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Transcript of The Talk Show Episode 1

Title: All iPhone, All the Time

Hosts: John Gruber, Dan Benjamin

Release date: 28 June 2007

Description: In this, our inaugural episode, we discuss the impending release of the iPhone, speculate about costs and service plans, waiting in line for a phone, and more.

John Gruber: That’s what you’re going to say.

Dan Benjamin: That’s what I’ll say when I start recording.

Gruber: Right.

Benjamin: Which I did.

Gruber: Right. All right. And who are you?

Benjamin: I’m Dan Benjamin.

Gruber: I’m John Gruber.

Benjamin: How are you doing?

Gruber: Doing all right.

Benjamin: Why don’t we start talking about the iPhone?

Gruber: The what?

Benjamin: The iPhone, that’s the big thing.

Gruber: Oh, right, right, right, it’s like the iPod phone.

Benjamin: It’s a phone that can play songs. I think it’s an MP3 player.

Gruber: Right. So...

Benjamin: Big question, I mean, are you getting one?

Gruber: Right, am I going to get one. I think we’ve got to get at least — I think the question is how many will we get. Do I need one for each pocket?

Benjamin: [laughs] So you’re getting one, I’m getting one. Are we sort of people that are — are we unusual, are we really going to be seeing the kinds of lines and people waiting like people saw for the PS3 and things like that?

Gruber: Well, I don’t know, maybe I’m just not connected, I don’t even know how many people were waiting for PS3. I think it’s a very different crowd. I mean, certainly nothing I’ve ever been interested in — I can’t remember the last time that I was interested in something where I was worried would I be able to get it.

Benjamin: You’re actually thinking there’s a fair chance you’re not going to be able to even buy one of these things?

Gruber: Well, nobody really knows — how many are they going to have available on day one? I’ve heard the number three million bandied about. But that’s certainly isn’t definitive. That’s not a statement from AT&T or Apple. Nobody really knows. I don’t even know where I saw it.

Benjamin: Who said that, who actually said that to begin with? I thought Steve Jobs said three million.

Gruber: No, I don’t think so. The only number that Apple has said is that the vague idea that they think they’re going to sell 10 million total by the end of 2008, 18 months from now. So obviously, if they had three million of the first generation model available on day one, that would be huge. I think partially I’m biased — you’re probably in the same boat — where years of following Apple — whenever they come out with something that’s really, really anticipated, it’s hard to get immediately. It’s never widely available or seldom widely available on day one.

Benjamin: When I called up Cingular, the 888 number, the Cingular people told me even just in their stores they didn’t see any problem. Nobody who wanted a phone would have a problem getting one. When I called a local Cingular shop — AT&T I should be calling them, right — when I talked to the local people, they’re behind the curve on what they know. They don’t seem to have any information that’s up-to-date. I actually was telling them, I said, “Oh, so I hear that the basic iPhone plan is going to be $20 a month.” And they were, “Oh, where did you see that?” And I gave them the URL, they were like, “Well, I wrote it down, and when I go home, I’ll read about it.”

Gruber: “I’ll ask my manager.”

Benjamin: “I’ll ask my manager if we can get online tonight, if we’re allowed to read something on Apple.”

Gruber: You told me yesterday that they told you that as far as they knew yesterday, this was late yesterday, that they still thought that you’d have to activate your phone at the point of purchase. Go through a 10- or 15-minute activation process per sale.

Benjamin: Right, so it’s kind of a puzzle. My main question — and something I’ve heard other people who are under an AT&T/Cingular contract as I am — one of the concerns, I think, was what happens to the existing contract, do we need to pay some kind of a fee or a fine in order to get the iPhone, and the answer is no, definitively no. The thinking is, the only reason that you would ever need to pay anything would be if you were canceling your contract, which you’re not, you’re extending it when you get the iPhone. And the only other time where you’d be forced to pay some kind of amount above and beyond something normal, is if you’re under contract and you want to upgrade to a brand new phone, you’re not eligible to do that until your contract is up, then you don’t get the discount price on the phone. What you get is the full retail price, so you want to buy one of those Razors or something, and it’s like $39 if you’re not under contract. If you are, then it’s $500. So in case of the iPhone, we have to pay full price anyway, so the answer is a simple one. You’re buying the phone for full price anyway, and there is no fee, just the activation.

Gruber: Right, and just to be clear, what we’re saying, we’re not reporting that this is news that you’re going to have to go through that sort of hassle if you buy at the AT&T store. We’re just saying that the retail employees are so in the dark that that’s what they think. I mean, I don’t even think that’s possible. I think that the way this is — from everything I’ve read so far, it seems like you have to — the fact that none of it works without iTunes — if it’s tied to your iTunes account, how would it even possibly be activated in the store unless they’re going to —

Benjamin: It makes absolutely no sense. Unless they have a Mac sitting up there or a PC for you to go up to, sign in with your iTunes account, which of course everybody has memorized, and you’re going to log in and activate it right there, and of course that’s not a security risk for you.

Gruber: [laughs] Right, like a public iTunes machine.

Benjamin: It’s just some guy’s — the manager brought his PC from home for you to use. I mean, it’s ridiculous. So they just don’t know yet, and I’ve heard that they’re receiving their training on the iPhone today.

Gruber: Well, and I think the big problem is that from an Apple Store retail employee’s perspective, it’s certainly going to be a big day, probably the busiest single evening in the store’s history, but it’s going to be a very Apple-style process, it’s not going to be that different than December 23rd iPod shoppers, where they’re going to have those little portable credit card swipers, and they’re going to move people as fast as they can. It’s not just going to be one guy at a checkout. Whereas from an AT&T retail store employee’s perspective, this is like nothing they’ve ever seen before. There’s never been this sort of — 150–200 people trying to buy the exact same thing in three hours on Friday night.

Benjamin: And I think something else that we had talked about a little bit before is there’s a big difference not only in what I think those people are used to selling but in the actual process itself. AT&T/Cingular stores are really becoming much more of a retail outlet than usual, they’re very much — and I think you made the comparison that buying a cell phone sometimes is more like buying a car as far as the experience goes. When you go to the Apple Store, if you want a straightforward experience where you just go in and say, “I would like this”, they’ll go and get it for you and you’ll buy it.

Gruber: My comparison was that the average cell phone store employee comes across more like a car salesman, it’s more like a personality type.

Benjamin: It’s all about the upsell. “Oh, you need a charger with that, don’t you?” And I think there’s a huge difference in the mindset, and I think when you go to the Apple Store, they’re expecting you to just buy something, and maybe you need help, if not, no problem, if you do, come back. The idea I think is that the individual person would be able to activate their own phone. I think it scares the crap out of the average AT&T salesperson.

Gruber: It just sounds crazy.

Benjamin: You can’t do that.

Gruber: Right. Assuming it’ll work, and presumably it’s pretty well-tested, but obviously, the one thing they certainly — I mean, in theory, maybe you could test it somehow, but live practice is always different — is how is the system going to stand up when 1.5 million people are trying to do it at 8:15 PM EST, simultaneously.

Benjamin: That’s actually good because I can’t answer that question, that’s a perfect segue into something I can answer, or I can talk about. These reviews have come out, the Mossberg review and some of these other ones, where they essentially say the iPhone is phenomenal, the keyboard issue is a non-issue, I think was one of the quotes. And that’s really great, but they seem to —

Gruber: I think Mossberg had the best line about the keyboard, and he really sort of backed up the Jobs’s line that you have to give it a week. And Mossberg said that three days in, he was so frustrated by the keyboard he wanted to throw the iPod [sic] against the wall, and five days in, he had like a breakthrough and felt like he could type just as fast as he does on his Treo.

Benjamin: That says a lot because those Treo people are kind of freaky. Or Blackberry, or whatever they are.

Gruber: And I think I know where you’re heading, but on the keyboard point — my thing with the keyboard is that — I’m a touch typist, I type pretty fast on a regular computer keyboard, so anything other than that to me has always been incredibly frustrating, whether it’s trying to type on somebody’s Treo — anything that I can’t touch type on to me feels like I’m completely and utterly hamstrung. So the way I feel, of course the iPhone on screen keyboard is going to suck. What’s the best portable keyboard ever made? A Blackberry, a Treo, or something like that? To me, they suck too. Do you want it to suck really, really bad or just sort of bad? So I feel like that’s where Apple made a trade-off where the best they were going to possibly do anyway with the hardware keyboard was still going to be something that you had to peck on, they traded that off for, compared to a Treo or Blackberry form factor, a much larger screen, and compared to any kind of slider phone, something that’s much thinner. Although I guess the BlackJack is pretty thin, but that’s not a slider. There’s no slider phone that compares to that sort of thinness, pocketability.

Benjamin: Where I was actually going with this was, the one thing that everybody sort of unanimously is criticizing now is the AT&T EDGE network. People talk about how sort of horrible it is. I have a phone now that is on the EDGE network that I use for checking email and very occasionally browsing the web. If you’re used to things being instantaneous, then it is horribly slow. If the idea of getting something like an email on your phone is still a novelty, then you probably won’t mind it. But I think one thing that’s actually a discussion point is why do you suppose Apple’s decided to partner with AT&T, and then as a second question, why do you think that the iPhone is only ever necessarily going to work on AT&T’s network? I think I know the answer to both, but I’d like to hear what you think.

Gruber: I think the answer to why AT&T was simply — I don’t really think it came down to networking capabilities or who had the best network, I think it was that AT&T/Cingular at the time offered Apple the best deal, that Apple, I think, came in with the minimal amount of “here’s how much control we want”, and maybe they didn’t even get that much, but I think Apple certainly wanted as much control in terms of pricing, in terms of the plans, in terms of the features they’d be allowed to add on the phone without any interference — a couple of people from Cingular have said they didn’t even get to see the iPhone until after they agreed to it. So obviously, Apple had a lot of control in it, and I think, I forget who had it, but a couple of people said, obviously, they did talk to the other networks, they certainly talked to Verizon, and I think it just came down to control, how much control was AT&T willing to — say, “Okay, you can do your thing if we’ll be exclusive for the iPhone.”

Benjamin: I think you’re 100 percent right, I think at the end of the day it came down to the company that was the most willing to say, “Okay, Apple, do whatever you want, essentially, but just promise us that it would be just us.” But I actually think that there is something else behind the reason why the iPhone is slated to only be on AT&T for as long as it is. I think a big part of it is the business reason that you gave, but they have done so much — and I’m saying this coming from a background in the telecommunications industry and telecommunication billing systems — there’s so much that happens behind the scenes from the billing and the processing and all of that. The idea that Apple would go and write software that would handle all of that, essentially replacing all of the point of sales systems, all of the prepackaged software, and all of the companies that are building software that does this, and Apple has actually gone and written something that on the front end is basically iTunes that we’re going to interact with, and on the back end is something that’s going to plug into all of this really, really old, ancient, legacy C-like type systems, in other words, all the software that Cingular and AT&T have — there’s a lot of work involved, I think, behind the scenes, in making that process be as streamlined as it appears to be on those videos. I think that took probably many months to get right, and I think the idea of Apple trying to build the system that’s going to continue to work seamlessly with multiple carriers, that seems almost impossible.

Gruber: Yeah, I think that’s a good point that they needed to get somebody who they were — pick one, work out the best deal, but then commit to it for the long term because they built their own custom iPhone back end on top of the network, for the visual voicemail and a couple of other unique features, or at least especially the visual voicemail, I can’t think of anything else at the top of my head. It wouldn’t just work with another carrier.

Benjamin: So tell me, what are some of the things that we don’t know about the iPhone.

Gruber: The two that come to mind for me are the calendar app and the notes app because while Apple has revealed so much in the last week and a half with these videos that they’ve been unveiling, showing off, you know, detailed how to use your iPhone, how the stuff works, the how-to video doesn’t show the calendar app. And I don’t even think they’ve shown screenshots of the notes app. And the notes app was also definitely one of the apps that back in January, when they let a couple of people at Macworld play with the early pre-production models, wasn’t even an application, it was just a screenshot. You’d tap the icon, and I think David Pogue said there were couple of the apps that at the time were just — just a screenshot would show up on the phone. So what happens with the notes app? Like I said, I don’t really think keyboarding — it’s not like you’re really going to be a good typist on this thing anyway, it’s not like anybody’s going to take — I think — really extensive notes on it, but if you type a note, where does it go? How does it sync? What is it, a text file? Is it an RTF file? It’s a total mystery. And with the calendar stuff, how does the syncing work? If you sync calendars from your Mac on iCal to the iPhone, can you edit and move those dates around? Can you change events and then sync it again and it goes back to your Mac and it keeps track? What happens while after you’ve untethered your —

Benjamin: What’s the point of a view-only calendar on an iPhone? I want to be able to enter an event right there, sync it up.

Gruber: I mean, I don’t know. Doesn’t seem to me like they’ve really said anything about that. And really, to me, the calendar stuff really sort of is this thing that really cries out for networking, somewhere to IMAP for email. You do most of your email on your desktop computer, and while you’re using your iPhone, you’re connecting via IMAP. The whole point of IMAP is that your inbox is going to be up-to-date wherever you go and look at it next. You sort of need the same thing for calendaring. But where would that shared calendar live? Obviously, I don’t think that’s going to be ready for any kind of official — here’s the official answer from Apple — it’s not going to be ready on Friday, but obviously, something like that is a much better way to deal with calendaring on a portable.

Benjamin: Absolutely.

Gruber: And it’s certainly one of those things, I think, people will criticize, people who are used to handhelds that connect to Exchange that already handles that sort of stuff.

Benjamin: Is the fact that it’s not going to do 3G — and I have used phones on AT&T 3G network, and they’re screaming fast, they’re really, really great. You could watch streaming TV on them, they’re really good. They don’t have much of a battery life but —

Gruber: I have to wonder because that’s one question nobody really seems to have a good answer for. It’s not like AT&T doesn’t have 3G networking, they do. I just read today —

Benjamin: It’s fast!

Gruber: — 160 markets that have phones, AT&T sells 3G data phones. So why isn’t the iPhone 3G? My only guess — I have two guesses: a) it’s about battery life, or b) it’s about widespread availability, that Apple wanted to have one device, just like the iPod. We’re going to ship the first time with one thing, or in this case there are two variations that are exactly the same except one has 4 GB and the other one has 8 GB of memory. But that’s obviously the single most insignificant — I mean, in terms of manufacturing, it’s a very insignificant detail.

Benjamin: So if they had built 3G capability into it, at least my understanding, which I could be wrong, but my understanding was that it can live happily on a 3G network, and if you step down to an EDGE network, it will jump on that.

Gruber: Yeah. I don’t know, maybe it’s battery, maybe it was cost. Battery might make sense. I don’t know. I mean, it must be something.

Benjamin: The battery lasted about an hour and a half on the 3G phone.

Gruber: And that to me is also, the battery angle, is the most surprisingly good news of the initial reviews from the newspapers this week. And even Apple’s announcement — what was it, about 10 days ago — when they said that battery life was higher than previously announced. Because I remember when the iPod [sic] was first announced back in January, there were so many of the initial people — there were two reactions: there were the people who said, “Oh my god, this is awesome, I cannot wait to get one.” That’s me, I was certainly there. Me and you were right there saying, “This is incredible, I cannot believe that they built this.”

And then there were the people who were saying, “They’re full of it. This is not going to work like they’re saying it is”, immediately began doubting it. And there were a whole bunch of people who said that it’s going to get about an hour of battery life, it’s going to get 90 minutes of battery life, it’s ridiculous that they built this thing, that with all these features and Wi-Fi it’s going to get so little battery life, and the battery is not replaceable, that it’s never going to get the battery life that Apple claimed — five hours or whatever they said. And so here they get closer to the release, and they say, guess what, by the way, eight hours. And the reviews more or less back it up, some of them said it ended up at seven, for music playback — 22–23 hours, nine hours of internet playback, I think, Walt Mossberg got, using the web and surfing Wi-Fi. And that’s with Wi-Fi on the whole time. The battery life is for real. Obviously, it’s not the sort of thing where you can use it for days at a time, but nothing with Wi-Fi is. In terms of its competitors, other phones that do even vaguely similar things, the battery life — iPhone blows it away. Blows everything else away.

Benjamin: So what are we really saying, are we saying go to the Apple Store, not the AT&T store to buy one, even though —

Gruber: Yeah, that’s a good — where do you go to buy one if you want to get one on day one? I think you and I both agree, go to an Apple Store if you live near one because I would say a) I think the retail staff is going to be better prepared for it, b) I refuse to believe that they’re not going to be at least as well stocked as Cingular stores, if not better. I just cannot believe that Apple Stores would not have more than Cingular stores, or at least as many.

Benjamin: Doesn’t seem possible that they wouldn’t have tremendously bigger volume going through those stores, and be able to move them faster.

Gruber: The big question is, is it worth gambling, if you really don’t want to wait in line for hours on Friday and spend the whole day in line, is it worth risking trying to swing by on Sunday morning or Sunday afternoon and pick one up? Or do you think they’re going to be sold out?

Benjamin: Well, yeah, that’s the question, are they going to sell out, and everything I’ve heard says no. And that’s the thing for me is, I don’t need to have one Friday evening.

Gruber: But I want it over the weekend.

Benjamin: Yeah, if I could pick it up Sunday, that would be great. If I could get it Tuesday, that would be fine. The point for me is, I don’t want to be the guy that thinks, “Ah, there are not going to be any lines”, and then on Tuesday I try to pick one up, or even Sunday try to pick one up, and now I’m the guy that’s not going to get one until August.

Gruber: I’m going to guess it’s not going to be August, but I’m the guy who’s been waiting since the first week of January to get a Wii because I don’t feel like showing up anywhere on Saturday morning at 6 in the morning. So every time I go to Target, or every couple of weeks I look in Best Buy online to see if they have any, and still can’t get one. I don’t think it’s going to be like that, I think that worst case scenario, you may have to wait till July, but who knows. I don’t want to take a chance. I want an iPhone a lot more than I want a Wii.

Benjamin: So you’re going to wait?

Gruber: No, I think I’m going to go Friday. I still haven’t really decided though.

Benjamin: You’re going to wait in line on the curbside?

Gruber: I guess so, I don’t know. I’m hoping they’ll let you stay inside, it’s going to be hot. What are you going to do?

Benjamin: I’m going to wait outside the Apple Store.

Gruber: Yeah, I think that the malls around here, I think they’ll let you wait inside. I mean, I don’t see how they would keep you from waiting inside, really. Today, right now, it’s like 97 degrees with like a 100 percent humidity in Philadelphia. Waiting outside for six hours is —

Benjamin: That’s like a nice fall day in Orlando.

Gruber: [laughs] When was the last time you waited for something?

Benjamin: Ah, that’s a good question. I think I waited for tickets when I was in college.

Gruber: Yeah, I don’t think I’ve waited in line, like a serious line, like got there hours before —

Benjamin: You’re not talking like at the local grocery store to buy milk or something.

Gruber: Right. I don’t think that I actually got in line hours before something went on sale since — I don’t know, must have been some concert back in college. 10–12 years ago.

Benjamin: So that says a lot, says a lot for Apple. I think there’s a lot of people in our situation who are sitting there thinking, yeah, I think I’m going to wait.

Gruber: Yeah, and I still don’t know — how many people do you really think are going to show up per store? I really don’t know what to expect. I’m not going to get there that early, I’m certainly not going to wake up early.

Benjamin: When are you going to get there?

Gruber: I’m thinking, like, 2. My thought is all you have to do is really get there ahead of the sort of people who aren’t taking off from work, the sort of people who are just going to leave work early on Friday. So I feel like if I get there around 2...

Benjamin: Probably safe. You’re thinking you just need to beat the people who are going to cut out early from work?

Gruber: Right. I figure a lot of people are going to start taking off work at 3 o’clock.

Benjamin: You don’t think there’ll be a lot of people saying, “Hey, it’s Friday, let’s do a half day.”

Gruber: Well, I don’t know.

Benjamin: I think if you want to be safe, John, you need to get there at 10.

Gruber: That isn’t going to happen.

Benjamin: I think that’s the only way to be safe.

Gruber: Yeah, that’s not going to — are you going to get there at 10?

Benjamin: Don’t know.

Gruber: See, I just can’t see doing it.

Benjamin: Get some breakfast on the way and —

Gruber: I feel like, get there at 10 and there’s like three guys with beards, neckbeards who — with folding chairs, sat up watching — I just can’t see getting in line with them. And if I get there at 2 and there’s 400 people in line, I would just go home and order it from apple.com.

Benjamin: And in that case you’ll have it in less than a week, probably. I think that’s probably the smart thing to do, we’re giving away all our ideas, but I think showing up there at about 2 o’clock when the store goes dark, seeing what the line is like, if there’s less than a hundred people in line, I say you wait. More than a hundred — get out of there.

Gruber: That’s what I think, look for about a hundred people.

Benjamin: And then do you go to the Cingular store down the road? Is that your fallback? Or is your fallback ordering online?

Gruber: I don’t know. My thought is that I’m so — unless I read something in the next day or two that really makes me think that AT&T is going to be prepared, really prepared for what’s going to happen, I’m just too afraid that you’d get there and even with like 20–30–40 people ahead of you in line in an AT&T store that it’s going to be a nightmare of 10 or 15 minutes per customer in terms of them not being prepared to just zip people in and out.

Benjamin: Personally, I think it’s going to be a nightmare at the AT&T store.

Gruber: Have you ever done Christmas shopping in an Apple retail store? Like, late, like, pick up an iPod around the 20th of December?

Benjamin: They set up special lines, and they get in and out really fast.

Gruber: It’s just fantastic if you’re buying anything that’s one of the big ticket items like any of the regular iPods, just give me the middle of the line iBook. You just hand the guy your credit card, he swipes it on a little handheld portable thing, asks for your email address, the receipt goes to your email address, they put a sticker on the box, and you walk out the door.

Benjamin: Done.

Gruber: Takes less time than it takes to walk into the corner grocery store and buy a bottle of iced tea.

Benjamin: Yeah.

Gruber: So I guess we’re about half hour into this thing, and we haven’t even —

Benjamin: Yeah, we’re wrapping up.

Gruber: We haven’t even said what it is.

Benjamin: We have a show.

Gruber: The Talk Show.

Benjamin: Yeah. The Talk Show dot net. Which you seem to like the dot net thing.

Gruber: Right. I’ve got the daringfireball.net.

Benjamin: So now we have thetalkshow.net.

Gruber: We’ve talked about this before. When I registered, people often asked me why is it daringfireball dot net instead of dot com. I actually own the dot com as well but don’t use it, and it’s just some sort of weird — I got on the internet in 1995 or 1994, and to me dot com means you’re selling stuff. I’ve since gotten past it, but for whatever reason I’ve always had a thing about using dot com as the generic domain name.

Benjamin: Well, and it works out because the dot com wasn’t available right now.

Gruber: Exactly. [laughs]

Benjamin: So this is perfect.

Gruber: I don’t think anything dot com is available anymore.

Benjamin: No. And this is a show that I’ve been telling you I wanted to do for a long time, since the very first podcast we’ve recorded, and it actually took us finally meeting in person in San Francisco a few weeks ago for me to finally convince you that it maybe wasn’t a horrible idea.

Gruber: Right, that’s very true.

Benjamin: And we have a sponsor.

Gruber: We do have a sponsor.

Benjamin: Would you like to tell us about the sponsor, John?

Gruber: No, I don’t even know who it is.

Benjamin: That’s not true.

Gruber: [laughs]

Benjamin: Our first sponsor, and hopefully not our only sponsor, so if you’re interested, thetalkshow.net for information on how to become a sponsor.

Gruber: What you need to do if you want to be a sponsor is call Dan very, very late at night, Eastern Standard Time, call around 11 or 12, maybe even 12:30 in the morning. Just call Dan Benjamin and tell him you want to sponsor this show.

Benjamin: So, PeepCode. This is a company that my friend Geoffrey Grosenbach, very well-known in the podcasting world — he’s done the Ruby on Rails podcast for quite a long time. He set up his company, PeepCode, where he’s basically doing screencasts, and you can learn — it’s basically like instruction that’s on demand, you go there, you pick the topic you’re interested in, a lot of it has to do with Rails, but it’s not specific only to Rails, and you go and you — very inexpensive to actually buy the screencast that you want — you watch it, and you actually learn something.

Gruber: Right, it’s sort of tapping into some sort of psychological thing where it’s just easier to learn things when you’re seeing it than just reading it. It’s literally almost as good as being there and looking over his shoulder while he shows you the app. And it terms of getting the general idea — oh, that’s what you do — it’s just, you get it, it’s just the most effective way to learn it.

Benjamin: It really is. I think one of the things that Geoffrey’s really done with PeepCode is he’s taking things that generally are more difficult to explain in just a blog post, things that aren’t necessarily “first do this, then do that”, but involve a lot more of concept and involve a lot more multiple concepts coming together, and something where you can say, if you see it, you can learn this in five minutes, but if you have to read about it, it’s going to take you two hours, and that’s what he does.

Gruber: I think “concept” is the key word, in terms of getting the concept across, that sort of format is better. It’s the same reason people go to WWDC. You go there, and it’s not like it replaces the Cocoa documentation, but when you go to a 45-minute session on some new technology, and the guy who actually is an expert at it, from Apple, is telling you in 45 minutes, here’s the most important things you need to know about Core Animation, you get the basic gist. You’re like, oh, I see, I understand what it’s about.

Benjamin: peepcode.com.

Gruber: Yeah.

Benjamin: Okay. So what’s next? I guess we try and go get some iPhones, and we’re going to talk about it.

Gruber: All right, I guess next week’s show we’ll record on our iPhones in a conference call.

Benjamin: Excellent.

Gruber: [laughs]

Benjamin: And by the way, we’re going to try and do this every week.

Gruber: Right, no, every week.

Benjamin: And you know, it turned out, John, to be more than — we’re trying to stick to half an hour, I’m going to have to cut 10 minutes — I told you I didn’t want to have to edit this thing. You did really good by not cursing very — at all.

Gruber: I think there were only two times where I wanted to curse.

Benjamin: Is that all?

Gruber: Two where I had to cut myself off.

Benjamin: All right. Well, hey, good talking to you, and good luck, hope you get the iPhone. I’ll be looking for some live twittering and picturing.

Gruber: I’ll call you from the line on Friday.

Benjamin: Not if I call you first.

Gruber: You know, why don’t you get two and just FedEx me one.

Benjamin: Oh yeah, okay. Done. Easy.

Gruber: All right. Thanks, Dan.

Benjamin: Thank you. Talk to you next time.

#John Gruber #Dan Benjamin

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