now we're all using iPhones that are using APFS instead of HFS+. What would be a noticeable improvement to the experience?

Craig Federighi

So, it'll help with performance, it'll help with things like how we do software updates and other things, 'cause we can snapshot volumes and other things, we can roll things back. I mean, there are a lot of important attributes there. It's important when you think about multi-user — like how files are protected between multiple users on a Mac, because we actually have file-system-level encryption now standard across both platforms. So I think from a security point of view, it's big. And I think performance, I mean now you do a copy or even like the safe save operation, when you save documents in a lot of apps it's like, "Move that one aside, create another whole copy of all of that, now overwrite some of it, now delete the old directory." Now that's atomic and the clone file makes all of that super fast. I think it's just going to be great across the board.

Phil Schiller

I want to answer in a very different direction. Of the keynote, the thing we haven't talked about that to me was really amazing was we had a bunch of demoers who had never been in a keynote before. It was their first time. [Applause] And they were fantastic. Stacey did a great job, Bethany and Imran did a great job. Boz did an incredible job. [Cheers] And Cheryl did an incredible job. And all of them work on the things they demo, and they were fantastic. So that's my sort of unsung thing of the keynote was those presenters.

John Gruber

I said mid-keynote — I was sitting with Ben Thompson — and I said I can't believe that none of these people have ever done this before, because they are amazing. And they really did kick ass up there. That was great.

Craig Federighi

They sure did, they sure did.

John Gruber

That's it unless you guys have anything else from me.

Craig Federighi

Just thank you for having us.

John Gruber

I want to give some thanks here. I want to thank our sponsors: MailChimp, Microsoft, and Meh.com. Go there and buy some junk. [Laughter] I want to thank Jake Schumacher and Jed Hurt. They're doing the video here, so if you're watching at home, you can thank them. They are the co-makers of the upcoming documentary, App: The Human Story, which has been in the works for awhile. I've seen a rough cut, it is amazing. It is really coming along. Appdocumentary.com if you want to see more. Drew Bischof from Hybrid Events is here running whatever apparatus is involved in doing the livestreaming, which I've heard is very hard. [Laughter] I want to thank Mezzanine and the entire staff here who has been— they're led by Megan Rogerson she's been here all four years that I've been here. The staff is great, the bartenders are great, security … I mean, just a really great place and I really appreciate it. I want to thank Paul Kafasis and my wife, Amy Gruber of Just the Tip fame, their podcast that is on, I don't know, some kind of hiatus. But they're the ones who made this event run so that I can just sit back here and be nervous and make these cards with questions and not pay attention to any of the details. I don't know anything that's gone on out here. The fact that you guys even have seats is thanks to them. And I want to thank Phil and Craig for being here.

Phil Schiller

Thank you.

John Gruber

Unbelievable. Thank you. [Applause] Last, but not least, thank you for being here.

Phil Schiller

Now we've gotta find the way out.

Apple adjusted some titles in its upper ranks today. I say adjusted because, rather than being promotions, they better reflect what's been the reality for a while now.

Jeff Williams, previously senior vice president of operations, is now formally the chief operating officer. That brings Apple's officer count to four, including chief executive officer Tim Cook, chief financial officer Luca Maestri, and chief design officer Jony Ive. Though Tim Cook was previously COO under the late Steve Jobs, and is one of the best the industry has ever seen, being CEO has different demands entirely. So, Williams has effectively been COO for a while. Putting Williams' name on the title, though, makes the responsibilities clear, including to investors who fret over such things. It also frees both Williams and Cook up for all that Apple is considering next, which likely includes more than just what's been rumored so far.

Williams also owns Apple Watch and spearheads Apple's health and fitness efforts, which includes ResearchKit and more. Since the Watch is a brand new product category for Apple, it makes sense to have a separate executive in charge of it for now, just like iPhone used to. Eventually, though, it might find a home among Apple's existing product divisions, just like iPhone has. By then, though, Williams could very well have other special projects that benefit from his attention.

Phill Schiller taking over on App Store is interesting. While Schiller has effectively had that kind of clout for years, the actual structure of App Store has been split between his and Eddy Cue's organizations. Schiller has and continues to own developer relations, app review, and evangelism. Cue has and continues to own the iTunes infrastructure, but now passes editorial and business management to Schiller. There will no doubt be some overlap, but also a lot of advantages to being and working closer together.

What this means for developers in general and indie developers in specific remains to be seen. Historically there have been issues in both orgs. App review has generated complaints about capriciousness and lack of responsiveness pretty much since launch, and that has always been under Schiller. iTunes infrastructure, resources, and tools—or the lack thereof—has been under Cue but now moves partially under Schiller. In the past, long-requested features like upgrades, trials, and Mac App Store parity have been nebulous in terms of who owned them and how they could be lobbied for change. App Store still lives on iTunes, which means the two organizations will continue to have some level of interdependency, but Schiller's name is officially on the top and it's absolutely clear—the buck stops with him.

Yet Phil Schiller is still only one person and, like any senior vice-president at Apple, he has an immense portfolio to manage. That's why it's great news that Tor Myhren (now formerly of Grey Advertising) is replacing Hiroki Asai, who's retiring after decades of services, as vice-president of Marketing Communications. Vice president Greg Joswiak has expanded his role within the product marketing organization as well. That should help make sure even Apple's growing line-up doesn't suffer from bottlenecks and gets the attention it needs.

I'd still very much love a similarly dedicated vice-president for App Store in Phil Schiller's org. Someone whose only job, from when they get up in the morning to when they finish at night, is to make the App Store great. It's a multi-billion dollar business for Apple, and it certainly deserves it.

Announcing Johny Srouji's title as senior vice president of hardware technologies is terrific. Srouji has been running silicon at Apple for a long time and reporting directly to Tim Cook for years. Given the importance of chipsets to Apple's business, and how far Srouji's team has taken the development of processors, controllers, batteries, and more, having him as senior vice president is important. Not just to investors either but to the industry. Apple's the most exciting company in chip design today, it's taken seriously at the highest levels, and everybody—especially the best and the brightest new talent—knows it.

Today's announcements have made public a lot of what Apple's been doing internally for a while now. And that's good news. A company's greatest strengths are also its greatest weaknesses. As Apple continues to grow, the culture itself becomes both asset and adversity. They need to preserve it but not become preserved by it. The only way to keep growing and expanding and making huge new plays is to continually question and adjust course.

Though not as shocking as Tim Cook's major reorganization in 2011, it none-the-less continues to treat Apple itself as a whole as the company's most important product, and to align people and organizations in a way that supports what's most important to Apple's businesses.

Just like Jony Ive was given all of design, Craig Federighi all of software engineering (pre-Kevin Lynch and Apple Watch), and Angela Ahrendts all of Apple Store, Phil Schiller has now been given all of App Store. There's a clear, unified leader at the highest levels.

That's why, while today's announcements may seem ceremonial, they're really far more functional. And staying functional is critical to Apple's ongoing success.

Updated to improve clarity.

Apple has named Jeff Williams as its Chief Operating Officer. Previously Senior Vice President of Operations, Williams now oversees Apple's supply chain, service and support, and social responsibility initiatives. The company is also moving the App Store under SVP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller, while bringing Johny Srouji to the Executive Team as SVP of Hardware Technologies.

In being placed in charge of the App Store, Schiller now leads almost all of Apple's developer-related initiatives. Schiller's marketing department will also add a new face in early 2016, when Tor Myhren comes on as vice president of Marketing Communications.

Apple is also moving Johny Srouji up to the Executive Team, making him Senior Vice President of Hardware Technologies. Srouji was previously vice presiden of Hardware Technologies, and oversees Apple's work on custom silicon like Apple's A-series chips, along with batteries, display controllers, and more.

Press release:

Apple Names Jeff Williams Chief Operating Officer

Johny Srouji Named to Executive Team; Phil Schiller Adds Ecosystem Responsibilities

Tor Myhren Joins Apple

CUPERTINO, California — December 17, 2015 — Apple® today announced that Jeff Williams has been named chief operating officer and Johny Srouji is joining Apple's executive team as senior vice president for Hardware Technologies. Phil Schiller, senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, will expand his role to include leadership of the revolutionary App Store® across all Apple platforms. Apple also announced that Tor Myhren will join Apple in the first calendar quarter of 2016 as vice president of Marketing Communications, reporting to CEO Tim Cook.

"We are fortunate to have incredible depth and breadth of talent across Apple's executive team. As we come to the end of the year, we're recognizing the contributions already being made by two key executives," said Tim Cook, Apple's CEO. "Jeff is hands-down the best operations executive I've ever worked with, and Johny's team delivers world-class silicon designs which enable new innovations in our products year after year."

Cook continued, "In addition, Phil is taking on new responsibilities for advancing our ecosystem, led by the App Store, which has grown from a single, groundbreaking iOS store into four powerful platforms and an increasingly important part of our business. And I'm incredibly happy to welcome Tor Myhren, who will bring his creative talents to our advertising and marcom functions."

Jeff joined Apple in 1998 as head of worldwide procurement and in 2004 he was named vice president of Operations. Since 2010 he has overseen Apple's entire supply chain, service and support, and the social responsibility initiatives which protect more than one million workers worldwide. Jeff played a key role in Apple's entry into the mobile phone market with the launch of iPhone®, and he continues to supervise development of Apple's first wearable product, Apple Watch®.

In nearly eight years at Apple as vice president of Hardware Technologies, Johny Srouji has built one of the world's strongest and most innovative teams of silicon and technology engineers, overseeing breakthrough custom silicon and hardware technologies including batteries, application processors, storage controllers, sensors silicon, display silicon and other chipsets across Apple's entire product line. Educated at Technion, Israel's Institute of Technology, Johny joined Apple in 2008 to lead development of the A4, the first Apple-designed system on a chip.

With added responsibility for the App Store, Phil Schiller will focus on strategies to extend the ecosystem Apple customers have come to love when using their iPhone, iPad®, Mac®, Apple Watch and Apple TV®. Phil now leads nearly all developer-related functions at Apple, in addition to his other marketing responsibilities including Worldwide Product Marketing, international marketing, education and business marketing. More than 11 million developers around the world create apps for Apple's four software platforms — iOS, OS X®, watchOS™ and tvOS™ — as well as compatible hardware and other accessories, and customers have downloaded more than 100 billion apps across those platforms.

Tor Myhren joins Apple from Grey Group, where he has served as chief creative officer and president of Grey New York. Under his leadership, Grey was named Adweek's Global Agency of the Year for both 2013 and 2015. As vice president of Marketing Communications at Apple, Tor will be responsible for Apple's advertising efforts and will lead an award-winning team that spans a broad range of creative disciplines from video, motion graphics and interactive web design to packaging and retail store displays.

Tor will succeed Hiroki Asai, who earlier announced plans to retire after 18 years in graphic design and marketing communications roles at Apple.

Apple revolutionized personal technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Apple's four software platforms — iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS — provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay and iCloud. Apple's 100,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it.

Daring Fireball founder John Gruber sat down with Apple senior vice president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller at WWDC for a live version of Gruber's podcast The Talk Show. Here, to the best of our ability, is a full transcript of their remarks, interspersed with occasional audience response.

On introducing Phil

Gruber: So, I have one guest for tonight, and it truly is—I use the words all the time when [John] Moltz is on the show—I say, "a very special guest;" that's not a very special guest.

This time I do have a very special guest, and I am very excited to introduce him. Ladies and gentlemen, I shit you not: [Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing] Phil Schiller.

Audience cheers, deafening applause... which dies down and turns into laughter when no one appears on stage. A few scattered boos. More laughter. And then:

Schiller: Good evening!

Schiller pops out from behind the curtain. The audience explodes.

Schiller: Hello. Hi.

Clapping.

Schiller: One giant selfie, everybody. No.

From the audience: "Schiller's my guy!"

Schiller: Wow! And I think Moltz is so funny, so I can't believe I got the cheer.

On the keynote

Gruber: So my first question every year at this event is always, "How did you think the keynote went yesterday?"

Laughter.

Schiller: Well, they finally introduced all the things I was expecting, so...

More laughter.

Schiller: I think it went amazing. I was so impressed, and everyone did a great job. From [Apple CEO] Tim [Cook], on to [Apple Music executive] Jimmy [Iovine], and, and...

Laughter, directed toward Iovine's name.

Schiller: Yeah. A lot of work goes into it, so I don't think a company on this earth could have done better.

Gruber: I heard some laughter when you said Jimmy.

More laughter.

Gruber: Alright, one person who did not appear on stage was... you. Which was...

Schiller: True.

Gruber: ... Highly unusual! How many keynotes in a row had you been on-stage prior to that?

Schiller: I've taken part, either presenting or demoing, over 50 keynotes in a row. Yeah.

Gruber: So you should have gone for 56, would have been, like, a Joe DiMaggio streak.

Schiller: [laughs] No, no, there was no other reason than it just worked out that way this time. But I worked really hard on it, so.

Gruber: I thought that the opening with the Bill Hader short film was so great, but so over-the-top well-produced. When did the gears get started on doing that?

Schiller: Well, a year ago, we started thinking, "We need a really good video next year." Truly. And I think about three weeks ago, we came up with the idea.

Laughter.

Schiller: [laughs] So... By the way, if anyone has a really good idea for an opening video next year: schiller@apple.com, I'll take all suggestions. [laughs] We do, y'know — what's that?

From the audience: "Do the Talk Show!"

Gruber: My only complaint is that it seemed to me that you cheated at the end. Because that didn't look like... Presidio. [laughs]

Schiller: So the idea of the video—and we knew it would throw some people, so... you're in that group—that it started by saying "Yesterday's Rehearsal" and it was meant to be in a secret location where they were rehearsing separate from Moscone so that people wouldn't know what the big production was, and that was the reason that it looked different, and... That's our story and we'll stick to it!

Gruber: I should state up-front that the... [laughs] The rules for this interview were actually extremely simple. Phil said to me, "Ask me anything. I may not answer everything."

Schiller: [giggles] This is true. But you know our PR rules, if you ask me some questions I don't like, you'll never speak to us again for the rest of your life.

Huge audience laughter. "Yeah!"

Schiller: [laughing] Not true. Whoever said "yeah" doesn't know... I'm not gonna use that word.

Gruber: Meanwhile, someone from Apple PR is up there with a gun pointed at my head... Like, a stun gun.

Schiller: Yes.

Gruber: So like, if I go down, then Adam [Lisagor] is right there ready to come out and take over. So the show will go on!

On diversity

Gruber: Alright, serious question. Very serious. And it's going to come out differently today—a day after the keynote—than I maybe expected it to. But... I'm sure you've noticed it, and it's not just this year, it's been growing over the last few years, is—people keeping track over the diversity of the speakers in keynote addresses of various companies at various events.

And that one way that Apple has had an imbalance in that regard is the number of women in keynotes. Now, yesterday, that—talking about streaks—that streak was over. Jennifer Bailey—

Cheers.

Gruber: —introduced Apple Pay, or the improvements to Apple Pay, and Susan Prescott, I thought, killed it.

Schiller: I do too. She did.

Gruber: I honestly think that the "I read ESPN for the articles" got a bigger laugh than the Bill Hader thing, I mean that... But talk to me about that. Does that deserve a "Finally"?

Schiller: No. In fact, far—honestly, far from it. It deserves a, "That's good, more of it." Not a "Finally."

Yeah, there's clearly...

Cheers.

Schiller: There's either some really high-pitched guys out there, or there are women in the audience, so cool—I can't see anything, so that's awesome.

This is a—clearly a topic that's been growing in technology. Not just about Apple, about all companies, particularly here in the [Silicon] Valley. And it's long overdue—and it's been gaining momentum—that there are not enough women and minorities both represented across all technology companies. It's time to start counting it, paying attention to it, but more importantly, doing something proactively to help.

And there are a lot of things that Tim has championed and driven at Apple under his leadership, and this is one of those things on the list.

He cares deeply about diversity at Apple, and believes that this isn't just something to do because people tell you to do it, but because ultimately we will make better products, and our customers will get better products because you have a diverse group of people all bringing their talents and ideas to making those products. And ultimately, you'll do a better job, and we'll all be happier.

And so how do you do that? Well, there are a number of things you do: One of them is, you present some role models and say, "Look, you can be a young girl in technology who wants to learn to become a programmer, become a marketing person, whatever—and there are people who have gone that path and have been successful. And you should too. Look up to that, and want to be that."

And he cares deeply about it, and so we were really happy with this show, that we had both Jennifer and Susan—y'know, their roles are deeply involved in exactly what they presented. Jennifer's worked on Apple Pay from the start. I've been working with Jennifer at Apple since, um, late 80s/early 90s. Susan's worked on my team for a good decade now doing product marketing.

And not only are they really smart, great speakers, deeply involved, and passionate about Apple—but those were two vice presidents at Apple. Right? They're in leadership roles. And so that's good. It's a start. It's, we want to see more and more of that, always.

Huge cheers.

Gruber: Right.

More cheers.

Gruber: Right, and my take has always been that the jist of it is, it has to be more than just the surface level of, "Okay, we will pick a woman, or somebody else, or person of color to go on stage."

Because the way you guys do the keynotes, it's the people who are responsible for the thing doing it. And so, there needed to be Apple Pay news for Jennifer Bailey to go out and do it.

Schiller: Exactly.

Gruber: Right. And so that's even better, though, because that means that they really are in these positions of influence and, y'know, getting shit done.

Schiller: Yes.

On Apple's executives and their love of sports

Gruber: Alright. What kind of deal does Eddy Cue have with the devil...

Laughter.

Gruber: He's a Duke fan, and they won the championship. He's a Warriors fan—they've never even been in the finals before, now they're in the finals. What is going on there?

Schiller: [laughs] Well, let me unwind that question, because there's two different parts to it.

First, Duke: It's no secret—Eddy went to Duke, been a fan since he was in college, he's good friends with Coach K... If you don't know Duke and basketball, Coach K is the greatest-winning-NCAA coach. And so rooting for Duke, like, isn't a big gamble that they're not going to win some championships. 'Cos, they can do it whether he roots for them or not. But he has rooted for them since college.

So that's not it. You don't need a big deal to make that happen. That's happening.

But the Warriors... Eddy has been a fan of theirs for a couple decades.

Gruber: Hm.

Schiller: Going to games. So he's been through some lean times. And he's due. And so, if you know Eddy like I do—and we're really great close friends—Eddy is one of the most loyal people you can ever have as a friend or co-worker, and so he's been loyal to his sports teams.

And the last thing I'll say on this is: If somebody's doing a deal with the devil for the Warriors, that's one crappy deal, because it's been, what, 40 years without a championship?! You're not a good deal-maker.

Laughs. "Who cares?"

Schiller: I care! I care.

On OS X El Capitan

Gruber: Alright. Let's get down to some of the products that you guys talked about yesterday at WWDC. So, I think I'll stick roughly to the order, y'know, go in your order.

OS X El... I'm going to mispronounce it.

Laughter. "El Cap!"

Gruber: Cap-ee-tahn.

Schiller: You said it well last show.

Gruber: [laughs amidst hoots from the audience] I'm a good guesser!

Schiller: [laughs]

Gruber: I really did guess!

Schiller: At least one of you did.

Gruber: [laughs] It is, I know there are definitely new features, some of the features are very cool. I love the new mouse shake thing—

Audience chuckles.

Gruber: I'm serious! I have a giant 5K iMac. I need to know where my mouse is. But there used to be an init), way back in, like, the ancient era that did the same thing.

Schiller: Yes.

Gruber: When the screens were this big!

Schiller: I know. [laughs] You had a nine-inch black-and-white Mac screen, you had to go like this to find your cursor, what was wrong with us?

But yeah, in fact, I kid you not, I did it this afternoon. I was working on some slides, I'm on a 27-inch iMac, and I went "Augh, where's my cursor?"

And I, like, did the shake, and like "Aughhh, I'm not on El Capitan yet on this system, it's not working!"

It becomes very intuitive, very quickly.

Gruber: In large part, though—like I said, there are some new features—but it is mostly a stability and refinement release of OS X. Or at least in large part that's part of the focus of it.

And that is what led me to guess El Capitan, because it's like... There was Leopard and then Snow Leopard, which was sort of a "Hey, let's slow down on the new features and work on reliability;" and then there was Lion and Mountain Lion; and I thought, "There's no such thing as Mountain Yosemite," so...

Laughter.

Schiller: Very astute. But, to your point, no. We don't think of it as only a stability and performance release. That is a big part of it, but the features the teams have worked on we think will matter to all of us in our everyday lives using these systems.

They took a lot of work, and some of them will have significant ramifications for a long time; I think most of all with Metal on the Mac on that. It's a huge opportunity for all of us. So, I think there are some really important things in this.

Gruber: Yeah, I guess that is a big one. And it really does, sort of, it's like this virtuous circle where you've got all these game developers—top game developers—cranking on iOS games for years, and adopting Metal very quickly in the last year, and already having code ready to go. And it really does—iOS is really helping the Mac here in terms of elevating the Mac as a gaming platform.

Schiller: Absolutely, especially in this case. It's, there's great leverage there. But it's not just for the gaming. I mean, that's a big part of it. It's great for pro apps, and we've seen that: Adobe came in and did some work, and we're really impressed with what they could do on it.

And our own teams have done it with systems, as [Apple senior vice president] Craig [Federighi] talked about, to have graphic software layers from the system starting to get accelerated with it, we see big benefit.

So I think it has a systemwide opportunity.

Gruber: Well, my son just wanted to thank you for the gaming.

Laughter.

On Apple, software stability, and Marco Arment

Gruber: But there has been in the last year, a sort of, I don't know if it's a meme, but a talking point that gained a lot of "Yeah, me too, I agree!" The basic gist of it being: Apple's software isn't as reliable as it used to be. And it got out there... I don't know, I forget, somebody wrote something about that...

Huge laughter.

Schiller: No! No, let's just deal with the elephant in the room. Marco [Arment]! So, there's a reason many of you read Marco's blog: He's a smart guy, and he's a passionate guy, and I read his stuff, too. So it's worth it.

And so, complete respect for your perspective and your belief. Don't share them in this instance, but I respect it! And I mean that.

Laughter.

Schiller: [laughs] Try to be magnanimous, and you somehow step in it. So, there's no doubt. With every release there's bugs, and there's things we hit on, and there's things that the team's passionate about getting out there and fixing.

But we're also very careful about tracking crash logs, and AppleCare calls, and Genius Bar visit, and we even have a tool that is able to follow a lot of user forums to ascertain what the complaints are, and try to really gather a good metric, set of metrics on all the issues.

And in this case, I do think the storyline isn't really accurate with the reality. Not to say there aren't bugs, there aren't things driving some people crazy—there are. Of course there are. But it isn't a change. In fact, if there's any change, I think the biggest change in Yosemite—truthfully—over the last year, was that we had a faster adoption rate of OS X than of any Mac in history.

And so you saw a larger number of users, faster in the release cycle, in more diverse networks and environments, in different uses, and that surfaced even more things that would kind of happen over a slower ramp.

And so, there were things to chase out and go work on, no doubt about it. But I wouldn't say it's systemic to some issue, or some wider thing going on. Not in any way.

Gruber: Yeah, I—the feedback I got, it seemed like you guys were taken a little surprised by that, because a lot of the things that you measure were all saying "This is better than before! We're seeing fewer crash logs per user; we're seeing fewer of certain problems."

And I kind of feel like maybe what maybe got lost in the shuffle there is that a lot of the problems people were having were things that don't even generate crash logs. And it's sort of like... y'know, like some of this discoveryd stuff, it's just like, "All of a sudden, my printer just isn't connected anymore."

[amidst laughter from the audience] No, I...

Schiller: Hey, we take—you gotta take the good with the bad. That's okay. All get it out of our system. Let's laugh about discoveryd.

Laughter and cheering.

Schiller: You know, there's an example where I think everyone should be proud that if we're going to try something... It's great to try things, sometimes it's okay to take a risk, you don't want everything to stay and never change.

But if things aren't perfect, and people are telling us they're not happy with how something's working, here we are. We haven't shipped El Capitan yet, [we're] already dealing with that within this one-year cycle inside of that to make a big change to make things better, and I think that's a sign of how much the team is willing to self-analyze what the situation is and do whatever's right.

Cheers.

Gruber: So, just for the record, before we move onto the next topic, you guys do read the Radars that they file?

Laughter.

Schiller: Yes.

On iOS 9 and iPad productivity

Gruber: Next up was iOS, iOS 9. And there's a lot in iOS 9. There's the multitasking, and the keyboard, and the trackpad. All, to me, the gist of it is for a lot of people, this becomes a lot more of a productivity machine. Like, a huge leap forward for advanced iOS users, iPad users.

Schiller: In particular, the iPad features: The team for the last couple years has been looking at what we think would be changes in the experience.

Remember, when we launched iPad, the very first iPad, a lot of work went into rewriting all of the applications in the system to take advantage of that big beautiful screen, and a lot of thought went into that.

And then, we put that out in the world, and saw how people use it, and then we went back to it, and said "Well, what are the next things we need to do [that are] unique for iPad, to make it a more productive, more useful product in the things you do. And one of the things was to help you use multiple applications in new ways.

And it actually took a couple years of development to get to this. It wasn't, like, someone woke up six months ago and said "Hey, let's do multi-window, multitasking on this."

It took a while to, for example, put out last year the size classes and auto-layout in iOS so that people can develop ostensibly for iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, but we knew that by doing that work, we were laying the groundwork to make this happen with El Capitan as well.

So some of these things take multiple years to put everything in place; to do it the right way. Because you can rush it out and do it the wrong way, and then we don't all like when we are.

Gruber: I thought it was the... I was sitting, not in the middle, but farther back, I was really in the mix with the developers, too. And I thought that that got the weirdest reaction—like, the most mixed reaction from the audience—was when Craig said, "You've already done the work, if you've been listening to us and done this Auto Layout and the Size Classes, you've already got it."

And there was this really mixed reaction, where it seemed like half of the developers were like, "Yes!" And they totally understood how Twitter maybe came in and did 50 minutes of work and got it working, because they already had it.

And then the other half of the developers were like, "Aughhhhh..."

Schiller: Yep.

Gruber: Like, when you guys offer a hint as to what developers should be doing, people should take the hint?

Schiller: I think our batting average is pretty good on that.

On the Talk Show's audience

Gruber: Wow, that's weird. My next question was about 64-bit Carbon.

Laughter, whoops.

Schiller: [laughs]

Gruber: That's an old note from a, this card is very old. This is from a... [laughs] This is our audience, Phil. A 64-bit Carbon joke got a laugh!

Schiller: [laugh] A pained laugh!

Gruber: Yeah, there's probably some angry people out there. [laughs] It's all good now.

On Apple and privacy

Gruber: Last thing on iOS, and it's a big thing, and I really thought you guys hit it several times. I think you almost couldn't have been more clear on it, and I really think it is the biggest story in the industry this year. Y'know, it's not like a flash in the pan. I think it's ongoing.

But it's—it's hard to summarize—but it's this idea of contextual awareness with your devices and services in terms of telling you if it's going to rain, or Craig's example of knowing you're getting in your car. Traffic patterns, you've gotta leave for the airport. All these types of features.

And how a company, and a platform, can implement them, with the flipside of—how did you say it, how did you guys say it in the keynote... It was the second-most popular mapping app on iOS, Google.

But there's this argument going on. And it's, the flipside of it is this privacy issue with data collection. And all sorts of things are coming out at once. Google is doing features like this. You guys are doing features like this.

And just, I think by coincidence, but the Annenberg School of Communication had this widely-cited paper that just came out this week—I'm sure you saw it—the gist of it being that typical consumers do care about their privacy, and the implications of the information that online companies like Facebook and Google are collecting. They're not comfortable with a lot of it. But they kind of feel helpless about it, and they're like, "Well, I guess I gotta, I guess Google knows where I am all the time."

But you guys seem to have a different vision of this. And the flipside of the argument, the last part of it—I know this is a very long question. Are you with me so far?

Schiller: Yeah, I'm waiting for the question.

Gruber: Alright.

Laughter.

Gruber: The gist of it is, though, that a lot of people are arguing that to implement these features well, a company has to collect, in an identifiable way, and keep a sort of dossier on you, otherwise the features don't work. You guys seem to have a very different stance on that.

Schiller: And obviously, this is not new. This is something we've believed for many, many years, and hoped that it would get traction—that more and more people would start to care, and question the choices they have to make.

If ever there's a modern definition of a Faustian bargain, this is it, right? Which is, that if you want to get the features, give us all this information about your life that you'd really rather not.

And we've believed for a very long time that that doesn't have to be the case. And so we've built systems and processes all around the idea that, in order to help users, you can do things that are surprising and delightful and magical—but we don't know your data.

We don't, y'know, if there's something that has to get through our server, then it's non-identifiable, and if it can be done in any way on your device without going to our server, then that's the better place to do it. And that we think we can deliver great experiences protecting users' privacy. And that has been a belief for many years. And now it's really becoming a much more well-received message, and we're probably talking a little bit louder about it, because we think people do want to hear it.

But we haven't changed our feeling. This is our feeling for many, many years about it.

Gruber: But it's sort of coming to a head now because it's like... I feel like these features really bring out the difference in the two strategies.

Schiller: We hope so. We hope people will see that I can get the capabilities I want, and somebody's standing up for my privacy, and somebody...

I mean, one of the great things about Apple, I believe, is that our customers trust us. They put trust in the fact that we're trying to make something that's quality. They put trust in the fact that we're going to support them. They put trust in the fact that we're going to respect privacy and security and do everything we can. And I think these are the features that best demonstrate that today.

Gruber: Okay!

Cheers and claps.

On keynote lengths

Gruber: I might be getting the next one out of order—it was a long keynote? My notes are a little mixed up.

Schiller: I've been to longer, but...

Laughs.

Gruber: Have you? I thought—I was wondering if maybe that wasn't the longest—I always thought that maybe you guys had, like, a loose rule that you wanted to keep it under two hours?

Schiller: We do, actually. We think that, in general, y'know, keynotes—people seem comfortable in the 1:45-2:10 kind of range. But that's never perfect. There's other times when things can be shorter or longer.

And in order to get it to the length we did, we cut a lot of things. We were very, y'know, very aggressive on trimming back on—

Laughter. "Apple TV!"

Schiller: Yeah, well, talking... I was thinking more about the power [saving] feature in iOS 9 and how we didn't even show the UI for that! Or a whole bunch of things that are there that were actually really nice.

But we had to, we have to. And even then, y'know, some people—nobody seemed to get up and leave, so I think we were okay.

On watchOS 2, product naming, and marketing

Gruber: Alright. What I think [I had] next was Apple Watch. [pauses] watchOS, with a lower-case "w". Are you trying to kill me?

Laughs.

Schiller: [laughs] It's, um... I think it works really well. I think it's nice, it's ownable, it's special...

I think, you'll see. Give us time, we've been through many fun naming things. This is an easy one. There have been many fun naming things through the years—some very emotional, some very easy—and most of the time, when all's said and done, you look back years later, people say "Yeah, you guys were right, it all made sense together."

So I think we're doing the right thing.

Gruber: I'm hoping that it's like... was it the 3GS? Which was the one where you had a lower-case s?

[From the audience: "The 5s!"]

Gruber: The 5s. And then, you upper-cased the S.

Schiller: As I said, sometimes in the middle of things, we decide we haven't done the right thing, and we fix it!

Laughter, applause.

Gruber: Alright. Hopefully right in your wheelhouse. But, one thing that really struck me is in the run-up to the release of the watch, and in the TV spots that ran, it ended with "The watch is coming."

And then, when it launched, I think, probably right around when, probably timed at April 24th—"The watch is here."

And I thought that was such a great slogan. But it also conveys the different position Apple is in now than, even 2010 with the iPad. In terms of... you didn't have to say which watch.

Schiller: Well, thank you for liking the marketing! I appreciate that. The... I don't think of it that way as necessarily different. When you look back with iPhone, you may remember that we started, the very first ad for iPhone was a teaser ad during the Grammys, where it was just shots of people answering the phone and saying "Hello" from famous movies.

Audience cheers and whoops.

Schiller: Yeah, that was a great ad. And we didn't have to say anything about it! Everybody knew that's because iPhone was coming, right? And so it was okay to do something, and we had that freedom to express it that way.

So in this case, the whole world was anticipating the watch. They knew about the watch. We had introduced it last September, and so we're getting closer, there had been a billion stories written about it. So we didn't have to say much more than "The watch is coming," and show a lot of the designs, and show a lot of the interface. Because one of the great things about the watch is the variety of choice you have with it.

And so the ad got to show that, and it created some energy, and some uplifting beats to it to get that sense that, "Hey, we're building up to a moment of excitement here. The watch is coming."

And so, I think it worked pretty well at that.

Whistles from the audience.

Schiller: Thank you.

On WatchKit

Gruber: Alright. A developer question. So WatchKit was announced last year, at the end of the year—which, I think, it surprised me, because it was out before, way before the watch. Months before, so that developers could get ready for it.

And now, here we are, six weeks after the watch actually shipped, and you guys—I know it's not out, it's coming in the fall when it's going to ship, but you've already, y'know, developers probably spent all day in the sessions at WWDC learning about native apps on the watch.

Do you think—was doing WatchKit first worth it, rather than just waiting to go right to native apps?

Schiller: Well, time will tell. And that will be the judge of it. But I think so.

Y'know, we've been through this once before with iPhone. And that model, we had a year without any native apps, just web apps. And then came out with the SDK and all the APIs necessary to do a good job with apps. And that model worked great. Now, people were frustrated during that time [the initial app-less period], but it worked great.

And in this case, we knew we—again—needed to finish the software, get the first version out before we could solidify the SDK and APIs to do native apps. And so what do you do in the time before that? Do you give developers an opportunity to do something on it? Do you create a WatchKit, and will that WatchKit have enough value for certain kinds of apps that it will make sense anyway in the fullness of time, even with the full native APIs?

And, obviously, our belief was yeah, it would help to have developers know to use WatchKit from the beginning. And there are many classes of apps [where] that may be exactly what they want, and they don't need to do more than that, and use the full native version. But others will. And I think that gave the maximum opportunity for developers.

And so the one other thing we did, that I think, because we talk about this: The same thing you guys all talk about, we talk about internally all the time. And we said "Well, how will people react to that if we bring out WatchKit, and then native?"

So, if you may recall, back last September when we talked about it, and last year's developer conference, we said "And we will bring out a native API and SDK later." We wanted people to know that that was coming, so nobody could say "Aww, I wouldn't have done this if I'd known that."

And so we wanted to make sure there was transparency and openness about that.

Gruber: Good answer.

Cheers, laughs.

On Apple Music

Gruber: Music. I think Apple Music looks amazing. I think that the size of the catalog is amazing. I think it—what was the phrase in the... "moving the needle" in the entire music industry. I really do.

I kind of thought the segment in the keynote was a little long?

Laughs, claps.

Schiller: You say po-tay-to, I say po-tah-to, but...

Gruber: Here's my big question—and this is where I'm rocketing towards being an old man, I just don't know. [to laughter from the audience] It's a very serious question!

So, the basic proposition is, you pay $10 a month—there's the three month free thing to get started, y'know, see what it's like, see how much you like it—but the basic idea for the long-term is you pay Apple $10 a month, and you can listen to all of it.

Are there a lot of people who want to pay $10 a month? I think it's a great deal. I really do. I mean, I think the family deal is a no-brainer. I really think it's a great bargain. But I'm an idiot. I've been paying for music my whole life! [laughs] Like, I was so happy when the iTunes Store came out, because I hated the Napster stuff. Because the songs didn't have the metadata, and it's like, you're doing all this cleanup work just to get the file names right. Just let me pay [for] it!

But is that, are there a lot of people out there who are going to pay $10 a month for a music service?

Schiller: Well, obviously we believe so. We think that once you see the service and you start to use it, you'll realize the benefits of having really great curated lists and albums and playlists and things being recommended to you.

And every time you see something, you can say "Oh, I like that, I want to listen to that. I want that playlist. Great, I'll use that the next time I go on my trip. Oh, cool new album. I want that!" And you don't have to think about it anymore, you're just getting it.

And then... Some people think that's all people will do, or, some of us who are older—a lot older—there's... I have favorite artists that I just want to buy just because I do, it's just locked in my brain that way. And so I'll still have, you still have the iTunes Store, you can buy the things you want to buy. You don't have to choose between the two models.

But once we're on this for awhile, and we're all living it, and we understand the social impact of music that's completely available to you, I think it's going to change enough—especially if there's that impetus coming from the curation and the recommendations—that will keep you really wanting to just add all that to your library constantly.

Gruber: What do you think Connect has got that's going to make it succeed where Ping didn't?

Laughter.

Schiller: A better name, to start. It's an opportunity to, on a bunch of levels that's different. I think Connect has much more been built from the ground up from an artist's perspective of what would they like to share with their fans, and how do they like to communicate.

And so, for Connect, the artists will have a very simple ability to create whatever content they want. Videos, audio tracks, y'know, photos and lyrics, and on and on.

And the ability to like and say what you care about and then instantly also share it directly to other social networks—you're not locked into one network—and the ability to communicate with users. It's not a one-way pipe.

And so, I think that it's a much more interactive environment, and [with] the ability to share a lot more. And we'll see. But we think that, based on the artists who have worked with us on it, that it's the kind of environment they want to contribute with fans.

On James Bond and the camera you have with you

Gruber: Okay. You and I just happen—a lot of times when we meet off-the-record, or whatever, we blow the whole—

Schiller: We never meet off the record.

Laughter.

Gruber: We'll have like—

Schiller: We just think we do.

Laughter.

Gruber: It'll be like, 20 minutes, and we'll blow the whole thing talking about cameras, and James Bond movies, and then...

Schiller: Yes. I tried so hard—I realized it when I got invited to this, and I didn't have time, because the one place you could order it was going to take two weeks—I wanted to get this Spectre logo t-shirt to wear, just for you. But I couldn't. Nice Octopus logo t-shirt, but I couldn't get it.

Gruber: But one of the things that we both share a passion for is photography, and cameras, and... y'know, at a hobbyist [level] type thing.

I've been thinking, and I think it's so clear—and the Shot with iPhone marketing campaign shows that you guys clearly believe it, too—but Apple has become one of, if not the leading camera companies in the world.

Schiller: The.

Cheers.

Gruber: And in the old days, being a camera enthusiast, you really were—it was, like, about the lenses. And it still is, y'know, if you add up the other cameras we have.

But with today's era of photography, it's really about mobility. And it's not about lenses and sensors, though that is part of it. But it's the software that processes the images off the sensor.

Which is why there might be other cameras from other companies that might use the same sensors that you guys have, or similar ones, and the pictures don't look the same. And after that, how do you get them on the phone? How do you send them to where they're going? And how do you edit it, and crop it, and fix the rotation? And then, two years from now, how do you get back to that picture?

It's this whole circle. It's called the iPhone, but to me, I would rather, if you said, "Hey, one of your apps is going to break for the next week, it's either the Phone app or the Camera app," I want my Phone app to break.

Laughter.

Gruber: Do you see it the same way?

Schiller: Oh yeah. The camera capabilities of iPhone [are], for me, one of the most personally valuable and important parts of it—has been for quite a long time.

And as you said, we both share a passion for prosumer photography. I'm no great Ansel Adams, but I love photography. I love the process, I love the thought that goes into it.

I have cameras of all different sizes and kinds, and photography's really powerful. And especially once you have families and kids, you realize how this stuff is meaningful for the rest of your life. And we've been putting a lot into it.

But I will start with the most important adage in photography, anybody who here's a serious photographer knows the old line, and it's true: it's not the camera, it's the photographer, right? A great picture comes from a great photographer, not a great camera.

And so that aside—I got that done—we've been putting a lot of effort for many years now into building an incredible world-class camera team. And working, doing custom work on sensors, building our own custom lenses, building our own flash technology, and most importantly, the ISP and software that makes that all come together as a complete system.

And the same mentality that goes into why a Mac is better than a PC, and why an iPhone is better than some other junky phone, that goes into—

Cheers at "junky phone.*

Schiller: —goes into the camera, that it's a complete system designed together from the beginning to work together. And that's what results. You can't just piecemeal put a lens with a sensor with someone else's chip, with someone else's software and get to the level of result we're able to achieve, the way the teams work together to deliver a complete solution.

On the 16GB iPhone

Gruber: Alright. I have to ask this. You guys have always had this—well, not always—but in the modern era of Apple, there's been this idea of "Hey, here's three: Good, Better, Best." Whether it's a Mac, or... y'know, a lot of different products. Three. Good, better, best.

I think that with the current-generation iOS devices going 16/64/128—I think that 16, it's really hard to make an argument that that's good. It's more like "okay."

Laughter, cheers.

Schiller: So... I'm guessing you're all 128GB users in here? Me too. So the 16, y'know... We used to be lower, and so it has increased.

Gruber: The iPhone didn't used to shoot video, too!

Laughter.

Schiller: So one of the hopes, and maybe we'll see how we realize it all, but the belief is more and more: As we use iCloud services for documents—or Azure, if your product uses Azure—or for our photos, and for our videos, the more we're able to use these things—and y'know, music is in the cloud—that perhaps for the most price-conscious customer, the person starting out at the beginning of the line, are able to live in an environment where they don't need gobs of local storage because these services are taking off more and more of the load, and making their life easier.

And they can start with an entry-point that's lighter than maybe you want, but gets their entire job done.

And we work very carefully to canvas and survey exactly how much storage people use, at different price points, and how much they need. And if we can give them a great solution with storage there, we can put that cost into other things, to make sure they have a great camera, or they have a great screen. And so it's all choices for the customer.

And that's the hope, that as more of this stuff is in the cloud, maybe we can have an easier entry-point for some customers.

Gruber: You did say you wouldn't answer some questions.

Laughter.

Gruber: I kid. Alright...

Schiller: Wow! I can get much more non-answer than that. [laughs]

On the quest for device thinness, and working with tradeoffs

Gruber: What do you say to the criticism that Apple has gotten too obsessed with device thinness? With year-over-year iterations that are getting thinner and thinner at a point where—maybe if you had stopped and kept the device thinness the same and just filled that extra space with battery—whether it's the phone or whether it's the MacBook that... where are you guys going to stop? I mean, is it going to be, like, a piece of paper?

Schiller: First of all, I think that feedback's always great to hear. Y'know, people tell us what they think, and we always want to hear what things you want in a product, because they all come with tradeoffs and benefits and associated things.

If you want a product that's thicker with a bigger battery, well, it's also heavier, it's also more costly, it also takes longer to charge. It's also... y'know, there are... all these things have ramifications [when] designing a total system.

And we look at this very, very, very carefully. The engineering team and the industrial design team work together and model every thickness and every size and every weight and we hold these things, and we work with them, to discover what the feature benefit/tradeoffs are.

And I don't think we've hit the point yet where we're trading off thinness for features and capabilities at the expense of the best optimized product. I really don't.

I love my new 12-inch MacBook. I think it's an incredible product. I use it constantly, and I love how thin and light that feels. And I love the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, and I think we've made great choices there.

And yes. This is something we talk about constantly, but I think we've made the right choices so far.

On Phil's MacBook and taking bold risks

Gruber: Alright, two-part question: What color is your new MacBook, and... how many USB ports does it have?

Laughter.

Schiller: So mine is the Space Grey...

Cheers.

Schiller: Thank you! But I'm glad there's individual choice. Diversity is important. And mine has one USB-C port, as you well know, with that leading question.

But again, be careful what you ask for. Because what the design team first envisioned when we started working on MacBook was to say, "If all we do is incremental, slight change—where's the excitement, and where's the value of Apple pushing things forward? We need to take bold risks. If people don't like it, well they can keep buying the MacBook Air, they can keep buying the MacBook Pro—but why don't we design a product that's around this wireless world, that has, really, no physical connection that you need. You can get by without ever needing that. Wouldn't that be a better world?"

And in doing that, we realized "Yeah, but we do need to charge it, so let's go create this one port that can charge, and be USB, and be your video out, and that way, if you need to connect, you can—you're not giving that up—but this is really designed..." And if you do that, how far can you push it? How thin can it get, how light can it get, how aggressive a design can it be?

And I think if... I'm in my job for one reason: because I'm a customer like all of you. I love these products. I love this company. I want this company to be the best Apple can ever be. And one of the ways it can be the best Apple can ever be is to take bold risks, and try to think of new things that others aren't willing to do.

I remember that—I mean, this is all the same mentality. I remember when we took out the floppy. Oh, I'm sure many of you all do too. It's the exact same thinking!

I sat in the room with friends of mine who worked at... other companies in Texas and other places, and they literally said, "Oh my god, I'm so jealous. We can't do that. We can't do that! We can't take the risk. Because if the world is going to be risk-averse, and doesn't want us to take away anything... Then, y'know, if Dell doesn't have a floppy but Toshiba does, they'll just buy the Toshiba, they're all the same—except if you're missing one thing, no one will buy your stuff!

"You're so lucky. You make something where your customers give you the opportunity to try something in a completely different way, and they listen to you and they try it. And if you have to adjust and make an external drive for a couple of years, great, you'll do it, but you get to make that change and move on."

That's the embodiment of this new MacBook: Which is, take a bold risk; maybe some people will think it's not perfect for them yet, but for a surprising number of people, it's already their future laptop. The customer satisfaction is off the charts on it. Customer demand is great. Does anyone here have a new MacBook and love it?

Cheers.

Schiller: Yeah. So, that's the Apple I want. I want an Apple that's bold and taking risks and taking new things and being aggressive.

Huge cheers, clapping.

On "Apple is doomed"

Gruber: So you've been at Apple for... couple of years.

Schiller: Half—literally half my life.

Gruber: Wow. A lot of that time, an adjective that was often used to describe Apple was "beleaguered." And there were some hard times, and there were years where you guys were truly the underdog.

And now, there's no way that anybody can argue that the most profitable company in the world is the underdog. But yet, people still seem to manage to say that you're one step away from collapse.

Laughter.

Gruber: Does that surprise you, that it hasn't stopped? Like, I don't think it was surprising in, say, 1997, that there were a lot of articles predicting doom for the company. Do you find it surprising that there are articles in 2015?

Schiller: Honestly, no. I don't know if... Personally, I don't know if I'd know how to act if people didn't write that, and didn't say that. Because I've been through all that.

Y'know, there really, you all have read the stories, you know. There was a moment there when Apple was truly six months from gone and out of business. And we've been through this cycle, and as someone really smart once said, "There's nothing to make you take bold moves than a near-death experience." And we had that.

And having people tell you that "You're all not that smart. Your products aren't that great. You're not going to survive." It actually emboldens you to do good work and try to make each thing better, and be aggressive and hungry, and I think that's also the way Apple should be.

We don't need to be told how great we are, and how big we are. It's not about that, and we don't want it to become about that. It's not about P/Es, and it's not about market value. I mean, sure, the finance team has to worry about that. But for the rest of us, it's about: Are we making the best product? Do people love what we do? Is it changing lives? And if it isn't, then beat us up until it is.

And that's a good place.

And I don't remember any great product we've made where people haven't panned it in the press in the beginning. I mean, they panned the iPhone. They panned the iPod. They panned the iPad. I mean, great! Say it, y'know, because that's—I don't know what a successful product is if it doesn't start out with people saying "I don't get it, and I don't like it!"

Huge claps.

On email, logos, and sore losers

Gruber: This has been great. I really appreciate you being here, and the time we've spent. But...

Cheers.

Schiller: Did you say but? [laughs]

Gruber: No! Not but—

Schiller: Buuut! [laughs]

Gruber: But, I was going to—well, I did say but!—but before we finish up, do you remember the first time you got in contact with me?

Schiller: It was a long time ago, no, I don't.

Gruber: It was October 2004. Earlier in the month, the Yankees had—or maybe it was September, I don't know, it might have been September, I forget when the ALCS is—

Schiller: Must have been October.

Gruber: Probably October, probably October, probably early October. My favorite team, the New York Yankees, had taken a 3-0 lead against the Boston Red Sox and I still have this tradition—it's just been a number of years since I've been able to do it—which is when the Yankees are in the post-season, I use their logo [on Daring Fireball] instead of my star and a circle.

And I used to, in the early years—2002, 2003—when I was really greedy, because the Yankees used to win the World Series every year—I didn't even count the division series. I didn't change the logo until they got to the AL championship series. Those were the days.

Laughter.

Gruber: Well, one thing led to another, and I don't know what happened, but somehow the Red Sox ended up winning that ALCS. And it was—

Schiller: Greatest. Choke. In baseball history.

Gruber: So I wake up the next morning, and I was despondent, because it was like, jeez, of all the teams to—I mean, number one, losing three games to nothing, that hurts—but to the Red Sox!

And I start to work, and I love—y'know, whenever I'm in a bad mood, it's like, my work can distract me. And I go, and I check my email—and this is back in the day when you didn't get the preview—I forget what the subject was, but it said "From: Philip Schiller."

And I thought "Somebody's pranking me." And I click on it, and it's from Phil Schiller, at Apple.com, and it said:

"Hey John, it's so great—" Because I changed the logo back, because they lost the game. And it said "It's so great to see the regular logo back on Daring Fireball. The Yankees put up a good fight. Regards, Phil."

Now, do you remember it? Is it coming back to you?

Schiller: Oh yes, I remember that week really well.

Gruber: So... My reaction that morning was so bifurcated. It was "Holy shit, I got an email from Phil Schiller, and he reads Daring Fireball!" and it was like, half an icy dagger in my heart, like, the last remaining warm blood in my body was just drained.

Schiller: That's what I was shooting for.

Huge laughter.

Schiller: But! But to show I'm a—obviously, I'm a, I grew up in Boston, so I'm a big Boston sports fan.

From the audience: "Go Pats!"

Schiller: Yes, I don't care how much air is in the ball. I don't! I'm a Brady fan, and take it for what it's worth.

So, but that series, so the third game, I happened to be on an Apple business trip in New York during the third game, and I said "I gotta watch the game!"

And I said to someone in the hotel, "I'm going to go—where's a good place to watch the baseball game?"

And they said, "Well, the Mickey Mantle bar."

I said, "It's a Yankees game at the Mickey Mantle bar. Alright, I'll go." And I went.

And I whipped on a Red Sox cap, I was the only Red Sox fan in the entire Mickey Mantle bar, and that was the game we got, like, beat 17-6 or something, and I took a drubbing, and everyone [was] giving me a hard time.

And it was worth it, because look—we stunk, and we deserved it. And so, I felt I'd really taken the pain, and there was this cathartic thing that I could nicely—and I think I wrote that email probably twelve times in different ways, digging you, teasing you, being tongue-in-cheek, and finally just said: Just the simple, clean way—that's the way to go.

Gruber: So I told this story before the show to one of your colleagues, [Director of Mac PR] Bill Evans, at Apple, and he goes: "Oh, yeah, classic Phil."

Laughter.

Gruber: He goes, "That's Phil all the time." So anyway, thank you, Phil.

On conclusions and live-streaming

Gruber: A couple more thank yous: I want to thank everybody here at Mezzanine—this place is great, I have had nothing but good things to say about here, the entire staff, everybody from sound, security, the bartenders, everybody let's give it up for them.

I want to thank my friend Caleb Sexton, he's handling audio tonight, and turning this into the audio podcast, making sure we sound good.

I want to thank my sponsors: Mailchimp, who sponsored the bar; our friends at Fracture, who sponsored the video. Did it stay—did anybody—did the video stay up?

From the audience: "No!"

Schiller: It's hard to do right!

Gruber: I...

Huge cheers and laughter.

Gruber: We tried! And Microsoft. Thank you Microsoft for sponsoring the event. I also want to thank Jeb Hurt and Jake Schumacher; they're the directors of the documentary App: The Human Story. They're here tonight shooting this, just to help with the video feed, and everything like that. That should be coming out later this year, early next year. Great movie. But they're helping out with the video.

And then lastly, I want to thank all of you. Thank you. You guys are the best audience in the world, you guys get it, I really appreciate it. They say at Mezzanine, they thanked me, and they're like, "Your show is the best. These people are so nice!"

So thank you for that. Thank you, Phil. Goodnight!

Phil Schiller, Apple's long time senior vice president of worldwide marketing, is the latest person to pour a bucket full of ice water on his head. It's part of a growing viral campaign to help fund research, and raise awareness of, into amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as motor neuron disease or Lou Gehrig's disease.

Schiller used his Twitter account to post three images of himself pouring the ice water bucket on himself. The idea behind the ALS campaign is for people to either make a donation to the ALS Association to help fund research into fighting the disease or to have ice water poured on your head. As you might expect, many people who take that challenge on have elected to do both.

Schiller has now challenged three people to do the same thing he did and one of them is Apple CEO Tim Cook, along with actor Chris O'Donnell and someone named Kim. * Donate to the ALS Association

Source: Phil Schiller on Twitter

After yesterday’s introduction of the iPad mini, Phil Schiller, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Product Marketing, found himself defending its $329 price tag. While Apple’s biggest competition in the category of smaller tablets, Google and Amazon, price their small tablets starting at $199, Schiller defended the iPad mini as a premium product worth the higher price, and said that customers understand this and are willing to pay. Schiller highlighted this at yesterday’s press event, drawing direct comparisons to Google’s Nexus 7, as Noel Randewich and Poornima Gupta for Reuters report:

On stage yesterday, Schiller compared the iPad mini’s app experience to that of the Nexus 7, and said that while the Nexus 7 runs blown-up phone apps, the iPad mini runs full iPad apps. This is one of the main selling points for the iPad mini, that it is a full iPad and that the app experience reflects that. Schiller also tauted the decreased weight of the iPad over the competition, despite the fact that the screen area is 35% larger than the Nexus 7.

Unlike Amazon and Google, who are selling their tablets at or close to cost, Apple always looks to make a substantial profit on its devices. This is reflected in the price of the iPad mini. Apple can afford to make a $250 tablet, certainly, but to generate the profit that they want to out of the device, they sell it for a higher price. They are not selling a cheap tablet, they are selling a cheaper iPad. That might be enough. Despite the existence of cheaper rivals, the iPad has held on to a large majority of the tablet market for over two years now. With the iPad mini, Apple seeks to continue that dominance by betting that what people don’t want a small, cheap tablet, but rather a smaller iPad with a lower price tag. Time will tell if they are right.

What do you think about iPad mini pricing? Is it too high, or are you getting what you pay for?

Source: Reuters

The single most fascinating aspect of the ongoing Apple vs. Samsung trials continues to be the wealth of historical information they're unearthing about the design and development of the iPhone and iPad. Yesterday, Apple senior vice president of worldwide marketing. Phil Schiller, and senior vice president of iOS, Scott Forstall, both took the stand and shared an unprecedented look into the events and timelines surrounding the creation of Apple's iPhone and iPad. Bryan Bishop broke down the testimony for The Verge. Here's the timeline:

• Phil Schiller said the project began with the idea of putting entertainment content on phones. (Because phones back then weren't as good as iPods)
• In 2003, Apple began working on the tablet that would become the iPad
• In 2004, they shifted focus from tablet to phone, and the device that would become the iPhone
• They used a table view as a proof of concept. (We've heard this from Steve Jobs before -- that he was sold on the project after seeing inertial scrolling and the rubber-band physics.)
• Forstall was only allowed to recruit from within Apple, and couldn't tell anyone what they'd be working on until they were on board. (He could tell them they'd be giving up nights and weekends.)
• Forstall repeated the Jobs' mantra that they made the phone they themselves wanted to own
• Of the various "colors", "Project Purple" went ahead as the iPhone project and the building the team took over became the "Purple Dorm", complete with a "The first rule of Fight Club is not to talk about Fight Club" poster on the door.
• Forstall had the idea for tap-to-zoom while using early prototypes.
• Schiller said sales for the original iPhone exceeded expectations.
• Schiller said sales of subsequent iPhones have been greater than all generations previous.
• After the iPhone, Apple moved back to the iPad project.
• Schiller said Apple was going for great design, ease of use, and lust factor with the project.

So, not only have we seen early prototypes of both devices, including the "Project Purple" prototype itself, but we're getting even more information about the timeline and the thinking behind the product development process.

And again, the typically ultra-secretive Apple's willingness to share this information provides tremendous insight into just how genuinely they feel wronged and want to absolutely trounce Samsung in court.

And it's only been the first week.

Source: The Verge

Time Magazine has given their April 12, 2010 cover to Steve Jobs, and features a massive interview of Apple's CEO alongside design SVP Jonathan Ive, marketing SVP Phil Schiller, and internet (iTunes, MobileMe, App Store) SVP Eddy Cue by none other than Stephen Fry. (He also talks to publishers, educators, developers, and more).

Fry meeting with Steve Jobs:

Jonathan Ive on the missing features:

And Fry's final thoughts:

Read the full article, it's well worth it, and let us know how you think Fry did with his thus-far unmatched time and access to Apple's iPad brain trust.

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