00:00:35 ◼ ► And so this is where I am today. And you said to me, I should have told you I've been off the show, but I refuse, and here I am. I want to be here.
00:00:44 ◼ ► I know. We were ticking down until your leave, and so every opportunity for us to do a show together, we ought to take it.
00:01:07 ◼ ► I have a Snell Talk question for you. It comes from Aaron who wants to know, "Does smoking the turkey change the tier ranking that you gave to turkey in the Christmas special?"
00:01:22 ◼ ► No, because all issues with turkey are dealt with in the rankings. I think this is clear.
00:01:30 ◼ ► The rankings are, if you go back and listen to that episode, deeply considered, very scientific. All aspects have been considered.
00:01:39 ◼ ► And that includes the fact that turkey itself has a range and can be dry and awful or can be made well.
00:01:45 ◼ ► And the smoked turkey was also brined, and it tasted great, but the brined turkey that I roasted for Thanksgiving was also great.
00:01:55 ◼ ► And the greatness of good turkeys and the badness of bad turkeys all are already factored into the tier list. So it's where it is.
00:02:03 ◼ ► See, this is what you're saying. We're very scientific when it comes to food tier lists. We would never leave something off the table.
00:02:12 ◼ ► All tier lists are completely thoroughly considered. And if you're thinking, "I can't believe you didn't mention," believe it, we didn't mention it.
00:02:27 ◼ ► If you have a question you would like for us to open a future episode of the show, go to upgradefeedback.com and you can send in a Snow Talk question of your own.
00:02:35 ◼ ► I have some follow-up for you, Jason Snow. You will know this as I do. Many listeners got in touch to ask, "Where is a good place to start with upgradey award-winning podcast 'The Rest Is History'?"
00:02:47 ◼ ► So I thought we could maybe just give those recommendations now. What I'll say is 'The Rest Is History' is an incredible podcast. I love it.
00:03:02 ◼ ► Yes, that's what it's for. They actually don't have a way to easily link to the show anyway.
00:03:09 ◼ ► This is just how some podcasts are. But you can, like what I do, just subscribe to it and then you can search in the feed.
00:03:17 ◼ ► So here are my recommendations. I looked at your list and I want to talk about those too, but here are my recommendations.
00:03:23 ◼ ► You stole a bunch of mine, so I'll just concur with yours. Because all four of these are very good.
00:03:35 ◼ ► And that's Dominic's area of expertise. He wrote his master's thesis about some of the political players in the '60s in America.
00:03:43 ◼ ► And I'll say as well, just as a general overthought, as I've listened to this show more and more, I feel so much happier about the world as it is now.
00:03:51 ◼ ► Because I start to realize that the things that feel like unique problems today have been happening for centuries.
00:03:57 ◼ ► But nevertheless, 'America in '68,' 'The Assassination of JFK,' 'The Murder of Franz Ferdinand,' and 'Britain in 1974.'
00:04:10 ◼ ► Yeah, 'Murder of Franz Ferdinand' is really good if you're ever like, "Oh yeah, I know that World War I was a thing, but how did that happen?"
00:04:18 ◼ ► And they go into very detail. And also, it's phrased that way because it's an assassination plot that happens.
00:04:25 ◼ ► And then there's the ramifications of like, "Why did this all kick off that they follow up afterward?"
00:04:30 ◼ ► And the Franz Ferdinand episodes are in Sarajevo. They went there to do them, which is hilarious.
00:04:36 ◼ ► And 'Britain in '74,' it's just what a story of a terrible time in British history. It was really amazing.
00:04:43 ◼ ► So I concur about those. I do think it's interesting that you've got a lot of American things from the perspective of British historians. I think that's funny.
00:04:52 ◼ ► I like American history. I explicitly like it when I hear two British people talk about it.
00:04:57 ◼ ► Yeah, absolutely. So first, I'm going to mention some of their long series because they do long series.
00:05:05 ◼ ► We should also mention there's no continuity really in the rest of history. Sometimes they will make reference to past episodes.
00:05:10 ◼ ► But it's more like, "Well, if you want to hear more about this, go listen to this past episode."
00:05:14 ◼ ► Or occasionally they'll joke about how they did a very long series about the Battle of Little Bighorn and some of the characters in that.
00:05:25 ◼ ► Like all shows that are, in my opinion, good, there are in-jokes between the two of them.
00:05:34 ◼ ► And I heard a joke that has been referenced multiple times in the show and now I know what it's about.
00:05:41 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, that works. But it's pretty light. You don't have to start from the beginning. You don't have to be a completist.
00:05:46 ◼ ► So my recommendations. I love the long series about the fall of the Aztecs. It is a weird clash of civilizations, very rare.
00:05:53 ◼ ► It doesn't happen that often. It's long, but it's really great. And it prompted me to read a book about that too.
00:05:59 ◼ ► So I mean, I really got into that. I thought their American Revolution series was fascinating because as an American,
00:06:05 ◼ ► you're taught what the revolution is about. And then you listen to British historians talk about it and say,
00:06:09 ◼ ► "Nope, it wasn't about that. That's all American propaganda." And just it blew my mind. It's really, really cool.
00:06:20 ◼ ► And then there's the very, very long series about Custer versus Crazy Horse, but I think it's good.
00:06:25 ◼ ► It's just extremely long, so be warned. But if you care about that kind of era of history and the clash on the American plains
00:06:33 ◼ ► from both perspectives, it's in there and they're very careful about that, which I appreciate.
00:06:50 ◼ ► They've done a couple of collections of episodes about that. But I read about the French Revolution in college
00:06:56 ◼ ► and haven't since then and some of the storytelling of some of the wild things that happen in the run up to the French Revolution
00:07:02 ◼ ► and then as it kicks off, I thought were really good. Those are the long series. If you're looking for something shorter
00:07:08 ◼ ► to try to test the waters, they did a, I think it's a three-part series about Lord Byron where it's Tom Holland who loves Lord Byron.
00:07:18 ◼ ► Just wild, just like what wild playboy, bizarre behavior, so amazing and hilarious and entertaining.
00:07:25 ◼ ► Their Titanic series I thought was extremely good because they talk about the Titanic and sort of all the social issues
00:07:34 ◼ ► and class issues and the story of sort of British empire kind of fading away and American empire rising that's all encapsulated
00:07:43 ◼ ► in the story of the Titanic. So even if you know the story of the Titanic, you've never heard it told like this.
00:07:54 ◼ ► And how the movie gets some things wrong that are like easy kind of social dynamic things like all of course all the rich people
00:08:01 ◼ ► survived and all the poor people died which is not entirely true and also there's some reasons for it that are not we let them die
00:08:12 ◼ ► And then I'm going to throw out the Martin Luther episodes which are basically kicking off the Reformation, the Protestant Reformation
00:08:20 ◼ ► and Tom Holland really kind of blew my mind again talking about how the Reformation isn't just the Catholic Church, you know,
00:08:30 ◼ ► getting this upstart group of non-Catholic Christian churches. It's not just that but it's also like our concepts of the secular
00:08:39 ◼ ► versus the religious, our concepts of personal spirituality, atheism, all of those things are also fundamentally a thing that
00:08:49 ◼ ► stems from the Reformation which is just wild. So another mind-blowing kind of moment. They're all great but those are some
00:08:57 ◼ ► Yeah, they're all really, really good ones. I actually would also, I think I would say if you wanted to see if you like it, the Titanic one is
00:09:05 ◼ ► maybe a really good start because like it's probably a story you know a bit about so you'll learn some new stuff and they also do a good
00:09:21 ◼ ► That one's wild. I don't know if I'd recommend that as the start because like that one is just, yeah, that's wild.
00:09:27 ◼ ► Tom Holland wrote a novel where Lord Byron is a vampire. When he was a kid, when he was like a young man, he wrote that novel and it was
00:09:40 ◼ ► And also, as rumors suggested, we're talking about before the holidays, all iPhones with Lightning ports are no longer available for sale from
00:09:48 ◼ ► Apple directly in most EU countries and those that are in the single market. So that has happened.
00:09:54 ◼ ► The expectation is, you know, there's going to be the iPhone SE4. I'm sure that Apple will get that thing out as quickly as they possibly can now
00:10:14 ◼ ► Apple Intelligence has once again upset the BBC. So we spoke a few weeks ago about an Apple Intelligence notification summary falsely reporting the story,
00:10:22 ◼ ► which the BBC complained to Apple. It happened again. They've written another article about this.
00:10:27 ◼ ► So it incorrectly stated that Luke Littler had won a Dart semifinal that he had yet to play.
00:10:33 ◼ ► And also that tennis star Rafael Nadal had come out as gay. These are two things that are quite incredible to say when these things were just not true.
00:10:45 ◼ ► And you can see it. In this story, I like what the BBC does here, where they show some screenshots that show the individual headlines.
00:10:53 ◼ ► So you can kind of get an idea as to how they got smushed together. But the BBC has a bee in their bonnet and I'm here for it.
00:11:10 ◼ ► That's what it stands for. It's canon. I have a theory. I have a theory, because Apple has not said much about this at all, if anything.
00:11:19 ◼ ► I have a theory that what Apple is going to do, which we'll see, maybe I guess this is a prediction, is that as a way for Apple to silence this aspect of the story tactically,
00:11:33 ◼ ► that Apple will offer app developers the option of opting out of summaries. Either specifically just you can opt out in your app or in your app metadata or in the app store or whatever,
00:11:52 ◼ ► but you can just opt out and they will put a patch in an OS update that will just opt those apps out if they opt out.
00:11:58 ◼ ► Or some sort of an entitlement that's related to a topic like sensitive subject area or something like that, or news apps or something like that,
00:12:09 ◼ ► where there are certain classes of apps, because they love to do that. They love to classify apps and say only you get this feature and the rest of you don't.
00:12:16 ◼ ► That would of course include news organizations like the BBC. I think one of those things is probably the quick patch on this, just to stop this,
00:12:24 ◼ ► which is look, if you don't want, BBC, if you're angry about this, you can opt out of it now. That sounds like the most likely scenario here.
00:12:31 ◼ ► We have precedent for this, right? The reactions on cameras, like with the video cameras where you can show your thumb and it pops up with a little thumb emoji,
00:12:43 ◼ ► that was becoming a problem, right? We were talking about this quite a bit on Connected with teletherapy specifically, which is an issue.
00:12:55 ◼ ► - To my therapist, yeah. I've been quite a few times. It was pretty embarrassing. But luckily, I think he's a bit of a techie guy, so he got it.
00:13:03 ◼ ► And I expect it would probably work a similar way, which is when you open the app, it would say this feature has been turned off. Would you like to turn it off?
00:13:13 ◼ ► And I think that's the way to do it. I think this is the only realistic way for Apple to solve this problem in the near to mid future,
00:13:26 ◼ ► - Right, we forgot to tell the summary engine to not mess up things that are true, right? They've already done that. Do not lie, do not fabricate, whatever.
00:13:36 ◼ ► But they're still misunderstanding these headlines. In the longer term, I think the way forward for this is probably for Apple to build a richer notification protocol,
00:13:50 ◼ ► where there's more metadata that goes along with the notification to be summarized, right?
00:13:57 ◼ ► That the longer play here is, oh, also, in the next iOS release, the BBC app will be able to put the text of their story in the push that gets summarized,
00:14:14 ◼ ► - I was thinking they could also have a system to kind of say what type of app you are.
00:14:20 ◼ ► Where like, so a messaging app, it makes sense to take individual messages and smush them together, right?
00:14:26 ◼ ► But if you are a news app, absolutely under no circumstances should you be taking half of one headline and adding it to another one.
00:14:35 ◼ ► - Exactly, 'cause that's what's happening here is the, and that's a thing that Apple could also do, that's a thing they could do technically right now,
00:14:41 ◼ ► is say, wait a second, there are certain classes of app where each item is discrete, and when you summarize it, you can make those shorter,
00:14:51 ◼ ► but you can't mix them, and that might actually, you could even look at the number of notifications that have come in,
00:14:59 ◼ ► and then take them and say, okay, I need you to shorten this one, and this one, and this one, and then put them together,
00:15:04 ◼ ► instead of throwing them all in the pile and saying shorten them, which is what they're doing.
00:15:11 ◼ ► They could also get more signal, because probably they're just using the headline, right?
00:15:17 ◼ ► They could do a better job here, but can we, I wanna back up a second, though, and talk about the larger issue that we're talking about here.
00:15:28 ◼ ► I just, I was quoting someone else talking about this, Craig Grinnell, about the BBC issue, and about the fact that BBC says fix this,
00:15:39 ◼ ► and Craig says they can't, they're all fancy autocomplete, AI doesn't understand context.
00:15:56 ◼ ► I think there was, I think all of us understood that Apple was behind, and Apple was trying to catch up,
00:16:02 ◼ ► and was trying to put AI everywhere in their products, and that there was gonna be a rough patch, you know,
00:16:07 ◼ ► predicting things that Apple would have to apologize for, all of those sorts of things.
00:16:23 ◼ ► If this was any other Apple feature that wasn't in the context of them struggling to catch up with AI, and keep up with their competition,
00:16:33 ◼ ► if it was just a feature that Apple did using who knows what technology, and it generated fictional notifications on your system,
00:16:46 ◼ ► whether it is saying something about a darts match that didn't happen, or saying that the wrong person got assassinated,
00:16:52 ◼ ► or if it was something like saying some spam was actually priority email, whatever it is, yes, whatever that is,
00:17:02 ◼ ► if you take it out of the context of Apple trying to catch up to some technology that is already sort of fundamentally untrustworthy,
00:17:12 ◼ ► but on top of that, that Apple is behind, and so they're throwing at it, and they basically, I mean, let's, this is part of my point,
00:17:23 ◼ ► I think this year, all of us who write about this stuff and talk about this stuff need to cut them less slack about it,
00:17:32 ◼ ► because the fact is, if this was a regular feature that shipped using the standards we usually hold Apple to,
00:17:47 ◼ ► It's not, "Well, you gotta understand, it's an LLM, it makes mistakes, Apple's trying to play catch up,
00:17:53 ◼ ► they're keeping up with the Joneses, they have to do it strategically, because what if some of this stuff is really important,
00:17:58 ◼ ► and then Google's got a huge lead, or whatever?" Yes, yes, yes, yes, all of that is true,
00:18:03 ◼ ► but fundamentally, Apple is foisting broken features on its users, and not just that, they're advertising them heavily.
00:18:18 ◼ ► It's like, "Okay, it's beta, but it is heavily marketed, the marketing doesn't really talk about it in beta."
00:18:29 ◼ ► And they really want you to turn it on and use it, and yes, you can turn it off, and that's good,
00:18:35 ◼ ► but again, contextually, if Apple promotes a feature, and ships it and calls it a beta, and it's kind of broken in bad ways,
00:18:45 ◼ ► counterfactual ways, they should be criticized for it, because it's not up to their standards.
00:18:52 ◼ ► And I think that, honestly, I think Apple knows that it's not up to their standards, but they're doing it anyway.
00:18:58 ◼ ► This actually kind of corresponds to my thoughts about where they are with the Vision Pro, which is that Apple only has one way to do anything,
00:19:06 ◼ ► like a hype-filled launch of a product that nobody's gonna buy, and that it really is kind of a demo and a dev kit for a product they want to make in five years,
00:19:15 ◼ ► but they should launch the Vision Pro using the same playbook as everything else they do, because they only have one way of doing it.
00:19:21 ◼ ► I would say they only have one way to launch anything, which is 100% hype, full-on, and so as a result, if Apple Intelligence ships,
00:19:31 ◼ ► they're going to market the hell out of it, right? They're just gonna do that. They're not gonna say, "Let's soft pedal this,
00:19:37 ◼ ► because it's kind of broken. Let's just slide it out there." They're like, "No, it's the defining feature of all of our products now."
00:19:43 ◼ ► I'm not sure that they're not wired to do it any other way, but the problem is, it's not good enough. It's just not good enough.
00:19:52 ◼ ► A feature like this, we have to be able to point at it and say, "If your summaries are turning news headlines into lies, your summaries don't work."
00:20:02 ◼ ► Like, period. Period. If it's only 20% of the time or 10% of the time, it doesn't matter. They're broken.
00:20:08 ◼ ► And, in fact, to go back to the initial point of this, you should have anticipated this and built controls around it so that the apps could protect themselves,
00:20:21 ◼ ► so that the apps could be put in different buckets with different processing, but what happened?
00:20:33 ◼ ► They could have taken more time, but they felt like they couldn't, so they just shipped the bad thing.
00:20:38 ◼ ► I feel like we need to be less understanding of Apple lowering all of its standards and shipping the bad thing that's broken.
00:20:46 ◼ ► So, for this year, for those of you listening who didn't love how negative we were about some of Apple's AI moves,
00:20:54 ◼ ► I would just say brace yourself, because if they ship stuff that's substandard, they gotta get called out on it.
00:21:06 ◼ ► That lowering their standards to the point where they're shipping things that lie about BBC headlines is not acceptable.
00:21:13 ◼ ► Don't ship it. You can't get away with that. Because right now, I feel like we've let them get away with it.
00:21:23 ◼ ► Shipping to customers who are gonna use it, and it's telling them things that aren't true.
00:21:28 ◼ ► We've got enough of that in this world. We don't need any more. We don't need our iPhones lying to us.
00:21:33 ◼ ► Because you know that there are many people, maybe going all the way up to the top, that knew stuff like this was gonna happen, right?
00:21:39 ◼ ► But they decided to ship it. I want to say these things, because I want people to know that we understand the full context.
00:21:47 ◼ ► But that doesn't mean it's good enough. I know that they thought about this, and if they would've had more time,
00:21:56 ◼ ► maybe they could've implemented it differently. But they didn't. But that is also their own fault, right?
00:22:02 ◼ ► This is it. They could've delayed this and put more controls in it for apps. They could've shipped it for their apps only.
00:22:15 ◼ ► It could lead to the "Hike almost killed me" being "they committed suicide" or whatever.
00:22:22 ◼ ► It would still lead to some of that, but it would be a little more controlled and constrained and they could learn from it.
00:22:27 ◼ ► They didn't do any of that. There were no limitations here. They just said, "Yep, summarizing everything on the system, here we go."
00:22:35 ◼ ► And it's led to these issues. And again, I'm not saying Apple needs to respond to this because of the bad press.
00:22:43 ◼ ► Apple does need to respond to it because of the bad press. They do need to do that. They're gonna need to do damage control.
00:22:48 ◼ ► And I think their silence on these issues is really troubling because they're just whistling past the graveyard here.
00:22:54 ◼ ► Apple needs to do this because of the respect of their users. They need to care about the product they ship.
00:23:04 ◼ ► And that's one of their brand promises. But you understand we have to ship you junk that doesn't work right, that you can't trust,
00:23:12 ◼ ► because everybody is doing it in the tech industry. It's not good enough. It's just not good enough.
00:23:20 ◼ ► You need to have some set of standards. I understand the pressure that Apple is on, although I would argue that some of that is groupthink,
00:23:26 ◼ ► and that they're not under as much pressure as they are. But it would be supremely ironic if Apple destroyed its brand
00:23:34 ◼ ► in an attempt to rush out new technology so that its brand isn't destroyed. That's all I'm saying.
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00:25:54 ◼ ► So to get about this year, considering that it is a new year, I wanted to kind of look at Apple in 25.
00:26:11 ◼ ► They're going to have to make better what they've done that realistically have more features this year.
00:26:18 ◼ ► I mean, to be fair, we haven't even seen all the features, have we? I've just realized this.
00:26:22 ◼ ► We have not got Siri with personal context. We have not got apps being able to work with each other.
00:26:30 ◼ ► That's still to come. I wrote a piece for Macworld called 2025 will be the year of Apple intelligence again.
00:26:37 ◼ ► Because the truth is, and yes, I know everything we just talked about, that's why we're talking about it.
00:26:42 ◼ ► The first half of the year, they have to make good on their promises from June of last year.
00:27:07 ◼ ► But it feels like that's what's going to happen because they still haven't shipped all the promise from June.
00:27:21 ◼ ► I imagine that 2025 is all Apple intelligence, not just until they ship those features,
00:27:39 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, the next point I wanted to ask you about was software improvements other than AI.
00:27:53 ◼ ► because they have actual new areas that they have things they can do to the operating system.
00:28:05 ◼ ► These are like legitimate new areas that they can do new, that doesn't enable them to do new stuff.
00:28:13 ◼ ► That's got to be encouraging for some of the people inside of Apple that maybe in a year or two's time,
00:28:20 ◼ ► we might see some like, okay, considering this type of technology that we now have available to us,
00:28:29 ◼ ► And we had already seen an example of this, which was transformer-based predictive text.
00:28:39 ◼ ► Well, this is the irony here is that Apple has been doing machine learning based stuff for a while now.
00:28:52 ◼ ► But I get the feeling that there was some stuff that people were like, we could really do this.
00:28:57 ◼ ► And then when the AI thing happened, everything that was machine learning based at all,
00:29:02 ◼ ► that was plausibly part of this, it seems like got the green light, the good ones and the bad ones.
00:29:16 ◼ ► I'm saying that it got rushed in ways that have led to bad outcomes and that it needs to be fixed.
00:29:22 ◼ ► And I would say that that is true for a bunch of the AI stuff as well, that there are like, look,
00:29:37 ◼ ► when they ship, they're going to be disappointing because they're going to be super limited.
00:29:40 ◼ ► But I think those are the features with the most potential to completely transform how we use our devices,
00:29:46 ◼ ► because you've got a large language model that understands your context in a way that no other model should,
00:30:00 ◼ ► It really should be a device that you hold, that you trust, that has your personal information in it,
00:30:15 ◼ ► you've really got something very interesting in terms of using our devices by having an assistive model
00:30:24 ◼ ► that knows who we are and knows our apps and knows what they can do and will just do what we ask it.
00:30:33 ◼ ► But you're right, that unlocks direction for Apple's devices that they otherwise weren't really going
00:30:42 ◼ ► And also, there may have been things that I think before now, Apple's machine learning efforts were all,
00:30:55 ◼ ► So there may be new things that they're able to do, which could be legitimately very interesting.
00:31:00 ◼ ► And now because they're building things outside of your device, this might become more possible again.
00:31:06 ◼ ► Are you intrigued, excited or optimistic about software improvements outside of AI this year?
00:31:29 ◼ ► I think the big thing in Vision OS 3 will probably be that they'll add Apple Intelligence.
00:31:34 ◼ ► I think the big thing in tvOS will probably be that there'll be some connection to Apple Intelligence.
00:31:39 ◼ ► I think if they've got any home products this year, I think that Apple Intelligence will be a selling point.
00:32:11 ◼ ► I'm skeptical about what we will get other than Apple Intelligence features going forward.
00:32:29 ◼ ► And so if Apple just give me that, I'll get most of what I want and that would be good for me.
00:32:38 ◼ ► And I think that they could do much more with that sort of thing too than they're doing.
00:33:17 ◼ ► If I had to guess, when you're like, will they release a version of that hardware that's cheaper
00:33:23 ◼ ► and that has some of the features removed, or will they do a new version of it that is using kind of modern,
00:33:31 ◼ ► more modern processors and stuff like that and just giving it kind of a refresh to keep kicking it along as a developer unit?
00:33:40 ◼ ► That's my gut feeling is if, and certainly if I were working at Apple on what the next Vision product was,
00:34:01 ◼ ► But I do think that they made a lot of decisions that are bad in that product that increased its price for not very much value.
00:34:09 ◼ ► Some of the other kind of design decisions they made in terms of materials they could probably undo.
00:34:13 ◼ ► And probably some of that tech has just improved where you could do a refresh of parts of it
00:34:21 ◼ ► So that's my guess is that we will end up getting a Vision Pro 2 or maybe they'll call it a Vision, but I don't think they will.
00:34:29 ◼ ► I think they'll call it a Vision Pro 2. I don't think it's going to be this year though.
00:34:32 ◼ ► My guess is next year. I do think there'll be a Vision OS 3 and I do think they're going to add Apple intelligence to it.
00:34:52 ◼ ► It's not going to make more people buy them and you're only going to upset everybody that did.
00:35:12 ◼ ► It might even be sooner. I mean, Mark Germa's report was that they were going to announce it.
00:35:15 ◼ ► So that means it may be a Vision OS 2 point something update that adds support for that.
00:35:27 ◼ ► I know, again, we think just like Apple, we tend to think of every Apple thing in the lens of what Apple does.
00:35:33 ◼ ► And that's pedal to the metal. What's the next one? Ship another one. Let's get it out there.
00:35:49 ◼ ► Behind the scenes, they need to be working hard to get it miniaturized, to get it in glasses,
00:35:54 ◼ ► to address it from a couple of different directions, to push the OS forward to where they're going,
00:36:06 ◼ ► That in the interim, when they update this, really, they should make a more affordable developer kit
00:36:19 ◼ ► Like, they are exploring this area. So, does there need to be new hardware that isn't based on M2? Yes.
00:36:33 ◼ ► And that you could use some of the lessons you've learned from this first year with it on sale
00:36:38 ◼ ► to make some decisions about what to keep and what to drop so you know where the platform is going in the future.
00:36:45 ◼ ► But, again, I really do think you've got time. Not in the sense that you don't need to work on it again,
00:36:51 ◼ ► because meta certainly is. But I'm saying, I don't think, and I think this is what you were saying,
00:36:56 ◼ ► I don't think any rush to push out Vision Pro hardware in calendar 2025 will do anything for the future
00:37:05 ◼ ► of the platform because it's just not going to advance the ball enough. It's still going to be a dev kit,
00:37:11 ◼ ► because we're just not there yet. And it's going to be interesting to see how they approach
00:37:18 ◼ ► Vision over the next year. I'm just intrigued. How much marketing does it get? What more or not do they do?
00:37:28 ◼ ► Yeah, I think it's all going to be strategic, right? I think the Sony thing is actually strategy.
00:37:32 ◼ ► So Julia Alexander, my old pal on Downstream, did a post today on her blog. She's working for Disney,
00:37:43 ◼ ► but she's still got comments that are not related to what she's working on for Disney that she can write about.
00:37:52 ◼ ► And she wrote about Vision OS today. And it's Julia. It's smart. It's a lot of things we've talked about,
00:37:57 ◼ ► but it's very smart. But Apple's issues with the Vision Pro right now, I mean, they do need to be continuing
00:38:04 ◼ ► to advance the hardware forward. There does need to be new hardware at some point, but really, they've got to be
00:38:07 ◼ ► thinking about the big picture. They've got a lot of opportunity in the next year or two to fix all the other things
00:38:14 ◼ ► that are broken, right? So it's, why is there not more immersive hardware? Well, they've got a hardware partner
00:38:19 ◼ ► who's going to ship a camera. That's good. That's a good start. Why is there not more immersive content?
00:38:24 ◼ ► Are there deals they could do to up this thing as an entertainment device? They need to be working on that.
00:38:30 ◼ ► And on the developer side, again, what can they do? Is games a direction? How do they get the hot developers
00:38:38 ◼ ► interested in the product? Again, when I talk about Apple, I mean, basically, I feel like what I'm saying is,
00:38:43 ◼ ► for a company that is so aggressive internally on developing products, I think policy-wise and corporate-culture-wise,
00:38:53 ◼ ► the problem is that Apple is just completely calcified, that Apple does it Apple's way. And this has come up
00:38:59 ◼ ► in our criticisms of how they've handled being regulated. That there's like, no, we do it by the book, and it's our book,
00:39:04 ◼ ► and we're going to do it this way. But with Vision Pro, I'll say it about their developer story. They approached
00:39:11 ◼ ► the Vision Pro like they were God's gift to developers, because here's another Apple platform you can develop for.
00:39:17 ◼ ► When all developers look at it and think, wait a second, you're not going to sell any of these for years, and it's
00:39:23 ◼ ► going to cost me how much to develop software for it that nobody will use, that dozens of people or maybe hundreds
00:39:30 ◼ ► of people will buy? Why would I do that? And it makes sense when it's iPhone or iPad or Mac, because they've got
00:39:38 ◼ ► big user bases there. But Vision Pro, you've got to put in the work. You've got to act like an upstart. You've got to
00:39:44 ◼ ► shake hands. You've got to influence people. You've got to make them make it worth their while. You've got to make
00:39:49 ◼ ► them want to be on your platform, believe they need to be on your platform, or pay them or give them a special deal
00:39:55 ◼ ► or whatever to be on your platform. That stuff Apple can do now is change how they approach vision as a platform
00:40:03 ◼ ► so that it's going to have room to grow and find what it needs to be from not just a hardware side, but a
00:40:11 ◼ ► development side. And that's the problem right now, is they're so calcified in their attitude that they figure
00:40:18 ◼ ► out how to do what they did on iPhone and iPad, which is just toss it out there and say, "This is so hot. Everybody's
00:40:23 ◼ ► going to just do it. We don't need to do anything." And VisionOS isn't like that. So what are they going to do?
00:40:29 ◼ ► Are they just going to sit there, or are they going to change their strategy? If I were at Apple, that's what I would
00:40:37 ◼ ► be talking about this year for Vision, is how do we get this thing to be picked up by people who are going to pull
00:40:44 ◼ ► the platform forward? Not to sell millions of them even, but to pull the platform forward. And they haven't done
00:40:54 ◼ ► No. Speaking of hardware, are you intrigued, hopeful, expecting other new hardware this year outside of what we
00:41:08 ◼ ► Well, we already said here last week that if -- sorry, this is the beginning of the year, I guess I'm doing a lot of
00:41:17 ◼ ► if I were at Apple right now, but I would love it if Apple challenged its internal team to get something like
00:41:23 ◼ ► AirPods glasses out this year. Like, crash program, get it out. Because the other problem I have with a lot of Apple
00:41:30 ◼ ► stuff is they make these decisions and they're like, "Well, that'll take two years." Like, "Okay, come on. Strike
00:41:37 ◼ ► by the iron, it's hot. Get something out there. You've got the tech for this. Put it together. Don't let perfect be
00:41:42 ◼ ► the enemy of good. Get something out there." And I know what I said about AI, but what I'm saying here is that sometimes
00:41:50 ◼ ► for hardware, sometimes Apple places the bar too high. And that there's a perfectly good product out there, and they're
00:41:56 ◼ ► like, "Yeah, but we could do custom chips and all that." Or you could just take your AirPods and put them in glasses,
00:42:00 ◼ ► and that would probably be pretty good. So that would be a challenge. I think this is the year of home stuff, in large
00:42:09 ◼ ► part because I think that so much else of what Apple is doing is pretty static. I look at the Mac and the iPhone and
00:42:18 ◼ ► the iPad, and other than that thin iPhone, I think the updates are going to be super boring. I think they're going to be
00:42:25 ◼ ► super boring because I think that they've made a bunch of exciting updates recently, but what's left right now, unless
00:42:31 ◼ ► they do something completely wild with the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro, I don't think they're going to. I think it's going
00:42:36 ◼ ► to be a fairly dull year on the hardware front, other than we've got Mark Gurman's report that they're going to do a home
00:42:43 ◼ ► screen thing. There's some thought that there's probably going to be an Apple TV update that might, again, be Apple
00:42:51 ◼ ► Intelligence-related. There might be a HomePod update that, again, might be Apple Intelligence compatibility-related.
00:42:59 ◼ ► I see that as an area that's new. I'm not saying boring is bad. I feel like Apple's gotten a lot of their product lines
00:43:10 ◼ ► in good places. They've redesigned every Mac. They've redesigned all the iPads. They're in a good place, but if you're
00:43:21 ◼ ► looking for the new, I feel like the home is the most likely place you're going to get it.
00:43:27 ◼ ► Apple clearly wants new areas, right? That's their whole thing. They want to make more hardware to make more money. This is a place to do it, and to do it potentially at a volume.
00:43:41 ◼ ► Wearables is kind of in the doldrums right now. Wearables Home and Accessories is in the doldrums. Home is part of that. Wearables is part of that.
00:43:47 ◼ ► Accessories is part of that. It is a place where you could probably push, and they have not bothered to push. As we all know, in the last five or ten years,
00:43:56 ◼ ► the home has not been a place that Apple has put a lot of focus. Smart home technology, when it works and when people like it, they will buy multiple of the same thing for their house.
00:44:06 ◼ ► You'll buy four cameras and three speakers. You have the opportunity to sell through quite a lot of units to the same customer.
00:44:16 ◼ ► So if they can make good, compelling products in these areas, this could be a new business the size of AirPods or the size of Apple Watch, which would be great for them.
00:44:30 ◼ ► And get more growth into Wearables Home and Accessories, which is I think what they want to do. And the truth is, the good news about the smart home category is that even after Apple not paying attention to it for a while, it's still not great.
00:44:44 ◼ ► There's still opportunity for Apple to come in. I mean, there are a bunch of announcements being made at CES this week.
00:44:50 ◼ ► As always. Some of them are made up, but some of them are real. And they'll advance the ball a little bit. Sounds like matter. There was a report today about how Apple and Google and Amazon are agreeing to use matter certification as certification for their standards,
00:45:06 ◼ ► which sounds boring, but it means that if you make a product and you get it certified by matter, you've picked up works with Apple, works with Google, works with Alexa. That's a nice step forward.
00:45:20 ◼ ► And tertiary. Matter is going so slow, but it is happening. And I think that it is these other players saying, "Yeah, we're putting it all in the middle of the table with matter."
00:45:34 ◼ ► And that's good, but there's still opportunity for Apple there. And you're right. You can invest in a lot of tech. Plus, it's an ecosystem thing for Apple. Apple is always about the ecosystem.
00:45:47 ◼ ► All the products don't have to be Apple. But if Apple's got a home controller that's on your wall or on your kitchen table, that's that screen thing. And it's integrated with your Apple TV.
00:45:55 ◼ ► So your cameras come up on there and you get alerts on there. And obviously it's on your Apple Watch and it's on your phone and it's everywhere that is in the Apple ecosystem.
00:46:04 ◼ ► So you say, "I don't want a Google home. I don't want an Amazon home. I want an Apple home."
00:46:10 ◼ ► Apple needs to do more work to get there, but Apple could get there and that's a place Apple would really like to be, is to have all of that stuff be another sticky stay in the Apple ecosystem kind of thing.
00:46:22 ◼ ► Yeah. You mentioned the iPhone, like iPhone 17. We're expecting the thin phone. Well, are you expecting the thin phone? That has been rumored.
00:46:36 ◼ ► Sure. iPhone Air. 17 Air. Do you think it will be significant to people or it's just going to be a nice addition?
00:46:43 ◼ ► I think it's going to be better than the Plus and the Mini, is what I would say. I think it's going to be better than the Plus and the Mini. I think it'll be a sub-thousand.
00:46:49 ◼ ► I think it really will be in that category because it's not going to have the pro features. It's going to have one camera, it sounds like, and it's going to be thin.
00:46:57 ◼ ► But it's going to look great. And we know already from just the colors on the iPhone 16 that there are some people who are like, "You know what? This is good enough. I'm going to..."
00:47:05 ◼ ► I mean, not Federico. He kind of backed out of that. But in general, I think that there are some people who are like, "This is enough. This is fine."
00:47:11 ◼ ► In fact, having the people who don't buy the thousand-dollar-plus phone have this awesome thing that feels cutting edge, I think it will attract some pro people.
00:47:20 ◼ ► It will also attract some people who would normally just buy a base model. They're like, "Oh, I like this. I don't need all those cameras." Even if they do.
00:47:27 ◼ ► I like it. It's simple. It looks really cool and different. And I think it will do better. I don't think it's going to blow the other models out of the water, but I think it's going to do better than the Plus or Mini.
00:47:38 ◼ ► My theory is still that this is just a test bed so that they can do folding down the road by making a product that's so thin that ultimately, in a year, there'll be a foldable phone. A year or two.
00:47:51 ◼ ► Yeah. Last thing I wanted to touch on with you, because I think this is still going to be a big theme. Political, economic, legal. What is Apple's 25 in these areas?
00:48:03 ◼ ► It's so hard to say, right? Apple's been pretty consistent up to now, but at the same time, we've seen with a give and take in Europe that Apple sometimes will try stuff and Europe goes, "Nope."
00:48:19 ◼ ► And Apple's like, "All right." In the end, they have to comply. And as much as some commentators say, "Well, what if they just leave Europe?" It's like, "They're not going to leave Europe. They're not going to leave Europe.
00:48:30 ◼ ► It's not going to happen. They want that money. They're not going to abandon a market. They'll do what they need to, and if they're really spiteful about it, they'll do what they need to in the most limited way possible and limit it to that region, and that's it."
00:48:41 ◼ ► But I think that there will be other parts of the world that will jump on the regulatory bandwagon following the EU's lead, and so that Apple's going to have to deal with that.
00:48:52 ◼ ► I think the real question is what happens in the U.S., because we've got a change in administrations.
00:49:01 ◼ ► I know everybody's talking about Tim Cook donating money to the inaugural fund and all of that, but let's not even look at that and sending congratulations to Trump.
00:49:11 ◼ ► Let's look at the four years Trump was president before. What did Apple do? The answer is Apple played ball politically.
00:49:20 ◼ ► But I would also say Apple didn't just do what the administration wanted. Apple kind of steered the administration in a lot of ways and did what it needed to.
00:49:31 ◼ ► Tim Cook sitting right next to Trump in the White House at that meeting of tech leaders. Tim Cook with Trump at that factory in Texas.
00:49:40 ◼ ► They did those things, but also behind the scenes, they were doing negotiations about not having the tariffs counted, which sounds like that's happened again, where it's like, "If you do this, Samsung wins, and they're not an American company, so don't do this."
00:49:54 ◼ ► It sounds like that's going to kind of win. So the question becomes, what prices does Apple have to pay, if any, in order to be championed by the government and not attacked by the government?
00:50:06 ◼ ► And more broadly, does the nationalist policy of the administration affect Apple's regulation of American companies in other places?
00:50:18 ◼ ► Because I don't know what happens if the U.S. rattles its saber with the European Union about the regulation of American companies in Europe and threatens some sort of retribution.
00:50:36 ◼ ► I think it's unlikely that it'll be like, "Stop regulating Apple in Europe and Google and in Facebook, or else," because I'm not quite sure what the "or else" would be.
00:50:48 ◼ ► However, it's very hard for me to not think there won't be a--well, I'm going to take out a bunch of no's there. I suspect there will be a chilling effect. Let me put it that way.
00:50:59 ◼ ► I can't believe there won't be a chilling effect, where the EU will be like, "Oh man, we're really getting battered by everybody in the U.S. administration about our regulations of American companies."
00:51:13 ◼ ► And we're going to still regulate them, but back behind closed doors, they're like, "Let's cool this off a little bit."
00:51:19 ◼ ► Right? Like, "Let's cool this off because we don't want to get in a shouting match with the President of the United States about this. This is not conducive to what we're doing."
00:51:28 ◼ ► Hard to believe that stuff like that won't happen. So I don't know. I mean, that's the real wild card, because that whole administration is a kind of a random policy generator.
00:51:38 ◼ ► So who knows? But I think that in the end, if we've seen anything, donations to the inaugural fund aside, we saw in the last Trump administration that Apple worked really hard, and Tim Cook worked really hard,
00:51:53 ◼ ► to make it, if not positive to Apple, at the very least neutral to Apple. And the same thing will happen again. Apple's advantage, and I think all the tech companies' advantage,
00:52:09 ◼ ► as much as conservatives have talked recently about, "Oh, the big tech companies and they're so bad," I think, especially with Elon Musk sitting at Trump's right hand at this point, whispering in his ear,
00:52:20 ◼ ► "For now." For now. For now. But right now, as they're composing the administration, here's my theory, which is Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, sure, throw them in there.
00:52:38 ◼ ► These are all what we would call great American companies. And I think fundamentally, nobody in Trump's orbit wants to be seen as harming great American companies.
00:52:56 ◼ ► And so I think at least for their position for these companies around the world, I think they're going to keep their hands off. I think they're going to be as light touch as you might expect.
00:53:07 ◼ ► I think there's going to be a lot of politics, and there's going to be a lot of threatening, and there's going to be a lot of behind the scenes things that happen.
00:53:13 ◼ ► But I think it's hard, and we already saw this, I think, with Apple, it's hard for an American administration of any party to say, "We're going to do a policy that kills an American company and makes it okay for a Korean company to succeed, or a Chinese company to succeed."
00:53:32 ◼ ► So I feel like that is one of the things that's going to make the big tech stuff not as big a deal as it might have been when they were all out of government talking about it.
00:53:45 ◼ ► And that's why those CEOs gave money to the inaugural fund, and that's why they sent congratulations, and that's why Tim Cook did what he did during the first administration, was this.
00:54:02 ◼ ► That's the way the game is played. And you don't have to like it, but that's what's going on, and I expect that will continue.
00:54:09 ◼ ► And as a result, I don't think the story is going to be that Apple faces crippling tariffs on stuff they mailed in China because of Trump trade policies.
00:54:19 ◼ ► I think that kind of stuff is going to get smoothed out, just like it did four years ago.
00:54:23 ◼ ► Yeah. Something I'll be interested to see is if Apple jumps on, encourages, or sponsors any AI legislation. Are they able to get their competitors to be pulled back?
00:54:42 ◼ ► Yeah. It's an interesting question, right? Because some of the legislation is supported by AI companies because they want to kind of erect a moat and make it harder for other companies to come in.
00:54:51 ◼ ► And if Apple can be like, "Yeah, we're on that side with those guys," constrain them a little bit, but let us be over there, and then we're going to catch up to them.
00:55:00 ◼ ► I don't know. If I had to predict, I would say that there'll be nothing about AI legislation because I don't think anybody can agree on it.
00:55:09 ◼ ► No. I think a lot of people saying, I think Casey Newton, a platformer, said this, something that he expects is during this next administration that the conservative social media is censoring us, will move to AI is censoring us.
00:55:26 ◼ ► And you'll ask it for an opinion about a certain group or about a certain politician, and it gives an answer they don't like, and then that's going to be a new thing. I think that could be an interesting thing to see just in general in technology.
00:55:40 ◼ ► What is the free speech of AI? That's going to be an interesting thing to look upon, but I don't really think it's something Apple's going to need to worry about.
00:55:50 ◼ ► I would say this. If I'm a tech giant that's not in the US, and I've got competition that's in the US, I'm going to be a little worried.
00:56:04 ◼ ► I'm going to be a little worried about that because I think you may get punished in the US market for not being American, essentially. I think you'll also, you may get punished, potentially, or threatened as a ploy, if that makes sense.
00:56:24 ◼ ► I'll put it this way. If the Trump administration is really unhappy with the European community and the European Commission and their regulation of American companies, what do you think is going to happen?
00:56:40 ◼ ► One of the things that's going to happen is that Spotify is going to get threatened, and what Epic is going to get threatened. I'm not saying that that makes any sense legally or something, but if Apple goes to the Trump administration like they're killing us in Europe,
00:56:57 ◼ ► one of the things they could do is say, "We've decided that all Spotify subscriptions come with a $10 a month tariff." They don't even have to actually do it, and it doesn't have to be legal, and it doesn't have to make sense, but that's the saber rattling that maybe makes people in Europe go, "Mmm, quiet down, calm down. Now is not the time.
00:57:24 ◼ ► X nay on the eggulation ray." We'll see. We'll see how it goes, but something to watch for, because I think there'll be a lot of incidents like that. It's like saying, "I want to buy Greenland." Is that something that's practical, plausible, or makes any sense at all?
00:57:41 ◼ ► No, but it happened, and everybody's like, "Yeah, and President of the United States, so we've got to at least take it seriously enough, even though it's ridiculous because you have to." There's going to be a lot of that for the next four years.
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01:00:09 ◼ ► So this week marks 25 years since the introduction of Mac OS X that brought with it Aqua and the Doc.
01:00:20 ◼ ► Yeah, I wrote a piece about this at their request for Macworld, which is funny because I wrote a piece about this for Macworld 25 years ago too. So why not? Why not?
01:00:34 ◼ ► Not the same piece, but it was funny. There was a period where they were on their old CMS before they switched to WordPress where I would want to refer to old OS X things that were not on the web anymore.
01:00:46 ◼ ► And so I would literally just take the article from Macworld, the text and post it on Macworld backdated, which it's their copyright, right?
01:00:55 ◼ ► I don't have the right to post it on the internet, but I have access to their CMS still. So I would just post old articles.
01:01:00 ◼ ► So that article is still online, even though it's 25 years old. I did that for a bunch of my early OS X articles because I wanted them to be available.
01:01:09 ◼ ► And it's like when John Syracuse had access to the Ars Technica CMS, which he doesn't anymore. It's a little like that.
01:01:16 ◼ ► Like I could just post old articles and actually my editor, he would be happy to post old articles as well if I asked him. They have a copyright. It's great.
01:01:25 ◼ ► So there are lots of anniversaries for OS X. We should start there. There's Steve Jobs brought on stage to announce that they bought Next.
01:01:35 ◼ ► There's the announcement that they're doing a thing called Mac OS X. There's the Mac OS X server that shipped.
01:01:41 ◼ ► There are various developer releases. And then there's the final 1.0 release, which is actually not, the 25th anniversary of that is not until next year in the summer.
01:01:52 ◼ ► Because although they said they were going to ship this summer 25 years ago, they didn't. They shipped a public beta, but not the final.
01:02:00 ◼ ► So it's complicated. I would say if there is one, and there isn't, but if there is one moment, that is this is when it really kicked off in terms of OS X being announced as more or less it would ship.
01:02:20 ◼ ► It's this one. Because this is the event at Macworld Expo. That's why it's in January. It's a January thing because Macworld Expo was always first week in January.
01:02:30 ◼ ► This is the one where they unveiled the interface. And the funny thing about it, Mike, because I watched it back. I linked to the, in the piece, I linked to the video.
01:02:43 ◼ ► We can put a link in the show notes to the YouTube video about this. And you can watch it.
01:02:49 ◼ ► The amazing thing about it is that Steve Jobs is unveiling Aqua. And it's the thing where it's like, we said that you should be able to, you should want to lick it.
01:02:57 ◼ ► All those things are in there, right? He shows off interface elements. And viewed from today, it's so bizarre because he'll be like, look at this thing.
01:03:11 ◼ ► And everybody loses their minds. And I know it's the Macworld Expo audience, which means it's the only Apple events that ever happened where the general public could be there.
01:03:22 ◼ ► And today's Apple events are completely controlled by Apple. And even some of the last of the Macworld Expo events were like that.
01:03:28 ◼ ► But there was a time where you could buy a pass from Macworld Expo and wait in line and see a Steve Jobs keynote. So part of it is that.
01:03:36 ◼ ► - I mean, this is similar to me for like the one that I always think back to is the iPhone, right? Which is like similarly in some way of like when, you know, there are many anniversaries for the iPhone.
01:03:45 ◼ ► It just depends which one you want to celebrate. But like, you know, the rubber band scrolling, people lost their minds. So like that's my touch point to that idea.
01:03:55 ◼ ► - The reason I'm making this point is because I think so much of what got announced in this event is still relevant.
01:04:02 ◼ ► And that 25 years later, like literally they're like, "Oh, this is going to give us, this is going to be the next, here's what he said.
01:04:09 ◼ ► This is our foundation for the next decade of Macintosh operating systems." Let's take that apart.
01:04:14 ◼ ► Okay, first off, not just Macintosh operating systems, literally like five other operating systems. This will be the foundation for it.
01:04:20 ◼ ► And decade, decade, dude, it's been quarter of a century and we're still living in the OS X era, essentially.
01:04:33 ◼ ► - Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. They only changed it to Mac OS recently. Honestly, from before Mac OS X, it was just Mac OS.
01:04:41 ◼ ► So it's sort of going back to that except with weird punctuation. So this is the part that really gets me is that he shows,
01:04:48 ◼ ► it just struck me how much of this we just take for granted now. Like he shows the finder and people lose their minds.
01:04:53 ◼ ► He shows the fact that you can take a window and move it around on screen and the content stays in the window or you resize it
01:04:59 ◼ ► and the content stays in the window. On classic Mac OS, when you moved a window, it just showed you the outline of the window
01:05:05 ◼ ► as dotted lines until you moved it to where you want it and then you let go and it redrew it. People don't even remember that now.
01:05:11 ◼ ► When you resize, the same thing happened. It did not keep the content in the window. Like people lost their minds.
01:05:18 ◼ ► He was like, "Oh look, up in the upper left-hand corner, there's red, yellow and green dots. We think that's kind of like
01:05:24 ◼ ► a stoplight." And it does these three things and people lost their minds. And he says, "And look, if you move your mouse over
01:05:29 ◼ ► them, you can see a little X and a minus and a plus or whatever because it's maximize, minimize and close."
01:05:37 ◼ ► And people lost their minds. Like all of these things, it's like, "Oh, let's look at the finder and you can double-click and it moves
01:05:42 ◼ ► and there's a back button and it's got icons and there's a dock and you can drag things into it and you can see things
01:05:47 ◼ ► and you click on them." We built an app called "Bomb" that tries to do everything to crash the system.
01:05:56 ◼ ► And now we're going to play a QuickTime video. By the way, Mission Impossible 2 trailer. How old is Tom Cruise now?
01:06:01 ◼ ► Anyway, they run the Bomb app and the movie still plays. And everybody loses their minds. Because again, on the classic Mac,
01:06:09 ◼ ► one app would break the entire system and you'd have to restart. And in Mac OS X, you didn't have to do that.
01:06:13 ◼ ► So it's a great Steve Jobs production. It's literally just Steve Jobs sitting at a computer clicking on stuff.
01:06:21 ◼ ► And people are, every 30 seconds, losing their minds about this stuff. But this is the thing I can say, as somebody who comes to you
01:06:29 ◼ ► from the past, from 25 years ago, all of that stuff was legitimately mind-blowing if you were a Mac user.
01:06:35 ◼ ► Because the classic Mac OS, even though it was only 16 years old at that point, was really dated from another era.
01:06:42 ◼ ► It really dated from the early 80s, late 70s personal computer era. It was missing so many things that they couldn't add to it.
01:06:49 ◼ ► They tried it with Copeland. They tried it with Pink, Intelligent. They tried to find ways to get a new OS for the Mac,
01:07:00 ◼ ► or make the old Mac OS work better. And they just couldn't. They couldn't. That's why they bought Next.
01:07:07 ◼ ► And then here it was. This was the moment where it's like, yep, all those things crash-proof, essentially,
01:07:13 ◼ ► where other apps won't bring your apps down, dragging things around on screen. PDFs are in the native format.
01:07:23 ◼ ► And what struck me is that that keynote was so successful because all of that stuff is super boring now.
01:07:31 ◼ ► It's just using the Mac now. It's how computers work now. And we talk a lot about 1984 and the original Mac and all the great things about it,
01:07:42 ◼ ► but this is the moment where the next quarter of a century of the Mac is just laid out there with Steve Jobs and his mouse.
01:07:56 ◼ ► It's just laid out there. It's wild. And yeah, the Aqua interface isn't there anymore, and it doesn't always look like you could lick it,
01:08:03 ◼ ► but all the details are still there. The Finder still behaves that way. I would argue that the three stoplight buttons in the upper left-hand corner of a window
01:08:12 ◼ ► is as iconic to the Mac as the menu bar is, and the Apple menu. By the way, there was no Apple menu back then.
01:08:18 ◼ ► There was just an Apple logo that didn't do anything that sat in the middle of your menu bar like an extraneous third nipple or something like that.
01:08:25 ◼ ► And by the time it shipped, they put the Apple menu back. They redefined what it was, but they put it back. So it's just astonishing.
01:08:34 ◼ ► So this for me is the moment. This is the moment because we got to see what Apple's vision was. And if you think about it, and I'm fascinated by this.
01:08:41 ◼ ► I would love to do some more reading and research about this at some point. I'm fascinated by those three years between when Jobs was brought up on stage
01:08:50 ◼ ► and by the time this was shown. And really, you could throw in the fourth year when they shipped it the next year. Because one of the things that had to happen in the background is
01:08:58 ◼ ► all those next engineers came over. They knew the OS top to bottom. That's Avi Tavanian and his gang. They knew Next top to bottom.
01:09:06 ◼ ► But Next was not meant for regular people. And now they were going to be meeting a user base vastly larger than the Next user base.
01:09:16 ◼ ► And they had expectations, which was the Mac. And Next, if any, have you ever looked at a Next computer? It's bananas. It's sort of Mac-like, Mac OS X-like.
01:09:26 ◼ ► But like, it's not. It's like, it's very weird and alien in a lot of ways. And this was their challenge, is, and I mentioned this in the Mac work column a little bit.
01:09:36 ◼ ► Think about it. They have to go through what's on Mac OS, what's on Next, what they need to do to ship a new version of Mac OS. And they know they've got deadlines.
01:09:49 ◼ ► There's only so many programmers they've got. Not even to mention the politics of people inside Apple and people from Next arguing about like, we should do it this way, we should do it that way.
01:09:58 ◼ ► With presumably Steve Jobs as the ultimate arbiter since he was the father of the Mac and Next. So maybe he's the right decision maker there who's kind of above it all.
01:10:07 ◼ ► But they had to decide, all right, how are we going to do this? Are we going to build a new feature that's like the Mac? Are we going to build a new feature that's not like the Mac or Next?
01:10:18 ◼ ► Are we going to take a feature that is from Next and reuse that code, but maybe make it a little more Mac-like? And they had to do that for everything in the system, the whole operating system. They had to do that.
01:10:32 ◼ ► And I think that's fascinating because they had to make some judgments, James Thompson in our Discord saying the Next people versus Mac people was interesting. I am sure it was.
01:10:41 ◼ ► Again, but in the end, this whole team has to come together and ship something called Mac OS 10. And I'll up the stakes a little bit because you could think, well, yeah, but it's really easy for the Next people to say, look, we can't rewrite a whole operating system.
01:10:57 ◼ ► We're here because you bought our operating system. We have to use it. That's absolutely 100% true. But it's 1997, 98, 99, 2000.
01:11:08 ◼ ► Microsoft reigns supreme. Apple has with its hardware been able to turn it around a little bit and stem the losses to Windows 95 and successors. But here's the thing.
01:11:21 ◼ ► In this era, if what Apple does is release a new operating system that doesn't connect to the Mac, that means Mac users have a decision to make, which is do I go to an entirely new operating system I'm unfamiliar with that has questionable prospects because it's just from Apple?
01:11:47 ◼ ► Or at that point, do I just go to Windows? Because if there's not enough continuity with the Mac, you might as well just go to Windows because you're going to have to get a new computer anyway. Why don't I just choose the computer that everybody else uses and save some money and it'll be fine?
01:12:01 ◼ ► And literally, that was the way it was in the late '90s. So pushing against the next preference, I think, to keep as much of it next step as possible, is the Mac people are coming in and not saying, "Oh, we're so great. Our OS was so great," because everybody knew that the old Mac OS had to go.
01:12:20 ◼ ► But it's like, "But you must be fundamentally a Mac." And what they had behind them was Apple's user base. And it wasn't a user base that was irrelevant because we're going to tell them what they want and they're going to take it. It was a user base that was ready to walk.
01:12:35 ◼ ► So you better impress them and make them feel like there was a nice glide path from classic Mac OS to modern Mac OS. And they had to decide features and interface for everything in the entire operating system over that time to get to the point where they could do this presentation
01:12:52 ◼ ► and then tweak it for a year afterward and say, "We got some new stuff in here. The doc is sort of like Next but not really. It's new." And as James will point out, they threw it out a couple of times and rewrote it and his code only ever shipped once and then they brought somebody else in who rewrote it.
01:13:09 ◼ ► But they had some new stuff. They had some Mac-familiar stuff. They had some Next.familiar stuff. My favorite is the Finder, which John Siracusa hates because they changed it into kind of a file browser instead of what it was, which was a little more like every window was its own space.
01:13:25 ◼ ► But the one that makes me laugh every time is we know about Steve Jobs' preferences. So he's like, "Hey, Finder, look, Icon View. Everybody loves Icon View. We've had that since 1984. List View. Everybody loves List View. We've had that since 1984. And now we've got this really awesome multi-column view where you can see your whole hard drive."
01:13:43 ◼ ► Well, I mean, that was Steve Jobs' favorite view. He probably is one of the reasons it was in Next. I hate it. But again, people can differ. I hate it. I hate that view. I hate the column view. It's terrible.
01:13:56 ◼ ► I hate it. I hate it so much. I hate it so much. But again, I'm from the past. I like the List View. I'm a big List View guy. But anyway, Steve Jobs is like, "Oh, man, this is so great," because of course it is. It came from Next. It's probably there to please Steve. And of course, he likes it. He demos Mail. This is also the 25th anniversary of Mail.app being shown.
01:14:25 ◼ ► But you know who loved Mail? Is Steve Jobs. He loved the Next Step Mail client. And so obviously one of the things was, "You're going to put that Mail client on Mac, right? Because I'm going to use it. So you're going to put it there. It's not a question. You're going to put it there." And they're like, "Yep, yep." And so he's like, "Oh, look at this Mail app. It's great." It's like, "Yeah, it's the Next Step Mail app brought to the Mac." But anyway, so they had to make all those decisions. It's a fascinating time because if you think about all the different constraints that they had, and
01:14:51 ◼ ► I'll just say, I know that it was shaky. Version one was really slow. It was really until 10.1 where it was even sort of usable. It was a many-year transitional process. But I would say you can't argue with the results because all that stuff, you look at it now and you think, "Well, that's just computers." And it's 25 years later. That means it worked, right? It worked. That's the amazing thing about that event.
01:15:19 ◼ ► So 25 years on, I just think it's so impressive that they have used the Darwin stuff that they talked about at that keynote, the kernel and the open source stuff that's underneath it. So much of this is the foundation of not just macOS, but iOS, iPadOS, WatchOS, tvOS, VisionOS.
01:15:53 ◼ ► Yeah, I was thinking as you were talking, right, like, will we ever have something like this again? And the answer is probably no. But in a similar way, like, yes, we just had it, right? Like, VisionOS was something akin to that, right? Which is like, "Hey, we're going to show you this new operating system. You've never used anything like this before because you use it with your eyes." And it's funny because you're talking like, "Oh, man, I would love that." I just had that. I just had that like two years ago.
01:16:19 ◼ ► We'll see. It wouldn't surprise me if in 25 years, people look at the VisionOS announcement and say, "Oh, wow, yeah."
01:16:28 ◼ ► Not saying that VisionOS or not predicting anything like that. I'm talking about at an interface level being like, "Oh, yeah. Yeah, they do this thing and that thing and this thing. We all do that now."
01:16:41 ◼ ► Again, I think it's actually not as likely because even Steve Jobs, who was great at hyping things, was like, "Mm, 10 years. Next decade."
01:16:50 ◼ ► Maybe he was hoping for more, and it turns out that they overshot by a lot. But it is one of those moments where you see things that are new.
01:16:56 ◼ ► But when we get to 25 years of iOS, that will be the case, right? Like, it will be like, "Oh, yeah, look, we do that. Oh, yeah, yeah, I see where they were going.
01:17:07 ◼ ► I think the iPhone will have a lot of that, right? Because the iPhone was also a defining thing.
01:17:13 ◼ ► But the funny thing about Mac OS X is it didn't, you know, I don't think it gets that kind of credit.
01:17:19 ◼ ► But if you look at that thing from 25 years ago and look at the Mac now, you're like, "Oh, yeah." Like, it's all there.
01:17:24 ◼ ► And it's funny because the classic Mac OS gets so much credit because it started it all.
01:17:29 ◼ ► But like 16, not even 16, it was 16 years old when this happened, 13 years into its run, they had bought Next because they desperately needed to replace it after having failed to replace it many times.
01:17:43 ◼ ► Which means like 10 years after Mac OS had come out, they knew it was no good and they had to replace it technically.
01:17:50 ◼ ► Not saying it was bad on a user basis, but like it was built for another era and they needed to do something about it.
01:18:03 ◼ ► And it took them, you know, probably a good 10 years to get from the realization that it wasn't going to work to shipping a usable version that people just migrated to from the classic Mac OS.
01:18:15 ◼ ► It took a very long time. So it's an amazing accomplishment and this, I feel like, is a pretty good moment even though, you know, fashion changes and pulsating glassy aqua buttons don't exist anymore.
01:18:29 ◼ ► But if you look beneath the surface, like all the structure of this is still what we use today.
01:18:34 ◼ ► I would like to use this as an opportunity to air a grievance about the dock before we move on today. So Upgrade Plus listeners will know that I'm now using Mac Mini, so I've transitioned over to a Mac Mini on this desk.
01:18:47 ◼ ► And with that, I've done the thing that I've promised you and our video editor a chip for a long time, which is to rearrange my desk a bit.
01:18:59 ◼ ► And the problem was I'd have to have my camera on the left of that monitor, so the angle was considered to be less than preferable.
01:19:06 ◼ ► So I have now moved my monitor from the left to the right to bring my camera in a bit more.
01:19:12 ◼ ► So I think I'm now told I match a bit closer to your angle and this apparently looks better. Great.
01:19:18 ◼ ► The problem is I like to have my dock on the right, which now means my dock is all the way over there on the external display because you cannot choose where you want your dock to go, which display.
01:19:36 ◼ ► Madness to me. It doesn't make any sense. And I know what people are going to say in a minute and I can argue away that point.
01:19:49 ◼ ► No, the dock on the side is best. I like it on the right. But now it means that it's all the way over there and there's no way to get it to come into the middle of my display.
01:19:57 ◼ ► And then people, I know people will say, but how could you drag your cursor through the dock? That is madness.
01:20:07 ◼ ► Stage Manager, which I use, exists on multiple displays and I drag my cursor over the Stage Manager view to move between displays.
01:20:17 ◼ ► So like the idea of there being a app choosing element that you can move your cursor over and switch displays is a thing that Apple does.
01:20:27 ◼ ► Also, universal control means that I can put an iPad to my right and go right over the dock into the iPad.
01:20:32 ◼ ► Now look, using the boundary as a way to move your pointer to the dock, like when I've got a universal control on, I am frequently trying to go to the dock and I overshoot and I'm on the iPad.
01:20:46 ◼ ► I get it. But like, that doesn't mean you couldn't allow it or allow the dock to run, maybe a setting to just put the dock on all monitors.
01:20:56 ◼ ► That would actually be my preference. A dock on both monitors. I don't know why they can't do that.
01:21:01 ◼ ► So, I am using Switch Glass by a friend of the show, John Siracusa, to create like a fake dock.
01:21:07 ◼ ► It's doing a decent job, but there are just things that John can't do, right? I'm assuming, right?
01:21:12 ◼ ► Like, it's not as easy for me to have every possible app I could ever want in there for a bunch of reasons, or maybe I just haven't set it up right.
01:21:20 ◼ ► But there are things like notifications. You can't show me notification badges on here is my assumption.
01:21:24 ◼ ► So there are just like a lot of things. Now, Switch Glass is getting me most of the way that I need to be.
01:21:28 ◼ ► Because if I need to go from app to app, I now have that little list on the left side and I can just like click through them and that's great.
01:21:33 ◼ ► And I'm happy that Switch Glass exists. And I now see one of the reasons why it exists.
01:21:44 ◼ ► Like, I don't know why. Why do I have to have it all the way over there? I don't want it over there. I want it there.
01:21:56 ◼ ► If you were a veteran at Mac user and you watch that dock demo, you will find it curious.
01:22:02 ◼ ► Because it does things like it has files on the desktop and Steve drags them to the dock and they disappear from the desktop.
01:22:08 ◼ ► And you're like, where did it go? The answer is, apparently, there's a dock folder inside the user folder.
01:22:14 ◼ ► And it went in there. And then when you drag it out to the desktop, it comes back onto the desktop and disappears from the dock.
01:22:20 ◼ ► That is a behavior that they got rid of. Because what we have now, the dock is more like a weird other zone where things can be referenced.
01:22:31 ◼ ► But it's not the things themselves. But in that early demo, the dock was actually a place files could be.
01:22:38 ◼ ► And it also means you could put files into the dock folder and they would appear in the dock.
01:23:08 ◼ ► You've heard me talk on this show about how much of your personal data could be out there on the internet for people to see and how uncomfortable that can make you feel.
01:23:15 ◼ ► I mean, it's uncomfortable to me. I don't like the idea that my data could be out there.
01:23:26 ◼ ► She put all of this into me of like making sure that just the information that I want to be out there is out there and keeping what I don't want away.
01:23:36 ◼ ► And so I was very happy recently when DeleteMe were like, hey, would you like to gift DeleteMe to someone?
01:23:41 ◼ ► I was like, yes, my wife would love it. And she did. She set it all up just like I did.
01:23:46 ◼ ► Put in the information that she wanted to be removed and is now getting those regular privacy reports that say this is what we found based on the information that you gave.
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01:25:38 ◼ ► 2025 laser time. Jim says, "If everything I'm doing on my Mac, PC, and my iPhone is saved to my iCloud account, how critical is it to backup my computer to Time Machine?
01:26:09 ◼ ► It's like all your preferences, if you want to get back up and running and have all your preferences saved and all of that, that's the advantage of using Time Machine or Clone Drive.
01:26:25 ◼ ► So whether it's Time Machine or cloud-based backup, like Backblaze, or on like a USB drive that you could use.
01:26:40 ◼ ► But if you have a place you go sometimes that's like a desk that has a dock or something, you could attach a USB drive to it.
01:26:49 ◼ ► And in fact, I just set this up here at my desk, which is I used to have a USB drive permanently plugged into my Mac Studio, but I'm using a MacBook Pro now.
01:27:11 ◼ ► And what it does is the Carbon Copy Cloner, or no, I'm using Carbon Copy Cloner for this.
01:27:28 ◼ ► And it would be that, or you could just plug in a drive at that place and choose Time Machine and backup to that drive while you're there.
01:27:35 ◼ ► If you've got a Mac on your network, you could also just do it to a Mac on your network and use Network Time Machine.
01:27:44 ◼ ► And if none of those options work, you should get something like Backblaze to do an actual backup via the internet, because even if you don't have a usual spot, you have an internet.
01:27:54 ◼ ► Yeah. I think on a Mac specifically, it can be easy for things to be outside of what is being backed up to iCloud.
01:28:09 ◼ ► Yeah, your apps and your preferences, especially, like if you want to come back up and running, you might have all your cloud files.
01:28:47 ◼ ► Matthew asks, following up with your recent hypothetical discussion where you were like what jobs you would have to take to work at Apple, which was a conversation we got a lot of really good feedback about.
01:29:01 ◼ ► Matthew follows it up with, are there dream opportunities that you would take on alongside your current jobs because you would regret passing them up otherwise?
01:29:09 ◼ ► For example, Jason is offered a generous advance from a publisher he admires to publish a novel.
01:29:14 ◼ ► Mike gets an opportunity at a respected design studio to create and market a product of his choice.
01:29:28 ◼ ► And part of what we do is manage our various opportunities and decide what to do and what not to do.
01:29:36 ◼ ► Knowing that if you take something new on, you probably got to drop something because that's just, there's only so much time in the day.
01:29:46 ◼ ► So I can tell you from my years doing NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, when I was working at Macworld that I could have a full-time job and write a novel in a month.
01:29:59 ◼ ► It's like I made the time when I came home, I stopped like watching as much TV and reading as much and I would have dinner with my family and then I would go lock myself in a room and I would write for a few hours.
01:30:12 ◼ ► So I would say if there was a dream opportunity that came up and it was truly a dream opportunity, I would find a way to make it work.
01:30:22 ◼ ► But that said, I'll point you back to that previous conversation, it would need to be a dream opportunity that made some sense in terms of what I would have to stop doing, whether it was part of my professional or personal life.
01:30:45 ◼ ► Sure, I have been very slowly, I need to get back to doing it faster, rewriting a novel I wrote 10 years ago in the hopes that it actually gets in a place where people would want to read it.
01:31:03 ◼ ► So of course, there are lots of opportunities out there, but I would have to process them.
01:31:11 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, essentially we are masters of our own destiny, right? We are freelancers in a way, we have things that we do.
01:31:46 ◼ ► And if a project of some description came up, like for example, the rest is technology.
01:31:56 ◼ ► They came to us, Goldhanger came to us and said, Mike and Jason, you're perfect for the rest is technology.
01:32:13 ◼ ► And then also, I mean, and this is especially a thing for me now in my year of fatherhood,
01:32:18 ◼ ► like this is actually a thing of like, I can't take on anything new unless I'm willing to give up something that would have been of equal time commitment.
01:32:42 ◼ ► It's more that just like, I know my life is going to change forever, but this is going to be the biggest change, right?
01:33:03 ◼ ► And so, if that opportunity presented itself now, you'd probably be like, I can't do it because I'm having a baby in a couple of months, right?
01:33:15 ◼ ► So I don't know if we've dreamed enough for Matthew here, but certainly, I think if something that is not possibly going to happen, but something magical like that came along,
01:33:25 ◼ ► I think what I said about that Amazon thing that I went through 10 years ago, and there have been a few others like that,
01:33:32 ◼ ► mostly 10, 8, 9 years ago, is I'll talk about all of them, but in the end, I have to weigh them and decide whether it's worth it.
01:33:47 ◼ ► Try searching messages in settings to look for the messages app. There are hundreds of results.
01:34:02 ◼ ► So I searched the word messages because messages is now one of the apps that has been put into the apps part of system settings.
01:34:12 ◼ ► So I searched the word messages and I put a screenshot in our show notes just for me and you, but I'm going to read.
01:34:20 ◼ ► Announced notification in Apple intelligence. Blocked in mail. Blocked contacts in messages.
01:34:26 ◼ ► Blocked contacts in FaceTime. Blocked contacts in phone. Blocked sender options in mail and braille alert messages.
01:34:33 ◼ ► None of these are messages, right? Like, which is the actual word that I have searched to get to go to the messages app.
01:34:44 ◼ ► I support the idea of tidying up system settings, right? By like putting the app settings in like a separate thing.
01:34:52 ◼ ► But they've not, the search is too bad. Yeah. I'm a, well, look, I've ranted about this a lot.
01:35:05 ◼ ► I think putting apps in apps is a good thing, but the challenge is, first off, I think you should be able to navigate to what you're trying to find without searching.
01:35:16 ◼ ► And second, the search needs to work. And right now it does, I have had this exact same issue where I'm like, where is this thing?
01:35:25 ◼ ► And I'll search and be like, that's a lot of choices. That's a lot of choices. I don't know. It's not great.
01:35:32 ◼ ► It's not great. Something's going on. I don't know what's going on in settings land at Apple, but it doesn't seem right.
01:35:39 ◼ ► You can send us your feedback, follow up and questions, including your own Ask Upgrade questions by going to upgradefeedback.com.
01:35:48 ◼ ► I would like to thank our members who support us every week of Upgrade. Plus you can get longer ad-free versions of the show each and every week.
01:35:57 ◼ ► One of the things I want to discuss on today's show, Jason, is the fact that I'm shortening the intro, the outro, I should say.
01:36:02 ◼ ► This very outro is being shortened and I want to talk to you about why I've decided to do that.
01:36:09 ◼ ► Yep. Getupgradeplus.com is where you can go to sign up and become a member and support the show.
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