The Talk Show With John Gruber

Special guest MG Siegler returns to the show. (Finally.) Topics include rumors of an upcoming Siri SDK and an Amazon Echo-like device from Apple, the future of the MacBook lineup, Peter Thiel's secretive role as the financial backer of Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker, and my hatred of Roman numerals.

Rene Ritchie returns to the show. Topics include Apple’s new flagship retail store in San Francisco, recent improvements to App Store approval times, and Google’s announcements at I/O this week — Google Home and Google Assistant, Allo and Duo, and Android “N” and Android Instant Apps.

Ben Thompson returns to the show to talk about Apple’s recent quarterly results, what we think is going on with iPhone sales, Tim Cook’s misleading guidance, Apple Music, and a lot more.

Special guest Guy English returns to the show. Topics include Ben Thompson’s argument that Apple’s functional organizational structure is hindering their efforts in online services, recalling our first Apple computers and the elegance of the classic Mac OS’s conceptual design, Prince (and his early use of Macs for creating music), emoji and exclamation marks, WWDC 2016, and yours truly’s youthful foray into on-the-job vandalism.

Serenity Caldwell returns to the show. Topics include the new 9.7-inch iPad Pro, using an iPad for “work”, podcasting microphones, the damn Siri Remote for the new Apple TV, the *Star Wars: Rogue One* teaser, and more.

Jason Snell returns to the show for an in-depth look at last week's Apple Event, and the two products that were introduced: the iPhone SE and the 9.7-inch iPad Pro. Other topics include the ongoing FBI/Apple encryption soap opera, what's wrong with the Apple Watch -- and our appreciation for the late great Garry Shandling.

Glenn Fleishman joins the show. The primary topic: Apple’s legal battle against the FBI regarding the iPhone and encryption. Other topics include Aaron Burr’s resurgence in popularity, the U.S. founding fathers’ use of cyphers and codes in their correspondance, next week’s Apple event, USB battery packs, and more.

Special guest John Moltz returns to the show. Topics include the Apple/FBI encryption fight, Apple’s upcoming event and the products they’re expected to announce. And Campo Santo’s fantastic new video game “Firewatch”.

Special guest Jim Dalrymple joins the show to talk about the Apple/FBI legal showdown, the debate over Apple software quality, and more.

Very special guests Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi join the show. Topics include: the new features in Apple's upcoming OS releases (iOS 9.3 and tvOS 9.2); why Apple is expanding its public beta program for OS releases; iTunes's monolithic design; how personally involved Eddy and Craig are in using, testing, and installing beta software; the sad decline of Duke's men's basketball team; and more.

Special guest Ben Thompson returns to the show. Topics include last Sunday’s Super Bowl 50 (and its mostly terrible commercials), Tim Cook’s tweet with a photo he took from the sidelines post-game, Twitter’s algorithmic timeline and the state of today’s Google- and Facebook-dominated online advertising industry, Yahoo’s dismal prospects, and more.

Special Guest Matthew Panzarino. Topics include Apple's quarterly financial results, rumors of Apple working on VR handsets and "wireless" charging for iPhones, Bezos charts, and more.

Merlin Mann returns to the show. Topics include Winter Storm Jonas, the politics of sick kids, sweating out a fever, people going insane over the rumors that the next iPhones will omit the standard headphone jack, the seven-hour *The Godfather Epic*, and more.

Special guest Dan Frommer returns to the show to deliver his first-hand report from last week’s CES in Las Vegas. Other topics include Periscope, Peach, why Apple never participated at CES, El Chapo’s re-capture, iOS 9.3, Apple Watch, Apple’s finances (and stock price), and self-driving cars.

A brief holiday chat about ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’, with a cavalcade of special guests, including Guy English and Amy Jane Gruber.

Rene Ritchie returns to the show for a look back at the Apple year that was: the new one-port MacBook, Apple Watch's launch, WWDC and Apple Music, the iPhones 6S, iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Apple TV, iPad Mini 4, iOS 9, Mac OS X 10.11, and, of course, the most important new product of the year, the Smart Battery Case. (This episode contains absolutely no Star Wars talk, except for a little.)

Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi joins the show for a wide-ranging half-hour discussion about Swift -- Apple's new programming language that just went open source. Next, John Siracusa returns to the show to follow up on Federighi's segment on Swift. Other topics include Apple's new Smart Battery Case for the iPhone 6/6S, and our mutual (and perhaps futile) desire to head into this week's premiere of *Star Wars: The Force Awakens* knowing as few spoilers as possible.

Joanna Stern returns to the show to talk about the iPad Pro, Microsoft's Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book, what's going on with Yahoo (spoiler: not much), how best to sell old iPhones when upgrading, and Mark Zuckerberg promising to donate 99 percent of his fortune to charitable causes.

Special guest John Moltz returns to the show to discuss rumors that the iPhone 7 might not have a standard headphone jack and that Apple is working on new MacBook Airs. Also: a parenting guide to the Star Wars and James Bond franchises.

Special guest Jason Snell joins the show to talk about iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, how iOS still feels like *iPhone OS* at a fundamental level, and Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini’s overwrought “How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name” article for Fast Company. Also: the new membership program at Six Colors.

Special guest Adam Lisagor returns to the show. Topics include the new Apple TV (why we both love it, despite several 1.0 flaws), 4K video, 3D movies, and Adam’s excellent new series “Computer Show”.

Special guest Guy English returns to the show for an in-depth discussion about the new Apple TV.

Serenity Caldwell returns to the show. Topics include this week’s new iMacs; the new “Magic” mouse, trackpad, and keyboard; an overview of Apple Music and iCloud Photos; Facebook’s outrageous background battery usage on iOS; Elon Musk’s gibes on Apple getting into the car industry; and my take on the new *Steve Jobs* movie.

Marco Arment joins the show for a brief chat on ad blockers, advertising in general, and the new iPhones 6S.

Rene Ritchie joins the show to discuss last week's blockbuster Apple Event and the products that were announced: Apple Watch updates, the iPad Pro (and Smart Keyboard, and Apple Pencil), the all-new Apple TV, and the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus. Also: iOS 9.

Special guest John Moltz is back. Topics include Google’s new logo, the Tacoma Tahomas, and our speculation regarding what to expect at this week’s Apple event in San Francisco.

Special guest Ben Thompson returns to the show. Topics include: our top complaints about Apple Watch, Apple making a car, the New York Times's profile of Amazon's work culture, and more.

Special guest Matthew Panzarino returns to the show. Topics include Twitter (their musical chairs game at CEO, the @MagicRecs feature, and whether their declining stock price makes them an acquisition target), the end of Google Plus, why the new Photos app for Mac is inadequate as a replacement for Lightroom for us, Apple's new San Jose real estate acquisition, Apple Car speculation, and Apple's spree of hiring writers from the Apple media.

Special guest John Moltz returns to the show. Topics include bluetooth headphones, Apple Music and iCloud Photo Library, phone sizes (including speculation on the lineup of new iPhones in September), El Chapo’s social media intern, Apple’s stock price, Alex Gibney’s upcoming Steve Jobs documentary, and the new trailer for “Spectre”.

Jason Snell returns to the show, with a lot to talk about: Pebble's new Pebble Time smartwatch, the "Safari is the New IE" argument, the state of web advertising (and its adverse effects on performance and privacy) and monetization, and more.

Special guest Horace Dediu joins The Talk Show for the first time. Topics include the state of the maps industry, Apple's functional organizational structure, what the WWDC keynote said about the state of the company today, and more.

Guy English returns to the show, and we make a valiant but failed effort to cover all of the technical/developer news from last week’s WWDC. Among the topics we did hit: app thinning, Bitcode, WatchKit 2.0, CloudKit (and opening it up to web developers), Swift 2.0, Metal coming to the Mac, accessibility and low-level support for right-to-left languages, iOS 9’s new low-power mode, and more.

Recorded in front of a live audience at Mezzanine in San Francisco, John Gruber is joined by Phil Schiller to discuss the news from WWDC: OS X 10.11 El Capitan, iOS 9, the new native app SDK for Apple Watch, Apple Music, and the 2004 American League Championship series.

Prelude to WWDC 2015 episode, featuring special guest Mark Gurman. We cover anything and everything you’d want to know heading into WWDC.

Special guest Rene Ritchie returns to the show. Topics includes Jony Ive’s promotion to Chief Design Officer and the implications for Apple; the differences in Apple’s internal design culture now that industrial and user interface design are under one roof; Google’s announcements at their I/O developer conference last week in San Francisco, including Google Photos; “machine learning”; Apple replacing the much-maligned discoveryd with good old mDNSResponder in the latest Yosemite developer beta; our thoughts on the space black Apple Watch with link bracelet; and more.

Special guest Dan Frommer returns to the show. Topics include David Letterman, iPhone docks, the space black steel Apple Watch, whatever happened to the Edition collection, San Francisco as the new system font for iOS and Mac OS X, and more.

Special guest David Sparks joins the show for the first time. Topics include “power users”, Markdown, Apple Watch, the new MacBook, iCloud Photo Syncing and the new Photos for Mac, WWDC, and wearing slippers as “work” shoes.

Special guest and longtime friend Adam Lisagor returns to the show. I don’t know anyone who’s more excited about Apple Watch than Adam, except, maybe, my son. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that Apple just released a brand-new thing, and they don’t do that very often. This episode, we just had fun. Some keen observations about the future of the platform, too.

John Moltz returns to the show. Topics include Gruber’s retina, Apple Watch backorders and the watch itself, news from Microsoft’s Build conference, how to introduce yourself to people you’ve publicly branded a “jackass”, and more.

Special guest Joanna Stern of The Wall Street Journal joins the show to talk about Apple Watch and the new MacBook (and her reviews thereof).

Special guest Ben Thompson returns, with the intention of not talking about Apple Watch — and so of course we spend two hours talking about Apple Watch. Other topics include the launch of Jay Z’s streaming music service Tidal, audience ceilings faced by different types of dedicated TV devices, and Meerkat-vs.-Periscope and the nascent revolution of ubiquitous live-streaming video. We make some NCAA men’s basketball Final Four picks, too.

Special guest Serenity Caldwell joins the show. Topics include last week’s “Spring Forward” Apple media event; the new Force Touch Trackpad for MacBooks, and the prospects for force touch in future iOS devices; and of course, Apple Watch.

Special guest Matthew Panzarino joins the show to talk about this week’s “Spring Forward” Apple media event, for the new MacBook and Apple Watch.

Special guest Paul Kafasis returns to the show. Topics include the new Pebble Time watch, the imminent arrival of Apple Watch, Paul’s clever new doorbell (and unfortunate refrigerator situation), a little bit of baseball, and why I can’t attend next week’s Apple event in San Francisco.

Special guest John Moltz returns to the show. Topics include Apple Watch; rumors that Apple is working on a secret car project; our love of old Mac hardware; and a long discussion on Ian Parker’s extraordinary New Yorker profile of Jony Ive and his design team at Apple.

Merlin Mann returns to the show to talk about movies and shit.

MG Siegler returns to the show, reporting from London. Topics include last week’s blockbuster earnings report from Apple, the increasingly imminent Apple Watch, phone display sizes, the impact of China on sales, rethinking the intended purpose and success of the iPhone 5C, speculation on Apple’s 2015 product roadmap, and whether Bluetooth is the future for mass market earbuds and headphones.

Topics include Apple’s pseudo “sabbaticals” (employees who leave the company but then return after a year or two); Google’s cultural similarities to Microsoft; the ways that Apple (and iOS users) might miss Scott Forstall; accessibility as a high priority for Apple; Instagram’s success (and how they effectively ate Hipstamatic’s lunch); a debate on just how “simple” Twitter is; Box’s successful IPO, and Dropbox’s support for Yosemite’s official Finder integration for such services; MIT economist Jonathan Gruber pissing in my Google juice; Chromebooks; Amazon’s overall strategy, and the colossal failure of their Fire Phone; and, lastly, a good chunk on Microsoft’s Windows 10/HoloLens event last week.

Special guest Marco Arment returns to the show. Topics include microphones; Marco’s much-publicized article last week on Apple’s seemingly declining software quality; talking to the press and agreeing to interviews; Apple’s relatively tiny developer relations team (and how that pertains to the aforementioned segment on Apple’s perceived software quality); the purported new 12-inch MacBook Air and its dearth of peripheral ports; and more.

A brief chat about the Star Wars movies, with special guests John Siracusa and Guy English.