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SOFI.com. Terms and conditions apply at sophy.com slash legal. John Gruber, you are a podcasting pioneer. What did you think of that pre-roll ad? Pretty good. I was surprised they didn't give you a special code, though, or did they? No, I think maybe in a mid-roll, there'll be something. I am very familiar with them. Well, we can talk sponsorship later in the sponsorship portion of the segment. Let's talk dongles. Let's introduce you, first of all. I think most people know who you are, but in case you don't, you are one of the foremost Apple experts. You are a pioneer in both blogging and podcasting. I'm very happy to have you. Welcome, John Gruber. Thank you. Happy to be here. I didn't really think we were going to talk about dongles when I booked you weeks ago, months ago. But here we are. Donglegate broke, what, a week ago? Two weeks ago? We're talking now about the rumor that the next iPhone will no longer have a headphone jack?

Yeah.

It's weird the cycle of these rumors with Apple stuff because that first came out via

sketchy sort of Asian supply chain sources months ago.

Right.

And there was initial, what's Apple thinking?

Right.

And we went through it with the whole thing and, you know, we being the people who obsessively comment on Apple stuff on a daily basis. And then what happened last week was the Wall Street Journal reported the same thing. Right. Daisuki, Wakan Nayabi. I might be butchering his name. We call him Dice K. Dice K. Which just, every single thing he reported was all previously rumored. Right. But once the journal puts their stamp on it, it becomes a big deal. So this is a, it's both like a fun thing to talk about. It's also sort of, I think, instruct about sort of what you do and how tech press works. So the story, again, is that Apple's going to do away with the standard headphone jack, replace it with the lightning port. Nobody knows that's part of it is that all that people know is that the headphone jack is going away. What their proposed solution is for how you're going to listen to audio from your phone, we don't know yet. Is it going to be lightning? Is it going to be all Bluetooth? Maybe they're, you know, we don't know yet. So we know the old port is going away. This then triggers a bunch of sort of the standard sort of re-blocking of the journal. And then there are several angry posts, one of them's written by my colleague at the Verge, Nilai, very angry about the notion that Apple is going to force, get rid of the open stand. There's a whole series of, it's a great rant. And then you respond to the ranters and saying, I think Apple knows what they're doing, although I don't really know what they're doing. This is both a familiar cycle, if you sort of watched Apple technology, and I think it's less frequent than it used to be. I think this stuff used to happen a lot more

often and now maybe there's less of it because there's less sort of surprise coming. Does that

sound right? Yeah, maybe. If there's, you know, something that maybe separates me from other

people who follow this stuff is that I think I'm more

calm yeah I don't overreact to this stuff and I feel like you know we've been through this so many

times before I mean my one of the examples I cited was the 1998 original IMac which didn't have a

floppy drive and in hindsight everybody, everybody's like, well,

floppies were so slow and small and you couldn't put anything on them. And so now today,

when you cite that example, everybody looks back and says, well, of course they got rid of the

floppy drive. They were stupid at the time. But at the time, they were, people used them for

like what the colloquial term is a sneaker net. So like the way we

use thumb drives now, but thumb drives didn't exist then. Right. Because USB was like a brand new thing and

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