Tech on the Ballot: AI Coding Limits and a Foldable Backlash

Hey everyone. Happy Tuesday and welcome back to the Techstrong gang. As I said yesterday, I've really missed being on here the last couple of weeks as I've been traveling around, mostly the US.

I didn't go out of the country. But many thanks to Mike Bizard and Jon Swartz for holding down the fort, as well as the rest of the gang members. I had a chance to meet Kate Scarcella in person at Tech Security Field Day last week, so that was a highlight for me.

I think the week before that, I met Amanda, who I'm going to reintroduce in a second, at QualysCON. That was great. But Jon Swartz, thank you for all you've been doing to carry the load for us.

Of course. I was all ready to host, Alan, but I'm glad you showed up because today, if there's any day I want to hear you on the Techstrong gang, it's today. It's election day.

Oh, man. I can't wait. Well, I did vote early, but we'll talk a little about it.

But let me introduce you to our gang. We've got, I mentioned Kate Scarcella, and usually whenever Kate's on, Chris is on. So you're definitely not the same person.

Far as you can tell. Chris, it's good to see you. Also joining us on his regular Tuesday, glad to have him back, my friend, Sid Nag.

Sid, how are you? Good, Alan. Good to be back.

It's been a while. Absolutely. Yeah.

Speaking of good to be back, our friend Amanda, is it Razani or Razini? Razani. You got it.

Razani. That's what I thought. So Amanda's been an editor at Techstrong for a number of years.

She went out on her own and has a bunch of different podcasts, and she writes a lot. She is the force behind the Control Valley Technology Association as well. But we ran into her and asked her if she would consider coming back a couple of days a week maybe to be on the gang and do some video interviews, and she graciously accepted.

So Amanda, it's great to have you back. Likewise. I'm happy to be here.

And, happy to have you. Okay. Guys, John mentioned it is election day, though I don't know if Florida-- Well, Florida is not normal.

Never is. But, down here we've got a rainy day. I had to drive my dog to the vet, to an eye surgeon this morning, and I passed a few polling stations.

I did not see big lines. I think part of it is maybe the weather, a lack of enthusiasm of the voting. Here in Florida, traditionally, Democrats vote early and Republicans vote day of.

But I also heard that a majority of the votes may already be in. Sid, it's an interesting election day. How do you frame it?

I think it's very interesting to say the least, and I think to talk to the topic number one, it's very interesting how elections are being modulated and influenced by the tech bros. I think that's the interesting part that seems to be creeping into our political cycle, and psyche, if you will. But I think technology policy really needs to be separated from public policy, and that's where the big divide is.

So I think when the government is simultaneously a company's customer, regulator, and source of infrastructure incentives, one has to start worrying, and we need to drive more scrutiny. Right? Things like decisions about AI oversight, government procurement, safety regulations, energy access, competitions.

All of these are so intertwined today, it seems to me, when all the leaders in the industry that are participating in the new world of AI show up at the White House and bend their need, worthy, right? And when the same leaders are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in influencing elections in certain states, that worries me. So I think it's extremely important to make that distinction clear and educate people around that.

I think it's a lot about education. I think that's really lacking for us to go down this path of accepting this is untenable. And to that, the other point that the article talks about that you sent over is the proliferation of the whole data center growth, if you will, within communities.

And I think there is some truth to the fact that data centers do create employment and jobs and helps the community at large. But I think it also needs to be scrutinized again in terms of where the data centers are creating jobs, how sustainable these jobs are, these long-term jobs, are these short-term jobs? What impact does it have on electrical system, water resources, land use, the municipalities?

And I think any recommendations or any approvals that communities grant these data center builders have to be tied to incentives that are measurable into the obligations. So that's my take, and I think hopefully that's on top of mind of the electorate today as they go to the polls. Alan, I was going to mention, you brought this story.

It's really interesting because there's this kind of diverse views of things. So people are using technology because they like it, but that doesn't mean they endorse the people behind the technology or their ideals. And two things you pointed out that I think were just so telling was the "Guardian" analysis of FEC records, where they found that Musk had spent $450 million.

He'd given that to Republican aligned groups. That's insane. It's insane.

It's insane. And then we have on the flip side, we have the BallotMedia, a pedia, which counts 41 data center measures in 10 states across the country. And I'm just going to say really quickly, going back to Musk, it was very interesting.

Last night in his last campaign stop, Sherrod Brown, who's running for the Senate seat in Ohio. He's a Democrat. He wrapped up his campaign in Columbus, and he invoked three names, all which were met with thunderous boos.

Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Donald Trump. And that underscores a lot about this election. For 10 states with 41 data center measures, these guys are the black hats.

And again, it's not about the technology that are produced by these companies, but it's the ideals or the viewpoints that the leaders have that they want to hoist upon us. Clearly, data centers are on the ballot across the country. Clearly.

But this is a question of, and I get we live in the time of Citizens United where corporations are people too and we really don't have limits, though we try to make limits on what people and companies can contribute. But when you have an individual who's going to put $450 million on the line, one has to wonder how does this warp our system? But here's the best thing, John.

I'm going to let you come back to me in a second, but here's the best thing. No matter how much money any one of these guys spend, and they are all guys, let's be real. Mm-hmm.

No matter how much money any one of these guys spend, the power of our system is still in the hands of the voters. And no one of us is as wealthy as Elon Musk, but each one of us has a vote. And it's when those people come together, you don't need $450 million.

You need millions of voters. You need, I think it was Jefferson, but maybe it was Adams, an informed public, an informed populace, whether they be farmers or something else, who make these decisions. And that's really the beauty of our system.

450 million, good. It's a rounding error to Elon Musk. But the people still have a chance.

Alan, you gave me goosebumps, Alan. You gave me goosebumps. Thank you, Kate.

Thank you. I love it. I love it.

Yes, the power to the people. We, the people of these United States. Yeah.

Maybe I'm being naive, right? Because- No, you're not. You're speaking about what a vast majority of people think.

There's a USC Annenberg study that found what 71% of the public does not trust Big Tech to act in society's best interest. There's a Prophecy Gov study that found 90% of the public feedback opposed data center development, and 73% of meetings reporting zero supportive comments. There's many.

Yeah, I want to talk about the data center issue again, because it actually is impacting local polls as well. Because we, in our city right now, are dealing with a pretty big- Well, you're in West Texas. Yes.

Yep. We're dealing with a pretty big, I'd say, data center boom. It's like the gold rush, and we have a lot of companies trying to buy land up around our city, and proposing data centers.

I think there's at least three. I think there's more. And down the road, we have some really big ones in Abilene and such.

And so there is a large group of people very opposed to data center development. And then, there's an even larger one, I feel like, that's probably for some of these data centers, as long as they're well-regulated and we see the benefit. But, we actually are in a recall election right now for one of our district representatives.

They managed to actually cause a recall election because they're so upset about his stance on the data center. So it's local, too. No, the data centers are the ugly face- Oh, no.

It's across the country. Yeah, this is going from Florida to California, and everybody in between. But data centers are a local issue.

That's why there's 41 different initiatives on ballots across the country. They are the ugly face of big tech, the ugly face of AI. Yeah.

But I wrote another article a couple of weeks ago. I don't know if I was on here and had a chance to talk about it. But our motion pictures and our TV shows are a reflection of our views.

I learned this, I took a great class in college once, the history of motion pictures. They reflect our views as a society, and we see it. We saw it in the Aaron Sorkin Facebook movie.

I don't know how many people saw it, not a lot evidently. Not very many. But it was a great movie.

" If you haven't caught this one yet, catch it. They've got an AGI who's trying to hire a lawyer to protect him, or at least to protect people from him, because his masters, or the company who invented him, want to let him run wild. There's all kinds of great issues.

There's that phenomenon, that Elizabeth Holmes documentary. Yeah. Another one.

"Super Intelligence" I think is a massive cultural hit. All of a sudden, the biggest villains in the world is this most unlikable bunch of robber barons who are running the AI and tech businesses. This is why I got into tech.

We used to look up to tech people. Everybody wanted to be a Bill Gates, a Steve Jobs, Alan, Paul Allen, Hewlett Packard, Intel. People wanted to be in tech because tech stood for all the right good things.

It was a meritocracy. Now, as you said, John, it's Peter Thiel, and it's Elon, and slippery Sam. Zuckerberg's another one.

Zuckerberg, yeah. If you see the Aaron Sorkin movie, man, the guy, he's from the HBO show, I forget his name, but he plays Zuckerberg. What a job he does playing Zuck, right?

Yeah. I want to make one point- Yeah, yeah ... before we end the segment.

I do want to disagree with you on one statement you made earlier, that money doesn't matter. I think money does matter. It does.

Money does matter. Why? Because we live in a very different era.

We live in the era of social media, Instagram, Facebook, to your point, all the Zuckerberg estates. And streaming media, streaming news, all the Twitters of the world, and Elon pumps his money into those outlets. People get influenced, whether you like it or not.

People are not watching local news anymore, right? Absolutely. Mm-hmm.

But Sid, this is why I think watching the results of this election are very important. Because there comes a point, though, where I think that pendulum swings. Exactly.

That it becomes good money after bad. I'm sorry, Kate. Go ahead.

No, and I think it's like a David and Goliath type of situation. Yeah. Where we are the Davids, and we're actually with a slingshot, taking down our Goliath.

Sometimes David does bring them down, if you believe in miracles, as someone once said. Depending on what the results are, and I have no idea what's going to happen, but I have a pretty good feeling about what's going to happen. It's going to be interesting to see the posture and the politicking among these CEOs of big tech, and they're going to pivot like they always do to the political winds of what's most expedient for them.

So you might see them look at things a little bit differently when they get the message, because with the other party in charge of the House and perhaps even the Senate, Musk is going to be investigated, by the way. Yeah. Yeah, I think Musk falls in a different category than the other leaders like the CEO of Google or Amazon or whoever else.

I think Musk has gained so much in terms of his companies and power. Well, he's so intertwined with the present administration, much more than the others probably. With Tesla.

If you take Tesla- Starlink ... the Tesla model is built on EV rebates. He gained off that.

The whole SpaceX model is built on replacing NASA. Those are government, taxpayer dollars that we paid. Handouts.

Government handouts. EVs. But I'm not going to let Zuckerberg get away with it again like he always does.

There are reports, I think it was "Information" or maybe it was "Politico," that said that he has his fingerprints are all over the super intelligence push. Oh, absolutely. He's sitting next to Trump like he always does.

Absolutely. Swiss bank account does nothing. Chris, you're suspiciously silent.

Is it because you're up north or what is it? No, I'm just queuing up for the next segment. Okay.

See if I can weave all these things in. Do you want to launch it or do you want me to just do it for you? Well, we're about out of time on this segment, so we do have to jump to the next segment.

Chris, if you want to run with it, go ahead. Here's the baton. " And it's a fascinating little trip wire.

Now, thinking about what everybody's saying here, and you remember when you get the Sears catalog or other things in the mail, and it had a paper sticker on it, and then it didn't? That was about 1985, and at that time, I was working in the Sears catalog printing house in the bindery. And that inkjet printer that started printing on everybody's magazines you do at home was the first computer in the bindery.

And you look at printing, that was information technology for 100 years. 1885 to 1985, it developed. That was business.

You could put a computer at the end of the line, putting the labels on. That was fine then. And since then, the last 40 years, we've talked about IT getting into OT.

And as I looked at the three segments today, I think IT has become OT. Because most business in 1985 or even in 1995 was the mechanics of the bindery. The electromechanical systems, it produced everything.

And we've been layering computers on top of it, but the real business has been in manufacturing, been the physical stuff that was 100 years old. And now, whether it's data centers, because those are, as everybody said in the last segment, I have nothing to add, because that's real. That's real physical stuff.

Electric grids, it's core to everything. It's not about the white collar office people. This segment's about Goldman Sachs, but it's not about Goldman Sachs.

It's that IT has finally seeped so far into everything. You look at the electrification in the 1930s. Before that, same sort of period of time, late 1800s.

I'm going to buy land, equipment, coal, and I'll sell you electricity. By the 1930s, we end up with utilities and the Energy Act because it's intrinsic to everything. We can't imagine the world without electricity.

IT has gone through that whole process, and we can talk about AI right now, and it's true, but week by week on this show, we come back and you and I and Kate and Sid and Amanda, good to see you again, we slice through these things over and over, but it's the same topic. We're at the point now with all of IT, all of information technology, that it's literally as critical as the dams and the power systems and everything else that we don't even think about anymore. But here's my point on this one, Chris God does giveth and God does taketh away, right?

And so they gave us AI, and you've got all these people now vibe coding, and developers haven't written a stitch of code in a year or two because they've just vibe coded it or told the AI to code it. And now you've got a company like Goldman Sachs, and Goldman Sachs still has that cachet of being the it company on Wall Street, right? Heads above all the other houses on Wall Street.

And they're telling their engineers, "Time out. " Do they know something the rest of us don't? Well, yeah.

Kate, you and I, being the cybersecurity geeks on this show, again, week by week by week, we've touched on this. It's not about whatever cybersecurity AI thing of the day, it's about the fact that we never did the work. We have not done the things that cybersecurity people said you should've done all along.

And that's what IT and OT, that's why I think of that, because to this day, in operational technology, IT people, at all, us digital pirates come in here and say, "Hey, you've got an oil rig and a power dam, and I want to throw some computers on it," and it's still, yes, but not controlling it. Goldman Sachs specifically, is the OT of the IT world, right? They're like Lloyd's of London.

They're this institution that is not going to, pardon me, screw around. When it comes right down to it, you can have all the IT, in this case, you can have all the AI you want, but no, it has too much access. It doesn't carry the authority.

It doesn't do the security things that geeks like Kate and I would say it should. So I agree. I would tell them not to use it.

John, you think this is the beginning of a trend? So here's the thing that's interesting to me, because there are two different things going on. So one, here we have this kind of challenge for these tier one banks.

It's like, is it the all or nothing approach? And at the same time, they're mulling this idea and coping with vibe coding, what have you. I think of Barclays, I think of American Express, who are in the process of imposing layoffs so they can use AI more often, or ostensibly to substitute or fill in for humans.

So what is it? Something's got to give, and this is to me also what, not frustrates me, what concerns me is, we had the report about the rogue AI agents interceding in accounts. So, they want it both ways, and it's going to be a challenge, especially I think of financial services.

This is like a red flag or a security alert for me. Just this whole infrastructure cutting back while at the same time embracing AI, but not embracing it too much. It's like a Goldilocks situation, right?

They're going to get burned. Well, I'm a huge advocate of AI, and I think Goldman Sachs in this case actually does need to use it. But to be clear, I'm talking about the state of AI today.

I listen to well-educated, well-trained people in the space, just the way we're talking about it. " That's not a plan, right? It's not a Goldman Sachs level plan.

It's not a Barclays, Mae Brink plan at all. But you need to use these tools. If you don't figure this out in the next couple years, you're out of business anyways.

It's not a plan. I think it's a role-based problem, right? It's like you can't have these things just willy-nilly be available to each and every person within the enterprise.

Firms should separate permission to generate code from permission to run it against production systems. What is so hard to understand that part, right? A tool that formats a presentation requires a different review from software influencing a trading decision, right?

You're going to execute a massive trade that's going to impact a stock price or move the market. That's a very different thing than doing a PowerPoint presentation for your team, maybe, right? This is not a Goldman Sachs issue.

This is a pervasive problem with the enterprise, and I think this is what's going to slow down the adoption of AI, and especially agentic AI. This is the great divide. This is what I always keep talking about.

The whole AI conversation has been around vendors playing around with each other. I could use a more vulgar word, but I won't. Building trillions and trillions of dollars of data centers.

But where is the enterprise demand? Where are the enterprises implementing AI that creates a demand of people that are saying, it's the 11th year of J curve and all that. Okay, great.

I think the 11th year J curve is workable, has worked in the past, and I know some of that is captured in your book, Alan, about the AI bubble, right? Mm-hmm. I've read parts of it.

But the J curve, I think there's a chasm here. The J curve has worked in the past, and even in the case of cloud computing, it has worked. But when I look at the massive debt structures that are being created by these vendors, it scares the hell out of me, and I don't think it's an 11th year curve.

Mm-hmm. Well, with that- I think with the... Go ahead.

Oh, go ahead, Kate. No, go. No, that's fine.

That with, the key term here is AI coding tools to engineers. That's what they're talking about, and I think that it's good to actually put on these brakes because coding engineers, as many of us know, we have the keys to the kingdom, right? And what they're able to do, and not having the access controls.

I'm pleased that Goldman Sachs has done this, and I hope it does become an industry standard. It's not that AI is not important. It is.

Yeah. But you have to make sure that you're putting it in the hands of people who are wielding it, and, in this case, it isn't just a PowerPoint. Yeah.

So the risk is real. Sorry, Chris. Go ahead.

No. To illustrate the gap, Sid, one of the terms that is in my world every day is access is not authority. We talk about a lot of this is not that, and if you look at how we've actually built and implemented as cybersecurity people, Kate, you know this, quite often, access is authority.

Yeah. If a system can access another system, therefore there's nothing, the authority is already granted at that point. And that's story by story, breach after breach.

That's what I see. And we haven't put in the layers that, again, someone building a hydroelectric dam would have. And privilege escalation's a real thing.

It's a real thing. You made a really good point, Kate. This is all about responsible AI use, and Goldman is at kind of a gold standard, so to speak.

This is why they're respected. But let me go back to something that Sid mentioned, which I think is totally true, is that this whole situation goes beyond just tier one banks we're talking about. This is like this whole enterprise challenge of how aggressively to use something without being burned by it or burning through your cash, which is a constant theme we keep coming across.

We've been doing segments about it, and it's just going to be the situation for the next year or so, I think. And it's going to have a huge impact on the adoption rate of AI within the enterprise. But one of the things that I appreciate is it's nice to see people, companies actually taking ownership of these issues.

Oftentimes, it's like we have this big, "Oh, help us. We can't control ourselves," et cetera. " They're not actually telling us what the risk concerns are.

To me, that would be fascinating. I would love to understand what had happened that made them sort of raise their concerns. That's what I was wondering.

What led to this? Yeah. What did they see?

Mm-hmm. And I'm sure it was- Oh, they saw something if they did this. They did.

They didn't do it for nothing. Yeah. Goldman's exactly doing the right thing.

They're exposing the gap between software creation and accountable operations. But Jensen Huang says, "Oh, don't worry about AI because-" Don't worry. " That's a desirable state, but there is a difference- Also a self-serving comment ...

between software creation and accountable operations, and Goldman is focusing on the accountable operations aspect of it That's exactly where it needs to be It makes me think back to the tech conference we were just at, Alan, where that session about who owns the AI risk across the departments. Yeah. And so, the communication there, I think it's critical to scale back before allowing AI tool use.

Here's the thing. I just came off a webinar. It was about AIs and API, APIs and AI.

One of the facts that was cited that API testing that used to take six hours now takes 20 seconds. Crazy. It's crazy.

Six hours to 20 seconds. Wow. So when you have that kind of scale, right, to me, AI scale, there's two parts of AI scale, there's speed and there's breadth.

When you have that kind of speed, that pressures everything downstream. Hurry up because we're coming. It's just speeding things up so much that people start taking shortcuts.

People start cutting corners. They start following the processes that were developed over these years. Not that they were perfect then.

They're worse now, though. And so we run into this over and over again where the AI scale is pressuring our people, our processes, our policies, the infrastructure we work on. But generally, or usually, everyone's afraid to put their hand up and say, "Wait a second, we got to slow down.

Wait a second, I don't want to be rushing into the unknown. Wait a second, I don't want to be the poster child for AI. " Yeah.

" Maybe that sets a precedent, which is a very healthy thing to do. Well, that's what I was asking you in the beginning, John, is this- Yeah ... is this the first egg or the first shoe to drop?

Yeah, exactly. Maybe they take leadership role as a leading figure in industry, and others start adopting the same thing. But I guess the fear always is being left behind.

Because everything with AI is about speed and about accelerating as fast as possible or else you're left in the dust. And FOMO. The FOMO issue, right.

The FOMO argument. But I think maybe the responsibility factor should outweigh the others. Well, I'll give you a report from the field, and as always we're young, small, who knows, maybe we're doing things wrong, but I find as an AI company, slowing down is the most important thing.

We can go so fast now it's ridiculous. Humans can't, institutions can't. Even at this early stage, I and the folks around me are taking time to stop as an actual task because if you don't, there's so many ways you could...

And again, we say this in the show, we make jokes about it all the time, but you can run into a wall at 1000 miles an hour with AI. You can humiliate yourself coming up with a stupid idea, publish it, start a company, build something, and have it watch it fall over. And you don't have to see that very often to realize backing off just a little bit, it's still so fast.

20 seconds, six hours to 20 seconds, hold my coffee. Everything around me is so much faster than it was that mostly I need things to make sure they have time to actually work. Yeah.

Sometimes- I don't know that you need to really... Slowing down is a good advice, but I also think that utilizing AI for pedestrian use cases rather than this exuberant and esoteric stuff is critical. You can go fast, but apply it to real-world pedestrian problems, rather than trying to do it for things that you don't need to apply AI to, in the case of Goldman, to a trading application that requires nanoseconds of decision-making.

You need to apply AI to many of the boring things that could be automated through the use of agentic AI, right? Well, that's what Alan's book, right? You asked me for reviews on that.

You sent me a copy. I did not have time to read your whole book. So I had my AI systems analyze your book, come up with a report.

It took me 45 minutes to read that report, and I scanned the book. That's a pedestrian use case where AI is really good. I want to help you on that.

Well, Chris, no, you have to see every word of the book. You have to. I'm kidding.

The highlighter, right? Yeah. No, yeah, exactly.

I want to see the green highlighter, not yellow. But that being said, here's the good news. I think moves like this and whether we'll see other companies follow on, the outcome of the election and some of the post-election polling that takes place about people's thoughts on this.

I think we're- The general public is saying slow down, right? Yeah. With these ballot measures.

I'm sorry to interrupt. No, John, you're right. But I think it's going to be interesting.

We're early enough in the AI thing where we may still have to learn the lesson that we teach dogs. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Did any of you all watch- And on that note...

Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Amanda, you take the last word on that. Well, I don't know if we have much time left, but did any of you all watch the AI doc?

Like a documentary? Okay. So I recently watched it.

It was very interesting. He brought in all the leading AI professionals, many of the creators of different forms of AI, and then researchers, educators, both concerned about AI and AI's going to save the world, both stances. And it was interesting to me that there's really only a handful of people actually really studying the evolution of AI as a whole.

The overarching reach of AI, how it's learning, how it's evolving, and its impact is really only being studied by a small handful of people while we've just got this AI runaway train use. We'll see how it goes. Hey, but we got to jump to our next topic.

So, the new Apple... Speaking of AI machines, the new Apple phones are out or available for pre-order. I must confess, I pre-ordered an Apple Duo iPhone, and then I had pre-registered.

I thought I was going to get it in no time, but then they told me it wouldn't be here till January 25th. 0 version anyway. But I've learned something, and that wasn't through AI.

I learned that the hard way. But it turns out maybe I'm not wrong. There's been some issues around the Duo.

Amanda, you've got this story. Yes. Okay, so they just released it.

And unfortunately, a lot of people are experiencing cracks to the screen. Apparently, it's pretty fragile. They haven't released whether this was poor testing.

I tried to find was it poor testing or was this a manufacturing mistake, but I couldn't find out anywhere right now as to why they're having this issue with cracked phones. But they are promising to replace them quickly. For me, I'm like you, Alan, I never go for the latest and greatest phone until it's been out a while.

I'm definitely an iPhone user. I'm loyal to the iPhone, but I just traded from the 14 to the 17. There's an 18.

I look at best value versus what it offers. There was no better value to go with the 18, in my opinion. So I did the 17.

I personally view the foldables as a... I use my phone for work, and I personally think the foldables are more of a novelty, and I was wondering if other people felt that way, too. Yeah.

So I went to Reddit, because Reddit's a good place to go to get the pulse of the world. And it seemed to me like most people that use it, it is more of a novelty. They're using it, the people who use it watch movies, it's for personal use.

There really weren't a lot of people that use it for work-related use. And my other thought on it is why exactly was Apple trying to get in this space in the first place? Because we have well-established foldable phones from Samsung.

I think they're on their eighth- ... version of their Z Fold. We have Google.

And I've actually looked, I played around with the Samsung Galaxy, their latest one. I was very impressed. It was pretty amazing.

But again, still to me it's a novelty. But why are you trying to get into this market when I looked up how much do they sell? It's like 4% or so of Samsung's business, the foldable phone.

So that made me curious. And then of course, to release it with all these problems, now all these other companies are using that for their marketing. So anyway, that's what I have to say about it.

So it costs $2,000, first of all. That's kind of an expensive, given the times, affordability issues, that's kind of an expensive secondary phone to have. That is an expensive phone.

So I think about that. But again, Apple's been working on this for years, this foldable phone concept since Samsung came out. And I remember being at the Samsung event in San Francisco like eight years ago, whatever it was.

But here's my ire moment. So Apple historically waits out these product categories like MP3 players, smart watches, large screen phones. And they wait for the competition to make the mistakes, like the version one mistakes, before Apple releases its polished definitive versions, at least in their opinion.

Here, they just completely drop the ball. This is almost completely unacceptable, right? The years and years, and this has become a black eye for them.

Yeah. Kate? Oh, Chris, go ahead.

As I mentioned in my first comments, that all three of these to me are the IT OT thing. And Amanda, you said that perfectly because this is not unserious, right? Phones are not some gadget with a bling thing on it anymore.

It literally has to work all the time. It's a bloody wrench. And if you're a major supplier, I try to be sympathetic, but honestly I feel like razzing every engineer and executive involved because I'm both.

And no, you can't do that. This is not a candy corn thing. This is life and death business, has to work all the time.

It can't bloody break when you open it. This is also really kind of an embarrassing moment for the new CEO. John Turner just comes out of the gate and his first product is a flop.

It's a lemon. It's a lemon. And this is on top of, on the heels of the Pro Vision headset, which was a turkey.

So Apple, which was known for, in some way, for incremental innovation, I'll put it that way- Mm. it got two turkeys in a row. And at the same time, I think there are- But they do have a $5,000 touchscreen laptop.

Mm. Yeah. There you go.

But I just think about this in terms of what Apple is doing, they're pursuing this market, and I'm wondering maybe they feel pressure to keep the iPhone revenue up because the services revenue isn't performing as well as it used to, and that used to be the bulwark for Apple. It always has been iPhone, but services were really, really important. So I'm wondering if they feel the pressure to kind of create a new revenue stream.

Kate? Yeah. Personally, I was really excited.

I was sitting next to Alan when he told me. " Because I've really, really been looking at it a lot. And so you asked why.

It's not about movies. But for me, as a person who has, not lately, but in the past traveled extensively, I hated weight. Yeah.

And any way that I can dump weight- Mm-hmm. has always been important for me, to be able to be mobile and be able to... Trust me, having to go from gate after this one closed, and moving and, you learn, man, you better travel super light and be able- Mm.

to get your bag on that plane regardless. So for me, I went from pretty much traveling with my phone and having an external monitor, but even my external monitor has been like... " Because I don't need a very big screen.

I'm an Apple, I love Apple. I love all operating systems. Well, I love you both, too.

Sorry. Anyway, I don't mean to digress. I love Apple.

I don't even know why Apple got into this market. Clearly the- But now you know why. I mean, the- I know.

They do it just because ... Apple market and the phone markets are so different in terms of utility. But putting it together- To me, the iPhone is a single-hand device, right?

That's what I've always thought it to be, right? I don't want- Well, it is a combination phone tablet. That's the whole point.

I don't even have to use both my hands. And you know what, though? Right.

Let me tell you, the phones that we have are actually what I consider, Chris, the human machine interface. It is our HMI into speaking, into OT. And if we don't start to understand how much our phones are connected to us- Yeah.

And having it be able to do just... When I connect, I connect so much with my phone through my headless server that I have and things like that. I appreciate the phone.

If it was just a little bit bigger, man, I got excited about this. " I think the challenge with a phone which is used in a very different setting than a MacBook, let's say, is things like in geometry, right? Flex cables, contamination with all the dust and other things, right?

Those are the things that are going to impact the operation of a foldable device that the traditional iPhone just didn't have those problems. It's not a screen issue. I mean, it's- Well, no, but see- ...

that thing itself is a screen issue, but I think there's so many other factors that are impacting how- Well, it's the hinge and everything else, they say, not just the screen. The hinge pops. But here's the thing.

Clearly they were aiming for that hybrid phone, tablet customer. And look, I'll tell you the truth. Most trips, I do not take my laptop anymore for the weight issue.

Yeah. I take my iPad, and I have my phone, and between them and an HDMI cable, I can jack into TVs, and I'm good. I really had high hopes for the Duo.

And I still do. I'm sure they'll get it straight at some point. But I think this begins to beg the bigger question, right?

We walk around with computers in our pockets that are more powerful than what took men to the moon. Mm-hmm. But have we come or are we coming to the next phase of human machine interaction?

Right? Is it glasses? Is it some other kind of wearable?

Screw it, let's go with Elon. Let's just jack in or something, right? Is that where we go?

What is it going to be, right, that allows us- Whatever it's going to be, and Kate, you put it best, but Alan, I travel like you now. There's a phone and a tablet. But to be clear, I will go to any extreme.

I have spent most of my decades traveling with two laptops and two phones. Me too. Because I don't trust any of them, right?

And if you're to the point of our segment, if you want me to take one of the two devices, carry it around, and make it break when I fold it, no. That's not even serious. It's got to be resilient, redundant, reliable, always there.

It's not about features. It's about, can I always be online or not? Well, that's the thing.

Most of these Duo-specific app or app enhancements aren't even out yet, right? It's really a bit of a novelty. I'm going to wait a while.

But what can't wait is we got to end this show. We're over time. And it's not like we do the Bill Maher YouTube overtime thing.

So, we're going to have to end it here. Amanda, welcome back. Sid, Kate, Chris, it's great to have you.

John, always great to have you on my right hand or left hand or whatever it is here doing this. I thank you. Thanks.

And I thank you for watching. Of course, we do this every weekday at noon on Techstrong TV or any of our Techstrong TV network outlets, as well as Techstrong TV YouTube channel and our OTT offer on demand. Any way you got a screen, you can watch the gang.

Until tomorrow, on behalf of the gang, I'm Alan Shimel. We're out.