Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:05:26 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tony Fadell
[01:05:26] S1: I feel like this is a really interesting lens into the press release first or working backwards idea, is create the infomercial first and just go extreme. [01:05:35] S0: Sure, you could. [01:05:35] S1: Oh my God. I just kept up with a whole new- [01:05:36] S0: Know what you don't want to do for sure. [01:05:39] S1: But it's like a cool lens to go really far and then kind of pull back the best parts and make it honest. I think we just came up with a really good idea here. I want to come back to the iPhone. So I think it- [01:05:39] S0: Okay. [01:05:51] S1: Came out 20 years ago almost at this point, right? It launched 27, 2007. Something like that. [01:05:51] S0: Yeah, 2007. [01:05:57] S1: So what's crazy is people are still trying to build the next iPhone, especially with AI. Everyone's just like, "We've had this thing forever. What the hell? Why has nothing changed?" I'm curious, I imagine people ask you this question. I'm curious just what you think the next iPhone may look like with AI. What's the device that you think emerges over time? Do you have vision?
01:06:16 · Tony Fadell
[01:06:16] S0: Okay. There's the what it could look like long-term and there's what it could look like soon. And so a lot of people are like, okay, there's the long-term thing and when we can trust the models, and when they have memory, and when they do this stuff, then we're still going to need a display because, sorry people, unless we're plugging it into our brain like a BCI brain computer or there's some laser thing going into our retina, we're going to need a display. So barring those kinds of technologies, we're going to need a display. And so the best display that we have is a smartphone-like thing. Okay. Not going to be this tiny thing. We saw what happened with Humane, all that other stuff. So you're going to have some kind of, because the best way to visualize visual information is with a display, right? So we're going to have some kind of small slab, maybe it's foldable like we see today, whatever, so that you can access it. Maybe many things you don't need a display for, but a lot of things you still do, right? Because you might not be tapping, and swiping, and all that stuff. So I am of the opinion that long term, if you look at how a device is layered today, and this is many, many devices, and iPhone specifically started this, which was tapping and swiping, right? That was the first thing, is use your finger. Then after that was keyboard and then after that, the tertiary thing was a voice input. We need to flip it. We need to absolutely flip it and we have to say, and this is what I always wanted to do with Nest, which is I want to remove displays and we need to have voice as the number one primary feature and you build around voice. Then we have keyboard if necessary and then we have tapping and swiping. Okay. It should go exactly the opposite. And the problem why most of us don't go around talking to our phones and everything, and we saw this also happen with cars. There was tactile buttons, and then there was the touchscreens, and then they also added the voice in, but nobody really uses voice in the car unless it's some accessibility thing, right, because voice was always added at the end because it was always like, well, it sort of works and it's a gizmo, but it's like Alexa was for version 1.0 or Siri was [inaudible 01:08:55].
01:08:43 · Tony Fadell
But when we actually have really good voice input with not just understand it's like whisper flow or something because that's great. And what I'm saying is the intelligence behind it with memory and everything else. So then we can start to say and we can start to use that much more specifically and then deprecate those other things, but we've always have to have them there as a crutch for voice because voice has never been able to deliver. So that's the long-term thing. So it'll have some kind of display, but it's going to be much more voice primary and then you're going to have the other things as secondary and tertiary. In the middle now or sometimes soon, it's going to look much, much like the smartphone is because we're not going to get away from the all app interface anytime soon. We're going to remove some things, but we don't trust it yet. It's going to take a while till we trust it. And we are literally turning over a lot to this trusted thing, right? Because tapping and swiping, we know what that is, for the most part. We know that we can trust ourselves when we're tapping and keyboarding or whatever. This other thing, we don't know. And so it's going to take a lot of time, reminds me of kind of general magic in a way, for us to be able to get en masse to trust it. And we're already seeing this with coding agents and everything else, "Oh, they deleted my source code." And again, I'm not trying to be an old guy who's saying it's not going to work. Sure, it's going to work in certain things. I'm saying for consumers every day and the things they want, and it's cheap enough so it doesn't cost them a lot, right? Today people are like, "Yeah, I'm going to try ChatGPT or whatever. It's $20 a month or $200 a month." That is unsustainable if you think consumers are going to pay that. There's just no way unless it's incredible, but they're not going to... You know what I mean? They tried it and now they're getting kind of their Siri, a lot of them are getting their Siri 1.0 with this. "I paid for it, but it's really not all that yet." And it's like full self-driving. I paid for full self-driving, it's 15 years later, I'm still waiting for full self-driving.
01:11:05 · Tony Fadell, Lenny Rachitsky
So I think we, again, understand what we think we want, but where the technology is and the social adoption and the social trust that needs to be created around that is going to take a lot of time and it's going to take a lot of iterations to get there, and it's especially if you're going to have to pay for it. [01:11:26] S1: It's really interesting to hear you say that long-term even we're going to need a screen because I think a lot of people are trying to go to just like an AirPod or some kind of magical AI. [01:11:35] S0: Sure. How are you going to look at a map if you want to look at a map? You're going to listen, like put on the voice stuff in your car and never look at the map on your car and say, "Oh, turn left in 200 feet. Turn left in 100 feet." You're like, "Shut up. I can't hear you anymore. I just want to glance over." So I don't buy it, like unless you have it jacked in your brain or into your eye or some other way, it's getting into your cortex. [01:11:58] S1: That is so interesting. And you're not a fan of, like, the Humane approach; I think it was like a little projection on your hand as a screen... ... have the humane approach, I think, was a little projection on your hand as a screen replacement. [01:12:05] S0: It was. [01:12:05] S1: Was that part of it? [01:12:07] S0: Yeah. Why? What? It's different, not better. [01:12:14] S1: So funny. I guess the advantage obviously is it's like a small little device you could just put somewhere versus a screen, but yeah.
01:12:14 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tony Fadell
[01:12:14] S1: So funny. I guess the advantage obviously is it's like a small little device you could just put somewhere versus a screen, but yeah. [01:12:21] S0: Yeah. And you're like, oh, it's like the hologram projections of Star Wars or something. You're like, yeah, that's cool, but you still need a screen or something to project on. So it is a screen at the end of the day. You got to still project it onto something. [01:12:38] S1: Yeah. It's wild because everyone keeps saying, how is it possible that the end ideal product is a piece of glass that we look at? And what you're sharing here is just that's, actually, maybe, the ideal product long-term. [01:12:49] S0: Yeah. And like I said, you fold it up, you put it in your thing, and it rolls out or whatever else. But I still think there's going to be that thing. [01:12:55] S1: The screen it's so interesting. [01:12:55] S0: If you look at Her, if you remember the movie Her, they had glass. There was glass there for certain things. [01:13:03] S1: [inaudible 01:13:03]. Wow. And I completely don't know [inaudible 01:13:06]- [01:13:05] S0: Yeah. You have to go back and watch the movie; it's there. [01:13:10] S1: Oh my God. That movie. That nailed it. Oh man. [01:13:13] S0: Go Spike. [01:13:13] S1: It's Spike Jonze, right? [01:13:14] S0: Yep. [01:13:18] S1: That I didn't know. I wanted to ask also, just, it's interesting that basically everyone is getting to hardware now. You've been at this for so long, building hardware in AI, and now it's just the hottest thing. Everyone's building hardware. [01:13:27] S0: So funny.
01:13:27 · Tony Fadell, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:13:27] S0: So funny. [01:13:28] S1: Thoughts? I don't know. How does that feel?