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576: Quiet Little Leech

 

00:00:00 ◼   ► So I've been using your vision pro a lot this week? Are you asking genuinely or are you I feel like I'm walking into something

00:00:06 ◼   ► And I don't know what I'm a little scared. No, I've been using it a medium amount. I feel a little bad

00:00:12 ◼   ► Because I haven't really been using the vision pro and I feel like I'm being a bad Apple fan and a bad

00:00:20 ◼   ► Developer and a bad podcaster by not really using it much, but you think we haven't talked enough about vision pro. Is that what you're worried about?

00:00:28 ◼   ► I

00:00:30 ◼   ► Don't know cuz like I so so finally like I so I've been in this, you know, we're doing our house renovations

00:00:36 ◼   ► It's taking forever. So we've been in this rental

00:00:39 ◼   ► I don't want to like buy my new desk and set it up here only to move it in a few weeks or whenever we actually

00:00:45 ◼   ► Finally get out of here any day now any day now, right? Can I interrupt you? Can I interrupt you right there?

00:00:49 ◼   ► So I'm guessing the end of the story is not only have you bought a desk

00:00:53 ◼   ► But you have somehow ended up with a bespoke monitor just for this just for this purpose not entirely wrong, but not right

00:01:00 ◼   ► All right settle in everyone let's let's hear so I had all these hopes of like, okay when the vision pro comes out

00:01:07 ◼   ► I'll use the Mac mirroring mode and cuz like I had the rental has this like, you know crappy basic

00:01:13 ◼   ► You know one of those particle board staples $50 desks

00:01:16 ◼   ► It's fine for most people but it's too high like desks for me

00:01:22 ◼   ► I one of the reasons I get standing desks is because they're also

00:01:25 ◼   ► Adjustable height desks easily. Most desks are too high for comfortable computer use for me

00:01:31 ◼   ► And I would argue correct ergonomics for almost anybody, but that's a separate discussion

00:01:35 ◼   ► so anyway, so I'm you know, I'm at this like particle board rectangle and

00:01:40 ◼   ► It's too high and my wrists are all hurting and I'm not able to use my good keyboard

00:01:44 ◼   ► I don't have space to like lay everything out on the tiny little thing and I'm like I should just

00:01:48 ◼   ► Should I just order my my new desk early and but it's gonna be heavy

00:01:52 ◼   ► I don't want to like move it, you know, just in a few weeks

00:01:55 ◼   ► Yeah, but Marco the desk is too damn high

00:01:57 ◼   ► I know and and then secondly the monitor situation like, you know

00:02:00 ◼   ► Not having my giant monitor and I was gonna try the vision pro thing

00:02:04 ◼   ► I just work in that for like a month. And again, it's just it's kind of just not compatible with my eyes

00:02:08 ◼   ► Much. I realize like wait a minute

00:02:11 ◼   ► Somewhere in our garage full of stuff that we moved out of the old house

00:02:14 ◼   ► That's still all in boxes and moving blankets somewhere in there. There's an old IKEA desk frame and somewhere else in there

00:02:22 ◼   ► There's a big plank of wood

00:02:24 ◼   ► That that TIFF was using as like a fake desktop on top of some other stuff

00:02:27 ◼   ► I'm like if I can find those two things I can have an a lightweight easily moved desk

00:02:33 ◼   ► That will be the right size and the right height like so anyway long story short dug through the garage

00:02:39 ◼   ► It was an adventure, but I got it and I also a few months back

00:02:46 ◼   ► Because we were about to move into our new house

00:02:48 ◼   ► in the fall

00:02:51 ◼   ► I also ordered another protos play XDR because that's the read the reason I mailed you the LG ultra fine

00:02:58 ◼   ► Which I'm very thankful for I'm looking at it. Literally as we speak it is plugged into my computer right this very moment

00:03:04 ◼   ► Yeah, so the reason I made it to you is that I intended to once we moved to replace it with another XDR

00:03:11 ◼   ► And I was hoping they would update the XDR in the meantime

00:03:13 ◼   ► They haven't and I was also hoping to have been moved in five months ago. That hasn't happened

00:03:18 ◼   ► So it's been sitting in the box like waiting to be used again same same rationale like do I do I want to like?

00:03:23 ◼   ► Unpack this giant monitor from its giant box and set it up just to have to move it again in a few weeks

00:03:29 ◼   ► I'll just use the vision Pro Mac screen-sharing mode that didn't pan out the desk ergonomics sucked a few days ago

00:03:36 ◼   ► I finally was like, you know what? I think we're gonna be in this house for like three more weeks

00:03:39 ◼   ► I am just gonna set this stuff up even though it's only for three weeks

00:03:43 ◼   ► Like I'm just gonna set up the stupid desk and set up a stupid giant monitor

00:03:47 ◼   ► Maybe I'll waste an afternoon and have to waste another afternoon taking them all down and moving them in three weeks

00:03:53 ◼   ► But maybe it'll be worth it. I

00:03:55 ◼   ► Am so happy I did

00:03:59 ◼   ► Not surprising at all. It is a thousand percent worth it

00:04:01 ◼   ► I wish I would have done it weeks ago or a couple months ago even oh my god working on a correct height desk

00:04:08 ◼   ► With a giant monitor. I am so happy for the people out there for whom the vision Pro Mac screen-sharing mode is working

00:04:17 ◼   ► Well, that's wonderful for you. I'm so happy for you

00:04:19 ◼   ► It's not the case for me. And so now that I have like the real thing again. Oh my god. What a difference

00:04:26 ◼   ► Night and day in terms of comfort ergonomics my productivity my eyes working. Oh my god, it's

00:04:33 ◼   ► Fantastic. So long story short. I finally moved some furniture around that was really worth it. It's a super exciting story

00:04:40 ◼   ► I'd answer the question that you were originally asking perhaps as an excuse to tell this story, which I don't I don't begrudge you for

00:04:47 ◼   ► I

00:04:49 ◼   ► Have been using my vision Pro. I have certainly been using it less than I had in the first couple of weeks. I had it

00:04:55 ◼   ► but I am actively working on the

00:04:58 ◼   ► Vision Pro version of call sheet and just in the last week

00:05:03 ◼   ► I don't remember if we brought this up last week or not

00:05:05 ◼   ► But in the last week, I've gotten to the point that I've gone from actively embarrassing to well this kind of sucks

00:05:11 ◼   ► but it's at least workable and so

00:05:15 ◼   ► For the select few that are on the test flight and I am NOT looking for more at the moment

00:05:20 ◼   ► But thank you for asking the select few that are on the test flight. Do you have a vision Pro version? My hope?

00:05:25 ◼   ► Not a guarantee in fact probably won't happen. But my hope is that I'll have it done before my birthday

00:05:30 ◼   ► Which is in just a couple of weeks now

00:05:32 ◼   ► But I am actively working on it and I tell you what the easiest way in my personal opinion

00:05:37 ◼   ► To do vision Pro work is to do it using match Mac virtual display in the vision Pro environment

00:05:43 ◼   ► You know with the vision Pro on your face and so on and so forth. I

00:05:46 ◼   ► I still like it. I

00:05:50 ◼   ► Maybe even like it plus plus I certainly don't like it more than three physical 5k monitors that are staring me in the face

00:05:56 ◼   ► Right now giving me a sunburn

00:05:58 ◼   ► but I do like it and

00:05:59 ◼   ► I don't find it burdensome or bothersome in the ways that you do and as we've covered before like that's not to imply that that

00:06:06 ◼   ► Your feelings or story is wrong and mine is right or vice versa, you know

00:06:09 ◼   ► Just like you said a moment ago for some people it does work and for you it doesn't

00:06:11 ◼   ► I'm one of those people does work for so anyways, I have been using it

00:06:16 ◼   ► Some I've gotten sidetracked with other professional nothing bad, but other professional responsibilities

00:06:21 ◼   ► So I haven't been doing as much work this week as I usually do

00:06:24 ◼   ► But I will say that last night Erin had her monthly book club which happens in the evening time

00:06:32 ◼   ► and so I had a couple of hours to kill, you know, once the kids were in bed by myself and

00:06:37 ◼   ► I started by looking at my repertoire within or my

00:06:43 ◼   ► Collection within Apple, you know the Apple TV app in terms of movies that I've bought which really amounts to you know

00:06:49 ◼   ► Movies that I connected with movies everywhere movies anywhere whatever it's called

00:06:53 ◼   ► And well of which there are not many to be honest with you

00:06:55 ◼   ► But heat is one of them and so I watched the scene from heat Marco you have not seen heat

00:07:00 ◼   ► I assume I think I might have no it's a miracle. It's a great movie. But um, anyways, I watched the bank heist scene from heat

00:07:08 ◼   ► Which was amazing and then I just I didn't want to watch the whole movie because I'd seen it relatively recently

00:07:13 ◼   ► So I've been having an itch recently to rewatch

00:07:16 ◼   ► Tron legacy or whatever the sequel is called. I forget what it was called

00:07:20 ◼   ► But it was like 10 years ago now and I watched the first like half an hour of that

00:07:24 ◼   ► It is not 3d or anything like that. It's just a regular 2d movie, but there is a 3d version of it

00:07:29 ◼   ► Okay. Well the version I have is not 3d here. I think I was watching from Disney Plus

00:07:33 ◼   ► I thought maybe I was looking at the wrong one or maybe they might not they might not offer 3d version of it

00:07:38 ◼   ► But I'm pretty sure that that was a there's a 3d version. Okay

00:07:41 ◼   ► Well, whatever whatever ended up happening be that user error, which it very well could have been but the one I was watching was not 3d

00:07:48 ◼   ► But it was pretty delightful, you know, this is not the sort of thing I would do if Erin was with me

00:07:53 ◼   ► I mean she would be happy to watch the movies

00:07:55 ◼   ► I watched but I would not be sitting there with the goggles on my face watching movie while she's next to me

00:08:01 ◼   ► But when I'm by myself, it's pretty great and I did enjoy quite a lot before I forgot

00:08:05 ◼   ► We got a great feedback email from Sam's dad

00:08:08 ◼   ► Who has a pretty good theory about maybe why it's not working out so well for me with the max stuff in the vision pros

00:08:14 ◼   ► other people

00:08:15 ◼   ► Sam's dad says like a few of us Marco is blessed with perfect vision until his 40s because he didn't have to rely on glasses

00:08:21 ◼   ► He's probably more accustomed to moving his eyes than someone like Casey or John who had been burdened with glasses their entire lives

00:08:27 ◼   ► Because I think it is more natural for native eyeglass wearers to change their field of view by moving their head instead of their eyes

00:08:33 ◼   ► I believe the foveated rendering is less evident to them than someone like Marco. I can test this

00:08:38 ◼   ► Why would I not move my eyes? It's not like I don't have glasses. I can't look through the edges

00:08:42 ◼   ► I can look like I'll do right now. I'm looking straight ahead. My head is not moving

00:08:46 ◼   ► I can look at the Apple menu through my glasses and the Apple menu is not warped or bent or broken or blurry or anything

00:08:51 ◼   ► Like that. It's perfectly crisp and clear. Maybe it's because I don't have progressives

00:08:56 ◼   ► Maybe it's because my prescription isn't that bad

00:08:57 ◼   ► But I don't the part that where this the logic falls apart is the idea that because you wear glasses

00:09:02 ◼   ► You're more likely to turn your head

00:09:03 ◼   ► I think multi monitor people are more likely to turn their head because they have to turn their head

00:09:07 ◼   ► Otherwise, they can't see the stuff that's on the far left of their far left monitor, but I'm a single monitor person

00:09:11 ◼   ► So yeah, anyway, so I thought it was an interesting theory, but maybe John is more right than not

00:09:17 ◼   ► You know as like this we're still in such early as you know

00:09:19 ◼   ► We keep seeing some you know various doom and gloom things about vision Pro like oh, it's you know

00:09:23 ◼   ► People are returning or whatever. We had a little bit of that last week and you know

00:09:27 ◼   ► A couple more stories trickling out here and there I personally honestly I have seen a

00:09:31 ◼   ► Somewhat frightening decline in the number of people using overcast on vision Pro over the last two weeks

00:09:37 ◼   ► Using the iPad version of isn't pro to be clear

00:09:40 ◼   ► Yes using the iPad version of an audio only podcast player in a virtual reality headset

00:09:45 ◼   ► So obviously like this is not the ideal test case

00:09:49 ◼   ► but but I've seen you know, basically the week after launch is about twice as many users as I currently have this week now really

00:09:56 ◼   ► Quickly, is that basically how many people and your check-in is not the right turn turn of phrase

00:10:01 ◼   ► But how many people like checked in and open the app each day? Is that how you're computing this?

00:10:05 ◼   ► Yeah, and no matter how I smooth out Lee if I do like, you know weekly rolling average, it's the same pattern

00:10:10 ◼   ► It's you know, I've lost I've lost half the users already

00:10:12 ◼   ► But we are still in such early days of vision Pro

00:10:16 ◼   ► Everyone's still figuring out what it is and what they want to do with it and what it's for and it's gonna take

00:10:21 ◼   ► Probably a couple of years to really start

00:10:24 ◼   ► You know finding its legs and and and finding like the really great things and having those great things

00:10:29 ◼   ► mature into actual developed app markets and content markets if we all buy vision pros and then half of us decide this is not

00:10:37 ◼   ► Doing what I wanted it to do or it turns out this thing

00:10:40 ◼   ► I wanted to do and this doesn't work very well or whatever

00:10:42 ◼   ► That's not like a failure of the product that just means our expectations were a little off

00:10:47 ◼   ► And now we have to figure out what is it good for if anything and I think you know

00:10:51 ◼   ► Every other like major new tech product category. They've all gone through similar arcs

00:10:57 ◼   ► there have been very few exceptions that were just instant hits and instant like perfect market and

00:11:02 ◼   ► Usefulness fits right right at the right at the door, you know, we've had a few complaints

00:11:06 ◼   ► I've seen a few complaints people who are like what you know, I'm so down on division Pro, you know

00:11:11 ◼   ► Why am I such a you know, evil person insulting the work of all these hard engineers or whatever and I don't really see it

00:11:19 ◼   ► That way I think this is a product that has a lot of potential most of which is unrealized so far

00:11:26 ◼   ► Not because it's a flop or a failure, but because it's brand new we try, you know

00:11:31 ◼   ► I've said this many times like we we always whenever a new category is coming out

00:11:35 ◼   ► We always project our needs from the current things. We know onto that

00:11:39 ◼   ► So, oh the watch will replace the smartphone or whatever. I'll get all my work done on my iPad

00:11:44 ◼   ► I wanted to buy a laptop and ever again like that kind of thing and what we see over and over again is

00:11:48 ◼   ► That might be true for some people but not for most and then we figure out what it is good for and it finds its market

00:11:56 ◼   ► We're in the very early stages of this

00:11:58 ◼   ► It's way too soon to declare anything great or terrible for any particular use and it's gonna take time to sort it all out. I

00:12:07 ◼   ► Feel as though and maybe maybe I am in over indexing on my own personal experience

00:12:12 ◼   ► But I feel as though I didn't hear a lot about

00:12:15 ◼   ► Revolutionary is a bit dramatic but like revolutionary apps that that were available at launch day

00:12:22 ◼   ► I haven't had the chance to try black box for example

00:12:25 ◼   ► But I've understood black box is one of those apps and certainly it was amazing on

00:12:29 ◼   ► IOS and I loved it. I haven't had a chance to try it on vision Pro yet, but I've heard it's very very good

00:12:35 ◼   ► But there wasn't too much like crouton is another one that I've heard is that's a recipe app that that does some really cool and great

00:12:42 ◼   ► Stuff with like timers and placing a timer like over the pot you're cooking you saw this enjoy in a Stearns video

00:12:46 ◼   ► Don't forget the television app by sandwich. That's really cool

00:12:49 ◼   ► Well, so that's what I was that's exactly where I was going with. This is that television

00:12:53 ◼   ► I don't think was available at launch although honestly, you know, we're a month later or whatever

00:12:57 ◼   ► so it's not been not even a month later, so it was available shortly thereafter and

00:13:02 ◼   ► Television is definitely very very cool. And my understanding is that YouTube support for it is coming out soon

00:13:08 ◼   ► So, I'm sorry

00:13:08 ◼   ► I should back up television allows you to put one of what feels like an infinite number of TVs like physically set-top

00:13:15 ◼   ► TVs that you would see in the house like when you and you or me or John was growing up

00:13:20 ◼   ► You can just stick that in your space and have it on as like an ambient background noise

00:13:24 ◼   ► Which John has talked quite a bit about how much he hates that but I don't mind it

00:13:28 ◼   ► And so you can stick a TV somewhere put your own, you know video file in it or presumably

00:13:33 ◼   ► YouTube soon and just have that play in the background and it's spatial audio

00:13:37 ◼   ► So you hear it off in the corner of your room if that's where you put it and so on

00:13:40 ◼   ► It has to be in the background. I don't think that's part of the app

00:13:42 ◼   ► You could just put it right in front of you and watch it like it's that is true

00:13:46 ◼   ► That is very strange that you've decided this this is the app to put on a television in the background

00:13:51 ◼   ► Well, that's fair

00:13:53 ◼   ► But in any case another great example this I don't remember the name of the app offhand

00:13:57 ◼   ► but I just tried earlier today some app by for flight that lets you see it puts like a disc with a

00:14:05 ◼   ► Mildly 3d version of the landscape around an airport and we'll show you real-time flights coming in and out of that airport

00:14:13 ◼   ► It's one of those things that's kind of silly and it doesn't really need the vision Pro

00:14:20 ◼   ► But damn if it isn't cool the vision Pro, you know what I mean?

00:14:23 ◼   ► And it's stuff like that should be able to trace the paths for the planes to land with your finger

00:14:27 ◼   ► Yeah, right. Oh, man. I love flight control so much. That was my favorite up to this day might be my favorite

00:14:32 ◼   ► iPhone game that would have been actually a good vision Pro launch app if the people who currently own that IP

00:14:38 ◼   ► Did like flight control and it was basically just flight control but in 3d really hard to do with the hand tracking that Apple offers

00:14:44 ◼   ► Now though I imagine yeah

00:14:46 ◼   ► very true

00:14:47 ◼   ► But anyways, my point that I'm that I'm getting at slowly here is that I feel like we're starting to see a bunch of much

00:14:55 ◼   ► More interesting apps come out and like take call sheet for an example

00:14:59 ◼   ► I'd like to think it's going to be pretty good on vision Pro, but there's nothing

00:15:03 ◼   ► Especially unique about the vision Pro build. Well, all I'm really doing is making the iPad build

00:15:08 ◼   ► Fit in in the platform and follow the platform conventions and things like that

00:15:11 ◼   ► There's nothing that's unique about it for the vision Pro in terms of like, you know

00:15:16 ◼   ► Having it be particularly spatial or anything like that

00:15:19 ◼   ► It's just it's just a very fancy iPad app and and I feel like things like television like this for flight app whose name escapes

00:15:26 ◼   ► Me I think the in crouton in black box. I think those apps are

00:15:31 ◼   ► Better examples of thinking outside the box with vision OS and I suspect over time and I think this is basically what you're saying Marco

00:15:39 ◼   ► Over time we're gonna see more and more of that as we discover

00:15:42 ◼   ► What is this?

00:15:42 ◼   ► What is this device really good for and to quickly answer the question that you've kind of implied?

00:15:48 ◼   ► You sort of asked before like I mean, obviously I didn't return mine

00:15:52 ◼   ► But I don't know that I would have spent the money on one originally if it wasn't for you know

00:15:56 ◼   ► the professional obligation that I feel like I have

00:15:58 ◼   ► But I do like having it like if you if you consider that obscene amount of money awash at this point

00:16:04 ◼   ► I really like having it and I am probably going to be taking some plane travel next month and

00:16:09 ◼   ► Assuming I have the gumption to be that guy

00:16:12 ◼   ► You bet I'm gonna be watching a movie on the plane or doing work or whatever the case may be

00:16:16 ◼   ► So yeah, I it is an extremely cool device and if any of us seem down on it

00:16:20 ◼   ► I think I speak for Marco and seeing this, you know, if we're down on it, we sound like we're down on it

00:16:24 ◼   ► I don't think we mean to at all. It's extremely cool and extremely fun

00:16:27 ◼   ► It's just everyone including the three of us slash two of us are trying to figure out where it fits in our lives

00:16:32 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. And I think it's gonna be very much like, you know, it's to bring it back to our roots here

00:16:39 ◼   ► Like starting a car in fifth gear like you can do it. It's gonna be a slow start

00:16:45 ◼   ► you know, it's it's it's a little bit challenging, but it is possible to do and

00:16:50 ◼   ► Eventually, you can get something you can get to a pretty great place

00:16:54 ◼   ► And I think this is just gonna have a very slow build up

00:16:58 ◼   ► We don't know what to do with it Apple doesn't know what to do with it, but we can tell it's really cool

00:17:02 ◼   ► Some people have found some things to do with it already and we're gonna just grow them from here and it is largely a dev kit

00:17:08 ◼   ► For developers right now again, like I don't think there's much of an app market to speak of yet

00:17:13 ◼   ► But again, it's so early days. We're not gonna know yet

00:17:17 ◼   ► We're not no one's gonna be able to declare this like oh this thing is great or this thing is terrible

00:17:21 ◼   ► Because there's just so much

00:17:23 ◼   ► so far unrealized potential that will just take a long time to develop like I'm talking on the order of

00:17:29 ◼   ► Probably years not months

00:17:31 ◼   ► like it's probably going to be a couple of years before there's really like a decent amount of stuff on vision Pro decent amount of

00:17:36 ◼   ► Reasons to buy one for most people, you know

00:17:39 ◼   ► And and certainly it's gonna take longer than that for the prices to come down and for the capabilities to get better

00:17:43 ◼   ► So it's gonna be a slow process, but I think it is going to move forward

00:17:49 ◼   ► It's just gonna you know, it might be it might take a while for us to really see that. Yep agreed

00:17:54 ◼   ► But we're not talking about vision Pro this week. No, no

00:17:56 ◼   ► While you were talking I pulled this item which I was gonna say for next week's follow-up

00:18:01 ◼   ► But it is very relevant to what you just discussed

00:18:03 ◼   ► So new top item new top item breaking news vision Pro demand is higher than expected returns down to 1%

00:18:10 ◼   ► Reports 9 to 5 Mac Ming Chi Kuo writes the US shipments are expected to be between 200 and 250,000 units this year better than Apple's

00:18:17 ◼   ► original estimate of 150 to 200,000

00:18:20 ◼   ► Apparently according to 9 to 5 Mac Apple has asked suppliers to increase production which quote which Ming Chi Kuo believes is due to a mix

00:18:26 ◼   ► Of relatively high US demand and plans to roll out sales in other countries in the coming months

00:18:31 ◼   ► I don't know what Ming Chi Kuo would know about Apple's return rates

00:18:34 ◼   ► But I would expect him to know about that Apple has asked suppliers to increase production because that's his beat Apple supply chain

00:18:42 ◼   ► And I feel like this is very counter to the you know

00:18:45 ◼   ► The very predictable story of like people are returning them

00:18:48 ◼   ► No one wants them sales are down or even market was saying you could get one immediately

00:18:51 ◼   ► That means they're doing badly

00:18:52 ◼   ► but whatever Apple's estimates were apparently they either they either did a conservative first order and now are asking for more or

00:18:59 ◼   ► They just really didn't think they would sell this money. So I think it's doing fine

00:19:02 ◼   ► I think it's doing as expected for a year one sales of an expensive weird thing

00:19:06 ◼   ► Anonymous writes I work as an applied cryptographer and have been researching this stuff for several years including deploying it into production systems at my

00:19:12 ◼   ► Jobby job one minor correction to how the PQ hybrid scheme was described

00:19:16 ◼   ► It's not that the data would be encrypted twice once with classical crypto like ECD H and then twice with PQC

00:19:24 ◼   ► rather two separate shared secrets are established one classical one PQC and then combined cryptographically to form a single session key that

00:19:31 ◼   ► inherits the security properties of both crypto systems with a single encrypt operation

00:19:35 ◼   ► That's pretty neat

00:19:36 ◼   ► The reason for this is not entirely to hedge against potential bugs in the PQC implementation

00:19:40 ◼   ► But also to hedge against the selected PQC algorithm itself becoming broken by continued crypt analysis

00:19:45 ◼   ► And that's not such a crazy notion in 2022 one of the finalist algorithms for NIST's

00:19:50 ◼   ► PQC selection process the algorithm is called psych as IKE which I love was broken with a ten-year-old laptop whoopsie-dipsies

00:19:57 ◼   ► So keeping the classical crypto in the equation means that you at least fall back to the security of today

00:20:02 ◼   ► Which is battle-hardened for millions of hours of research attempting unsuccessfully to break it

00:20:06 ◼   ► I thought that was neat like the because a post quantum cryptography is so new it hasn't really been battle tested

00:20:13 ◼   ► So people have ideas we think this will be you know protected against quantum computers and oops

00:20:19 ◼   ► It's not protected against a ten-year-old laptop. Well, let's try let's try again, right?

00:20:23 ◼   ► And so that's you know, I I thought it was like, okay bugs and apples implementation

00:20:27 ◼   ► What if they messed it up or whatever, but it could just be they implemented it perfectly and but the algorithm is so new

00:20:32 ◼   ► That it doesn't perform as expected that happens with all you know

00:20:37 ◼   ► Cryptography things like that all the weaknesses that were found in things that were once considered a state-of-the-art like, you know

00:20:43 ◼   ► the original RSA MD 5 all these things that are

00:20:46 ◼   ► Much less strong now than we thought they were back in the day and that could happen with

00:20:50 ◼   ► Apple selection of their post quantum cryptography thing. So underneath it all is the cryptography

00:20:55 ◼   ► They've been using up till now which has you know, thus far so the test of time continuing another

00:21:00 ◼   ► Peculiarity, I wanted to call out was the choice of security levels in Apple's hybrid construction

00:21:04 ◼   ► They're using the PQC algorithm Kyber 1024

00:21:08 ◼   ► Which is roughly equivalent to the security level of an AES 256 or in NIST's parlance a level 5

00:21:14 ◼   ► But they're combining with the elliptic curve algorithm p256, which is roughly equivalent to AES 128 or level 1 in NIST's

00:21:20 ◼   ► parlance and IST

00:21:22 ◼   ► The level terminology is confusing because Apple seems to have invented their own leveling system. That is unrelated to the levels

00:21:27 ◼   ► I mentioned here, but what that tells me is that they are really skeptical of Kyber

00:21:33 ◼   ► So they are going with the highest security level possible while keeping the lower classical crypto level presumably

00:21:39 ◼   ► This is so that they continue doing their comparatively more efficient per message rekeying on the classical portion of the hybrid construction

00:21:46 ◼   ► Yeah, if there's doubts about the post quantum thing and you have a choice of strength

00:21:50 ◼   ► Just pick the strongest one and cross your fingers and you know

00:21:53 ◼   ► Just keep doing the the classical one in the you know in the way that's efficient and doesn't you know burn more resources and take

00:22:00 ◼   ► More time. I think the Apple's post quantum cryptography approach for messages is

00:22:05 ◼   ► Very sound and well-considered doesn't mean that they're not gonna have to you know, take a second or third pass on it

00:22:11 ◼   ► But it's better to move now for the reasons we talked about last week that like we're not

00:22:15 ◼   ► There's no quantum computers out there now that are able to efficiently crack Apple's systems

00:22:21 ◼   ► But if someone's storing a bunch of iMessage data now by intercepting it and they have this pile of encrypted stuff that they think they

00:22:27 ◼   ► Can't read you don't want them cracking that open 10 20 years from now when they can read it

00:22:32 ◼   ► So the sooner Apple starts the big conversion of like sort of silently in the background kind of like they did with APFS

00:22:37 ◼   ► Silently in the background all your iMessage conversations will start converting to this as long as everyone who's participating them has at least iOS

00:22:43 ◼   ► 17.4 or whatever the other equivalent versions of yeah, it's good to get this

00:22:47 ◼   ► transition going

00:22:49 ◼   ► John males writes something I discovered recently you can download your data from Apple in Google takeout style including Apple notes from privacy

00:22:56 ◼   ► Apple calm the notes are downloaded in a format that includes the data importing the data back into notes would be tricky. I presume

00:23:02 ◼   ► If I knew about this already or I forgot about it, but as soon as I saw this

00:23:06 ◼   ► I'm like, I've been looking for something to export notes

00:23:08 ◼   ► I think maybe last time I did it that was using some app or script that exports them as PDF or just exports the text

00:23:13 ◼   ► or whatever, but I took a look at it and it the privacy that Apple like home thing is

00:23:17 ◼   ► Structured very much like Google takeout, which is just sort of like a little, you know form that you fill out

00:23:23 ◼   ► What do you want to export how many files do you want it in?

00:23:26 ◼   ► You can pick like a maximum size give it to me and files no bigger than five gigabytes or whatever you want

00:23:31 ◼   ► And just like Google takeout you finish filling out the form and it says, okay, we're working on your export

00:23:36 ◼   ► We'll send you an email and it's done unlike Google takeout. This seems to take a long time

00:23:40 ◼   ► I requested my notes archive just my notes archive which is not that big

00:23:45 ◼   ► I have maybe a thousand notes not a lot of attachments and then not a lot of images

00:23:48 ◼   ► Two days ago and they're still working on it. So Google takeout

00:23:52 ◼   ► I mean Google takeout does take some amount of time, but I don't think I've ever waited more than 24 hours

00:23:56 ◼   ► For my Google takeout of my like gigs and gigs of Gmail, so I'll tell you how it goes

00:24:00 ◼   ► I did the takeout thing because I wanted to see what format does it give it to me in any format?

00:24:05 ◼   ► It's probably better than nothing. So I may add this to my sort of annual like paranoid data dump backup of online stuff because at this

00:24:12 ◼   ► Point I have a lot of stuff and notes and I would be sad if it all went away due to some weird bug

00:24:17 ◼   ► Is this gonna be a better alternative than just having some app like read the SQLite file in Mac OS and dump it for you?

00:24:24 ◼   ► I will say like I mean part of what's in the notes is I have these nicely formatted documents with like

00:24:29 ◼   ► photos and text coloring and like in inline images and styled text and you know, like they're nice documents and so if I just had like

00:24:37 ◼   ► You know if I just dumped the text file from some blob and sequel light plus a bunch of attachment images

00:24:43 ◼   ► That's not the same thing. You know what I mean? But I will see what for on this isn't it could be equally useless

00:24:47 ◼   ► I'm hoping it is something that

00:24:49 ◼   ► Preserves some of the fidelity of the the work I've put into some of the more complicated documents like

00:24:54 ◼   ► The one where I'm trying to pick out a new couch

00:24:56 ◼   ► It's like seven years old and we still haven't bought a new couch

00:24:58 ◼   ► but there's a lot of pictures of couches in there and URLs and informations and measurements and images and

00:25:03 ◼   ► Map locations for stores that have stuff and yeah, I would want that to be preserved

00:25:08 ◼   ► Wait, are you gonna actually buy new couch? That's major news. I mean signs say no, but

00:25:14 ◼   ► For many years now, I've been trying to buy a new couch and failing most recently we did a tour of like five local furniture

00:25:21 ◼   ► Stores to sit on candidate couches and we still bought nothing. So

00:25:24 ◼   ► Yeah, cuz you know remind the listeners how many new couches have you bought in your entire life never bought a couch never

00:25:32 ◼   ► I'm using my

00:25:35 ◼   ► Grandparents hand-me-down couches currently they bought them. These are their new couches. So they bought them probably in the late 80s early 90s

00:25:42 ◼   ► They're both sleepers and they weigh a ton. Oh, yeah, you're never getting out of your house

00:25:46 ◼   ► I carried them into my house. I carried them from my grandmother's house in New Jersey into into a

00:25:50 ◼   ► You haul like rental truck and then accidentally drove it on the parkway. Sorry everybody

00:25:56 ◼   ► We've all been there. Yeah, I just I just didn't think I'm in a truck now

00:26:01 ◼   ► It's so you know, you know, like I know parkways aren't for trucks

00:26:04 ◼   ► But what kind of any would take a truck on the parkway? Everybody knows that. Oh, I didn't realize I'm a truck now

00:26:10 ◼   ► No, we've been also looking to get a couch not a particularly actively in the same way

00:26:15 ◼   ► It sounds like you are and we have not done so in the last few years and we need to not we don't have

00:26:20 ◼   ► couches from late 80s, but

00:26:22 ◼   ► We are in the market as well. And I don't know. I just I haven't found the one that sticks for me

00:26:27 ◼   ► Yeah, it's couches are tough

00:26:29 ◼   ► Right something got the hardest of line couches

00:26:30 ◼   ► But yeah, they're just and you have to you have to go sit in them

00:26:34 ◼   ► Like you have to find them in a store. I did one on the sitting tour. I was like, this is it

00:26:37 ◼   ► I've candidate couches. They're all like roughly the right measurements. They have all the things I want about them

00:26:42 ◼   ► I'm gonna sit on them and you'd sit on them and you'd be like what I've said to myself was

00:26:45 ◼   ► Grandma's couch that is like torn to shreds and incredibly ugly. It's more comfortable than this

00:26:50 ◼   ► It's sad to say that but it was true

00:26:52 ◼   ► So I'm not gonna pay all this money for a couch that is I mean

00:26:55 ◼   ► It's gonna be less ugly but not as comfortable as the current one. We have it's rough

00:26:59 ◼   ► Yeah

00:26:59 ◼   ► It is shocking how difficult it is to find a couch that

00:27:02 ◼   ► Fits you comfort wise like you have to just go to a big furniture store and sit in a whole bunch of them and you

00:27:07 ◼   ► Usually at the end of that you'll have either one or zero that you like. Yep can confirm

00:27:12 ◼   ► All right, moving right along Adam whirl

00:27:15 ◼   ► Writes that Marco is right. Hey calibration can prevent a magnetic watch band from throwing off the compass

00:27:20 ◼   ► I'm an aerospace engineer and satellites can use magnetometer magnetometers

00:27:25 ◼   ► I hope I pronounced that right to figure out which way they're pointing even with magnets and ferrous metals nearby

00:27:30 ◼   ► The key is that those disturbances are fixed with respect to the satellite or watch while the Earth's magnetic field is locked to the earth

00:27:36 ◼   ► Use GPS to look up the local magnetic field take measurements while rotating the device and solve for the calibration

00:27:41 ◼   ► Parameters normal watch behavior involves a lot of movement and rotation

00:27:44 ◼   ► So this could be entirely transparent to the user or it could be a prompted swirling motion the iPhone compass apps sometimes asked for

00:27:50 ◼   ► Yeah, this is the key bit. We're missing out. I was missing the last one

00:27:54 ◼   ► It's like oh, what about third-party watch bands?

00:27:55 ◼   ► They have magnets that Apple doesn't know the strength of that doesn't matter because the Earth's magnetic field is always in the same place

00:28:03 ◼   ► Right. So even if you put different strength magnets or whatever that Apple didn't anticipate the key is

00:28:08 ◼   ► Whatever those things are pick any strengths you want they're going to be attached to the watch

00:28:13 ◼   ► But the Earth's magnetic field is not attached to the watch

00:28:16 ◼   ► So as the watch moves in your normal usage or if you're asked to swirl it or whatever

00:28:19 ◼   ► The Earth's magnetic field will still always be pointing in the same direction

00:28:22 ◼   ► indeed

00:28:24 ◼   ► Zev Eisenberg writes regarding magnets messing with the magnetometer aka the compass and watches the core motion framework can cancel it out and it's not

00:28:32 ◼   ► Just about calibration of onboard magnets at the factory all iOS devices with magnetometer

00:28:36 ◼   ► Except the original iPad also have a gyroscope core motion takes them both into account to cancel out magnets moving with the device

00:28:42 ◼   ► See mag safe car mounts don't break your compass

00:28:44 ◼   ► Guessing the watch already does the same with two with the same two sensors

00:28:49 ◼   ► So now we can to do it or in theory there is even a framework to do it

00:28:52 ◼   ► So this seems I mean not that this makes it any more plausible that the straps are gonna be attached with magnets

00:28:57 ◼   ► But we'll see at least it doesn't cancel it out

00:28:59 ◼   ► Orlando Herrera writes on a professional cinematographer and camera operator and I dabble with iOS and now vision OS development as a hobby

00:29:05 ◼   ► Based on my observations the pass-through cameras at the are at the heart of the color and motion blur issues when using

00:29:11 ◼   ► Pass-through, I suspect the shutter speed of the cameras is slower possibly to reduce the risk of triggering adverse reactions and individuals who are sensitive to strobing

00:29:19 ◼   ► You can see the degree of motion blur change based on whether or not you are in a well-lit environment versus a dim environment

00:29:25 ◼   ► You can also observe that the pass-through video motion blur is different than the motion blur of vision OS windows

00:29:30 ◼   ► Which further indicates it's the cameras not the OLED screens that causes behavior

00:29:33 ◼   ► Similarly, I think the vibrancy saturation depth of colors when viewing vision OS windows and content is higher than the pass-through because the pass-through color

00:29:41 ◼   ► Bit depth is lower to reduce processing time. So the device can maintain its low latency target

00:29:46 ◼   ► I imagine an improved pair of processors and a future device could increase the color bit depth while maintaining low latency

00:29:52 ◼   ► So the pastor experience could gain HDR and a higher percentage of the p3 gamut

00:29:56 ◼   ► Do you find this ring true to you because I'm asking about the motion blur which I didn't notice myself is the the the pet

00:30:02 ◼   ► Does the pass-through have different motion blur than like window contents?

00:30:06 ◼   ► You're asking the wrong person. I can't I don't see it either. So I'm not sure

00:30:10 ◼   ► I mean this makes sense to me because like that the cameras on the vision Pro are I mean, they're they're fine

00:30:15 ◼   ► But they're not going to be you know

00:30:18 ◼   ► the the fidelity of things that are being drawn in vision OS is obviously going to be as perfect as it can be because they're

00:30:23 ◼   ► Not passing through a camera and a sensor or whatever and yeah cameras with sensors that small especially in the room is dark

00:30:30 ◼   ► They're gonna have to keep the shutters open for a longer period of time to get enough light and that's definitely gonna cause blur

00:30:35 ◼   ► But what I had heard is for some people complaining that there was a blur on things when they move their head

00:30:40 ◼   ► Including things like windows of vision OS applications. Yeah in my in my experience

00:30:45 ◼   ► I I think the any kind of motion blurring is true of the vision OS windows as well

00:30:50 ◼   ► I noticed it in particular when trying to like scroll text and read it in Safari just you know within the vision Pro Safari app

00:30:57 ◼   ► Again, it's not like unusable. But if you notice the motion blur in other areas, you will notice it there, too

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00:33:24 ◼   ► Gottfried chin writes I recently saw an interview using metas version of personas called Kodak avatars. They are

00:33:35 ◼   ► Basically photo realistic, but the scanning process is highly complex and not feasible with consumer hardware

00:33:40 ◼   ► I think it shows that the current technical challenge is the high quality scan

00:33:43 ◼   ► The interview was done using quest Pro which I assume is inferior division Pro regarding device sensors

00:33:48 ◼   ► So I wonder if Apple should offer high quality persona scanning stations in Apple stores

00:33:52 ◼   ► So you can do an optional HD scan if you want

00:33:54 ◼   ► I mean, I don't know one way or the other but I will tell you that I saw

00:33:57 ◼   ► You know a couple of stills from this video and my goodness

00:33:59 ◼   ► The quality is night and day better than the personas and I say this as a persona apologist. Well, so here's the thing about the

00:34:06 ◼   ► Avatars these Kodak avatars obviously, you know setting aside the fact that I don't know what they use to scan them

00:34:13 ◼   ► Maybe they use like the fancy laser scanner or whatever

00:34:15 ◼   ► but it's not you know, as we said last time we discussed this the miracle of the personas as you take the headset that you

00:34:20 ◼   ► Bought you just pointed your face for two seconds and it gives you one. This is something else but

00:34:25 ◼   ► The uncanny value which people just throw out that phrase without re-explaining and just assume everyone knows what it is

00:34:30 ◼   ► But the uncanny value is the idea which I don't think is ever really even proven out

00:34:34 ◼   ► But people just accept it because it feels right to them

00:34:36 ◼   ► But anyway, the idea is that as you make something more and more realistic looking it gets more and more appealing to you

00:34:42 ◼   ► Until you get really really close to it being like perfect like wow

00:34:46 ◼   ► This is totally convincing as a human and you get really really close to it

00:34:49 ◼   ► And then it takes a huge dip and that is the uncanny value. It's like boy

00:34:52 ◼   ► I was liking these avatars more and more as you made them better and better

00:34:55 ◼   ► But then all of a sudden right when you got close to them being perfect now

00:34:59 ◼   ► I don't like it at all because it's a scary death mask, right?

00:35:01 ◼   ► There's a lot of questions with this

00:35:04 ◼   ► How close do you have to get to being perfect for the uncanny value to take place?

00:35:09 ◼   ► If you look at the original paper or whatever

00:35:10 ◼   ► It's just kind of like a wavy line craft and it's like they don't really make any strong stances about how close you have to

00:35:14 ◼   ► Get it's just a general trend. It's like things look better right up until they don't but then after you're perfect again

00:35:20 ◼   ► You know people like them and this is all about how does it feel to a person has it does it appeal to a person?

00:35:24 ◼   ► because you want your avatar to be appealing not repulsive to a person I say all this because these

00:35:30 ◼   ► Much more finely detailed much more photorealistic avatars the the codec avatars from Facebook

00:35:36 ◼   ► Are I think further into the uncanny valley than personas? Oh, they are closer to being perfect

00:35:44 ◼   ► They're better like in that uncanny valley graph

00:35:46 ◼   ► I think they are like over the edge of the rollercoaster thing and screaming down in the middle of it like so

00:35:52 ◼   ► You know the the personas ones what they have going for them. Is that their blurriness and sort of slight cartoonish ness?

00:36:00 ◼   ► Helps keep them in my opinion. Anyway in my personal uncanny valley graph for these

00:36:04 ◼   ► Farther up the hill, you know farther up the big dip that is the uncanny valley in that graph, you know

00:36:10 ◼   ► You can take a look

00:36:12 ◼   ► We'll link to the the paper about this and Facebook's video about it from was it from a couple years ago a couple months ago

00:36:17 ◼   ► You decide whether you think that is farther into your uncanny valley or not

00:36:22 ◼   ► But part of the problem with doing like actual photorealistic humans where there is not a bunch of like fuzzy

00:36:28 ◼   ► Gaussian blur around everything and sort of you know, a little bit of caricature is that as you know

00:36:33 ◼   ► People who make 3d movies and games I've known for many many years

00:36:36 ◼   ► it's really difficult to do convincing humans because we know what they look like and things like subsurface scattering underneath translucent skin a

00:36:43 ◼   ► Technology that was sort of pioneered maybe 15 years ago and is now pretty commonplace is

00:36:48 ◼   ► Necessary for you to not look like you're not made of plastic and I think this is doing that

00:36:54 ◼   ► But doing that well gets expensive real fast. And then if you see these things in motion, they're not

00:37:02 ◼   ► You'll see the video of it but you can see the actual human wearing the headset and then you see their avatar

00:37:07 ◼   ► And I feel like the if you look at the motion of the human the avatar seems

00:37:12 ◼   ► Stiffer like maybe they're not moving all the parts of it

00:37:17 ◼   ► Like maybe the mouth doesn't move quite as much and when the mouth moves like the earlobe doesn't move and you might not think those

00:37:22 ◼   ► are connected but on a person like when you talk

00:37:24 ◼   ► More than just your lips moves and that's very difficult to do unless you carefully model or observe that which is why I think

00:37:31 ◼   ► Apple's personas when you look at this Apple's persona starts to look a lot more like me emojis because they

00:37:36 ◼   ► Apple has chosen the three or four or five

00:37:39 ◼   ► Most important parts that need to move and they've probably put in some simple heuristics of saying look

00:37:44 ◼   ► We can't tell when the earlobe twitches

00:37:46 ◼   ► But basically every time they make this noise at this volume with this mouth sound move the earlobe a little bit or whatever

00:37:52 ◼   ► And I think they're doing a little bit more of like what animators do which is

00:37:55 ◼   ► Just give me the gist of it and use what you know about how people talk to make it convincing

00:38:00 ◼   ► These ones look a little bit more death-masky to me

00:38:03 ◼   ► But hey, everyone has their own opinion on these so you should take a look at it as for the question though

00:38:07 ◼   ► Should Apple have high-quality persona scanning stations?

00:38:09 ◼   ► Well, I think not if they end up looking like this, but either way, it's not it's not feasible

00:38:13 ◼   ► Like if they ever end up selling a whole bunch of vision pros

00:38:16 ◼   ► You can't have people lining up at the the Apple store to get their scans

00:38:20 ◼   ► The whole point is the device should do it for you

00:38:21 ◼   ► So that they should continue to work the solution the way they have you buy the device you take it home you do the scan

00:38:26 ◼   ► The privacy of your own home after you've done your hair and makeup the way you like it

00:38:30 ◼   ► tweak it to your heart's content and

00:38:32 ◼   ► They should just keep making that better rather than saying you need to come in for a three-hour session in our laser scanning booth. I

00:38:37 ◼   ► Disagree with you with regard to these Kodak avatars. I think these look incredible

00:38:42 ◼   ► I really really do and and to me the personas which again I did I am a defender of the personas

00:38:49 ◼   ► I think that they are a pretty good idea and they work pretty well. I think the Kodak avatars look way way better

00:38:54 ◼   ► Do you think they're on the other side of the uncanny valley or they haven't dipped into it yet?

00:38:57 ◼   ► Do you know the only uncanny valley chart I'm talking about? I gotta find. Yeah. Yeah. I think that the Kodak

00:39:01 ◼   ► I'm sorry, the personas are dipping into the uncanny valley

00:39:05 ◼   ► I certainly don't think they're at the bottom of the uncanny valley by any stretch

00:39:08 ◼   ► I think they're dipping in but if you think the personas look better than you like the personas aren't even in the uncanny valley for

00:39:14 ◼   ► You yet, right? Correct. Yep. I would agree with that. I would agree with that

00:39:17 ◼   ► Retelling of my opinion. I don't want to I don't want to imply that you feel the same way

00:39:20 ◼   ► This is kind of like a Bezos trade. I just put a link from the Wikipedia page to the uncanny valley thing and

00:39:25 ◼   ► I

00:39:27 ◼   ► Mean, I guess like where where is the dip? Is it like at 90 ish percent? It's a very fudgy. Yeah. Yeah

00:39:34 ◼   ► No to me in I feel like the personas are starting down the cliff

00:39:40 ◼   ► But they haven't fallen yet

00:39:41 ◼   ► And I feel like this is comfortably on the upswing if not the top on the other side of the valley for me

00:39:47 ◼   ► You're gonna say other side. All right. Well, maybe you need to play more video games

00:39:50 ◼   ► Yeah, actually that's probably true

00:39:52 ◼   ► That's actually a really really good point because these look about as good as like, you know

00:39:56 ◼   ► The cutscenes and last of us part two, for example, you know, that's a really good point

00:40:00 ◼   ► Actually, I think you were saying it kind of tongue-in-cheek, but I think you're right because I very rarely play any video games

00:40:05 ◼   ► I don't know what the state of the art is on this sort of stuff yet, but kind of tangentially related to this

00:40:10 ◼   ► Recently, I did a podcast

00:40:12 ◼   ► with Wojciech

00:40:15 ◼   ► I'm not even gonna try to pronounce his last name

00:40:17 ◼   ► I'm so sorry, but there was a Polish podcast which obviously I don't speak Polish

00:40:21 ◼   ► But you know, he speaks phenomenal English and we did this in the same style as as Gruber in sandwich

00:40:28 ◼   ► Adam Lisagor on the talk show and yeah, we were doing this just with our personas and I've never met him in person

00:40:35 ◼   ► And so I don't know what he looks like and to me his persona looked completely good like completely big great even

00:40:42 ◼   ► But I think that's in no small part

00:40:44 ◼   ► In fact entirely because I don't know what he actually looks like like I've seen photographs of him, you know from time to time

00:40:49 ◼   ► But his hair is not blurry in real life. It was fair, you know

00:40:52 ◼   ► but I think you get the point I'm driving that is when you don't have a

00:40:55 ◼   ► Relationship a physical relationship with this person in so far as you've never been in the same space before it

00:41:01 ◼   ► I thought the personas were great. Actually, it didn't feel unnatural to me at all now

00:41:07 ◼   ► that's probably that would be very different if I was talking to you or Marco or Mike or Jason or what have you but

00:41:14 ◼   ► But for an instance where this person who is not a stranger but is sort of kind of a stranger like I'm underselling our relationship

00:41:21 ◼   ► You get my point

00:41:22 ◼   ► It was very passable to me and then there's a video

00:41:26 ◼   ► There's YouTube video which will English I know it's if you want to see this for yourself, but I thought it was really good

00:41:30 ◼   ► And teach your own

00:41:32 ◼   ► All right, moving right along

00:41:34 ◼   ► There's a gate now for the vision Pro and it's crack gate

00:41:37 ◼   ► some Apple vision Pro units develop an identical crack and the cover glass reports Mac rumors a

00:41:42 ◼   ► Small number of Apple vision Pro owners have claimed that their headsets developed a hairline crack right down the middle of the front cover glass

00:41:48 ◼   ► Despite never having been dropped or mishandled and there's a link in this article that makes it pretty clear what they're talking about

00:41:54 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean this kind of thing like it looks like, you know, it's kind of a standard, you know

00:41:58 ◼   ► Manufacturing defect or weakness with like a certain stress point in the glass that probably is you know

00:42:04 ◼   ► No fault to the people who are using it

00:42:07 ◼   ► Again, it's unfortunate but it's a version one product and of a very very complicated design

00:42:13 ◼   ► so

00:42:14 ◼   ► This kind of stuff happens. They'll fix it. It'll be fine in a long run

00:42:18 ◼   ► All right, there is breaking news. This was just today wasn't it as we record

00:42:23 ◼   ► Apple has officially canceled project Titan ending a decade long and allegedly 10 billion

00:42:31 ◼   ► billion billion dollar efforts this is reported by Bloomberg and also the New York Times will put links in the show notes from

00:42:38 ◼   ► Bloomberg Apple Inc is canceling a decade-long effort to build an electric car according to people with knowledge of the matter

00:42:43 ◼   ► Abandoning one of the most ambitious projects in the history of the company Apple made the disclosure internally Tuesday

00:42:48 ◼   ► Surprising the nearly 2,000 employees working on the project. Was it really that much of a surprise? Yeah, I guess fair fair

00:42:54 ◼   ► The decision was shared by chief operating officer Jeff Williams and Kevin Lynch a vice president in charge of the efforts

00:42:59 ◼   ► the two executives told staffers that the project will begin winding down and that many employees on the team working on the car known as

00:43:05 ◼   ► special projects grouped or SPG will be shifted to the artificial intelligence division under executive John John

00:43:11 ◼   ► Giannandrea something like that. I'm sorry. Those employees will focus on generative AI projects and increasingly key priority for the company

00:43:19 ◼   ► Interesting confluence of events here because this you know

00:43:23 ◼   ► The fact that they're taking some employee first some employees are gonna be leaving the people who knew how to build cars

00:43:27 ◼   ► I'm not sure Apple needs those people but shifting the other employees to AI projects made me think of exactly

00:43:33 ◼   ► You know, I was even thinking of blogging this but enough time because it just came out today how I would sum up

00:43:38 ◼   ► This, you know 10-year foray into the car project as we always called it project Titan

00:43:44 ◼   ► for Apple and it's related to AI

00:43:48 ◼   ► When I was a kid, I read a lot about computers and stuff and I used to read a lot about AI because who wouldn't

00:43:55 ◼   ► It's cool. You watch 2001, you know the you're learning about computers

00:43:59 ◼   ► You want to learn about computers that are like hell 9000, but don't kill people spoiler alert. Yeah, seriously, I've never seen it. Sorry

00:44:06 ◼   ► When our computer is gonna be smart and talk like people that'll be so cool. It's all in all the science fiction

00:44:12 ◼   ► Let me learn about where computers are today. And let me tell you when I was a kid in the 70s

00:44:17 ◼   ► you'd see

00:44:19 ◼   ► Stories on PBS and books that I'd check out of the library and stuff that would they would say like look here's here's this

00:44:25 ◼   ► computer they made and here's what it can do and

00:44:28 ◼   ► People were super excited

00:44:32 ◼   ► Like look what we've made this do I know I know it doesn't seem that smart to you

00:44:36 ◼   ► but I can talk to it and ask it questions and it understands the sentence and it knows what the different parts of the

00:44:40 ◼   ► sentence mean and it can reason about things and make inferences and respond to me and

00:44:44 ◼   ► People were so excited about that and I'd say and you know what look at computer chips

00:44:49 ◼   ► It's 1974 but in 1975 computer chips gonna be even better in the 1976. They're gonna be even better

00:44:54 ◼   ► And if you extrapolate on this those graph

00:44:56 ◼   ► You can see that in the year 2000 computer chips are just gonna be massively more powerful than they are now

00:45:03 ◼   ► And then you look at this AI thing and look what we've done now and it's so it's kind of dumb now

00:45:08 ◼   ► But we're on the right track, right?

00:45:10 ◼   ► and so if we just follow this graph by the year 1988 computers should be smarter than any human on the planet and

00:45:16 ◼   ► This is what I read about when I was a kid and when I got a little bit older

00:45:20 ◼   ► You kind of realized that since the 60s or the 50s or whenever they first tried to do this

00:45:25 ◼   ► Everybody thought how 9000 is gonna be like, you know at most 20 years in the future because just look at this graph, right?

00:45:31 ◼   ► I mean, I didn't know the term Moore's law then or whatever, but I was experiencing the advance of technology

00:45:36 ◼   ► Which was my computers were getting faster and faster all the time and the video games

00:45:41 ◼   ► I played in the 70s were so much worse than the video games. I played in the 80s and 90s or whatever

00:45:45 ◼   ► So you I was living the progression and yet artificial intelligence before the current AI trend that is in a computer that thinks and talks

00:45:53 ◼   ► Like a person like again how 9000 but not murderous or any other things to see in sci-fi

00:45:58 ◼   ► Very smart people

00:46:02 ◼   ► Really believed that you know, although we what we have now is not great in five to ten years

00:46:07 ◼   ► It'll be better and in 20 years

00:46:08 ◼   ► It will be the most intelligent thing on the planet Earth and as part of my you know

00:46:13 ◼   ► Let's talk about this in rectus ages ago the discovering the parameters of the world. Can you move things with your mind?

00:46:19 ◼   ► How big is the universe?

00:46:21 ◼   ► Are we gonna make computers that think one of the parameters of the world was people always kind of think?

00:46:26 ◼   ► breakeven fusion and artificial intelligence are much closer than they actually are and

00:46:31 ◼   ► Excited as I was about it as the years went by

00:46:34 ◼   ► And you saw the same stories and everyone said it's probably five to ten years in the future

00:46:38 ◼   ► You figured out that these people hadn't yet found the right approach

00:46:43 ◼   ► To fit to this problem. We found the right approach to flying which is like fixed-wing aircraft with engines

00:46:49 ◼   ► We found the right approach to doing math because we're getting really good at that with our computer chips that that approach

00:46:55 ◼   ► We just like that. That's the way just start scaling it, you know, and that's served us well up until today

00:47:00 ◼   ► But we haven't yet found the right approach to computers that can think and so with the car project

00:47:09 ◼   ► Apple like like all those excited scientists in the 70s that I was reading about and

00:47:13 ◼   ► like so many other companies in the world decided that

00:47:17 ◼   ► Cars that drive themselves are probably right around the corner. Look what we can do now

00:47:23 ◼   ► It's pretty impressive and if we just extrapolate and say if we just continue along this path and our computing resources get better like in

00:47:30 ◼   ► You know five to ten years

00:47:33 ◼   ► all of our cars are gonna have no steering wheels and they're gonna be driving ourselves because look at our progress and look how

00:47:38 ◼   ► Look what we're already able to do in such a short time

00:47:41 ◼   ► Surely by insert year that has already passed here

00:47:45 ◼   ► All the cars will be self-driving and driving will be obsolete

00:47:49 ◼   ► and

00:47:51 ◼   ► that's why Apple embarked on this project because if that's gonna be a thing that is a big disruption to the

00:47:56 ◼   ► Transportation world and Apple should probably be in on that and they were focusing on

00:48:00 ◼   ► Making a drive that making a car that was autonomous in some way and if you're wondering why Apple thinks they should make a car

00:48:06 ◼   ► It's not because you know, they just wanted to make something in an industry like in a low-margin industry

00:48:11 ◼   ► They wanted to get a part of they're like, well this this industry is about to be disrupted

00:48:15 ◼   ► In fact, we'll put a link in the show notes to Tim Cook an interview in 2017

00:48:19 ◼   ► where the interview was asking him essentially about the car project or about automotive stuff and Tim Cook flat-out says I

00:48:24 ◼   ► Think there's a disruption coming and it's because of autonomy

00:48:27 ◼   ► And you know Apple wants to be in on that and whatever vague way

00:48:31 ◼   ► He said it to not, you know mentioned unreleased products. A

00:48:35 ◼   ► Lot of people thought that uber thought that you know, we we hire drivers now

00:48:39 ◼   ► But kind of like Netflix sent people DVDs for a while

00:48:41 ◼   ► That's just how we're gonna start eventually. We're not gonna need the drivers

00:48:45 ◼   ► The cars will drive themselves so many companies looked at what they had and just like the AI people said

00:48:51 ◼   ► This is amazing. And in five years, it will be so much better

00:48:55 ◼   ► Turns out they did not have the right approach. No, no has the right approach yet

00:49:00 ◼   ► No one knows how to make a car that can drive itself as well as humans can drive in all conditions

00:49:04 ◼   ► It's not like it hasn't gotten better. It's gotten way way better

00:49:08 ◼   ► Waymo has cars that can totally drive themselves in limited circumstances and limited areas doing a pretty good job

00:49:15 ◼   ► but

00:49:17 ◼   ► even Waymo is approaching the limits of the techniques that it has been using so

00:49:22 ◼   ► Apple failing on this project is just a

00:49:25 ◼   ► consequence of us collectively as humans

00:49:29 ◼   ► Having not yet found the correct approach to make a car that drives itself

00:49:34 ◼   ► We can make a car that helps you drive a little bit better and the jury's still out on whether it helps you or not

00:49:39 ◼   ► Based on you know, you actually paying attention or not

00:49:42 ◼   ► But we haven't found the right approach where it's like if we just do this for five more years

00:49:47 ◼   ► We'll be there unlike for example, you know adding numbers together in your CPU

00:49:51 ◼   ► We look on the right approach for that right or planes or whatever and that's disappointing for everybody involved

00:49:57 ◼   ► It's if you're wondering why Apple spent ten billion dollars in ten years doing this

00:50:04 ◼   ► Important people at Apple like Tim Cook or if you read the New York Times story, Johnny Ive

00:50:08 ◼   ► Had convinced themselves or had been convinced by the hype or the other people they respect in the industry

00:50:15 ◼   ► That this was a thing

00:50:17 ◼   ► They thought they could do like they said look look at look at what Tesla's for example been able to do now

00:50:21 ◼   ► We're smarter than them and they're already almost there. Let's get on this

00:50:26 ◼   ► Maybe we can beat them to it because surely one of us is gonna crack this problem in the next five years

00:50:30 ◼   ► And the answer was no no one's gonna cry in the next five years

00:50:34 ◼   ► No one's gonna crack it in the next ten years. When are we gonna crack it?

00:50:37 ◼   ► I don't know is the current approach the right one seems like not you could but maybe it is and we just have to do

00:50:43 ◼   ► It for 20 more years, but like talk to the AI people

00:50:45 ◼   ► Everyone thinks what we've done is amazing. What we've achieved is amazing extrapolate and we'll get there and this is yet another

00:50:52 ◼   ► disappointing instance in my adult life of

00:50:55 ◼   ► Lots large portions of smart people in the world thinking that a thing was right around the corner and it wasn't which is weird because most

00:51:01 ◼   ► of the time if you listen to a tech podcast or you're interested in tech most of the time tech does sort of

00:51:06 ◼   ► Fulfill our dreams even more so like computers really did get way better

00:51:10 ◼   ► video games got so much better like so much if you if you could take like child me and show them like a

00:51:16 ◼   ► Mention again the last of us part two it would have exploded my brain

00:51:20 ◼   ► Right that really did happen just like everyone thought it do in fact maybe even faster the internet the internet look at that

00:51:26 ◼   ► Happened so much faster than people thought it wasn't people underestimated that but sometimes if you think something is around the corner

00:51:33 ◼   ► Sometimes you're gonna be wrong because it turns out you're barking up the wrong tree

00:51:36 ◼   ► And I think all of humanity so far has been barking up the wrong tree and getting cars that can drive themselves as well as humans

00:51:44 ◼   ► in all conditions and that's sad for

00:51:47 ◼   ► The little versions of me who are seven years old checking books out of the library about self-driving cars now

00:51:51 ◼   ► And they're gonna have to learn they guess they just didn't figure it out doesn't mean we're never gonna figure it out

00:51:55 ◼   ► We might eventually but Apple

00:51:57 ◼   ► Let's say Apple is taking a break for a few decades before they take another run at this because if it does become plausible

00:52:04 ◼   ► They should probably dive back in and participate in this industry, but right now

00:52:09 ◼   ► I think even Waymo had a big thing where they were like yeah

00:52:11 ◼   ► We're kind of giving up on the whole self-driving everywhere thing and we're just concentrating on limited circumstances

00:52:16 ◼   ► Everyone who has tried this has as they say in Dune they tried and failed they tried and died well

00:52:21 ◼   ► They didn't die, but you know the projects died, so I think this is

00:52:26 ◼   ► unsurprising but disappointing for little kids everywhere I

00:52:31 ◼   ► Think

00:52:34 ◼   ► You know the car project

00:52:36 ◼   ► We've been saying for a long time now that we didn't really understand why they were doing this obviously

00:52:43 ◼   ► It's very hard to judge with something that this secretive

00:52:46 ◼   ► We don't really know how much progress they were making but it sure has seemed like over time

00:52:51 ◼   ► This project has not been going well

00:52:53 ◼   ► We've heard of a number of reboots and reorganizations and changing directions change. You know there's been so much

00:52:59 ◼   ► You know change in the project trying to I guess get it to go in in a good direction

00:53:05 ◼   ► Well on that though like my 2017 video Tim Cook flat-out says we think there's going to be disruption on the automotive industry

00:53:11 ◼   ► And it's because of self-driving and automation essentially, right?

00:53:13 ◼   ► But then the most recent reboot that we heard about and talked about in the show was Apple said yeah forget about self-driving

00:53:18 ◼   ► We're just gonna do like we're still gonna do a car

00:53:21 ◼   ► But it'll just be like you know current sort of driver aid type stuff

00:53:25 ◼   ► And that is not the that was not the vision according to Tim Cook in 2017

00:53:29 ◼   ► It's not like oh, we saw my car cuz when I make a car

00:53:32 ◼   ► he thought there was going to be disruption related to automation and

00:53:35 ◼   ► that basically turned out to not be the case in the time frame that they cared about and so

00:53:41 ◼   ► You know changing the project like oh, let's reboot it, but now we're just gonna make a plain old car

00:53:46 ◼   ► That's like everyone else's car

00:53:47 ◼   ► It's not an exciting project

00:53:49 ◼   ► And I am very glad that Apple chose not to do it

00:53:51 ◼   ► Even if they had gotten the self-driving part to to progress further and and that was still the plan for the project

00:53:58 ◼   ► Even then I still don't think Apple is the right company to do that for lots of reasons

00:54:04 ◼   ► It doesn't really fit a lot of their their business shape and style and principles

00:54:10 ◼   ► You know we discussed recently how it seemed to be almost impossible to

00:54:14 ◼   ► fit that into their new carbon goals for instance like you know their goal with carbon neutrality is

00:54:19 ◼   ► To have their products be carbon neutral end-to-end over their entire lifetime including the energy they use during their useful lives

00:54:27 ◼   ► That's really hard for a car. Well the rumor is it was gonna be like a hundred grand

00:54:32 ◼   ► So maybe they'd sell so few of them that they could carbon offset every single

00:54:36 ◼   ► Because the volumes would be low, but yeah, it's it's different. I do really wonder

00:54:40 ◼   ► I mean maybe when they made that commitment

00:54:42 ◼   ► They kind of knew that the car project was gonna get canceled because you either

00:54:46 ◼   ► Don't sell a lot of cars and do a lot of carbon offsets

00:54:49 ◼   ► Or you can't meet your goals because they can't transform the world's energy

00:54:54 ◼   ► Infrastructure to be carbon neutral to power all their cars no and so that I feel like the the carbon plan

00:55:00 ◼   ► Was always at direct odds with the car project, and I don't know how they could have possibly ever resolved that and the other thing

00:55:07 ◼   ► Is like we've heard through a few different channels about Tim Cook really believing very strongly

00:55:13 ◼   ► allegedly even saying directly Apple products don't kill people

00:55:18 ◼   ► Period like Apple does not make products that kill people at least you know directly obviously you can text in your phone and crash

00:55:24 ◼   ► But they feel very strongly with that

00:55:25 ◼   ► And I think that's that's a very good thing both for the world and of course on a small level for their brand

00:55:29 ◼   ► And it's a luxury. It's a luxury for their because they're a company that currently doesn't sell things that can directly kill you, right?

00:55:37 ◼   ► And so they're getting they're thinking of getting into a business where you can't avoid that cars people dying car accidents, right?

00:55:43 ◼   ► So I don't know how he would square that stance or that's just like a soundbite really

00:55:48 ◼   ► But like the idea is we don't we don't want to be a company that does that

00:55:51 ◼   ► But we also want to get into the car business. Well. I have some bad news for you about cars

00:55:55 ◼   ► There's no such thing as a car that doesn't sometimes kill people due to car accidents at least not yet

00:56:01 ◼   ► maybe they thought they could make one again with the self-driving thing, but

00:56:05 ◼   ► You know that's that's kind of like you're making that choice like you could just keep making phones and computers

00:56:11 ◼   ► And they're not gonna like crash into you and kill you right, but you're choosing to try for a car

00:56:16 ◼   ► And that's you know that's changing things up again

00:56:19 ◼   ► We've we've been wondering for years why this project was still going on it seemed like it was a

00:56:24 ◼   ► Pretty long shot from the start and it seemed like it was never going super well

00:56:28 ◼   ► So I'm glad to hear that they finally axed it you know obviously

00:56:32 ◼   ► For all the tumult this is gonna cause the actual people working on it including probably a bunch of lost jobs. That's not great

00:56:38 ◼   ► But for the company strategically and and for the leadership to have chosen a direction

00:56:43 ◼   ► I think they made the right call I kind of don't know why they didn't make it years ago

00:56:46 ◼   ► But I'm sure they had their reasons whatever the reasons were now. They've made the right call this project is seemingly

00:56:52 ◼   ► You know really finally dead, and I think it's better that they don't continue to waste all of this

00:56:59 ◼   ► experimental money and and opportunity cost on

00:57:03 ◼   ► A project that's very unlikely to ever be very good for them because now they have freed up that capacity

00:57:09 ◼   ► Maybe not the exact people because it's different specialties, but they've at least freed up like that

00:57:13 ◼   ► Organizational capacity that money how about that sure you know the money is a big part of it of course

00:57:19 ◼   ► But also just you know focus talent. You know like there's other other limited resources. They have

00:57:24 ◼   ► Now they can focus that on

00:57:27 ◼   ► Products and and you know improvements to their other products that are much more likely to actually benefit them and their customers the car project

00:57:34 ◼   ► I was always kind of this you know massive moonshot

00:57:37 ◼   ► It was very very expensive and so if they're now redirecting that towards things like better Siri

00:57:44 ◼   ► You know which is what you know or you know whatever we're gonna call all their new AI efforts

00:57:48 ◼   ► That's way more likely to both a succeed and be to actually benefit their customers in useful ways and to benefit

00:57:55 ◼   ► the rest of their products together like

00:57:58 ◼   ► We see what Apple does they they share a lot of tech they share a lot of advancements

00:58:04 ◼   ► They share a lot of software between all the different platforms

00:58:06 ◼   ► They share parts they share techniques that like they share manufacturing you know strategies and things between all the different platforms

00:58:13 ◼   ► They share supplies and suppliers

00:58:15 ◼   ► With the car it was always kind of like does this have any chance of benefiting their other products not much

00:58:20 ◼   ► You know how would it even fit into their retail strategy who knows I mean?

00:58:24 ◼   ► It's not even clear from the outside how much carplay was shared with project. It seemed like not at all

00:58:29 ◼   ► So like except maybe like some dashboard design concept

00:58:33 ◼   ► Yeah, maybe some underlying stuff like it's it's so hard to tell and on this topic by the way not to get back into vision

00:58:37 ◼   ► Pro, but you know this is something that's come up with all the demos like when you see obviously AR kit and stuff

00:58:43 ◼   ► We saw all that coming out iOS and Mac OS. It's like. Oh, that's gonna be for the headset, right, and I'm yeah

00:58:47 ◼   ► Yes, there's a connection there right, but now that vision Pro is out, and you see universal control

00:58:52 ◼   ► It's easy to just retcon it and say I

00:58:55 ◼   ► Bet they did universal control for the headset, and it can't just came out earlier on Mac and iOS

00:59:01 ◼   ► That could be true, or it could be the reverse they did it on Mac

00:59:05 ◼   ► Oh, I owe an iOS and the headset to interpret team adopted it, but that's the nature of things inside Apple

00:59:09 ◼   ► They will share things

00:59:12 ◼   ► Between their projects when it makes sense to get the most value out of it and from the outside

00:59:17 ◼   ► It's very difficult to tell did for example universal control start with the headset team and and trickle down to iOS and Mac OS

00:59:24 ◼   ► Or was the reverse it doesn't really matter either way

00:59:27 ◼   ► They're getting the most bang for the buck out of that technology

00:59:31 ◼   ► They developed they developed universal control, and it has broad applicability across their products

00:59:35 ◼   ► And so now you look at the car project what things on in Mac OS iOS iPad OS or whatever have broad

00:59:42 ◼   ► Applicability to the car and vice-versa, and you know you go for carplay. It's like well carplay

00:59:47 ◼   ► That's got to be a thing, but because we know so little about the car and because carplay is such a odd duck

00:59:52 ◼   ► It's like maybe not even that was shared so I the best you can come up with is like maybe like whatever real-time

00:59:57 ◼   ► operating system and tooling and stuff they came up with the car they'll find a use for

01:00:00 ◼   ► But it's so hard to tell from the outside and the the synergies are not quite as obvious as like universal control or AR kit

01:00:08 ◼   ► Yeah

01:00:08 ◼   ► and I think there's probably just fewer of them in general and that like that's why I think

01:00:11 ◼   ► axing this project is the right move strategically for the company because

01:00:15 ◼   ► Now whatever the special projects group can work on can be things that

01:00:20 ◼   ► The company might have actual other use for in much larger scales because you know we see with Apple

01:00:27 ◼   ► They historically were very bad at multitasking

01:00:30 ◼   ► They've gotten a lot better in recent years

01:00:32 ◼   ► But still you you don't really want them like as a fan of their products and as a customer their products

01:00:37 ◼   ► You don't really want them to have

01:00:39 ◼   ► Massive distraction projects that don't benefit the products you use with vision Pro

01:00:45 ◼   ► We actually see that there is a decent amount of you know shared innovation between vision Pro and their other products

01:00:51 ◼   ► probably that we as the customers were able to benefit from with the car it seems like

01:00:56 ◼   ► Whatever, we would benefit from that would be much more limited with the other products

01:01:00 ◼   ► That was kind of an advantage though because you felt like well

01:01:02 ◼   ► They hired a lot of new car people to work on the car

01:01:05 ◼   ► So those people weren't even at Apple to begin with so you're not stealing them any people from other teams and because there's so little

01:01:10 ◼   ► Crossover I think for the ten years that this project ran

01:01:13 ◼   ► It was a money pit, and maybe it did suck in some important talent

01:01:19 ◼   ► But it was less of a drain than for example

01:01:21 ◼   ► Ios and the iPhone were or they were jobs came out on stage and said yeah

01:01:26 ◼   ► You're not getting a new version of Mac OS because we put all those people on the phone because it's more important

01:01:29 ◼   ► Sorry, I'm sure that did happen, but to a lesser extent just because so many more people had to be hired from

01:01:35 ◼   ► The car industry so that was that was one blessing

01:01:37 ◼   ► I think that's part of the reason this project lasted so long like the open secret that they were doing this and

01:01:42 ◼   ► Didn't you know it didn't sideline the whole company for a decade right the company continued to do what it was doing

01:01:49 ◼   ► Yes, there was some impact, but like the iPhone

01:01:52 ◼   ► Shoved the whole company off of its previous track and eventually it found a new track

01:01:58 ◼   ► Project Titan didn't do that project Titan was just just like a 10 billion dollar quiet little leech off in the corner, but Apple

01:02:04 ◼   ► Continued to be able to function its main business

01:02:07 ◼   ► I mean, and it's a very different company you know in this in that decade than it was before that as well

01:02:11 ◼   ► So obviously like that's that's a different scenario

01:02:13 ◼   ► But I do think it's interesting to consider like for years we had heard about these two

01:02:18 ◼   ► Giant skunkworks projects the car and the headset well now the car is dead, and we have the headset

01:02:24 ◼   ► What do you think is the next big Apple skunkworks project that we that isn't out yet?

01:02:30 ◼   ► Like I guess you know AI in general could be something like that

01:02:34 ◼   ► And I'm sure we're gonna see more of that as the rumors indicate you know probably this summer and honestly

01:02:39 ◼   ► I'm very much looking forward to whatever this ends up being but

01:02:43 ◼   ► Do we know of any other like large?

01:02:46 ◼   ► Rumored skunkworks projects that seem at all plausible that Apple has been working on

01:02:51 ◼   ► I think this is the time maybe to talk about this which I think will very clearly probably

01:02:56 ◼   ► quickly not happen, and we don't have to think about it, but

01:02:59 ◼   ► because of this announcement

01:03:02 ◼   ► People who really want Apple to make a car have been saying you know Apple if you've decided

01:03:07 ◼   ► That disruption in the automotive market is not imminent due to self-driving which I think is the correct conclusion

01:03:12 ◼   ► But you still want to be in the auto from automotive market because you think

01:03:18 ◼   ► people and your team know how to make cool dashboard things like the new car play or you just want to

01:03:22 ◼   ► You want a new platform that you can own like you want to own the infotainment stack or whatever?

01:03:27 ◼   ► There's still a way

01:03:30 ◼   ► For Apple to be in the car business and part of the thing when we've talked about the car project in the past

01:03:35 ◼   ► We're like Apple's good at making electronic gadgets, and if you squint you can call a car an electronic gadget

01:03:40 ◼   ► But honestly there's a whole bunch of parts of that that are not electronic gadget

01:03:43 ◼   ► Really like suspension and brakes and Apple just doesn't really make anything yeah

01:03:48 ◼   ► That's that's kind of like saying like my oven is electric gadget because it has a control panel on the front of it

01:03:53 ◼   ► Yeah

01:03:53 ◼   ► things that you sit inside that

01:03:55 ◼   ► Travel like the whole the the skill set we're hard to do that, and that's before you even get to stuff like

01:04:01 ◼   ► The batteries which I know Apple has some

01:04:04 ◼   ► Knowledge about from all of its gadgets, but it's a different scale entirely there and electrical motors

01:04:09 ◼   ► Which you know there are there are some in the vision Pro. I guess but not Apple's area of expertise for sure

01:04:15 ◼   ► But if Apple still wants to be in the electric car business

01:04:20 ◼   ► they could buy

01:04:22 ◼   ► lucid and Rivian and have

01:04:25 ◼   ► some cars SUVs and trucks

01:04:28 ◼   ► That would you know suddenly sport carplay

01:04:31 ◼   ► And they would have you know

01:04:35 ◼   ► Instant expertise lucid has the best power trains in the entire industry and the best EV packaging in the entire industry

01:04:40 ◼   ► Oh, we're gonna get so much email. Please don't do that John. You're just

01:04:44 ◼   ► This is this is not a questionable. I think is 100% defensible. Oh god

01:04:49 ◼   ► You're making just based on the just based on the numbers

01:04:51 ◼   ► How big is the engine how much power does it produce how efficient is it lucid has the best electric power trains in the industry?

01:04:57 ◼   ► They might not have the best batteries, but their batteries are pretty good Rivian is really the only game in town for

01:05:04 ◼   ► sort of non mainstream fancy Apple style

01:05:07 ◼   ► pickup trucks and truck like SUVs because you know the mainstream makers make them, but Rivian is the froofy kind of Apple ish brand and

01:05:15 ◼   ► The important thing about Apple buying both of those one. It will probably cost less money than they already spent in project Titan

01:05:21 ◼   ► -

01:05:23 ◼   ► Everything those companies do is stuff that Apple

01:05:25 ◼   ► As far as I know does not know how to do like all the rumors are like they're gonna build their own card like oh

01:05:31 ◼   ► Here's their who's they're gonna build it for him or whatever. I'm like

01:05:33 ◼   ► Do you think Apple's gonna get the cut like the people who started?

01:05:37 ◼   ► Lucid we're all like the lead engineer for the Tesla Model S started lucid like they they cut their teeth at Tesla

01:05:43 ◼   ► And then they came over and did lucid Apple has done none of those things so they think out of the out of the gate

01:05:49 ◼   ► they're gonna come up with a

01:05:50 ◼   ► An electric car that they you know solve all these manufacturing problems before everyone else has such a head start on them

01:05:56 ◼   ► I know they said the same thing about the cell phones

01:05:58 ◼   ► You know the PC people aren't gonna walk in but let me tell you a cell phone is much closer

01:06:01 ◼   ► To a personal computer and then a car is it's a big gap there, right?

01:06:05 ◼   ► so if they wanted to be in this business because they think I mean

01:06:09 ◼   ► I don't know that I think they shouldn't because this is low margin business and Apple products don't kill people in yada yada if they're

01:06:14 ◼   ► Not gonna be self-driving. There's no real point

01:06:16 ◼   ► but if they really want to a

01:06:18 ◼   ► Much faster better way to spend that money is to save these two companies that are currently having some difficulties

01:06:25 ◼   ► harvest the the all the people in technology that they have and

01:06:30 ◼   ► Voila now you have a line of Apple cars

01:06:33 ◼   ► If some if Tim Cook decided he's a CEO and if he and the board think that Apple should be selling EVs

01:06:38 ◼   ► That is I think the only reasonable way to do it in a reasonable time frame

01:06:44 ◼   ► If not again, let's just revisit

01:06:46 ◼   ► you know making a car in 20 to 50 years and maybe the self-driving thing will have will be more plausible then but

01:06:52 ◼   ► Yeah, like I'm with Marco that I'm relieved that they're not doing this because once they're not making a self-driving thing

01:06:58 ◼   ► Which it's been obvious that they're not going to do for a while now

01:07:01 ◼   ► to everyone except for apparently Apple

01:07:03 ◼   ► Just making a car is not something I have any faith that Apple would be any good at

01:07:10 ◼   ► At all like nothing they've done makes me think boy. If only Apple would make a car. They'd be great at it. Nope

01:07:16 ◼   ► absolutely not and

01:07:18 ◼   ► Making car is ask Rivian ask ask Tesla ask lucid making cars is very very difficult

01:07:25 ◼   ► like

01:07:27 ◼   ► It's not something that you get right on the first try or the second try or the third try

01:07:32 ◼   ► car companies have been around for a long time they've had time to work out a lot of this stuff and

01:07:36 ◼   ► Even they get stuck in their ways, which is why people can innovate around them

01:07:40 ◼   ► But like just the first the first several years of Tesla the first several years of living Rivian and lucid

01:07:45 ◼   ► manufacturing big important things like that complying with regulations making them safe reliable

01:07:51 ◼   ► Like just it's really hard and Apple has never done anything like that at that scale and it is so different

01:07:57 ◼   ► Than cell phones and computers that I don't think they could pull it off. So if they really really want to do this

01:08:01 ◼   ► Make some acquisitions by by the this drug. They've tried to buy Tesla

01:08:06 ◼   ► You know, that's you can read the story that they tried to buy Tesla way back when so it's clear

01:08:10 ◼   ► They were open to that idea

01:08:11 ◼   ► But if the if the car dream is still alive at Apple, they should buy lucid and Rivian

01:08:16 ◼   ► I hope the car dream is not alive at Apple and they should just ignore this for another 50 years. Well, I think if anything

01:08:23 ◼   ► First of all, I think you're right. That would be probably the best way for them to get into it at this point

01:08:27 ◼   ► but if anything that shows why they shouldn't get into the car business because suppose tomorrow Apple buys

01:08:34 ◼   ► lucid and Rivian

01:08:36 ◼   ► Okay. Now what like why why did they do that? And then how do they how do they integrate that into the rest of their?

01:08:42 ◼   ► Business. Well, it's still a massive question of like now Apple's a car company great now

01:08:47 ◼   ► Why do they want to be a car company and now now they have to deal with being a car company?

01:08:50 ◼   ► Well, but they already had that would give them two car companies that are already car companies and they're car companies with problems

01:08:56 ◼   ► And you know, there there's a lot of growing pains, but they they jump-start it

01:08:59 ◼   ► Like they don't have to worry like will we make a car that people want will we make a good car?

01:09:02 ◼   ► Those two companies have already made cars that people want that are good. They're just not making money making them

01:09:07 ◼   ► Apple could you know Apple has the runway to has a little bit more runway than those two companies do

01:09:13 ◼   ► To figure out a way to start making them profitable and obviously they would integrate with them

01:09:18 ◼   ► And I think Jeff Johnson had a good snarky tweet about this whole thing, which is snarky

01:09:22 ◼   ► But also I think there's kind of a point in that why Apple might want to be in this historically low margin business

01:09:28 ◼   ► he says I

01:09:30 ◼   ► Bemoaning the the the end of the car product

01:09:33 ◼   ► But I so wanted a car that demanded 30% of every shopping trip and refused to travel to destinations unapproved by the manufacturer

01:09:39 ◼   ► Got him, but like that's the thing

01:09:42 ◼   ► That's the kind of the reason Apple was interested in and this thing is like oh the automotive market is being disrupted

01:09:47 ◼   ► And if the automotive market is being disrupted that is an opportunity

01:09:50 ◼   ► For us to find another place for one of our platforms and modern Apple when they find a place for one of their platforms

01:09:57 ◼   ► They're like we we need to have a platform which we will then leverage to extract, you know, 30% from everybody, right?

01:10:04 ◼   ► That's their mo

01:10:06 ◼   ► Hasn't been going that great, but they got it. They hit it out of the park once with the iPhone

01:10:11 ◼   ► And so they've used that model for every other new platform. They've tried to roll out Apple TV vision Pro

01:10:18 ◼   ► iPad I know those all kind of look like you squint and like oh, that's just an extension of the iPhone, right?

01:10:24 ◼   ► But the inside of the car the inside of any sort of mod inside of cars are becoming more looking more and more

01:10:31 ◼   ► Like a platform that Apple could participate in the trouble is if Apple doesn't isn't literally a car company

01:10:38 ◼   ► It might be difficult to pull a Microsoft and become the plot the software platform for everybody else's hardware

01:10:45 ◼   ► Apple's trying

01:10:47 ◼   ► But there's a little bit of pushback contention there

01:10:49 ◼   ► So why would Apple want to be in the car business at all? I think cars will continue to be low margin, but I think

01:10:55 ◼   ► there is a potential future to

01:10:58 ◼   ► You know using the terminology extracting rents from the plot the software platform that lives inside cars

01:11:06 ◼   ► Certainly every car manufacturer wants to do that. Just ask GM. That's why no one car play in the car

01:11:10 ◼   ► They want to be the one you know

01:11:12 ◼   ► Skimming off the top of everything that happens inside the car that they can I'm not sure there's a business plan there

01:11:19 ◼   ► Apparently it's not selling rental renting heated seats to people like BMW tried

01:11:22 ◼   ► But that is I think that's in the absence of self-driving disruption

01:11:27 ◼   ► Another place for a platform is I think what would still have a chance to attract Apple to cars

01:11:35 ◼   ► But who knows like maybe they maybe the carplay project is that and they don't need to make a car

01:11:39 ◼   ► It's just it's it's too early to tell I

01:11:41 ◼   ► don't know I'm going back to what you were saying about lucid and Rivian and

01:11:45 ◼   ► The co-host of neutral in he says heck. Yeah, that sounds amazing

01:11:50 ◼   ► because I think Rivian is

01:11:52 ◼   ► Arguably more spiritually similar to Apple than Tesla

01:11:56 ◼   ► I think that lucid to your point has some of the best and most advanced technology

01:12:02 ◼   ► So I I agree with you as a car enthusiast as

01:12:09 ◼   ► Someone who at least tries to watch and understand Apple

01:12:14 ◼   ► I can't imagine them saying about a business as you've noted is very low low margin

01:12:20 ◼   ► Which they can't be too keen on to begin with I can't imagine

01:12:23 ◼   ► They're gonna say let's spend a sum total of roughly 20 billion dollars because that's the sum total of the market cap of the two companies

01:12:29 ◼   ► Today, let's spend 20 billion dollars on two companies that are barely keeping themselves afloat

01:12:34 ◼   ► Like what's you you wait a little bit longer lucid will get cheaper, I think

01:12:37 ◼   ► Sure, and so might Rivian but then I mean so so we're buying these

01:12:42 ◼   ► Beleaguered, you know failing companies. Yeah, we're getting them on the cheap. But if they were good, they wouldn't be beleaguered and cheap, you know

01:12:50 ◼   ► No, that's not true at all

01:12:51 ◼   ► like that their problem is they don't like their their problem is they need to get through like the

01:12:56 ◼   ► Scary growth period like the Tesla barely made it through like Tesla almost went out of business several times, too

01:13:01 ◼   ► Right, but there it takes so much capital to sort of get to get the ball rolling to work out

01:13:06 ◼   ► All the kinks and both of them are kind of on the bubble like they're probably gonna make it but Tesla just like barely made

01:13:13 ◼   ► It due to like some savvy fundraising and government mooching from Elon Musk in the right time, right?

01:13:18 ◼   ► Like it's a tough gig in the car business. So I don't think they're beleaguered because they have bad products

01:13:24 ◼   ► They have they have great products

01:13:26 ◼   ► they're just beleaguered because

01:13:28 ◼   ► Making a car cost a lot of money and they're not entirely sure that they'll get past the point where like they're just plowing and plowing

01:13:35 ◼   ► In money and then they're selling a smallish number of cars for a very low or negative margin

01:13:40 ◼   ► Then it's like just kind of like Amazon's let's just give us another decade to not make any profit

01:13:45 ◼   ► But eventually we will and Amazon did eventually and they had that runway

01:13:48 ◼   ► Rivian and lucid remains to be seen if they will be able to find the funding to give himself that runway

01:13:52 ◼   ► But you know who can give him that funding Apple? I mean, that's true

01:13:56 ◼   ► But I just don't think Apple would have that kind of patience

01:13:59 ◼   ► Especially after having been burned by being ten billion dollars in and having not a lot to show for it

01:14:05 ◼   ► Like I just know they did have the patience for that 10-year boondoggle project

01:14:08 ◼   ► It doesn't

01:14:13 ◼   ► Ultimately matter but it is an interesting thought exercise of nothing else. Yeah, I mean honestly

01:14:18 ◼   ► I feel like they'll Apple will not do this because they should they're just I think they're done with cars for a while

01:14:22 ◼   ► Right, but yeah, if if someone inside Apple just demands it like just like no we need to be in cars

01:14:27 ◼   ► Which I don't think it's true because again if Tim Cook's whole reason was that there was it was about self-driving disruption

01:14:31 ◼   ► I think he's now dissuaded of that and he's fine

01:14:33 ◼   ► But if someone demanded it

01:14:34 ◼   ► That would be the only feasible way to do it because if they didn't and they tried to make a car on their own

01:14:38 ◼   ► I think it'd be embarrassing for them because their car would they wouldn't have to worry about losing money because I got so much money

01:14:44 ◼   ► But they'd make a car and that car would have to compete with beleaguered Rivian lucid and then not beleaguered Tesla, right?

01:14:51 ◼   ► and I don't think it would fare that well because I don't think Apple is good at almost any of the things you need to

01:14:56 ◼   ► Be good at to make a good car. So yeah, I just you know, I just I think I should leave it alone

01:15:02 ◼   ► But if they don't leave alone, they should buy Rivian Tesla and heck even if they don't want to be in the car business at all

01:15:06 ◼   ► Apple should just you know, give an investment to lucid and reap it when the company comes roaring back two decades from now

01:15:14 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know. We'll see where it goes. I think I am certainly in support of Apple

01:15:20 ◼   ► You know letting go and stop trying to make fetch happen

01:15:23 ◼   ► I echo what I think it was Marco who had said, you know

01:15:25 ◼   ► I feel terrible for all these people that are going to now have to find

01:15:28 ◼   ► either new jobs than Apple or new jobs entirely like that that stinks but I think on the whole it's

01:15:35 ◼   ► Better for Apple to go this way. I think it might be interesting seeing people who surely are very good at

01:15:42 ◼   ► You know computer vision and an artificial intelligence thing and things of that nature working on other

01:15:48 ◼   ► projects and problems inside of Apple, I think I

01:15:50 ◼   ► Suspect a lot has been learned from this and I feel like I made the same

01:15:55 ◼   ► Alright, I'd shared the same theory a while back and I feel like somebody to debunk tip

01:16:00 ◼   ► But here I am again thinking that you know

01:16:02 ◼   ► I wonder if the real-time OS or some of the things that they learned building a real-time OS for the car

01:16:07 ◼   ► Or used in the r1 for the vision Pro and I don't know maybe maybe not. Yeah, there was debunked

01:16:13 ◼   ► But like I think you'd have a good point with the computer vision aspect because Apple does now have a platform

01:16:18 ◼   ► That could benefit from computer vision expertise

01:16:20 ◼   ► And so those people on the car project who are probably super isolated from the headset project because why wouldn't they be?

01:16:24 ◼   ► Bring those people to vision Pro now because that is expert even if it's not technology that they're currently using on the cross is over that

01:16:31 ◼   ► Expertise for sure crosses over well and now also like, you know with with this

01:16:36 ◼   ► Talent and budget and executive focus freed up from this project if you think about like what else could they do?

01:16:43 ◼   ► Even without having like good uses of the of like share technology with their other products

01:16:48 ◼   ► They could do something like pour more money into the idea of a glucose monitor for the Apple watch

01:16:53 ◼   ► Yeah, I think they're already doing that

01:16:54 ◼   ► But yeah freeing up the money is good for everything across the board

01:16:57 ◼   ► Of course, if you told me what they should give the money to it's just fixing bugs in Mac OS

01:17:00 ◼   ► But I don't think that's probably gonna be high on their list

01:17:03 ◼   ► But you know just just take a little bit of that 10 billion or you know

01:17:07 ◼   ► Whatever it is 1 billion a year that you just freed up

01:17:09 ◼   ► Slice that into Mac OS bug fixing please. I don't think it would even take that much

01:17:13 ◼   ► yeah, in terms of what the next big thing is like, it's you know, we said this in the

01:17:18 ◼   ► Our first episode in January 2024. We did like what do we expect this year to be for Apple?

01:17:23 ◼   ► And I think one of the things that we got right based on all the stories to come here now

01:17:28 ◼   ► 2024 the year when Apple sprinkles AI sauce on a bunch of stuff. I talked in a recent rectum episode about this

01:17:34 ◼   ► It's gonna come out soon. What are they gonna sprinkle it on? What will actually ship this year?

01:17:38 ◼   ► I don't know, but there's gonna be a I saw us and it's gonna be sprinkled and that is

01:17:43 ◼   ► On I don't think that's a you know tomorrow's question. What's the next big thing?

01:17:48 ◼   ► I don't think that's it because kind of like self-driving cars at this point. I would say that

01:17:53 ◼   ► They're like large language model AI stuff has proved its utility kind of like, you know smart lane holding

01:18:00 ◼   ► Better cruise control things have proved their utility in cars

01:18:04 ◼   ► But I also think that we're pretty close to well, I think the jury's still out

01:18:09 ◼   ► But I I would put money on the fact that the current approach to LM is

01:18:13 ◼   ► You can't just do more of that faster and get to how 9,000. Maybe it's a piece of the puzzle

01:18:19 ◼   ► maybe it's totally off in the wrong direction, but the but like I

01:18:23 ◼   ► don't think the next big thing equivalent of the car project is Apple should make a computer that thinks because nobody knows how to do

01:18:30 ◼   ► That and I don't think the current approaches are gonna get us there but all that LM stuff has proven utility

01:18:36 ◼   ► you can do useful things with it if you use it the right way and

01:18:40 ◼   ► Apple needs to use that to make its stuff better in all the ways that everyone else is making their stuff

01:18:47 ◼   ► But make Siri better make image search better maybe like we know like there's no question

01:18:52 ◼   ► It does that forget about how 9,000 you can use this technology Apple to make your current products better

01:18:58 ◼   ► And that is not the car project the headset or whatever

01:19:00 ◼   ► But I think getting a bunch of people put into that part of the organization is a good thing

01:19:07 ◼   ► So like rather than you know, the car project and the headset are both kind of like pie in the sky

01:19:11 ◼   ► We have a great idea. We think this is the future. We're gonna try to do it one of them

01:19:16 ◼   ► They shipped one of them they didn't but they're big pie in the sky things. This is not pie in the sky

01:19:21 ◼   ► This is keeping up with the Joneses. This is hey, have you noticed what everyone else is doing Apple?

01:19:25 ◼   ► you should do that too because you've got a lot of stuff that could benefit from

01:19:28 ◼   ► things that other people are proving the utility of so

01:19:32 ◼   ► That I think is going to happen some of it this year

01:19:35 ◼   ► hopefully more of it next year and

01:19:38 ◼   ► If that's all that came out of this like that Apple never came up with the next new big thing

01:19:42 ◼   ► I think it'll be fine partially because I think you know, oh we got the headset

01:19:46 ◼   ► But we're still waiting for the glasses, right?

01:19:48 ◼   ► like you can extrapolate from vision Pro and say where is this gonna go and unlike self-driving and how

01:19:55 ◼   ► And you can see a fairly straightforward path of like just keep iterating on the vision Pro

01:20:00 ◼   ► With increases in technology that we expect to happen and as you know screens get better

01:20:05 ◼   ► CPUs get better like just we can see that progressing. We don't quite know how to get all the glasses

01:20:10 ◼   ► Because some of the display stuff is questionable at this point

01:20:13 ◼   ► But even if it's just vision Pro but better than the current vision Pro

01:20:18 ◼   ► there is a path to travel there and I think that is a

01:20:22 ◼   ► Big enough project a brand new platform that is very much more ambitious or different than competing platforms

01:20:29 ◼   ► And the other things that it's done

01:20:31 ◼   ► There's 10 years of runway right there anyway

01:20:34 ◼   ► So I don't think

01:20:34 ◼   ► Apple should be out there saying

01:20:36 ◼   ► We need to start something new and it's setting aside all the health stuff that we know they're already doing

01:20:39 ◼   ► I don't think should be like hovercrafts like or we're gonna start an airline or you know, like just

01:20:44 ◼   ► Chill out you got just can we just do the vision Pro for 10 years and see if that works out because there is a runway

01:20:51 ◼   ► There you have so many other platforms that you're working on. You're still trying to do all the health stuff

01:20:55 ◼   ► You got all the services. You got all the antitrust things

01:20:58 ◼   ► You got the app store like I don't think Apple should be looking to you know, have a rebound

01:21:04 ◼   ► project after project Titan

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01:22:26 ◼   ► Joe writes what email clients do you all use these days?

01:22:33 ◼   ► Here's to know how each of you handle this on both iOS and Mac OS and what you feel are the best clients

01:22:37 ◼   ► I feel like this is one of those as John often describes annual or sometimes semi annual

01:22:43 ◼   ► Questions that people always want to know what email clients we use and I don't know that it's changed like

01:22:48 ◼   ► Properly changed for any of us since we started recording the show in 2013 2014 creatures of habit

01:22:54 ◼   ► Yeah, but for me it's mail app. I was

01:22:58 ◼   ► Briefly using whatever that one is is a mail plane that everyone loves something that everyone loves for Gmail

01:23:04 ◼   ► And I was using that for a while

01:23:06 ◼   ► And then when I switched to fast mail I put that aside and went crawling back to mail that app and that's what I use

01:23:11 ◼   ► Everywhere and I thought that was the same for Marco, isn't it? I have actually really never gone for many other mail clients

01:23:18 ◼   ► Sorry, I just meant that you're all in on mail. Yeah. Yeah, I'm all in on mail that app and I am mostly

01:23:25 ◼   ► Fine with it. I wouldn't say I love it

01:23:28 ◼   ► but I don't love email and so I

01:23:31 ◼   ► Treat email as a very kind of functional thing that I have to deal with somewhat reluctantly

01:23:37 ◼   ► And I deal with it as little as possible apples mail apps. Let me do that on their platforms with lots of you know

01:23:43 ◼   ► Various nice little integrations. I appreciate all of that first partiness of them

01:23:48 ◼   ► My problems with email have nothing to do with the client

01:23:52 ◼   ► Like none of the email apps that are out there would do a meaningfully better job at making me hate email less

01:23:59 ◼   ► I just kind of deal with it the way I do the only thing that I

01:24:02 ◼   ► Literally just ran into this earlier today

01:24:06 ◼   ► My one big feature request for Apple's mail apps having used them now for how many years

01:24:11 ◼   ► When the iPhone first shipped and the iPhone had its you know version of mail that app on it

01:24:17 ◼   ► It mostly worked it mostly satisfied my needs

01:24:20 ◼   ► except for one giant area

01:24:23 ◼   ► search

01:24:25 ◼   ► mail search on iOS has always been really rudimentary and really crappy and

01:24:31 ◼   ► Many times I end up having to go search on my Mac mail app instead and it will find things the iOS app will not

01:24:39 ◼   ► Find including this literally just happened today. I assume the reason why is because mail on the Mac

01:24:44 ◼   ► Downloads everything off the IMAP server and indexes everything locally whereas mail on the iPhone appears not to do that

01:24:51 ◼   ► I think mail on the iPhone has always done server-side IMAP search not local search

01:24:56 ◼   ► I assume that's why I'm getting different search results, but

01:24:59 ◼   ► That trade-off made sense in

01:25:02 ◼   ► 2007 that trade-off does not make sense in 2024. I

01:25:07 ◼   ► Understand that people's email boxes can be really big. So maybe make it an option

01:25:11 ◼   ► Give me a switch in the Settings app

01:25:13 ◼   ► It says download all mail and let me search all mail in the iOS mail app with the exact same search

01:25:19 ◼   ► Characteristics and results that I would get if I did it on my Mac. It's 2024. I'm pretty sure Apple can make that happen

01:25:25 ◼   ► John you still using the Gmail web client. Yeah, the main sort of performance characteristics that I'm looking for an email client

01:25:32 ◼   ► Date all the way back to you know, my the early days my very first email clients on the Mac

01:25:36 ◼   ► I was super heavy into entourage and

01:25:39 ◼   ► Later when that morphed or Claris emailer which morphed into entourage

01:25:44 ◼   ► and

01:25:46 ◼   ► They what I loved on those things is they had like rules that you could apply to mail that would ferry your mail into various

01:25:52 ◼   ► Folders or whatever, but it was so frustrating when I'd have all those rules set up on my home computer

01:25:57 ◼   ► And then I'd like try to check my home email while I was at work

01:26:00 ◼   ► And so I would like install the same email client on my work computer

01:26:04 ◼   ► but then the rules would be on my home computer and this was before the days of ubiquitous cloud sync and it was

01:26:09 ◼   ► Never quite the same and a lot of times I was using pop

01:26:12 ◼   ► So if you popped it from one location

01:26:14 ◼   ► If you popped it from a second location the second location wouldn't have it because it didn't pop it

01:26:19 ◼   ► So now you have the same message appearing in two different places. They had to be routed the same

01:26:22 ◼   ► We should probably we should probably explain that just a little bit more because everything everything you said was accurate

01:26:27 ◼   ► But this it sounds bananas to people of today

01:26:30 ◼   ► So most email clients or most email servers, excuse me from I don't know 15 20 25 years ago

01:26:36 ◼   ► the way it worked was you used post office protocol or pop and

01:26:40 ◼   ► Generally speaking granted you could tweak this but generally speaking what would happen is your email client would go to the server

01:26:46 ◼   ► It would say okay. What are the new messages?

01:26:47 ◼   ► It would grab the new messages and then it would delete them off the server

01:26:50 ◼   ► So like John was saying let's say you have a machine at home that is checking your email

01:26:56 ◼   ► Generally speaking the machine at home would check your email delete the email and then it would be living or alive

01:27:01 ◼   ► Oh those emails would only be living on that one computer if you went to any other computer because you know

01:27:06 ◼   ► You wouldn't go to a cell phone at this point if you went to any other computer and went to get mail

01:27:09 ◼   ► Well tough noogies it ain't there because it was deleted off the server in this was normal

01:27:14 ◼   ► But if I was smart enough not to do that, but that introduces a second problem

01:27:18 ◼   ► Which if you say okay don't do that leave it on the server now

01:27:21 ◼   ► My home computer would run run a little you know using pop it would check for mail

01:27:25 ◼   ► It would see there's a new message you would download it right now

01:27:27 ◼   ► My work computer would run two seconds later, and it would see that same new message

01:27:32 ◼   ► And it would download it which is why both computers needed to have the same set of rules because as far as they're concerned

01:27:38 ◼   ► It's like the home computer downloads the message and files it away the work computer downloads that same message now these two computers

01:27:44 ◼   ► Are downloading the same message you know and you know pulling it from the server

01:27:48 ◼   ► They better route it to the same place otherwise home and work will slowly get a sink like they're not even connected at all

01:27:54 ◼   ► But it's like a one-way process

01:27:55 ◼   ► but if they don't have the same rules as things flow in they won't go in the same boxes and

01:28:00 ◼   ► By the way if I respond to something at work or market it read it read at work

01:28:05 ◼   ► home has no idea that that happened because their only function is

01:28:08 ◼   ► Using the pop protocol protocol to see if there's new messages and downloading them

01:28:12 ◼   ► There's no reverse direction where when I mark something that's read at work

01:28:15 ◼   ► It sends a message up to the pop server so that when I go home. No no that doesn't happen. It's one way right so

01:28:22 ◼   ► Trying to deal with that just home and work being able to check my my personal email at work

01:28:27 ◼   ► Which is as all working people know is an essential part of your sanity

01:28:30 ◼   ► Yes being able to do that

01:28:33 ◼   ► Was made very difficult, and I and I do like rules

01:28:37 ◼   ► And I do like routing and I do like everything to be the same everywhere right and I map you say well

01:28:42 ◼   ► I map solves this well. I map especially early days was a little bit of a nightmare

01:28:45 ◼   ► It was trying to solve this problem by having two-way communication and everything

01:28:49 ◼   ► But the clients weren't weren't great and there were lots of different

01:28:51 ◼   ► I'm app servers and depending on your ISP and where your email from it was very confusing and annoying

01:28:55 ◼   ► But I'm app was an improvement, but still kind of janky, but anyway

01:28:58 ◼   ► I was using like Claris emailer and Eudora not Eudora

01:29:01 ◼   ► I know Eudora is great

01:29:02 ◼   ► But I wasn't a big fan entourage and Claris emailer back in the day where they did support both pop and I'm up

01:29:07 ◼   ► But then Gmail came along and Gmail said forget about your stupid client

01:29:11 ◼   ► The server is the source of truth. I have all your email that your only email only exists in one place folders rules

01:29:17 ◼   ► Those are all here on the server. Oh, you can look at what's on the server

01:29:21 ◼   ► However, you want say in a web browser try Chrome. It's nice

01:29:24 ◼   ► But don't be fooled

01:29:27 ◼   ► Gmail Google has all your email and all your rules and all your settings and all your preferences and when you mark something is read

01:29:34 ◼   ► Or unread or reply to it

01:29:36 ◼   ► You know your sentiment send mail into sent mail folder

01:29:39 ◼   ► That is all happening on Google servers. And what it did was gave me blessed freedom to say

01:29:44 ◼   ► Wherever I check my email from a phone an iPad an internet cyber cafe

01:29:50 ◼   ► Anywhere I go

01:29:53 ◼   ► Where I don't care whose computer it is

01:29:56 ◼   ► I don't care if it work at home on any computer that I have when I load up at gmail.com

01:30:01 ◼   ► My email looks exactly like it did the last time I left it if I marked a thing as red if I replied

01:30:07 ◼   ► I'm by the way search

01:30:09 ◼   ► Google's really good at that

01:30:11 ◼   ► I can search my email really easily and it also in the back of the day lets you import all your old email

01:30:16 ◼   ► So this is a long-winded way to say gmail. I use the gmail gmail for my email and I use the gmail web interface. I

01:30:24 ◼   ► Like the gmail web interface. I miss you know, the days of entourage and Claris emailer, but I've moved on since then

01:30:32 ◼   ► I don't like Apple mail. I don't like the interface on any platform

01:30:36 ◼   ► So I use the gmail web interface on my phone. I use the Google's gmail app, which is not very good

01:30:42 ◼   ► but it doesn't really matter because

01:30:44 ◼   ► All my mail is there if you know, I can do what I want in there if I don't like it

01:30:47 ◼   ► I just put the phone down pick up literally any other computer log into gmail and there's all my mail

01:30:51 ◼   ► Big proponent of gmail and it's been one of my favorite products over the years and I'll be very sad when a Google eventually cancels it

01:30:58 ◼   ► I don't think they would cancel that but I definitely take your point

01:31:02 ◼   ► No, I bet I think I'll be dead at retired by the time they do that too much valuable data goes through

01:31:07 ◼   ► You know there are people keep gmail around

01:31:09 ◼   ► Warren McKay writes you recently mentioned Marco's love of the Microsoft ergonomic keyboard

01:31:14 ◼   ► Which I've always liked why isn't Marco constructed a do-it-yourself mechanical keyboard in the ergonomic key layout

01:31:19 ◼   ► He prefers with the switches. He wants etc. This seems like exactly the kind of project

01:31:24 ◼   ► He would love and he'd end up with the keyboard customized to his personal specifications

01:31:28 ◼   ► You know, I get this and obviously my name is not Marco, but I mean at least for me

01:31:32 ◼   ► I actually like Apple keyboards and in your case

01:31:35 ◼   ► You like the the Microsoft ergonomic keyboard and I don't know as I get older and more crotchety

01:31:41 ◼   ► I feel like there's less space in my life for fiddly things and I'm assuming that's probably where you are, too

01:31:48 ◼   ► I'm glad that that whole world of keyboards exists if I ever want to dive into it

01:31:54 ◼   ► I will have no hesitation of diving into it

01:31:57 ◼   ► But right now like, you know every few years when my sculpt flakes out

01:32:01 ◼   ► I can spend 60 bucks and get and have that problem just disappear

01:32:06 ◼   ► And the reality is I like the sculpt ergonomic keyboard

01:32:11 ◼   ► there's not a lot about it that I would change it solves my needs very very well and

01:32:16 ◼   ► We're very low effort. And if I were to customize something with the world of like custom keyboard enthusiast kind of stuff. I

01:32:25 ◼   ► Think what I would end up creating would actually be worse for my own preferences

01:32:30 ◼   ► so for instance

01:32:32 ◼   ► Even though I know there's different key switches with different volume levels. All of them are way too loud for me

01:32:38 ◼   ► I've tried them all yes, even the you know, the Cherry MX Brown or you know, whatever whatever every few years

01:32:44 ◼   ► There's a new one and people say oh this one's like this one's quieter or whatever and I try it and it's loud

01:32:47 ◼   ► So that is problem number one is that I I don't really like the the giant mechanical key switch

01:32:53 ◼   ► sound I also don't have any problem with the feedback of the

01:32:58 ◼   ► Relatively standard scissor mechanism of the sculpt ergonomics keys. Like that's not a problem. I'm looking to solve

01:33:05 ◼   ► I understand why people like those things. It's just not that important to me. I don't like the noise trade-off

01:33:10 ◼   ► secondly the sculpt is actually a very compact keyboard for an ergonomic keyboard and

01:33:17 ◼   ► If I would actually create an ergonomic layout that has kind of the two key elements of what makes it help

01:33:24 ◼   ► Which is the split gap and then the kind of curved and reverse tinted shape of it

01:33:30 ◼   ► To actually create that with mechanical key caps

01:33:33 ◼   ► with that kind of keyboard would would be a

01:33:36 ◼   ► Probably a larger overall finished product and I again to create that it's solving problems

01:33:43 ◼   ► I don't have to make a result. That would be worse for my preferences. That's why I don't do it

01:33:50 ◼   ► things might change over time my preferences might change or the

01:33:53 ◼   ► Availability of sculpt ergonomic keyboards as we've discussed. It's kind of in flux right now

01:33:57 ◼   ► So that that could be getting better with like the the Matthias recreation or the was it in case who took over that business

01:34:05 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so. Yeah, so

01:34:07 ◼   ► So, you know their recreations could be fine or could be ruined

01:34:10 ◼   ► You know that the Matthias recreation could be fine or could be ruined. I don't know yet

01:34:14 ◼   ► I've pre-ordered both and we'll see what happens and I still have a few sculpts left from my from my stock

01:34:20 ◼   ► My personal stock so we'll see but right now this is a problem that I don't really need to be solved

01:34:24 ◼   ► Every time I use the sculpt, I'm not thinking like god. I hate this thing. I can't wait for until there's a replacement

01:34:31 ◼   ► No, I actually like it. I prefer it and whenever they die, I just pop a new out of the closet and move on with my life

01:34:38 ◼   ► Anonymous writes as tech enthusiasts. How interested are you in LLM's and generative AI?

01:34:42 ◼   ► Is it something you think you follow from the sidelines?

01:34:44 ◼   ► Or do you actually dive into these topics and do some of your own research and follow up question for which use cases?

01:34:50 ◼   ► Have you been using chat bots like chat GPT if at all and what were your experiences for me?

01:34:55 ◼   ► I'm interested. Certainly. This is the new hot thing and unlike crypto. It doesn't make me want to vomit all over myself

01:35:02 ◼   ► So that's an improvement

01:35:03 ◼   ► I am trying to keep up with it and get at least a

01:35:08 ◼   ► Nominal understanding of how it works and in a very broad and basic understanding of how it works in terms of how I use it

01:35:15 ◼   ► I don't typically do anything with generative, you know, like making images or anything like that

01:35:19 ◼   ► I've tried a couple of times like I think when I was

01:35:21 ◼   ► first trying to come up with a placeholder icon for call sheet then called flick look up I was trying to come up with a

01:35:28 ◼   ► An icon that was at least passable not to ship with but just to ship like a beta with and I

01:35:35 ◼   ► Couldn't even get something that looked even remotely what like what I wanted at the time and they all that very well could have been user

01:35:41 ◼   ► Ish a user error on my part, but nevertheless I do use

01:35:45 ◼   ► chat GPT

01:35:47 ◼   ► every once in a while typically to solve some sort of programming problem with something that I'm not familiar with or a great example of

01:35:54 ◼   ► this a wonderful use of chat GPT is

01:35:57 ◼   ► how do I do this particular ffmpeg incantation because I know a lot of the things that I do regularly and

01:36:03 ◼   ► I like to think as people go I know a fair bit about ffmpeg

01:36:07 ◼   ► But there's a ton of things that it does in almost infinite amount of things that it does that I don't know how to do

01:36:13 ◼   ► And I do have a folder in Apple Notes speaking of Apple Notes John

01:36:16 ◼   ► I have a folder in Apple Notes with you know individual notes of like different recipes if you will for ffmpeg

01:36:21 ◼   ► But there's certainly times that I'm like, well how the heck do you do that and chat GPT?

01:36:27 ◼   ► Oftentimes, we'll either get it right or get me close enough that I can get it right quickly

01:36:30 ◼   ► And that's actually applicable to a lot of programming problems. So that's how that's how I've been using it

01:36:35 ◼   ► I feel like I picked on Marco first a lot recently. So John. What are you doing with this?

01:36:39 ◼   ► I do use I'm interested in these things. I'm interested in understand how they work

01:36:43 ◼   ► it's kind of you know, I tried to learn as much about them as I could without actually having any reason to

01:36:50 ◼   ► Make anything like this. It's difficult to follow sometimes

01:36:53 ◼   ► It's not my area of expertise, but I think I have somewhat of a handle on what their approach is

01:36:58 ◼   ► but the most important thing like the distinction between crypto is that these these things is large language models in generative AI

01:37:05 ◼   ► Have practical utility you can use them to do useful things. It's very obvious to everybody

01:37:11 ◼   ► That's why people are excited about this again

01:37:13 ◼   ► I'm like crypto where it's like the useful thing is make a bunch of people a lot of money, you know

01:37:17 ◼   ► Like okay, but like does this help me with my work? No, not really

01:37:21 ◼   ► I use these things

01:37:23 ◼   ► kind of in as a

01:37:26 ◼   ► Augmentation to Google search right? So anything that I'm doing where I would be using Google

01:37:31 ◼   ► I will throw in these various large language model things into the competition just like I may I

01:37:38 ◼   ► You know put all my little voice cylinders in the house against each other and I asked them all the same question to see how

01:37:44 ◼   ► They do I'm trying to see who's going to be the most useful

01:37:47 ◼   ► So sometimes you know when I'm programming is a great example when I'm programming very often you Google for things, right?

01:37:53 ◼   ► Oh, I don't know what that is. How do you do this?

01:37:55 ◼   ► You know, what is the what is the order of arguments to this function? I can't remember right?

01:38:01 ◼   ► You can use Google for that and you find a stack overflow question or you find the reference documentation or you know

01:38:06 ◼   ► If you're an Xcode, you can go directly to it with just a right-click or whatever

01:38:09 ◼   ► But yeah, I'll throw in chat GPT

01:38:13 ◼   ► Google's bard thing the Bing thing to see how they do

01:38:17 ◼   ► Because sometimes even though I know the answer is in the reference documentation

01:38:21 ◼   ► sometimes reading the reference documentation like if you're trying to look like the

01:38:26 ◼   ► Select system call and pearl and you want to know what what are those bit?

01:38:30 ◼   ► What are the constants that you use in the bit masks?

01:38:32 ◼   ► and is it the right bits then the read bits or the read bits than the right bits and

01:38:36 ◼   ► You know, you could look this up in the reference docs

01:38:39 ◼   ► It's gonna tell you the order of the things you're gonna be able to find the constants

01:38:42 ◼   ► then you can look them up and just like you get I know exactly where the answer is and

01:38:46 ◼   ► You could Google for it and it will probably point you to the reference docs that you can read to get that answer

01:38:50 ◼   ► one of the utilities that things like chat GPT provides is you could just ask them for the call that you want to make and

01:38:58 ◼   ► it will

01:39:00 ◼   ► essentially not do that work for you, but

01:39:02 ◼   ► summarize

01:39:04 ◼   ► That it'll say okay

01:39:06 ◼   ► Use this bit mask for the first argument use this bit mask for the second or even based on what you asked me

01:39:11 ◼   ► So it already has found the the what order the arguments are in and it found their credit

01:39:17 ◼   ► Correct bit mask things to order together and the right things and it gives you me the result faster than if I had done that work

01:39:23 ◼   ► myself

01:39:24 ◼   ► One of the things I don't use

01:39:26 ◼   ► Any of these large language model things for is anything based on facts?

01:39:31 ◼   ► Because I'm like the like the line of code

01:39:35 ◼   ► Where I can just run it and find out if it does the thing that I wanted to do

01:39:39 ◼   ► I could step through it in the debugger. I can see yes, it's working. No, it's not working, right?

01:39:42 ◼   ► I can tell whether it compiles or is it made up a function or whatever?

01:39:45 ◼   ► Using it for facts. I don't find useful, you know

01:39:49 ◼   ► What year did this movie come out?

01:39:51 ◼   ► It'll give me an answer and the answer will be plausible

01:39:54 ◼   ► But the problem is if I knew what the answer was already

01:39:56 ◼   ► I wouldn't have asked and so now I'm faced with the answer says all this movie came out in this year. Is that right?

01:40:02 ◼   ► Maybe looks like it could be right

01:40:05 ◼   ► But now I have to go check somewhere to see if it actually is right and if I'm gonna go check somewhere

01:40:10 ◼   ► Anyway, I might as well just start in Google and end up at the Wikipedia page or the IMDb page or whatever

01:40:15 ◼   ► Now is Wikipedia right is IMDb, right? I don't know but at least I have a foundation

01:40:20 ◼   ► For setting a level of trust. How much do I trust Wikipedia?

01:40:25 ◼   ► How much do I trust IMDb when it comes to the release date of movies, right?

01:40:28 ◼   ► How much do I just you know this result from the New York Times or The Verge or whatever?

01:40:34 ◼   ► With large language models when it just gives me the answer for fact-based things. It's useless to me because I

01:40:41 ◼   ► mean I can just stare at that and go that might be the answer but I

01:40:47 ◼   ► Don't know where that answer came from. And if it's right or if it's wrong, like there's no

01:40:53 ◼   ► The LM's don't know don't care like that's not that's not their job

01:40:58 ◼   ► They're just smooshing together a bunch of stuff and spitting out something that is plausibly an answer to the question asked

01:41:05 ◼   ► and so that makes them an

01:41:07 ◼   ► Entire useless for me in that area and I would say also dangerous because you might think you're getting the answer and even like when Google

01:41:14 ◼   ► Does the general results at the top of it search results?

01:41:16 ◼   ► I tend to ignore those two for the same reason

01:41:18 ◼   ► Kind of for the same reason I've been ignoring the thing that Google's been doing for many years before generative AI which is like

01:41:23 ◼   ► Don't worry about the search results. We've extracted the answer for you

01:41:26 ◼   ► I'm like, yeah, but like I kind of need to see where you got that answer from

01:41:30 ◼   ► So I just ignore it and I go to the plain old search results and then I have to make the judgment myself

01:41:34 ◼   ► Like do I trust this SEO spam page?

01:41:37 ◼   ► It's in the first ten results are all like that or do I want to actually go to something more?

01:41:42 ◼   ► authoritative or if I go to the Wikipedia page is this page constantly being in edit wars and the talk page shows there's a much

01:41:48 ◼   ► Controversy about this. Does everyone agree that this movie came out on this date, right? So I do use it

01:41:53 ◼   ► I think it there is there is a bright future of utility for things like this and the the image generators the same type of thing

01:42:01 ◼   ► Because it's setting aside the legal and ethical implications there

01:42:05 ◼   ► people do agree that being able to type in a

01:42:08 ◼   ► Description of an image and get an image back is a useful thing to do if we can get the rest of the stuff worked out

01:42:12 ◼   ► So yeah, I'm definitely incorporating it into my into my normal workflows and I have found things

01:42:20 ◼   ► Kind of like Steve Jobs said about the iPad like there should be something where the iPad is the best device to use it

01:42:24 ◼   ► There are things that I do

01:42:27 ◼   ► when you know programming for example, where a chat GPT is better than Google for

01:42:33 ◼   ► Getting me what I need faster. There are also things where Google is still better

01:42:39 ◼   ► There are things where right-clicking and looking it up in the reference docs is faster

01:42:41 ◼   ► but very quickly things like chat GPT have become a sibling to

01:42:48 ◼   ► Direct lookups and reference documentation blind Google searches and now right alongside there ask a large language model

01:42:54 ◼   ► Marco so personally I have used generative AI

01:42:58 ◼   ► Relatively little I did make that icon for my fire island driving app

01:43:04 ◼   ► I made that with generative AI because that's an app that had

01:43:08 ◼   ► Zero budget and I any time spent on it was time

01:43:12 ◼   ► I shouldn't have been spending on it really and so I had I need something quick and dirty

01:43:16 ◼   ► That would be seen by about 70 people and it was perfect for that

01:43:20 ◼   ► I I don't really have a lot of need to generate a bunch of BS on a regular basis

01:43:25 ◼   ► So I tend not to use it that much but it's a tool that I'm glad it's there when I need it

01:43:30 ◼   ► I'm more looking forward to

01:43:32 ◼   ► And some of this is already out there tools that use generative AI

01:43:37 ◼   ► Functionality and techniques in ways that I actually do use on a more regular basis

01:43:42 ◼   ► So for instance, like if I'm editing a photo of myself and I want to you know, remove like the pimple on my forehead

01:43:48 ◼   ► You know, we've had various techniques to do that in image editors for a long time now

01:43:52 ◼   ► but if you

01:43:53 ◼   ► Involve generative AI in that kind of feature you can usually do a better job of it or other things other kind of image

01:43:59 ◼   ► manipulation things like you you have a low res image and you want to make a high res version of it and you want to

01:44:04 ◼   ► You know do whatever you can to extrapolate whatever the details might have been in a higher resolution of that image great

01:44:09 ◼   ► That's a great use of a lot of these generative AI type techniques to do things like that

01:44:14 ◼   ► So these features by themselves in like the current, you know standalone products that we see them in

01:44:20 ◼   ► They have utility to a lot of people no question, but I don't see a lot of that myself

01:44:25 ◼   ► but I'm looking forward to and and I already still currently benefiting from some of the

01:44:30 ◼   ► implementations of those techniques into tools that I use so again other instances like you know

01:44:36 ◼   ► If if Apple ever realized that there's five of us out there who use logic to edit podcasts

01:44:42 ◼   ► They can probably add a whole bunch of really interesting useful features to logic to make editing podcast better

01:44:48 ◼   ► Some of which would be AI based and another example of that is like the world of audio

01:44:54 ◼   ► Transcription algorithms has been radically improved by the open AI whisper model

01:44:59 ◼   ► it doesn't get as much attention as the other open AI stuff, but whisper has been a

01:45:05 ◼   ► Massive transformation no pun intended in in audio transcription

01:45:09 ◼   ► I'm looking forward to advances like that, you know that being integrated into more things like one of the big hopes

01:45:16 ◼   ► I have for whatever Apple's AI sauce sprinkling process looks like this summer is

01:45:21 ◼   ► Apple has a built-in API to transcribe audio. It's not that good

01:45:27 ◼   ► I'm hoping that this year it gets substantially better because maybe they're using some AI type models to to you know

01:45:34 ◼   ► Improve their transcription. They've already been going in that direction in you know small steps here and there. So that's the kind of thing

01:45:41 ◼   ► I'm looking forward to is

01:45:42 ◼   ► You know, yeah

01:45:43 ◼   ► There's gonna be fun new problems that arise that we didn't even think about that they can all of a sudden solve and it revolutionizes

01:45:49 ◼   ► Everything etc. But most of what we do in our computing lives is

01:45:54 ◼   ► Boring tasks that we've done for a long time things like as mentioned before answering emails, you know doing various media manipulation

01:46:03 ◼   ► Tact, you know tasks and stuff like that

01:46:05 ◼   ► there's lots of opportunities in tons of computing for

01:46:09 ◼   ► Those features and those tools to get better

01:46:13 ◼   ► Within the capabilities of what we already know AI can do like we don't need it to get

01:46:17 ◼   ► So much better that it can answer all of John's questions with factual accuracy

01:46:21 ◼   ► that'll be nice if it you know, if it goes in that direction it should but

01:46:24 ◼   ► Even with what we know it can do today

01:46:27 ◼   ► There's tons of possible applications for the existing AI techniques even the existing models that have already been built in

01:46:35 ◼   ► ways that we that we haven't seen it be either because

01:46:39 ◼   ► They kind of can't get built without somebody okaying it like in the case of Apple being a gatekeeper over their platforms

01:46:45 ◼   ► Like for instance, I would love the option to have chat GPT

01:46:49 ◼   ► respond to my Siri questions whenever they're about knowledge because

01:46:54 ◼   ► Even though it is a BS generator. It tends to generate more accurate answers than Siri

01:47:00 ◼   ► Does the vast majority of the time for informational questions? Well, I wouldn't say it's more accurate

01:47:04 ◼   ► You're more likely to get an answer and Siri will just be like, sorry

01:47:07 ◼   ► I can't help you or go look on the web. But honestly, I that's more that's that's the writer answer

01:47:13 ◼   ► I don't want something just giving me plausible BS when I ask a question if you can't answer it don't answer it

01:47:17 ◼   ► Well, just just ask a man

01:47:20 ◼   ► I do not want plausible BS when I when I asked him when that movie was released Alexa should tell me the real answer not

01:47:25 ◼   ► the plausible BS answer

01:47:27 ◼   ► Anyway, so I'm looking forward to just the the integration of

01:47:32 ◼   ► These awesome new AI techniques and models into the rest of our boring computing lives making them a lot better

01:47:40 ◼   ► That's where I see the most promise and yeah, we'll have some cool products along the way that are more exciting than that

01:47:45 ◼   ► But in the grand scheme of like how is it going to impact most people? I think it's gonna be more like the former more

01:47:52 ◼   ► Just making our everyday tasks better and making the tools that would that do them better

01:47:56 ◼   ► And to be clear Apple has been doing that for years and years back before the AI buzzword. They used ml, right?

01:48:04 ◼   ► The magic thing where you can I don't even know if this would even qualify for a quote-unquote AI table like subject detection where?

01:48:09 ◼   ► You can drag the picture your dog out of the photo

01:48:12 ◼   ► Apple's photo search where you can search for like, you know tin can or whatever and as I has a set of work like

01:48:16 ◼   ► That was ml and not AI but that's exactly the type of stuff we're talking about and what we're saying is hey

01:48:22 ◼   ► State of the art has moved on and you could make all those things better

01:48:26 ◼   ► I really because in photo search if you ever try this in Apple photos

01:48:29 ◼   ► You can search for things like dog or cat or bed or spoon or car or parking lot, right?

01:48:36 ◼   ► But if you try clipboard you might see that. Oh, the autocomplete isn't bringing up clipboard

01:48:41 ◼   ► Well, can't I just type clipboard and the answer is no Apple has decided there's a fixed number of things where you can search for well

01:48:45 ◼   ► Technology is marched on and you can do text-based photo search a little bit better than Apple's doing it with quote-unquote AI

01:48:53 ◼   ► Technologies instead of the quote-unquote ml that they use for that before just make your existing features better mark out the transcription is a perfect

01:49:01 ◼   ► Example they're already doing that with quote-unquote ml

01:49:03 ◼   ► Just do it with AI and it will you know

01:49:06 ◼   ► But we're just saying like keep up with the Joneses people are doing cool stuff and Apple is being left behind

01:49:10 ◼   ► And by the way, as I saw someone toot this today, this is a website

01:49:14 ◼   ► Fast no, it's it's fast SD XL dot AI. It's a demo of another

01:49:20 ◼   ► Way, these things could be interesting. It's just that you know, you type words and it makes an image. Let's go

01:49:26 ◼   ► it's like an image generator like stable diffusion or

01:49:28 ◼   ► Mid journey or like oh, you know this all sorts of things that can generate images for you

01:49:35 ◼   ► But there is this sub-genre of them. It says we're not as interested in generating

01:49:40 ◼   ► Every image really perfectly or whatever our thing is speed

01:49:45 ◼   ► This thing tries to generate images for you as fast as you can type

01:49:49 ◼   ► So you just start typing and it's generating images and you add another word another word and add generates it generates it generates

01:49:55 ◼   ► And you might think oh, that's a fun party trick, but I'd rather have it rather let you can

01:49:59 ◼   ► I just type a whole sentence then you generate really really awesome. I don't need you to do it to me fast

01:50:04 ◼   ► but

01:50:05 ◼   ► Being having the thing react to you in real time with like a smaller faster model does change how the interactions feel

01:50:12 ◼   ► and this is just another example of like, you know, when I think about Apple doing stuff on device or

01:50:16 ◼   ► You know, what's the advantage of doing it locally, especially if your model needs to be smaller

01:50:20 ◼   ► Sometimes you want that trade-off sometimes?

01:50:23 ◼   ► Doing it quickly locally not as well is better than doing it in the cloud

01:50:30 ◼   ► Expensively requiring a network round-trip or whatever just depends on the thing that you're trying to do

01:50:34 ◼   ► So I'm very optimistic that Apple can find many many places and it's existing products where it can use these technologies

01:50:42 ◼   ► Which everybody knows Apple has been working on to make all of its products better in I guess

01:50:47 ◼   ► What mark I would describe as boring ways, but honestly, it's not boring to me if my image my photo search starts working better

01:50:53 ◼   ► Thanks to our members who supported us this entire episode this week

01:50:57 ◼   ► You can join us and become a member at ATP FM slash join. We will talk to you next week

01:51:04 ◼   ► Now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental

01:51:13 ◼   ► It was accidental

01:51:16 ◼   ► John

01:51:19 ◼   ► Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental

01:51:23 ◼   ► Was accidental

01:51:27 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP

01:51:30 ◼   ► FM and if you're into Twitter

01:51:35 ◼   ► You can follow them at

01:51:38 ◼   ► CAS

01:51:40 ◼   ► EYL

01:51:41 ◼   ► ISS so that's Casey lists. Ma RC Oh a RM

01:51:46 ◼   ► Auntie Marco are men. Si are

01:51:50 ◼   ► AC

01:51:52 ◼   ► USA, Syracuse

01:51:54 ◼   ► It's accidental

01:51:56 ◼   ► I'm looking forward to WBC this year like all these rumors coming out about you know

01:52:11 ◼   ► Maybe a slight updated design but also like tons of AI stuff. I am looking forward to this

01:52:15 ◼   ► Yeah, but what I talked about in the rectus episode was like what stuff will they have ready for this year, right?

01:52:21 ◼   ► Cuz they're you know, I'm sure tons of stuff that they're doing, you know

01:52:24 ◼   ► Someone's gonna come next year. Someone's gonna come out the year after that

01:52:26 ◼   ► What can they get done in this year?

01:52:28 ◼   ► And the big question for me is is this the year where they do the apology Siri essentially and say Siri

01:52:34 ◼   ► It doesn't suck now because that seems like the hardest one like Siri is the hardest one making like, you know, transcribing audio better. I

01:52:41 ◼   ► Think they can ship that this year right making image search better

01:52:45 ◼   ► They could probably ship this year, but the Siri one is the big one and I honestly it's a kind of a distraction

01:52:50 ◼   ► But marketing wise and PR wise like because I would be perfectly happy if it's like this isn't the year we make Siri better

01:52:56 ◼   ► Siri still sucks, but everything else is a little bit better auto-complete

01:52:59 ◼   ► We already changed that to a transformer model last year, but guess what now it's a little bit better and searching your mail

01:53:04 ◼   ► It's a little bit better like this so many places where they can apply this to just make it a little bit better

01:53:09 ◼   ► It's not as citing as saying Siri - now it doesn't suck

01:53:13 ◼   ► But I'll be perfectly happy with a WWDC this year or every single piece of every single OS

01:53:18 ◼   ► Has some of that AI sauce sprinkled on it and just gets a little bit better

01:53:22 ◼   ► Even if Siri still isn't any good because I have faith that in a year or two or three

01:53:28 ◼   ► Siri will get what it deserves, which is a complete replacement

01:53:32 ◼   ► Last year was the year that we all were saying

01:53:36 ◼   ► Well, all this new AI stuff is breaking on the scene, but it's a little too new for Apple to do much with it

01:53:42 ◼   ► You know, they've had a while now

01:53:44 ◼   ► They've had you know generative AI stuff and LLMs have been really like broken into the scene now for

01:53:49 ◼   ► What about two years now or a year and a half, you know, it's it's been it's been enough time that

01:53:55 ◼   ► Apple has had time to

01:53:58 ◼   ► Get caught off guard

01:53:59 ◼   ► Realize they have to put a bunch of effort into this as everyone passes them by

01:54:02 ◼   ► Start dumping money into it and to start to see results like it now

01:54:07 ◼   ► This is the summer that we're going to start seeing the first

01:54:11 ◼   ► Probably bigger scale efforts from Apple in this front. Yeah, like I said, they did do the LLM base auto complete

01:54:16 ◼   ► And what was it iOS 16 17?

01:54:19 ◼   ► Like so that they're like despite the fact that they weren't caught off guard

01:54:22 ◼   ► They've already shipped some stuff that says hey, we've found a way to use this tech to make something in our OS better

01:54:28 ◼   ► It's just it was just so tiny but this is gonna be the big coming out

01:54:31 ◼   ► I think exactly and it's not gonna be the last big coming out of this stuff

01:54:35 ◼   ► Like we're gonna see this over the over the following few years. I would expect I do expect to see a whole bunch of

01:54:40 ◼   ► Those like, you know, as you mentioned like little stuff around the system features already existed

01:54:45 ◼   ► Maybe that are just now better. That's what I want to see and honestly as a developer like

01:54:49 ◼   ► Yeah, I guess I probably should have gotten into this with my answer. I guess we're doing this now in the after show

01:54:53 ◼   ► I've been hesitant to adopt much of this stuff in my apps so far for two big reasons

01:54:59 ◼   ► Number one is that I just don't have the time right now

01:55:02 ◼   ► I'm in the middle of this rewrite laying the groundwork for it to be easier for me in the future to make bigger changes

01:55:09 ◼   ► But during this time of relaying groundwork, I can't make those bigger changes. I don't have the time but in the future

01:55:15 ◼   ► I will hopefully but number two

01:55:17 ◼   ► Most of the AI features I could add right now

01:55:22 ◼   ► Would require me to do the work on the server. That is something that I could invest into

01:55:28 ◼   ► But I don't think it would be a great use of my time and I think it would be very expensive for me

01:55:34 ◼   ► Even if I wasn't running like the most cutting-edge models or the biggest models or whatever

01:55:39 ◼   ► it is a very high cost for a one-person operation and

01:55:43 ◼   ► it's probably not going to be worth it to me and when I look at what I would want out of

01:55:48 ◼   ► Some kind of server based AI stuff or any kind of AI based stuff in my app

01:55:52 ◼   ► what I'd most likely want would be transcription and

01:55:56 ◼   ► Recommending systems like like the recommending algorithms that that would be the two major areas of value for overcast

01:56:04 ◼   ► But those are actually like relative to what people expect out of my app. Those are not

01:56:11 ◼   ► massive

01:56:13 ◼   ► Percentages of the value so to speak I want to have transcription and I want to have you know

01:56:18 ◼   ► A more sophisticated recommendation algorithm, but if I never do those things, it's not the other world for my product

01:56:24 ◼   ► And so therefore it is not worth investing a huge amount of time and money on the server end

01:56:29 ◼   ► To try to make these two kind of ancillary features if it's gonna be that expensive

01:56:34 ◼   ► whereas if

01:56:36 ◼   ► Apple is building in a lot more stuff into the device side of things

01:56:40 ◼   ► I would expect much of that to be exposed through API's for instance the you know, the the speech transcription

01:56:47 ◼   ► Algorithm has been part of the public API now for a while

01:56:51 ◼   ► I think something like six or seven years if they improve the on-device

01:56:56 ◼   ► Transcription algorithms with AI stuff I would expect I could probably use that

01:57:01 ◼   ► Locally on device for all the same reasons that I don't want to run a whole bunch of AI stuff on my servers

01:57:06 ◼   ► Apple doesn't either on their servers because the scale they would be dealing with with

01:57:11 ◼   ► Every iPhone owner having access to feature XYZ

01:57:15 ◼   ► That is a massive scale to deploy in Apple's data centers and massive costs to pay

01:57:21 ◼   ► I don't even know if there are enough GPUs in the world to handle that kind of load

01:57:24 ◼   ► Well, they're already doing a small subset of this with podcast transcription on the server side, right?

01:57:29 ◼   ► But that's not inspiring response to customers requests for service

01:57:33 ◼   ► They just they just transcribe all their own podcasts once and then everyone every customer gets the benefit as opposed to essentially letting users say

01:57:40 ◼   ► Take this image and make a description of it for me or something. Yeah, you don't have to transcribe everyone's videos

01:57:47 ◼   ► They have recorded on all of their iPhones forever

01:57:49 ◼   ► like that's in server side at least and so, you know what Apple has Apple has this massive asset of

01:57:55 ◼   ► All of these iPhones out there in the world that are pretty capable hardware devices that they don't have to pay server time to run

01:58:03 ◼   ► So Apple has a huge interest for multiple reasons in

01:58:07 ◼   ► Pushing as much of this as possible to the device side to because they have this this fleet of computing capacity

01:58:14 ◼   ► That's out there in the world. That is just you know, the value there is immense

01:58:18 ◼   ► I also have a smaller version of that a much smaller version of that with overcast like as I lean into AI based

01:58:25 ◼   ► Features in the app. I would so much rather do things client-side than server side

01:58:31 ◼   ► and right now the client-side versions of these things either don't exist or

01:58:35 ◼   ► require me to bring in custom models like for instance the open AI whisper models and

01:58:40 ◼   ► That is possible. There are a few apps that integrate whisper in certain certain, you know features

01:58:45 ◼   ► But it's a big thing like whisper is a huge model

01:58:49 ◼   ► It comes in different sizes

01:58:51 ◼   ► But even even the small ones on the phone are pretty substantial and a pretty heavy lift

01:58:56 ◼   ► Computationally, but you know if Apple got in there and optimize things with you know

01:59:01 ◼   ► Their optimization techniques to run on their hardware with their models

01:59:04 ◼   ► They could do a much better job of it if they chose to and I hope they do

01:59:08 ◼   ► So anyway, I'm hoping that as I finish my rewrite over, you know, hopefully this year

01:59:13 ◼   ► Hopefully that gives Apple enough time to

01:59:15 ◼   ► Deploy iOS 18 with some really nice features that I can use for my first like feature update after them after the main rewrite release

01:59:22 ◼   ► And I would love to be able to do stuff like live transcription

01:59:26 ◼   ► Transcription search if possible, you know, there's there's so many things I could do if it was on device

01:59:31 ◼   ► that I would probably

01:59:34 ◼   ► never really have the

01:59:36 ◼   ► the prioritization and the budget and the time to do server side

01:59:40 ◼   ► [beep beep beep]

01:59:42 ◼   ► (beep)