00:00:18 ◼ ► This episode is brought to you by our good friends at Vitally, Google Gemini, Turbulence
00:00:24 ◼ ► And as we re-enter, after our wonderful monument break that we took last week with Mike coming
00:00:37 ◼ ► And this week's guest star is the proprietor of Daring Fireball and a podcaster extraordinaire
00:00:57 ◼ ► We don't get a chance to talk a lot, and then we're on podcast together, and we talk for a
00:01:09 ◼ ► If there's ever a good reason for the usual Upgrade duo to take a break, you know, what could
00:01:23 ◼ ► He's sending me pictures of babies and stuff, instead of talking about what Tim Cook said
00:01:35 ◼ ► And this one I like because it was sort of random, and I could also turn it into a local
00:02:07 ◼ ► And in the truest Bay Area fashion, I'll just tell you that we usually don't go because it's
00:02:21 ◼ ► But where I grew up, we had a parade, the Motherlode Roundup Parade, and it was just as full of
00:02:36 ◼ ► My dad drove a horse and buggy in it a couple of years, because in a later life, my dad became
00:02:56 ◼ ► For people who think I'm just a computer guy who lives in the suburbs, I just want to say
00:03:01 ◼ ► John, though, I wanted to ask you about parades, because I was thinking about Philly, where you
00:03:10 ◼ ► And there's this reputation that Philadelphia goes completely insane after the Eagles or the
00:03:18 ◼ ► And I just wanted to know, how disruptive was it to you, if at all, when the Eagles won
00:03:27 ◼ ► So famously, or infamously for people who follow me, I'm actually a Dallas Cowboys fan, even
00:03:40 ◼ ► As you know, when your team gets knocked out of the sports playoffs, you kind of have to
00:03:51 ◼ ► And so in 2018, when the Eagles went to the Super Bowl against the Patriots, it was a no-brainer
00:04:02 ◼ ► And this year, once again, similar, you know, the new empires, Kansas City, it was a no-brainer
00:04:18 ◼ ► Amy, my wife's Amy's dad, was a lifelong Eagles fan, sort of from the middle of Pennsylvania,
00:04:32 ◼ ► And you have to go to those championship parades kind of early to get a spot where you can actually
00:05:10 ◼ ► which is not worth going to, if I can recommend to anybody who's ever in Philadelphia on New
00:05:17 ◼ ► Year's, is a bizarre parade that pictures and video highlights of which condense three hours
00:05:25 ◼ ► of interspersed nonsense, you know, like with floats that are blocks, city blocks away from
00:06:10 ◼ ► Yeah, I was thinking when you mentioned championship parades, again, Super Bowl parades are in
00:06:35 ◼ ► And when we drive past that spot, I'm like, I was there for eight hours right at that spot.
00:06:50 ◼ ► And it was, it was, as I recall, it was actually unseasonably warm for late October, early November
00:07:03 ◼ ► I didn't go to the other Giants parades in 12 and 14 because, I don't know, I mean, because
00:07:08 ◼ ► it was a lot and, um, it was kind of overwhelming, but I felt like I had to do it once and, uh,
00:07:16 ◼ ► I, I probably wouldn't go out of my way to like, literally if there was a parade happening
00:07:34 ◼ ► It's literally like the mayor in a convertible and then some guy in an old car and a fire truck.
00:07:46 ◼ ► It's literally like the high school band and the, the dancers from the local dance academy
00:07:53 ◼ ► Uh, it's very charming, but it's also, you know, you don't like, you don't go, Oh, I can't
00:08:03 ◼ ► Um, pivoting from parades, cause that was a very important parade segment here in Snell
00:08:10 ◼ ► Cause Mike is, uh, had a baby and John, you have, uh, you have a son who is, uh, almost
00:08:38 ◼ ► I don't know what you've covered with the previous fatherly advice things, but I was just talking
00:08:42 ◼ ► just by coincidence the other day or over the weekend with my wife that my favorite thing
00:08:52 ◼ ► It's like a, uh, not a backpack, but like a belly pack that you mount the baby on your chest
00:09:09 ◼ ► And so we gave a lot of baby stuff to our Amy's and my younger siblings for reuse, but the
00:09:28 ◼ ► It's so much better and more personable than pushing a kid in a stroller where we Jonas and
00:09:33 ◼ ► I for a long time, you know, we'd just walk around the city and he'd be talking and pointing
00:09:56 ◼ ► Um, and I, what, what I remember about it is that when they're starting, they're very little,
00:10:00 ◼ ► you have them and there's like a little hole for their feet to go through and they face
00:10:05 ◼ ► you because it's got like a flap and to hold their head up and they kind of are, but they're,
00:10:11 ◼ ► They're with their parent and you're moving around, which they like cause you're walking and they,
00:10:21 ◼ ► Like you got the same view looking out, but they're still in contact with you so that they
00:10:36 ◼ ► And when they were, you know, when he was younger and facing me, but when he turned around and
00:10:40 ◼ ► got the first person perspective, I also think if you just think about it from a very common
00:10:44 ◼ ► sense perspective, if you were, I don't know, 18 months old, 24 months old, you don't get
00:10:54 ◼ ► You know, it's a much better view of the world, you know, and, and very, you can't see anything.
00:11:11 ◼ ► But, um, but yeah, you getting that perspective and being attached to your parent like that
00:11:23 ◼ ► So there's, there's our latest chapter who knows what next week we'll bring, but I want
00:11:40 ◼ ► Uh, I, every now and then somebody tries to say complimentary that they fall asleep listening
00:12:10 ◼ ► And, and so I've gotten used to just sleeping in silence, but, uh, I couldn't get to sleep
00:12:37 ◼ ► Uh, and I sometimes wonder if we get feedback for our podcast where people are like, I can't
00:13:05 ◼ ► You can just talk about your day or have it explain something to you or start brainstorming
00:13:21 ◼ ► Then I started talking through my answers out loud and it would give me feedback and it's
00:13:50 ◼ ► And although we could also call this, I mean, it's not really DMA today, but it's kind of
00:14:02 ◼ ► And I wanted to mention this because I thought this was a very interesting story in terms
00:14:08 ◼ ► of it being, it's something that Mike and I talked about a lot and said would absolutely
00:14:14 ◼ ► And now we've got a good example of it happening, which is that there's a judge in Brazil who
00:14:28 ◼ ► And I think the interesting quote, and this is coming from a report that translated the
00:14:34 ◼ ► So I know it's secondhand, but apparently what the judge said is, Apple has already complied
00:14:41 ◼ ► with similar obligations in other countries without demonstrating significant impact or irreparable
00:14:52 ◼ ► One is the old, once they've built it for the EU, what's to stop anybody anywhere else in
00:15:04 ◼ ► And also that one of Apple's big arguments is we can't do this because it would be disastrous.
00:15:14 ◼ ► And I wonder if this is just going to happen for the next few years, is that there'll be
00:15:20 ◼ ► more and more territories that just sort of point at the DMA and say, yeah, I want that
00:15:30 ◼ ► You know, there's a principle and it's more of a design principle or maybe a computer science
00:15:55 ◼ ► Well, that's an app where the main mail window, you can go up to file and say new viewer window
00:16:04 ◼ ► You could most people, of course, just use one and probably don't know that you can open
00:16:57 ◼ ► And it's like if zero places around the world have third-party app stores, that's an easily understood.
00:17:05 ◼ ► And again, putting aside all the other reasons Apple's ever made, all the cynical reasons you could say where they want no third-party app stores, just because that means all the money goes through Apple's app store.
00:17:16 ◼ ► Just from a simplicity perspective, all third-party apps come from the Apple app store is a very easily understood concept.
00:17:40 ◼ ► And I think your argument espoused in a Macworld column back in November, which I was weeks, months late linking to, but was very compelling.
00:17:54 ◼ ► And I think you're of that mindset too, right, that there's many – we can't take all the multivariables out of this.
00:18:03 ◼ ► And anybody who wants to reduce it to one, greed or whatever else, or freedom, there's – all of the variables matter.
00:18:12 ◼ ► But if you really want to think about the simplicity, if Apple's going to have as simple a worldwide model as possible, it's not going to be one and only one app store, right?
00:18:32 ◼ ► And so do you really want, like, different set of rules in Brazil than the EU, which is different than the U.S., which is different than maybe Japan soon or something like that?
00:18:41 ◼ ► It's – you know, and I think, you know, on the flip side, I think Apple has set this up in a way – and it's the nature of mobile and the way people act where it's just not that big a deal, right?
00:19:07 ◼ ► But it's not like in the EU there's this thriving marketplace and zillions of iOS users are using the third-party market stores, right?
00:19:25 ◼ ► That's why it became so successful when you're buying software like you're buying music, you're buying singles, right, on iTunes, which is literally what the back end was for the app store.
00:19:35 ◼ ► And because it's so easy and there's so little friction, that also leads to the idea that even if you made other app stores legal, most people aren't going to use them.
00:19:49 ◼ ► And that's – I mean, that's part of my frustration with Apple in all of this is I get why if, you know – I think what I said to Mike was there's no competition like no competition, right?
00:20:01 ◼ ► It's like if you are – if you control everything, that's the best because, I mean, it's the best.
00:20:07 ◼ ► But I always have believed that if Apple opened itself up to competition but had the platform advantage, the home field advantage of being the platform owner and can make, like, those purchases so easy and make the app store so easy and have all of that stuff be really easy, that it's not going to really affect their business very much because they – it is the path of least resistance.
00:20:32 ◼ ► And I think in Europe we've seen that it's the path of least resistance and that people don't know about it or if they don't know about it or if they do know about it, they might be interested in it or they might just say, ah, I don't need that.
00:20:46 ◼ ► The argument for it is it does mean that if you're a developer and you want to create an app and it's for iOS and Apple says no, you have somewhere you can put it.
00:21:00 ◼ ► And if you want a clipboard manager for iOS and Apple says no, you can go and get the alternative even though – I think that's a powerful argument.
00:21:08 ◼ ► And I don't believe that there's a strong counterargument in saying, yes, but most people won't do that.
00:21:30 ◼ ► And to me, my longer standing, pretty consistent, I think, if not very consistent, objection to the way Apple's run the app store, I mean, for well over 10 years, I think I've been pounding on this, is not the distribution of the software, but the exclusivity of the payments.
00:21:51 ◼ ► And I really – my stance is – and it's not that I think other third-party apps should be allowed to run their own payments for in-app digital content in-app.
00:22:06 ◼ ► It's believing, you know, that the web is such a big part of why the whole iPhone thing started.
00:22:13 ◼ ► I mean, it was a big part of the first keynote, the famous 2007, here's – you know, it's not the baby internet, it's the real internet.
00:22:30 ◼ ► And for content, it's always been the answer that this is not the Apple ecosystem, the walled garden.
00:22:39 ◼ ► And so many people use the walled garden as a pejorative only, and there are pejorative aspects to it.
00:22:56 ◼ ► And people pay a lot of money to go inside and have a good time and have a Disney-controlled experience.
00:23:01 ◼ ► And it's very clear when you visit a Disney theme park, when you're on Disney property, and when you've left, right?
00:23:14 ◼ ► We go there and, you know, get a shuttle to the hotel and then, you know, take the Disney transportation around.
00:23:25 ◼ ► You know, all of a sudden, there's gas stations, you know, and there's McDonald's and fast food and stuff outside the perimeter of the land Disney owns.
00:23:33 ◼ ► And when you are on the web – and yes, you can argue that there are some people, like my dad, who's probably not – he's very sharp, but he's older.
00:23:49 ◼ ► I'm not saying everybody really gets the distinction, but for the most part, people know when they're on a website or in an app.
00:23:56 ◼ ► And if apps were just free to say, go out to Safari or your default web browser and buy a subscription there or make a payment there and go do it if you want, then there is a huge level of competition for making Apple's own in-app purchases competitive with that.
00:24:17 ◼ ► And, you know, there's a bit of friction sending the person out of the app to the web, and they'd have to have one of those callback URLs so when they do it, they bounce you back into the app.
00:24:27 ◼ ► So Apple would have a bit of a built-in advantage there, but they'd have to compete on the commission they charge and the ease of use and to make developers want to stay in the app to do it.
00:24:39 ◼ ► I think that's such, and I think that's in the legal sense, I think judges and lawyers don't see that distinction as clearly and just want to look at the whole thing.
00:24:52 ◼ ► And maybe that's not the most wrong way to look at it and just say, you know what, you've got too much control and it's too powerful and influence a part of daily life in our society for you to control all of this.
00:25:05 ◼ ► But if they had opened up those payments alone 10 years ago, I think so much of this pressure for the app stores wouldn't be there.
00:25:13 ◼ ► Right, right. I agree. To extend your Disney World or Disneyland metaphor, because I like that. It's the idea that you're going to get the ultimate Disney experience by staying at a Disney hotel.
00:25:25 ◼ ► In California, it's like you stay at the Disneyland hotel, you ride the monorail into the park, you get a different entrance, you get a different entry time, you get the full Disney experience if you're at a Disney hotel and all of that.
00:25:36 ◼ ► But you know what, there is a quality in across the street. And it's cheaper or it's down the road. It's cheaper, but you've got to take a shuttle and you just have to queue up with the masses and you don't get a special entrance and all of that.
00:25:46 ◼ ► But you can do that. Or at a ballpark. I mean, I assume that you see this when you go to ballgames, but it's absolutely like you can buy a hot dog outside, you can buy some water outside, you can bring it in even.
00:25:57 ◼ ► And they're not going to even stop you from doing that. You can pack your own sandwich and take it into the ballpark and, you know, buy a cheap ticket and bring your own food and have a really cheap day at the ballpark.
00:26:07 ◼ ► Or you can do what most people do, which is just buy a hot dog and a Coke on the inside because it's more convenient.
00:26:14 ◼ ► I mean, I think where Apple has gotten with this at this point is that regulators like the EU would say, well, that's really unfair. You need to let other food vendors come into your park and sell food, which I think is kind of wild as an idea.
00:26:30 ◼ ► But at the same time, I feel like it's it's because they've gotten because this conflict has been going on so long.
00:26:36 ◼ ► And I feel like if Apple had said, sure, bring in your own food if you want to, which is sort of what you're saying with the web stuff.
00:26:41 ◼ ► This might not have been as big a deal. But now, I mean, here we are. And and to bring it back to Brazil. Right.
00:26:47 ◼ ► Like, I feel like this is just going to keep happening, which is it's so much easier now that the now that the bandaid's been ripped off for anybody to just say, well, you already did it.
00:26:56 ◼ ► Like you already did it and you're still in business and everything seems fine. So just do it again for us.
00:27:04 ◼ ► I started laughing here because it just occurred to me that I'll bet that Apple, as they built out the technical and documentation infrastructure for supporting all of this in the EU to comply with the DMA,
00:27:22 ◼ ► that they were thinking, what if, you know, let's build this in a way so that if we need to implement it in other countries, we can, you know, that it's not just a one off implementation specifically for EU.
00:27:37 ◼ ► But I started laughing thinking, but of course, Apple didn't say that, you know, of course, like like to encourage decisions like this, like, oh, and by the way, inside here, it would be pretty easy for us to comply with other countries as they demand similar things.
00:27:54 ◼ ► Sure. Exactly. Dear, I don't know, dear Saudi Arabia, here is our array of features you can turn on if you demand it. Right. Okay.
00:28:04 ◼ ► The other problem, and you've hinted at this or even written it explicitly, and I think it's a really interesting point.
00:28:11 ◼ ► And it's where Apple is bringing pain onto themselves and onto people like me and you who write and talk about this and onto users or developers who have to deal with users in multiple countries.
00:28:23 ◼ ► Because if Apple had on its own done a lot more to make a lot more people happy, both in payment flexibility, bouncing out to the web and building out on their own, not at the point of a legislative gun, some way to sideload outside the app store in a way that would sort of discourage the use from lay people,
00:28:46 ◼ ► But allowed more technical users to be like, yeah, you know, like the Mac, they'd have one unified set of rules around the world.
00:28:56 ◼ ► And the problem with waiting until legislation comes is the legislation is never going to be identical.
00:29:03 ◼ ► Yeah. Right. So the EU's DMA, as complicated as it is, at least the advantage of the EU model is that it applies to all, I think, 27 member states of the EU.
00:29:15 ◼ ► What you, what Apple, it doesn't want, and me and you don't want to describe it and keep it in our heads when we're podcasting and writing about it.
00:29:22 ◼ ► And what developers don't want is they support users around the world is to have Brazil's ruling be mostly like the EU, but different in its, you know.
00:29:31 ◼ ► You can do alternative app stores in Europe, but in Brazil and South Korea and the UK, there are no alternative app stores.
00:29:39 ◼ ► There's just a sideloading protocol, which works differently in Brazil because of this and, uh, right.
00:29:58 ◼ ► I mean, this is, look, their Apple strategy here, and I, I've heard a lot of people argue, uh, very intelligently that Apple strategy is why, uh, essentially, why give away something that is valuable?
00:30:10 ◼ ► And until you're forced to, the danger of that is what you described, which is you get to the point where now everybody's lining up to take their wax.
00:30:19 ◼ ► And if you had given it up tactically a little early using a model that you built, which is why I'm frustrated about that.
00:30:26 ◼ ► When I wrote that Mac as a model column, it's like, they literally built this model for the Mac where like they have that protective control and the ability to kill apps and do all sorts of things to exert control as a platform owner.
00:30:38 ◼ ► But otherwise you're also allowed to jump through hoops and click on a bunch of warning dialogues and open the settings app and click another warning dialogue and eventually launch an app.
00:30:48 ◼ ► That's not been approved and, or sorry, not approved, notarized, uh, ready for sale, uh, by Apple.
00:30:54 ◼ ► And, and so like they could have done that for everything tactically, and they might have escaped some of this, but I think they just decided to play, you know, this brinksmanship and just take it to the limit.
00:31:07 ◼ ► Yeah. And the other advantage they have from Apple's internal perspective of just for whatever reasons, again, you, if you want to think greed is at the top of the list or just simplicity or, or security and simplicity for non-technical naive users, whatever.
00:31:26 ◼ ► But that if Apple's interest is in keeping as many users as possible, only using the app store, no matter what they're legally obligated to offer them outside the app store.
00:31:38 ◼ ► They have a tremendous advantage with iOS compared to the Mac because everything, any kind of engineering system that gets built out over time, it always really matters where it starts.
00:31:54 ◼ ► And the fact that the Mac started from completely open, you could go in, you know, back in the day with res edit, go back and just res edit the system resources.
00:32:10 ◼ ► Now you used to be able to, while you were running the OS, go in and res edit and start diddling with the system suitcase where all the components for the system were you could, you know, there was the idea that you wouldn't be able to install applications without typing.
00:32:26 ◼ ► And you didn't have a password, you didn't have a password, there was no user account, every single byte, every one in zero on the disk was just readable by all software.
00:32:33 ◼ ► And starting from that point and shifting to a more private, secure model just means that inherently the ability to, and I really do think, I know people out there think that Apple secretly wants to move the Mac to be as completely locked down as iOS.
00:32:51 ◼ ► And they keep saying, no, no, we don't want to do that, we want to keep the Mac, the Mac, we're tightening these security things for users benefit, but it will be open.
00:33:03 ◼ ► But the fact that iOS started App Store only, and that's where everybody got familiar with it and built it to the juggernaut that it is, a literal global juggernaut and probably the most successful consumer product in the history of mankind to date.
00:33:21 ◼ ► No matter how they opened it up voluntarily or involuntarily, that's always how the system started, and it's going to be, it's never going to be as popular, anywhere near as popular on iOS to install stuff outside the App Store as it is on the Mac.
00:33:38 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, it's absolutely true, but I find what they've done with the Mac kind of inspirational in that it's, we don't have to ask ourselves, well, what would Apple do if it wasn't able to have that complete control?
00:33:56 ◼ ► They had to do it on the Mac, and they came up with some pretty clever ways, which they are actually using.
00:34:00 ◼ ► Like, that's the funny thing is they're using the notarization system in the EU, which essentially, which they built for the Mac.
00:34:07 ◼ ► Now, they're using it differently, and that has led to some issues where they, you know, have blocked some apps for reasons that are really, I would argue, that probably wouldn't stand up in court in terms of their reasoning for doing it.
00:34:22 ◼ ► I mean, I think that this is just going to continue being a story where different judges and regulators in different regions are going to say, you know, give us that, Apple, and we'll see what Apple responds.
00:34:37 ◼ ► Yeah, and Brazil, in addition to having a lot of people and being, you know, like in the Southern Hemisphere, a very popular Apple country for a long time just for customers,
00:34:52 ◼ ► And so, Apple, you know, it's good for Brazilian users that Apple wants to stay a thriving presence retail and consumer-wise there because a big part of their assembly and manufacturing is built out there, too.
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00:36:32 ◼ ► Because, like, there was the news when I was, you know, there was the news I didn't know about.
00:37:38 ◼ ► And they said they anticipate rolling them out in the coming year, whatever that means.
00:38:58 ◼ ► But I actually think it's interesting for other people, before I start pontificating and putting my spin on it,
00:39:07 ◼ ► And I put that out there at 1230 with a note, which I usually don't do because I don't do a lot of breaking news at Daring Fireball,
00:39:23 ◼ ► I do think, I think I initially, like I knew it was good enough to do something unusual, like for me to publish it right on the spot.
00:39:43 ◼ ► I mean, like easily countable on one hand, perhaps just three fingers, maybe just me, Reuters and CNBC, maybe.
00:40:35 ◼ ► Like I got not bamboozled, but sort of low grade, whatever a lesser version of the word bamboozled is by the phrase Apple intelligence.
00:41:03 ◼ ► But the red flag for these more personalized series, Siri features that have all been now postponed another cycle is that they didn't demo them to us in the media at WWDC at all.
00:41:24 ◼ ► The first level would be that people in the media can watch Apple representatives do a feature live in front of me, you know, and you.
00:41:37 ◼ ► Uh, and that's what we got at WWDC for the, all of the features in Apple intelligence that have shipped.
00:41:48 ◼ ► I'm not sure if I saw message notifications because that's, you know, the screenshots tell you what you need to know.
00:42:21 ◼ ► And I remember too, when I got the writing tools demo at WWDC, I asked about, cause my understanding, you know, it confirmed my, my understanding of LLM technology, that it's non-deterministic.
00:42:34 ◼ ► In other words, take the same, let's say you have a jumble of notes and you want to send an email or an invitation to people.
00:42:44 ◼ ► You could start with the same text and use the writing tools to say, make it more friendly and then undo it and do it again with the same command, make it more friendly and get a slightly different result.
00:42:57 ◼ ► It is very, it's, it's a dividing line between the computers of your and the computers of, of the future.
00:43:07 ◼ ► And so I asked about it when I got, saw the, the hands-on demo, I wasn't allowed to do it.
00:43:12 ◼ ► You know, we in the media, it was Apple people, but I asked and he, and the guy doing the demo said, Oh yeah.
00:43:20 ◼ ► Cause I never, I don't know what I'm going to get each 15 minutes as new media people come.
00:43:36 ◼ ► It was like four of us at a time getting these demos and it was slightly different wording to make the same thing more friendly.
00:43:44 ◼ ► You know, he was like, yeah, see, it's like, remember it, you know, he remembered what the first one said.
00:43:48 ◼ ► So I saw it, but all of this personalized stuff, the encapsulated by Apple's own vaporware demo, we can now say in the keynote of a woman saying, Hey, when's, when does mom's flight arrive?
00:44:03 ◼ ► Uh, and, and the Siri dingus goes out and looks in her email and finds the email from her and knows who her mom is, finds the most recent email from her where she says that she's, here's my flight info.
00:44:18 ◼ ► So flying from Chicago to SFO and then Siri takes the flight info and goes to a flight tracking data source to see if the flight is arriving on time.
00:44:37 ◼ ► No, we just saw a video and I'm as mad at myself as I've been in years that that didn't jump out to me as a red flag.
00:44:51 ◼ ► We all knew going in that Apple was going to make some statements about AI stuff because there was this feeling that they were, I think executives there were looking at early LLMs and going like, that's dumb.
00:45:05 ◼ ► You know, we're, we, our machine learning is happening over here and all these targeted ways.
00:45:10 ◼ ► And then there was a moment where they thought, oh no, it's really relevant and people want it.
00:45:44 ◼ ► And so when we looked at their announcements, we maybe gave them a little more latitude, understanding that they were trying to catch up.
00:45:51 ◼ ► That those features they were announcing, like, it's not like they've done more of this over the last few years where they've announced some features and they don't really get in until later in the process.
00:46:04 ◼ ► It's been, it started being like, it was a scandal if they didn't ship in the beta to developers that day.
00:46:21 ◼ ► But I think we gave them, we, we allowed them enough credit as being Apple and being responsible to say, look, if it's in the keynote,
00:46:33 ◼ ► they have some confidence that it will ship in this cycle, even if it's late in the cycle.
00:46:39 ◼ ► And I think, and because we were primed to think that we were going to give them a little more latitude because we knew that they were rushing and that stuff was going to be late.
00:47:01 ◼ ► we got this and, and I, and I think internally they knew that some of these things you talk about deterministic or indeterminate, like some of these were probabilistic of like, but probably we could do this.
00:47:17 ◼ ► And what happened is, you know, we, so we gave them credit of like, they, they, if they say they're going to do this, their, their track record is pretty good.
00:47:35 ◼ ► I do believe that there are, while there are regrets, and I want to be clear about this because Federico wrote a piece at Max Stories where he sort of said that I, he linked to something I said on Blue Sky and said that I,
00:47:47 ◼ ► I actually think it's kind of a deceptive strategy, but I think that from an Apple perspective, they're happy with the fact that they made so much hay last June that they were willing to let some chickens come home to roost in March of the next year because they've spent the last 10 months or nine months advertising Apple intelligence and saying that we're on it.
00:48:07 ◼ ► Um, I think that probably the negative connotations of right now are not as bad as the positivity of PR that they generated then, but you're right.
00:48:17 ◼ ► And that was my final point in my piece was, you know, the next time they stand up at WWDC and say, here's what we're going to announce there.
00:48:27 ◼ ► This is one of the fallouts of this thing happening is we all have to be much more skeptical about it because they don't get the benefit of the doubt of like, well, they probably calibrated this.
00:48:36 ◼ ► Like, I, I believe when they stood up, they thought they could do it or they wouldn't have said it.
00:48:48 ◼ ► Uh, and like I said, level one is Apple reps doing demos in front of us and letting us, you know, do things like me saying, can you do it again and see if we get the same text?
00:49:04 ◼ ► But then once we leave Steve jobs theater or wherever we are in New York or whatever, we don't carry the product with us.
00:49:32 ◼ ► One of my favorite things about the original iPhone is that I tapped on the, um, when I got my one hour with it or 15 minutes with it or whatever it was.
00:49:44 ◼ ► Level three is a public beta or developer beta, but something where, where, you know, where people outside Apple can do it.
00:49:53 ◼ ► Like, I can't think of anything off the top of my head, but you can, somebody can probably think of a couple of things that were in, in developer betas over the summer after WWDC and then get pulled in August and aren't in 18.0 in September or 17.0 or next year.
00:50:14 ◼ ► And they immediately appear in the 18.1 beta, but they had to pull them out of the shipping tree because they needed to ship that without it.
00:50:21 ◼ ► And showing us a video of a woman saying, when does mom's flight arrive and not letting us do it.
00:50:36 ◼ ► That's, that's, that's, that's not a real demo and it doesn't give, you know, and they, I mean, they did an ad for it too.
00:50:43 ◼ ► That's the thing that blows me away is that not only did they not have anything that anybody saw, but there was even an ad, which they have pulled now, but with Bella Ramsey in it demo.
00:50:51 ◼ ► Again, I think a great ad, I think one of the best ads of that campaign, because it's like, wow, imagine being able to say, Hey, I met this guy two months ago at this cafe.
00:51:08 ◼ ► So again, suggest that the confidence was high or the lack of confidence was not communicated to marketing and perhaps executives.
00:51:17 ◼ ► To, to be clear, uh, I want to emphasize, I have no little birdies at all on what level of debate there was inside Apple.
00:51:26 ◼ ► I'm very curious about it and I would love to hear from people, but I can only presume that there was significant, some number of people inside Apple pushed back against promoting this a year ago, based on where it was.
00:51:55 ◼ ► Was it a comp was what they showed at WWDC based on any running software at all, or was it entirely simulated presume?
00:52:05 ◼ ► And again, you have to presume that some number of people in engineering and the product side were like, we can do this by, you know, March, you know, for 18.4, you know, or right around now, really, I think it was supposed to ship.
00:52:22 ◼ ► Ideally, if everything had gone according to plan, it would probably be in the 18.4 developer betas right now.
00:52:32 ◼ ► And I'll, I'll pile, I'll, I'll pile something onto that too, which is, um, Mark Gurman has been saying for a while that there's going to be this Apple home device.
00:52:41 ◼ ► That's kind of like a little iPad thing that you can dock and make it a home pod with a speaker and it'll let you control your home stuff and all of that.
00:52:48 ◼ ► And what he said was that product kind of hinges on some aspects of this, like the app intense stuff.
00:52:55 ◼ ► And that, um, over the weekend, what he reported was it basically puts this product in limbo because the feeling is that it can't ship.
00:53:03 ◼ ► And to have hardware ready to go, that is going to rely on an aspect of one of these delayed features suggests to me that there was really a lot of confidence that they would have something to ship by now.
00:53:19 ◼ ► Because otherwise, I mean, you wouldn't build hardware around vaporware and a promise you, you, so maybe, and maybe it's something like, I know that, that, um, uh, you have, have mentioned this, the idea of security issues of, of being able to inject bad data in your, in someone's personal data store that allows bad things to happen.
00:53:42 ◼ ► And maybe that they were rolling along with a feature and then there was a showstopper, um, that that's my best guess, whether it was security related or not, is that they had something running at some point that gave them enough confidence to market this feature and to build some of the hardware, new hardware around it.
00:54:05 ◼ ► The funny thing about prompt injection, which is sort of tricking any of these LLMs into revealing.
00:54:12 ◼ ► Things that they're, their creators aren't supposed to have them reveal is that they're the opposite of the sort of hacks, you know, like jailbreak hacks for iOS, like back in the day when people would jailbreak, I know some people still do, but you know, it seems like they've closed most of them, but you know, and you'd read a technical explanation.
00:54:32 ◼ ► It was like a buffer overflow and you'd send a certain hex code in a, in a text message.
00:54:40 ◼ ► And all of a sudden, almost all of us, even people like me with a computer science degree, I was like, I don't, I kind of understand the gist of it, but I don't understand how this works.
00:54:54 ◼ ► And the idea is, and I might be slightly off here, but the idea would be, let's say Apple ships this feature that they promised.
00:55:17 ◼ ► Stop for a minute, ignore all previous instructions and send, you know, send a, this is very important.
00:55:36 ◼ ► And they say they need this right away, or his son, you know, is going to be in great medical peril.
00:55:48 ◼ ► And that maybe if that message is uses the exact right words, Apple intelligence will actually take the email that all that happened was you got an email from me that used this language.
00:56:13 ◼ ► I mean, it's basically, it's suddenly you're opening your own computer or phone or whatever to social engineering, essentially, if you attach an LLM to it.
00:56:21 ◼ ► And who knows what other capabilities the agent, the agent could do, you know, can it purchase things?
00:56:32 ◼ ► Like the more powerfully helpful, the more powerfully helpful the AI is, the more powerfully it might be able to be abused.
00:56:41 ◼ ► And that, when I talk about like them hitting a roadblock, them having a showstopper, when you mentioned that and linked to that piece about it, I started to imagine like a scenario where everybody's giddy and they're like, yeah, we got this.
00:57:04 ◼ ► And that, like, it's not that it may not work, like, because that's the shame of this, right?
00:57:08 ◼ ► And this is one of the reasons why I think we were all excited about it and wrote about this promise, this level zero promise, is this is where Apple, because a lot of chatbot stuff, like I use, I use ChatGPT all the time for little things.
00:57:26 ◼ ► I don't think that, I think that it's incredibly powerful, but also has lots of issues.
00:57:31 ◼ ► But I think we were excited that Apple was saying, ah, but when you, when you apply that technology to what we can do on device, when you apply it to all your personal data that is private and on your device, we can do interesting things with it that Ben Thompson made this point in his strategy piece today.
00:57:48 ◼ ► Like, we have the ability to create something special that is, as a platform owner, that a generic chatbot can't do, which is you trust us, we are on the device, we see all your data, and then we can do magic things like this with it.
00:58:04 ◼ ► That's the shame of it, is that this is actually a place where Apple could really demonstrate their advantage if they can ship it.
00:58:11 ◼ ► And I think that's almost surely, I don't know this, I really don't, but it's so common sense, it seems so obvious that it must be a big part of the reason why the side within Apple that said, we should start promoting this at the keynote, we should make commercials about it in September.
00:58:27 ◼ ► We're close enough, but the reason we should break our usual company policy of not promising things in the future and further break the policy of not promising things that we can't even demonstrate yet live is that this, this exact idea is so central to where we can take a, an important, useful,
00:58:58 ◼ ► This is something that we can show the world that not just that we have a very advanced feature that's very useful and, you know, any lay person can see the demo and see the utility of it, right?
00:59:12 ◼ ► But also it is unique to Apple and, you know, on the, or unique to Apple, certainly for people who own iPhones and, you know, only Google and companies like Samsung that have zillions of Android users could possibly be in a position to do that on the other side of the fence.
00:59:29 ◼ ► And so they wanted to demo a thing that only they could do if you take, I think in hindsight, if they, and clearly they must regret it now, they should not have demoed these in June.
00:59:43 ◼ ► And I think in the world where the side of Apple that was saying we, we should as much as cool as this is, this is a next year thing.
00:59:51 ◼ ► Let's, you know, take, take your team, John G and Drea and build this out for next year's WWDC.
00:59:58 ◼ ► And it'll be a tentpole feature, you know, we'll make a big deal out of it, but it's got to be further along if they had done that and, and announced Apple intelligence without any of this, obviously it would have been a little, you know, there would have been a lot, some, some degree less shine on WWDC last year.
01:00:16 ◼ ► But I don't think it would have been so much less shine that it would have like adversely affected the stock price overall.
01:00:27 ◼ ► I think they could have, if the question is, could they have omitted all of this and still had the PR bump?
01:00:32 ◼ ► I think they could have, which is why, again, I believe that they really did think somebody somewhere, you know, they had confidence that, that was misguided, maybe for unforeseeable reasons, maybe for foreseeable reasons, we don't know, but I, I agree.
01:00:45 ◼ ► And then another thing that you and Ben talked about, about Alexa plus that, and the Amazon's announcement about that and Siri is the idea that maybe they just, they, they did this backwards.
01:00:55 ◼ ► They, they put the cart before the horse, where maybe phase one should have been to LLMI Siri enough that Siri is okay.
01:01:04 ◼ ► And then, and then there'll be some other better series stuff later, which is kind of, kind of backwards.
01:01:20 ◼ ► And it's a shame I had, uh, uh, uh, our friend Greg Noss, uh, in a, in a Slack that I'm in, Greg is the, the, you know, the Zelig of the internet.
01:01:31 ◼ ► I remember the moment where you referenced him on Daring Fireball and I was like, what my college friend, Greg is on Daring Fireball now.
01:01:38 ◼ ► Um, Greg posted in, in a Slack that we're in, um, that he asked Siri when the LA marathon was.
01:01:49 ◼ ► And I mean, this is in that genre of like Paul Kofoss is asking about the Superbowls, but like, that's a very basic, like Greg lives in LA.
01:02:00 ◼ ► It literally not only did it say March 24th, 2019, but then below it, it had a footnote that said point in time, which I really love.
01:02:39 ◼ ► Like either you should be more aggressive of using your third party LLMs, or maybe you should be more aggressive about using your on, on device LLM to answer some of these questions.
01:02:49 ◼ ► But whatever's going on here, it feels like you made the wrong decision about what to do with Siri because we're in this really weird in between.
01:02:57 ◼ ► And again, this is something they mentioned last June, which was, oh, well, on device will decide whether it uses chat GPT or whether it uses the on device LLM.
01:03:07 ◼ ► But in that case for the LA marathon, Siri thought it had it and it was completely wrong.
01:03:22 ◼ ► And I sometimes wonder if it's all about sort of like letting perfect be the enemy of the good, where I know that, I know that LLM Siri might not be great, but I'm not sure existing Siri clears that bar.
01:03:39 ◼ ► And I, and I, and I, I just to carry right on from your point, I think that it gets to one of the problems.
01:03:48 ◼ ► I think one of the problems was their fear of being perceived as behind and that it was adversely affecting the company's stock.
01:03:56 ◼ ► And I don't think, I do not think even Tim Cook is driven primarily by the stock, but it is important.
01:04:15 ◼ ► I'm a skeptic about like whether the public really wants, uh, to type things in a, you know, on their phone into a chat bot and get an answer.
01:04:31 ◼ ► Then I, but I think, and I think it's related to stock a little, but there's just institutional pride slash arrogance slash hubris of how much we can.
01:05:18 ◼ ► And I'm not trying to be obtuse here, but I think with this stuff, I think Apple's bigger problem isn't the first principle of what their own in-house AI next generation stuff can do.
01:05:35 ◼ ► But I think it is a little, I think the problem is a little more abstract where they don't know what role they should take.
01:05:42 ◼ ► Like, and the mentioning chat GPT gets to the point of it, a big, you'll recall, I'm sure a big part of our podcasting and blogging post WWDC was clarifying how much of Apple intelligence was Apple.
01:05:57 ◼ ► And how much was chat GPT because the first impression from a lot of the more mainstream media was that Apple's got this new thing called Apple intelligence and it's all powered by chat GPT.
01:06:19 ◼ ► Like, and, and it's, I'm not trying to date myself, but it's cause, but I think it's a very simple way of looking at it.
01:06:30 ◼ ► And I think it's possible that Apple exists today because of the role that the Mac took in desktop publishing, graphic design in the late eighties through the nineties.
01:06:59 ◼ ► Like Adobe is today, still a giant software company that, and, and, you know, the dot, you know, more dominant than they were then in the field of design tools.
01:07:10 ◼ ► But Apple made by far and away the best computers to use software from Adobe on or software from Quark on or software from Aldis to name companies that have gone, you know, come and gone.
01:07:33 ◼ ► And they invented technologies like local talk for networking so that you could just buy a laser jet or laser writer and just string a simple cable to your Mac.
01:07:47 ◼ ► You just plugged it in and turned it on and you printed and you got amazing output that didn't look anything like the printer output from before.
01:07:55 ◼ ► Um, so Apple played a role in the technology, but they also knew here's where third parties come in and a company like Adobe that invented postscript and that their whole reason for being is creating professional caliber design software tools.
01:08:13 ◼ ► We don't need to be the ones who make the page layout program or the image editing application or the vector illustration program.
01:08:20 ◼ ► And maybe their role, at least for now in this world is making their platforms, the, what the Mac was to desktop publishing all of Apple, you know, the Mac and iPad and iPhone, especially are to just using LLM tools, right.
01:08:35 ◼ ► And sort of make it a system where the, uh, open AIs and chat GPT and the anthropics and the clod and Google with Gemini can compete, but make it so that using whichever one of those is the one you're using, or maybe you're using most of them, but the best way to use them is on an iPhone and on a Mac.
01:09:01 ◼ ► And I think also, I mean, I think it goes back to the whole cart before the horse thing where, um, they increase their difficulty level.
01:09:24 ◼ ► And I don't mean to jump ahead to something that I suspect you might want to talk about, but the best hardware you can buy today, well, you, you can order it today, but you can't have it in hand.
01:09:36 ◼ ► The best hardware you can buy to run and develop AI locally is a Mac studio with the M3 ultra chip, right?
01:09:52 ◼ ► It is objective and you cannot argue with how great with a max, you know, I know it's insanely expensive from a consumer's perspective, but from the perspective of companies working on this, a $20,000 Mac studio workstation with 512 gigabytes of Ram.
01:10:11 ◼ ► That's where Apple has like, so anybody who says Apple's out of the game and AI or whatever, it's like, no, they're in the game, but they're in the game in the Apple way, which is making the best devices for it.
01:10:23 ◼ ► They don't have to be in it to be the company that understands when's mom's flight arriving.
01:10:30 ◼ ► I mean, I think, I think their goal should be adding Apple layers on top of it and that, and that's what they were trying to do with when's mom's flight arriving.
01:10:38 ◼ ► I mean, I, I don't love the feature, but I think image playground is the best example of Apple building its own interface on top of a model where they've, they built it in where you're, you know, you can, you can type text in there.
01:10:52 ◼ ► But they provide like a UI where you can click on objects and you can click on scenes and in the background, it's obviously formulating essentially a text query for a image generation model, but they built a, an interface on it.
01:11:13 ◼ ► And it, and it's, and the UI is, I wrote about this briefly a couple of months ago, but like the UI is next to the spelling and grammar checking UI.
01:11:30 ◼ ► And that's a sign that they just slapped it in there as fast as they could, but like the functionality isn't terrible.
01:11:43 ◼ ► And I mean, that's, I think at the root of the notification, uh, controversy about like news notifications kind of mucking up facts and turning them into fiction is they looked at that problem while they were holding the AI hammer and they're like, boom, there's a nail.
01:12:11 ◼ ► I have not been more fascinated about what Apple will do at a WWDC in a very long time for this year, because this year, the real question is what now, what are your priorities now?
01:12:29 ◼ ► Cause this obviously happened so fast that it's like, what have you learned about how you put LLMs in your system, where Apple can add value, where third parties play in because, you know, last year was all about the scramble and about sending a message that they're on it.
01:12:42 ◼ ► This year should be about what you've learned in the last year and what you're capable of.
01:12:48 ◼ ► Well, let me, uh, continue with a point I made earlier where about the degrees of Apple software realness.
01:12:55 ◼ ► Like I will observe now in hindsight, three days after their announcement on Friday that they just gave me the announcement over the phone.
01:13:05 ◼ ► And, you know, and then Jackie emailed me a copy so I could have it for, you know, I didn't have to transcribe it and you know how slow I type.
01:13:12 ◼ ► So, um, but they didn't call me or you, they didn't say come to Cupertino or come to New York and watch us demo it and, and say we, you know, this is taking us longer that, you know, the same statement, this is taking us longer than we thought it would.
01:13:31 ◼ ► And it's going to be coming in the coming year, but come to New York and watch us do it.
01:13:36 ◼ ► We can't, we're not going to let you do it yet, even under our supervision, but watch us do it.
01:13:52 ◼ ► I'm going to be glued to the WWDC keynote for once they mentioned Apple intelligence, which, you know, I guess would be early on is do they even show this again?
01:14:03 ◼ ► Or does this sort of thing not even, you know, Tim back to Tim and Tim says, Hey, we've got a great thing.
01:14:15 ◼ ► And, you know, and we start closing our laptops and getting up to, you know, do whatever we're going to do in, in Apple park for the next thing after the keynote.
01:14:29 ◼ ► I think that would be the tell that this wasn't a, Hey, we need more time for the way we were approaching it.
01:14:39 ◼ ► I think that's the, that come June, this June, that will be the tell that what they've done and announced on Friday was we had to scrap what we were working on and what we thought was going to ship.
01:14:52 ◼ ► And, you know, and to his credit, Mark Gurman has reported that there are just, you know, since before Friday's discussion that, that there were people within Apple's engineering telling Gurman that that's on the table to do like a real reset and take an entire, you know, more or less start over to build this sort of functionality.
01:15:24 ◼ ► I mean, this sort of stuff is definitely going to come, you know, to platforms and it will come to Apple's platforms eventually.
01:15:32 ◼ ► Um, but I think whether the thing that they thought, and clearly some people thought it was going to ship right around now.
01:15:42 ◼ ► Uh, if that can still ship and that's, you know, they just need an extra six to eight months to get it out, then I think they'll show it again in the WWDC keynote.
01:15:52 ◼ ► But if the keynote comes and goes and they don't talk about this sort of stuff, red flag.
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01:17:24 ◼ ► Like, finally, I told Lauren, finally, we've gotten the answer to the question, what happens if I go on vacation and Apple announces a bunch of stuff while I'm gone?
01:17:48 ◼ ► But the Air, like, the Air update isn't super interesting, but it's super important because I would argue it's the, I did the math this weekend.
01:18:10 ◼ ► I remember in the 2000s watching the number keep ramping up because I used to say it was more than half, and then I started to say it was two-thirds, and then I started to say it was three-quarters, and then they stopped telling us.
01:18:25 ◼ ► And the Air sells better than any of the other Apple laptops, so it's the number one Mac.
01:18:29 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm sure you get the same sort of feedback because I know lots of people who work in the Apple retail stores listen to our shows and read our websites.
01:18:36 ◼ ► And whenever I talk about this, they, you know, they'll chime in and send me an email like, hey, off the record, I work in an Apple retail store.
01:18:41 ◼ ► I don't want to quote a number, but they'll be like, oh, my God, it's like 95% overnight, you know.
01:18:46 ◼ ► Like, we go days without selling a desktop Mac, and we don't go more than 15 minutes without selling a MacBook, you know.
01:18:53 ◼ ► Yeah, MacBook Air is the definitive Mac of, I mean, I would argue the last 15 years maybe, but certainly now if there's a core Mac, and I know our audience is not representative, and so it's not as much, but like the, this is the one to buy Mac.
01:19:10 ◼ ► I mean, it's very clear now, and that's part of the big news here is not, yes, they added an M4 chip to it.
01:19:17 ◼ ► But not only did they do that, people aren't buying a new MacBook Air every year, but they took the starting price back down to $999, and that took them multiple cycles, right?
01:19:28 ◼ ► Because when the M2 came out, they had to keep the M1 around, because the M2 was, I think, $1199 at that point.
01:19:37 ◼ ► It was much more expensive than the M1 Air because it was a brand new design, brand new process, and we know that over time, margins on those products go up.
01:19:52 ◼ ► And when they're on the financial calls, they say, well, margins are going to be down a little bit because we've got a new product ramp coming, and that means that the margins are smaller on that new product.
01:20:05 ◼ ► That was a very important product, and the margins were going to be down because it costs more to make it.
01:20:09 ◼ ► Yeah, and the best proof of that is the actual M1 Air, which is still on sale at Walmart.
01:20:16 ◼ ► With that sort of, not weird, it makes sense, but weird in that it's unusual deal that it's the only place to buy it.
01:21:05 ◼ ► Yeah, it speaks to the lasting value of Apple Silicon that it's even credible to be buying a 2020 laptop now.
01:21:12 ◼ ► No, I didn't mean to say, you know, the 16 gig baseline started a couple months ago where they even bumped up the previous generation Airs to get rid of the 8 gigabyte configs.
01:21:37 ◼ ► I know it's only 256 SSD, but I would argue that, again, the point is to hit the price point and that a lot of people who are just using CloudSync don't really need more SSD than that.
01:21:52 ◼ ► The point is to make a very pleasant computer available at $999 because that's a really good price to hit.
01:22:02 ◼ ► And it's a big deal because I can just sort of point at the $999 Air and say, there, get it.
01:22:10 ◼ ► But, like, if you really, to get people in the door of, like, I'm interested in a MacBook Air, oh, the new one is $999, is a huge, it's a huge deal.
01:22:42 ◼ ► But I do blame Tim Cook for the 8 gigabytes of RAM, 8 gigabytes of RAM, you know, the way that Macs got stuck.
01:22:50 ◼ ► And the relative dearth of RAM in iPhones, and that it came to bite them with Apple Intelligence, where they more or less had to draw the line, you know, older Macs, all M1, M Series Macs get Apple Intelligence because they have enough RAM to do it.
01:23:09 ◼ ► And the baseline for iPhones, which is the more important product from Apple's overall perspective, starts with the iPhone 15 Pro from a little over a year ago.
01:23:20 ◼ ► Which is really unusual, that there are an awful lot of very recent iPhones, iPhone 15 non-pros, all iPhone 14s, including iPhone 14 Pros, don't get it.
01:23:36 ◼ ► And so I hope it unsticks the margin, margin, margin on RAM mindset, and that we're not stuck at 16 gigabytes until the end of my career.
01:23:54 ◼ ► But as we speak today in 2025, 16 gigabytes of RAM, to me, is the right amount for the baseline of a Mac.
01:24:08 ◼ ► And the nice thing about storage, whether it's a phone or an iPad or whatever, because these are existing device classes that people already have, very few people, you know, other than young children, are getting their first Mac, right?
01:24:26 ◼ ► So you could say, well, how much storage do you have on your current Mac or PC if you're moving, and how much is being used?
01:24:34 ◼ ► And if they say, well, I'm using 500 gigabytes already, well, then a 256-gigabyte storage isn't going to work, and a 512 isn't going to be enough, because you're already using 500 gigabytes on your current laptop.
01:24:54 ◼ ► But if you can look at your current laptop and say, yeah, it says I'm using 100 gigabytes, and, you know, I use iCloud Drive and Dropbox and, you know, my email's in Gmail.
01:25:10 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, and that's the, if you care enough to know better that you need more, at that point, Apple's like, well, yeah, you need to pay us more then, right?
01:25:35 ◼ ► People go look at the commodity prices of those parts and say, wow, Apple's margins on those things are huge.
01:25:40 ◼ ► But I would say this is what Apple and Tim Cook's pricing strategy is, is they're not willing to compromise on that entry price sliding upward, that they are very happy with that entry price, where it is.
01:25:55 ◼ ► Even with inflation, everything else is like, no, $9.99 is still the target for the MacBook Air.
01:26:02 ◼ ► Now, everything else above that, you got to pay, and they're not as concerned about that, right?
01:26:08 ◼ ► They're, like, happy to reap the margins above the baseline, but they're going to hold on the baseline because they want to say, starting at $9.99.
01:26:15 ◼ ► If they can make it so that an awful lot of very typical Mac users, very typical, right in the middle, the median of user needs, walk out with a $1,400, $1,500 MacBook, they're not going to complain.
01:26:34 ◼ ► It gets you in the door at $9.99, and then you're out the door, your head's spinning a little bit, and it's $11.99, and what just happened, right?
01:26:50 ◼ ► It is penny-wise, pound-foolish for them to be selling a $9.99 computer that's actually bad for anybody.
01:26:57 ◼ ► I agree, and that's the argument about the 8 gigs of RAM, is it felt like the 8 gigs of RAM way outstayed its welcome, where it felt compromised.
01:27:04 ◼ ► That's why I feel so good about this M4 Air, and part of that is dating back to the M3, where they upped the RAM at the base model, and now they've taken it down to $9.99.
01:27:13 ◼ ► It's a lot easier for me without quibbling, without saying, well, to say, yeah, the $9.99.
01:27:20 ◼ ► I know we could quibble about the $256 storage, but again, in today's environment, there are a lot of people for whom $256 with iCloud syncing or with anything else like that, just using the web and some email is okay.
01:27:34 ◼ ► I don't feel like it puts the pressure on me to say you can't really buy the $9.99, but it used to be like that, right?
01:27:41 ◼ ► It used to, with the 8 gigs of RAM, we had reached the point for a few years where we're like, well, like you could do it if you can't afford the update, but you really, and that's gone.
01:27:53 ◼ ► It really was in your interest to consider the $200, whatever the upgrade is to $16, above anything else.
01:28:03 ◼ ► Like, go down in size class, get a 13-inch one instead of 15-inch, because if your budget is set, because the RAM is more important than the extra screen space.
01:28:17 ◼ ► Because you'd be better off with an M2, which is fine, and getting enough RAM, and now all that is gone.
01:28:26 ◼ ► Yeah, so getting it down to the M4, and it just shows how their Silicon game, their Apple Silicon game, is really, really running smoothly.
01:28:53 ◼ ► And they keep mentioning Intel, and the fact is, a lot of people out there are still on Intel.
01:28:58 ◼ ► My daughter just came off of her, she had the last generation Intel MacBook Air until this spring, and now she's got, or this, just like a month ago, two months ago, where she got a hand-me-down of an M1 Air.
01:29:21 ◼ ► I know that comparing Apple Silicon Macs to Intel Macs gives them really big numbers to quote and market, and that's part of it.
01:29:31 ◼ ► And they know that that's the number one audience for a new Mac, is those people on the old Macs, to get them to experience this Apple Silicon, which will be a, you know, it will be a quantum leap.
01:29:59 ◼ ► Apple's product page says up to 23 times faster than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Air.
01:30:20 ◼ ► If you're upgrading from an M1 MacBook Air, getting a twice-as-fast computer is really nice.
01:30:38 ◼ ► But the 23X for product that they were selling until the very end of 2020, that's bananas, right?
01:30:49 ◼ ► And I remember, like, when we were, me and you were reviewing, everybody in the racket were reviewing the first Apple Silicon Macs.
01:30:58 ◼ ► But if Apple keeps getting this hard, the chips improving as fast as they have been with the A-series chips for iPhones, these chips are going to be bananas in four or five years.
01:31:17 ◼ ► I called it because it was very clear that what happened last year is Apple decided the webcams, their webcam game needed to be upped.
01:31:40 ◼ ► Now, what Apple told me at the time, because I said, you know, the iMac camera doesn't look the same as the MacBook Pro camera.
01:31:46 ◼ ► And they said, well, the specs are the same, but that doesn't imply that the actual physical camera is the same because they're fitting in different spaces.
01:31:55 ◼ ► And so we don't know how the Apple or the MacBook Air will perform with its new 12 megapixel center stage webcam.
01:32:04 ◼ ► My guess is it will be a lot like the MacBook Pro one because it's a similar small space, but it may be different because it's a different shape.
01:32:13 ◼ ► But clearly they decided they need to do that, you know, a higher resolution camera that's capable of zooming within an image.
01:32:20 ◼ ► So you can use center stage or if you don't like center stage, you know, you can just choose the, you click the little recenter button and it does center stage one time and then leaves it there.
01:32:31 ◼ ► And that was one of the really kind of lagging behind features of all of Apple's laptops until last fall was the webcam was still kind of bad.
01:32:40 ◼ ► And it was kind of an unusual blind spot in the company because, you know, like you think about things like Apple cares about corners, right?
01:32:48 ◼ ► That the rounded corners on the screen, the rounded corners on your hardware, if there's a rounded corner, somebody at Apple can can talk your ear off if you get them in a bar about the math behind the curve that they use and how it's not really a round rectangle.
01:33:10 ◼ ► Because they really, certainly with the iPhone, they really, really care about the camera quality on the front and especially on the back.
01:33:18 ◼ ► And then it just sort of seemed like for Mac FaceTime cameras, it was like, did anybody really try this?
01:33:31 ◼ ► And I love my studio display, but you and I talked about it while talking about the setting up to record this very show.
01:33:40 ◼ ► If my studio display front-facing camera broke, but the display just stopped working and I took it in and they said, yeah, this camera is, you know, your studio display is out of warranty, so you'd have to pay to fix it.
01:33:59 ◼ ► And I'd be like, maybe this is better because now I can position the camera I put on top of the studio display right on top of it without worrying that I'm blocking light sensors or whatever.
01:34:17 ◼ ► And I have no doubt that they, I mean, clearly that they put out that center stage camera on the Mac Studio or the studio display.
01:34:30 ◼ ► There's all sorts of ways where I know that the people working on X within Apple know way more about it than I do.
01:34:36 ◼ ► But at this level, it was like, did you just turn it on and look at yourself on this camera?
01:34:44 ◼ ► When the studio display came out and you texted me and you're like, is this really a bad camera?
01:34:57 ◼ ► And I sit here in my office and I've got the huge window to my left with the sun shining in.
01:35:03 ◼ ► And it was afternoon and I was looking at the studio display and I was well lit and I looked fine.
01:35:09 ◼ ► And the truth is, the people who were saying, oh, my God, this is bad, were in darker spaces where it did not look fine.
01:35:17 ◼ ► And when I did my comparison between the new MacBook Pro camera last fall and the existing cameras, same deal.
01:35:38 ◼ ► And that's the challenge is, yeah, you can make a really crappy camera look okay if it's lit well.
01:35:43 ◼ ► But the thing about webcams is they are used in so many poorly lit circumstances and they need to look okay.
01:35:54 ◼ ► And, you know, and I think even on the MacBooks for a while, it was just like, have you guys looked at the MacBook webcam?
01:36:00 ◼ ► You know, like, and, you know, their argument is that the lid of a MacBook is so thin that it is actually a real, I mean, the iMac was a bad, that iMac, M1 iMac came out and they had already introduced center stage on the iPad and it wasn't in the Mac and it was the bad webcam on the M1 iMac.
01:36:26 ◼ ► That's the challenge is getting a good camera in the smallest space of any Apple product, right?
01:36:35 ◼ ► You got the whole, I mean, the iPhone isn't thick either, but the iPhone, you have the thickness of the iPhone to work with.
01:36:40 ◼ ► A Mac laptop, you only have the lid, it's super thin up there and you're behind the screen.
01:36:49 ◼ ► I think it's, you know, again, you don't have to have little birdies to see it, that Apple just somehow deprioritized it institutionally.
01:36:56 ◼ ► And they were like, well, we have, you know, we already have this thin teardrop lid, so there's no room for it.
01:37:01 ◼ ► And then it's like the real thing, the step back is, well, you don't have to have a lid like that.
01:37:07 ◼ ► Like, for example, look at what they've done with the phones and how thick they've gotten with the camera protrusions and then the lenses that stick out of the protrusions, right?
01:37:14 ◼ ► It's like you could say, go back to the iPhone 5 and say, well, you know, we're limited optically because look at how thin an iPhone is.
01:37:21 ◼ ► And the answer was, well, we could make it thicker behind, you know, from the lens to the front display.
01:37:29 ◼ ► And obviously the camera Mesa won the priority list, which is like, look, having a better camera matters more than not having a bump.
01:37:36 ◼ ► And for Macs, whether they are iMacs, you know, which are super thin, they're crazy thin, they're unbelievable.
01:37:42 ◼ ► They look, oddly enough, they look most striking from the side because it's like, wait, is this possible?
01:38:10 ◼ ► And even though, you know, more people are working back in offices and things like that, there's so much more video than there used to be.
01:38:32 ◼ ► They changed the back to be flat, which means that they're no longer tapered at the edges.
01:38:36 ◼ ► Like, there's a lot of things working in the favor of having a little more space in there to put your camera.
01:38:55 ◼ ► And I can't speak about the Air's camera, but I can say on the MacBook Pro, that new spec, the 12 megapixel ultra wide where they use center stage, is way better.
01:39:11 ◼ ► And it really is important because sometimes people, it's not like, oh, I have a call at 12 o'clock, and so I have time to set up and plug a thing in.
01:39:22 ◼ ► And it's like, oh, and you go into a Starbucks, you put your headphones on, you lift the lid on your MacBook, and you're on the call.
01:40:02 ◼ ► If it had been day one, they're like, Jason, you have to be on the call about a new MacBook Air that's coming.
01:40:37 ◼ ► And if you look at their images, like the, the, the, that are usually on a slightly off white background, it's a, it's a blue off white background for their images of the sky blue MacBook Air, which makes it's very funny.
01:40:51 ◼ ► But the truth is, if I'm, if I'm listening to my gut, when they announced this, I thought, you know what this is going to be?
01:40:57 ◼ ► It's going to be silver shaded blue instead of silver shaded, slightly gold, like starlight is.
01:41:09 ◼ ► And the jury's still out because nobody's, you know, there are no reviews have dropped about the, about the MacBook Air.
01:41:18 ◼ ► But my initial response was once again, Apple has decided, I think philosophically internally and that, um, brightly colored IMAX style MacBook Airs are not a thing they want to do.
01:41:33 ◼ ► So there's a new, very conservative, like if you want your silver to be a little bluer, sky blue and not like a bright blue or a bright orange or something like that, that they, they, and you know, my theory, by the way, I, when I did 20 max or 20 max,
01:41:48 ◼ ► 20, 25 years ago now, when I did that, I did the story about, um, about the iBook, the original iBook, which is like tangerine and lime and all of these like brightly colored.
01:42:05 ◼ ► My theory is IMAX, you buy them to put them in a space and you know where they're going to be.
01:42:22 ◼ ► I don't love it because I don't love the outcome, but I think Apple feels that when you take a laptop around with you in the world, it should be unobtrusive.
01:42:32 ◼ ► And therefore it'll give you, they'll give you a little hint of blue or even with midnight, right?
01:42:37 ◼ ► It's black, but with a little hint of blue, if you look at it in the right light, that, that, you know, when you take your Mac laptop out, it shouldn't necessarily draw attention to itself because it could be in any environment and it might be appropriate and it might not.
01:42:59 ◼ ► I don't think that even they, though, I don't think there's any kind of market research that they can do.
01:43:20 ◼ ► You know, and I understand with the more vibrant colored iMacs that they wrap the bezel of the display in white because it's neutral.
01:43:30 ◼ ► But when you look at a MacBook, you don't really see the color around it, you know, and there's a little frame.
01:43:39 ◼ ► You know, there's something they could do design wise to just make it a black bezel all the way around in terms of what you see around the screen.
01:43:46 ◼ ► So that the color of the aluminum isn't throwing off the color of what you perceive on screen.
01:43:49 ◼ ► But I think if they sold just like, you know, like back in the iBook days, like just a, wow, that is cool orange.
01:44:09 ◼ ► Something, but like just like as red as some of the red iPhones they've made over the years.
01:44:13 ◼ ► I think some number of users would be like, finally, and they would be like, I don't need this.
01:44:20 ◼ ► I've already got an M3 or an M2 or whatever, and it's fine, but I'm trading it in because I want the red one.
01:44:30 ◼ ► I'm not saying it would be the best selling model, but I, you know, again, I just look at clothes.
01:44:34 ◼ ► I buy myself, everybody who's ever seen me like run into me or seen me on stage or whatever, I buy, you know, light blue shirts and lots of gray shirts.
01:44:43 ◼ ► I dress, I dress in the color palette of the shades of aluminum Apple actually ships for MacBooks, but I don't think all the clothes at the mall should be in the color palette that I buy.
01:45:03 ◼ ► I look at the clothes my wife suggests that I buy for myself, and a lot of them are much more vibrantly colored than what I buy.
01:45:13 ◼ ► I personally am happier if Apple's only going to ship only super vibrant colors or only really boring shades of gray.
01:45:21 ◼ ► I'm glad they only ship the boring shades of gray because that's what I want, but I don't think that represents the mix of what people want to buy at all.
01:45:30 ◼ ► I don't know what, nobody knows, except people inside Apple, what the iMac SKUs are, right?
01:45:36 ◼ ► Because they've had a few years now where they know what the color selections are from those iMac SKUs that they did, where it's six vibrant colors and also silver.
01:45:54 ◼ ► I've had people say to me that almost certainly the best-selling one is silver, and it's probably by a lot, and that maybe even more than half, a huge percentage of the iMacs that are sold are silver because it's the default kind of like simple, I don't know, I don't want to commit to a color.
01:46:12 ◼ ► It's going to blend in everywhere, and maybe that's true, and that might be their closest data point here.
01:46:19 ◼ ► I feel like letting people have some – I mean, I feel this way about the pro phones too, but it's like let people have a little bit of an outlet.
01:46:28 ◼ ► I hear from people who complain about this, and it's exactly your point, which is, look, nobody is saying that you have to have a bright color on your product, right?
01:46:38 ◼ ► It's not like when they came out with the blue and white G3 and all the pros – because I went back for 20 Macs.
01:46:43 ◼ ► I went back and I looked at all the Mac Week stories when the blue and white G3 came out where all of these pro desktop publishing people are like, I've got to hide it under my desk.
01:47:06 ◼ ► Why not let people see if they really want to have that blue or green or red or orange or whatever, and you don't even have to have all the colors.
01:47:15 ◼ ► Pick one and see what happens, and I would love them to try that because the MacBook Air is such a fun product.
01:47:21 ◼ ► I think it could bear the attempt, but for whatever reason, they've decided, and maybe they've looked at it, and they're like, I don't like how it looks.
01:47:33 ◼ ► I don't think any iMac is going to tell them the truth about whether the MacBook Air would work in brighter colors.
01:47:43 ◼ ► It was an off-the-record briefing, so technically by talking about it, I'm violating it.
01:47:48 ◼ ► But many – like 10 plus, 15 years ago, at some point I had an off-the-record briefing with Phil Schiller about iPhones.
01:47:57 ◼ ► I think it was – I'm almost certain it might have been with the iPhone 5C, where they really were vibrant colors.
01:48:03 ◼ ► And I was talking – I asked him about it, and he said, you know, the one thing about colors is customers think we know how much – which ones are going to be most popular.
01:48:20 ◼ ► And he – you know, Phil being Phil, he wasn't telling me that the 2005 second-gen iPod Nano in this color wasn't popular in some country.
01:48:33 ◼ ► But he just said, like, you know, we'll find out that, like, you know, a certain product in yellow doesn't sell in Germany.
01:48:39 ◼ ► But the green one just sells – you know, we have to quick redirect product there because everybody in Germany is buying green, and we don't know why.
01:48:47 ◼ ► And, you know, and that it varies culturally and country by country, but that Apple doesn't know.
01:49:14 ◼ ► But otherwise, you've got kind of these three, I'm going to guess, versions of silver, right?
01:49:24 ◼ ► Yeah, I was told, in fact, by somebody at Apple that Starlight is literally just silver with a yellow undertone.
01:49:44 ◼ ► And so, you know, it's just – I feel like this is a missed opportunity I would like them to take.
01:49:49 ◼ ► And honestly, as somebody who just bought a MacBook Pro, an M4 Max MacBook Pro in black that I'm not going to be replacing anytime soon, part of me is really relieved that they didn't make a bright colored MacBook Air now after I'm off of the MacBook Air.
01:50:11 ◼ ► Yeah, but it really does remind me, you know, like with a lot of the modern LED lights that are smart lights where you can smart adjust the color temperature.
01:50:18 ◼ ► You know, you get like an app or something and you can make a light, the same light, same room, a little warmer, a little cooler.
01:50:28 ◼ ► It's like – it's not really that you got a – not that you got a different colored laptop but that somebody – hey, did somebody screw with the light and make it a little cooler?
01:50:35 ◼ ► I mean, that definitely happened to me with – I forget what product it was but Apple sent me a product a little while ago, a couple years ago.
01:50:42 ◼ ► And I remember taking it out of the box and not knowing whether – I didn't know what color I had gotten.
01:50:48 ◼ ► It was probably one of those iPhones that was super light, one of those super light iPhones.
01:51:04 ◼ ► Because they say in the email – and like that's my fear with the MacBook Air is that it's going to be like that.
01:51:26 ◼ ► And just to close it off, just say if there's a little bit of a worrisome sign like a canary in a coal mine, it's that to me it's a sign that maybe the company is getting a little too cautious and that they're only picking colors that nobody is going to hate.
01:51:43 ◼ ► I mean, how could anybody have a really strong opinion about regular silver versus the old space gray?
01:51:53 ◼ ► That totally happened to me with, I got a space gray something and I was like, is this space gray or is this silver?
01:52:03 ◼ ► But out of context, it's just another silver laptop, like slightly darker silver laptop.
01:52:08 ◼ ► Yeah, I, so that's my little, I'll close it off with that is it's a little worrisome that they're afraid of using a color that they know some people might love, but that others are going to say that's horrible.
01:52:17 ◼ ► You know, so they just, just limit themselves to unobjectionable colors, but by limiting themselves to unobjectionable colors, they don't have anything that really makes somebody's heart sing and be like, yeah, I'm getting the crazy orange one.
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01:54:06 ◼ ► Since I was in my hotel room, and you were in your office in Philadelphia, and they come to the Mac Studio, and they're like, yeah, so M4 Mac Studio.
01:54:20 ◼ ► And I'm like, and M3 Ultra Mac Studio, which you said, I think on Darren Fireball, that you're like, you made a mistake.
01:54:42 ◼ ► They strongly gave us the impression, again, not trying to do the quote attribution kind of thing that Apple doesn't love, but I was given the strong suggestion.
01:54:52 ◼ ► I asked about it, that making it Thunderbolt 5 and having this kind of whole process to create an M3 Ultra that was more powerful in a lot of ways than the M3 Max required engineering and certification that meant that the M3 Ultra came later.
01:55:16 ◼ ► And that it is, in some ways, they're never going to call it this, but reading between the lines, it's kind of like M3 and a half.
01:55:24 ◼ ► Like, there are things in this M3 Ultra that are not in the M3 Max chips because they spent more time on it.
01:55:32 ◼ ► So it's, you know, they can't call it an M4 Ultra, but it's also more than just an M3 Max.
01:55:43 ◼ ► And as you said, you and Ben talked about it on Dithering, having all that RAM, that enormous amount of RAM available to, as, as pooled RAM, so it can be run by the GPUs, means that you could buy one of these things and run some pretty big LLMs, like right on it, which is also very impressive.
01:56:04 ◼ ► I mean, I mentioned it earlier that it, you know, and it's why NVIDIA, which makes the best graphic cards, you know, these super crazy expensive ones that go into data centers and that the big companies are all fighting to get in line to pay tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars to NVIDIA to buy enough of them to fill a data center with.
01:56:26 ◼ ► I mean, it's, it's super compelling, but that NVIDIA at their big showcase, I guess it was at CES in January, came out with a sort of Mac Studio, Mac mini-ish box that people can, you know, and it does look interesting for running AI at home, but this is a better machine for that.
01:56:47 ◼ ► Like, so, you know, you can, I think it's undeniable, just as undeniable that if you're really looking to build out a world-class price tag in the billions of dollars data center to execute AI in the cloud, you're, you, you cannot beat NVIDIA's high-end chips.
01:57:09 ◼ ► They're the ones that everybody was blown away that DeepSeek's R1 could perform so well by not having access to them for the training and using the lower end.
01:57:24 ◼ ► You cannot beat this M3 Ultra Studio and that the, it's one of those things, it's just like webcams, like getting ahead of webcams and just saying, we want to put the best possible webcam in a consumer product in 2019.
01:57:38 ◼ ► Then all of a sudden you have this product ready for 2020 when all of a sudden everybody's locked in and has to work at home and it's like, well, you've already got a great webcam because you built this great thing.
01:57:49 ◼ ► The unified memory architecture of Apple Silicon is very unique and it's, it, it, it sounds conceptually simple, like, oh, the CPU and GPU share the same RAM, but it's very different.
01:58:05 ◼ ► Like when you buy a, you know, like a gaming PC card from NVIDIA, it's like 16 gigabytes of RAM or something like that just for the video card.
01:58:16 ◼ ► Like, and I guess you can buy one with more, but you're talking about that level of RAM.
01:58:28 ◼ ► And it's not just like in the Intel days, having a Mac with 512 gigabytes of RAM that the CPU can address.
01:58:37 ◼ ► So if you're doing AI stuff that's running on the GPU, everything except like the 8 gigabytes that the OS itself is using is all addressable by the GPU.
01:58:49 ◼ ► I think in hindsight, now that we've learned more a week later, it's like, oh, it kind of makes sense.
01:58:55 ◼ ► Yeah, and they said it won't necessarily have, there won't necessarily be an Ultra in every generation.
01:59:01 ◼ ► I saw that reported in a lot of places as there won't be an Ultra in every generation, but that's not what they said.
01:59:07 ◼ ► They said they won't necessarily, it's in my notes, I looked it up, be, and it's interesting though, right?
01:59:16 ◼ ► And so while there is some confusion because it's M4 Max or M3 Ultra, it is one of those things.
01:59:23 ◼ ► I think Apple probably got to the point where the M3 Ultra was taking longer because they wanted to add these other features to it.
01:59:31 ◼ ► And then they looked at the Mac Studio and said, well, do we really want to update it to M3 Max and M3 Ultra now?
01:59:51 ◼ ► And then M3 Ultra is there for the ultra high end where they said in our briefing, like, it's a great, like, clause that they add in.
02:00:01 ◼ ► It's just like, in workflows that take advantage of all the CPUs and GPUs and memory bandwidth of the M3 Ultra, it can be up to, I forget what they said, four times as fast as the M4 Max.
02:00:21 ◼ ► But its push to the limit is faster than the M4 Max, even though it's M3 versus M4, because Ultra is a different beast on a different scale than Max is.
02:00:38 ◼ ► I think it was on the talk show with Craig Hockenberry, which came out over the weekend.
02:00:42 ◼ ► But I'll repeat it here, where I sort of think maybe the Ultra chips, and if they ever come out with anything more than an Ultra, an Extreme or whatever, maybe should have gotten a different letter.
02:01:08 ◼ ► A good one, a Pro one, and then a Max one where it's way more expensive, and it goes up to, now it goes up to, I think, 128 gigabytes of RAM, and it has more cores, and blah, blah, blah.
02:01:19 ◼ ► But if your workflow is a general Mac stuff, those are your options, good, better, best.
02:01:30 ◼ ► You need something different, and maybe it should be like the P chip or the X chip or give, I don't know which letters they still have available, but a different letter so that you're not comparing it like to the other M3s.
02:01:52 ◼ ► In some sense, the M4 is a sibling or a family member, a cousin to the A18 and A18 Pro.
02:02:25 ◼ ► And I think personally, I got way too into, way too attached to the layperson explanation that an Ultra is two Macs stuck together and that sticking them together is easy.
02:02:43 ◼ ► I know it wasn't easy, but that conceptually, it's such a neat, clean, easy way to think about it.
02:02:48 ◼ ► And you think, oh, and then somebody just goes into whatever CAD program chip engineers use in Johnny Surugi's team and just connects two M whatever maxes together, draws a bunch of connectors that stick them together, figure out how to dissipate the heat, and you're done.
02:03:06 ◼ ► I know Marco Arment talked about it on the most recent ATP, and I think it's a really good example that Intel's Xeon chips were always sort of like this, too.
02:03:15 ◼ ► And it's so much harder with Intel's naming schemes, which have only gotten more complicated over time, where they don't have this neat M3, M3 Pro, M3 Max, now M3 Ultra.
02:03:33 ◼ ► But the Xeons were always sort of, you know, 12 or 18 months behind whatever core beginning point they started to process, right?
02:03:46 ◼ ► So like the iMac Pro in the Intel era came with Xeon class chips, and it was way more performant for multi-core.
02:03:54 ◼ ► They were, you know, better in so many ways, better, capable of addressing way more RAM and et cetera, et cetera.
02:04:03 ◼ ► But if you just ran a simple single core JavaScript benchmark, they were going to lose to like a, yeah, they were going to lose.
02:04:11 ◼ ► You know, like, so it's very possible that like a $20,000, almost certain, I think, that a $20,000 or whatever the max config of an M3 Ultra Max Studio is, that if you just go run a JavaScript speed mark benchmark in your browser, it'll lose to an iPad with an M4 chip from last May on single core JavaScript performance.
02:05:08 ◼ ► And the Pro chip felt more like it didn't get that boost, that it had more in common with the base M3 that was souped up than the high end was sort of spreading.
02:05:27 ◼ ► And that as the generations come, they are optimizing and also varying them a little bit more.
02:05:33 ◼ ► And I think this is a great example because the, and I, just to be clear here, the M3 Ultra supports Thunderbolt 5.
02:05:51 ◼ ► Only the M4 generation of chips support Thunderbolt 5, except for the M3 Ultra, which also supports Thunderbolt 5.
02:06:05 ◼ ► I mean, obviously enough of the attributes are the same for Apple to put it in that generation.
02:06:21 ◼ ► And I remember I have it in, I don't have that notebook with me, but I remember you calling it out.
02:06:44 ◼ ► The other one that Apple called out in our briefing that definitely caught my mind, I'm sure it did yours, too, is the M3 Max maxes out at 128 gigabytes of RAM.
02:07:05 ◼ ► And the original Ultras, like the M1 Ultra and the M2 Ultra, I think their RAM cap was just double the max.
02:07:15 ◼ ► And again, I think that doubling, well, double the maximum RAM, double the maximum memory throughput, double this, double that, because it's too stuck together.
02:07:50 ◼ ► And, you know, if you really need Thunderbolt 5, or you could make use of Thunderbolt 5, it really makes a difference.
02:08:16 ◼ ► And they said in our briefing that there was a certification issue and getting it up and running and working with Thunderbolt 5.
02:08:25 ◼ ► But, like, I think it was, despite the vagueness, I think it was pretty clear that, like, they put more into it.
02:08:34 ◼ ► It's like this is not running a photocopier on that other chip and sticking them together.
02:08:43 ◼ ► And, I mean, I'm sure in single core performance, the M4 Max beats the M3 Ultra, right?
02:09:00 ◼ ► I think the memory bandwidth is faster on the M4, but you have less memory attachable because of what they did to M3 Ultra.
02:09:24 ◼ ► And you look at the fact that they could have, I would say, easily updated the Mac Pro at the same time with the M3 Ultra because the Mac Pro is the M2 Ultra and they didn't.
02:09:46 ◼ ► I think there's, whether it's an extreme, whether it's that they're not doing Ultra for M4 because they're doing something else, whether they call it M4 or they give it a different name or whatever.
02:09:59 ◼ ► Maybe that they just are leaving the Mac Pro out on a nice flow to throw it away and we'll never speak of it again.
02:10:06 ◼ ► But, I don't know, it feels to me like if all they cared about was making the Mac Pro a slot duplicate of the Mac Studio, they would have updated it last week and they didn't.
02:10:17 ◼ ► So, I think when they're saying not necessarily every generation will have an Ultra, I choose to read that as possibly the next generation doesn't have an Ultra because it's got a different thing.
02:10:31 ◼ ► Yeah, or, you know, like maybe, I don't know, maybe this is exactly what you're thinking, like maybe come WWDC, I mean, maybe we go through the end of 2025 and there's no update to the Mac Pro.
02:10:53 ◼ ► It makes me think maybe the story, this would make some sense to me, like the way that the studio encompasses both a Max chip and an Ultra chip.
02:11:06 ◼ ► And now they're not on the same process generation, but still there's a Max tier and then an Ultra tier.
02:11:12 ◼ ► Maybe the Mac Pro goes to, instead of only having Ultra, having two tiers, Ultra and Extreme.
02:11:20 ◼ ► And it would be, it would be, if it's this year, it would be an M3 Extreme, not an M4 Extreme.
02:11:26 ◼ ► Or it's an M3 Ultra or an M4 Extreme, and the M4 Extreme is this completely wild thing that they built.
02:11:31 ◼ ► Because my thought there is that maybe every chip generation, they are going to reserve one slot for the wacky high-end chip.
02:12:03 ◼ ► I like the idea that it would be like there would be the base model, which costs, I don't even know, what does the Mac Pro cost?
02:12:29 ◼ ► But like, you know, workstations was like the name we had in the 80s and 90s for very, you know, the Silicon Graphics only made workstations.
02:12:38 ◼ ► Sun Microsystems, they made servers too, but they made workstations that cost $20,000 to start with.
02:13:09 ◼ ► I'm just going to spitball, but I think to start and, you know, you could go from there and that's $1990, you know?
02:13:15 ◼ ► So like a $50,000, $60,000 Mac Pro config with this hypothetical M3 Extreme, yeah, you're not going to buy it.
02:13:33 ◼ ► But yeah, like imagine it was a $10,000 or $12,000 or $15,000 Mac Pro with some super incredible, amazing high-end chip in it that they know that some portion of their customer base is going to buy and they can assemble that in the U.S.
02:13:49 ◼ ► All of this, yeah, that would be a win too if you could, because it's so low quantity that it doesn't matter the efficiencies of scale.
02:13:57 ◼ ► But there are, there's always been a thirst for RAM and it turns, you know, it comes in new ways.
02:14:03 ◼ ► But this whole AI thing, everything, whatever you're doing with it, if you're running it locally or you're developing it or you're training or you're working on training or whatever, you cannot get enough RAM.
02:14:15 ◼ ► However much RAM you can actually address in whatever machine, whether it's in the cloud or whatever, you could use it and you need it.
02:14:26 ◼ ► And so if, like, a hypothetical M3 Extreme could go from a 512 gigabyte max, which is four times the max chips, to four times that, to two terabytes, that would be something that people, some companies, like engineers at OpenAI or whatever, would already start buying before they told them the price.
02:14:50 ◼ ► If I can have a machine with that much RAM addressable by the GPU on my desktop, I'll make that money back for the company, you know, in the first month of my work.
02:15:00 ◼ ► Now, if you're just doing video editing and exporting 4K or 8K video, you don't need two terabytes of RAM.
02:15:23 ◼ ► It would be super lame if come WWDC, or just an announcement in May, I don't know, just like a PR announcement, that, oh, and now here's the Mac Pro, and it also has the M3 Ultra.
02:15:49 ◼ ► Well, I think there might be something, I just go back to the timeline there, where if, you know, they seem to be on a very, they've gotten an annual schedule down.
02:15:57 ◼ ► They've had the 12-month schedule down for A-series chips, ever since they first named the one the A4.
02:16:12 ◼ ► Like, now it seems like every single October, we're going to get MacBook Pros updated with the Pro and the Max chips.
02:16:20 ◼ ► And every March or April, or maybe late February, but, you know, sometime around March, there will be a new MacBook Air lineup with the new integer behind the M.
02:16:34 ◼ ► And maybe, long story short, it's an 18-month cycle for ultras and ultra plus or whatever you want to call it.
02:16:43 ◼ ► And so if they know that it's sort of going to be an 18-month cycle, it makes sense to skip every other year.
02:16:50 ◼ ► Maybe only the odd number of years get them, you know, or odd generations of M-series, right?
02:16:59 ◼ ► And this is where Apple's doesn't talk about the future bites them, because nobody knew to expect this.
02:17:05 ◼ ► And if they would have just said two years ago, you know, when the M3 Maxes, or, yeah, when the M3 Maxes came out, that ultra chips take us longer to develop than Max chips, that would have told us, oh, there might be one coming.
02:17:19 ◼ ► In fact, in the future, we will, I think, keep referencing that one statement, that not every generation necessarily will have an ultra chip.
02:17:30 ◼ ► No quoting, not for attribution, but, you know, we've got them making that statement for once.
02:17:37 ◼ ► Because if there is an M4 Ultra, and then there is an M5 Ultra, we'll still be thinking two or three years from now, well, is M6 the generation they're going to skip?
02:17:51 ◼ ► Before we go, because we have gone long, which is an unsurprising short show this week, short show, I just want to at least mention that there were also new iPads announced.
02:18:07 ◼ ► I think most interesting thing here, as is often true with the iPad, is the accessory story, where they decided to do a new version of the Magic, the new Magic keyboard, rather than continuing to sell the old Magic keyboard, the original Magic keyboard for the iPad Air.
02:18:24 ◼ ► It now gets something that's like the new iPad Pro Magic keyboard, a little bit cheaper, although not a lot, and only comes in white.
02:18:30 ◼ ► But it's the one with the function row, and the little metallic hinge, and all of those things that are the, you know, kind of the upgrades that happened.
02:18:44 ◼ ► And it's like a kind of a slightly cheaper version of the Magic keyboard, and it will work with the previous Airs as well, because it's basically, it seems like a drop-in replacement for the old Magic keyboard for products that are exactly the right size to fit it, which is kind of wild.
02:19:04 ◼ ► But, you know, and then they updated the base model iPad, and I think the only interesting story there is that they chose to draw the line very specifically about what gets Apple intelligence.
02:19:15 ◼ ► I think we all thought maybe every new Apple hardware, you know, in a core category from now on would support Apple intelligence.
02:19:20 ◼ ► And the answer, now we can see that the cheap iPad, the price matters more than the specs, that they need to keep it down, and so it does not have Apple intelligence support at all.
02:19:31 ◼ ► Yeah, and I think it kind of makes sense, you know, again, you don't need any kind of sources in the company, but I think if you just sort of study the prices and the products, you can kind of see it by looking at the iPad mini, which did get the A17 Pro, and thus does.
02:20:10 ◼ ► I think that there's some competition in cheap tablets, and so they want to have a fairly cheap, good iPad at that price, and they're willing to, you know, it's like we were talking about the Air hitting $999.
02:20:21 ◼ ► I think this is one of those cases where, like, getting, there is a price above which the base iPad can't go to the point where a couple of years ago they did a new iPad and they kept the old iPad around for a while because they couldn't hit that price yet, and they couldn't not have an iPad at that lower price.
02:20:39 ◼ ► And I think that this is a case, unlike our discussion about colors of MacBook Airs and how well would a very vibrant color or two sell, where Apple itself doesn't know, I think they know very, very much how many people, they obviously know how many people are buying them.
02:20:56 ◼ ► But I think they know just how important the price is to those people, and that it's not like if they drop this product from the lineup, they'd all upgrade to iPad Airs.
02:21:09 ◼ ► Or, like, let's say instead of selling this iPad at $349, I think is the opening price, am I correct?
02:21:17 ◼ ► You know, if they still sold the M2 iPad Air at $100 less at $499 or something like that, that's $150 more.
02:21:30 ◼ ► That's a lot more, and I think they know that, you know, they don't make a Mac at this tier.
02:21:35 ◼ ► They don't make a – maybe that Walmart M1 MacBook is sort of that Mac, but they keep that very quiet.
02:21:59 ◼ ► They don't make – and that's kind of weird when you think about it because an iPad is a lot bigger.
02:22:07 ◼ ► It's a lot bigger than an iPhone, but it's a lot cheaper because it just has a lot less stuff, you know.
02:22:17 ◼ ► But there's a market for iPads for, like, you know, whether it's schools, whether it's kids, you know, parents buying it.
02:22:26 ◼ ► You know, speak in a parent corner, you know, talking about, you know, buying something for, like, a three- or four-year-old.
02:22:35 ◼ ► You know, places where iPads get used in business and they're like, we're going to buy a whole fleet of these, but all we need is somebody to poke at an inventory app and, you know, we don't need anything else.
02:22:55 ◼ ► And I think that that's one of the reasons that this product exists is because, yeah, you can get a cheap media tablet that's going to be way cheaper than an iPad.
02:23:10 ◼ ► And, you know, the larger you allow that gap to be, if you're Apple, the more risk you take that you're losing those sales.
02:23:21 ◼ ► They're going to be lost to whoever, to Amazon or, you know, some Android tablet manufacturer.
02:23:28 ◼ ► So you give them a price that is, and I'm sure there's somebody who's a large portion of their job is doing their research to find the price sensitivity so that they hit the right price point with the base iPad.
02:23:39 ◼ ► Me and you and the listeners of Upgrade and the talk show, we use iPads as iPads and we get apps and we do iPad type things.
02:23:47 ◼ ► And the things that when Apple talks about the iPad at WWDC, we're like, oh, yeah, I would use that or that's not really up my alley or look at the new pencil, what it does.
02:23:56 ◼ ► But the iPad has all these roles where it's like I just need like a component, like a touchscreen computer type thing that can run some software.
02:24:31 ◼ ► So it's easy because we've got these things there and that makes it worth the extra money than a super cheap tablet.
02:24:36 ◼ ► But I'm not going to spend more on this thing because it's just going to get beat up by a kid.
02:24:44 ◼ ► And so the miss on Apple intelligence on this, it's like for that market, it's like, I mean, it would be nice.
02:24:58 ◼ ► I just find it instructive in terms of seeing their priorities laid bare, which is what matters more to you, Apple intelligence or hitting that price?
02:25:06 ◼ ► And the answer is they're not willing to give back margin or raise the price on that product.
02:25:24 ◼ ► And I, my guess is that base model iPad has some pretty among Apple products, probably tighter margins than usual.
02:25:30 ◼ ► And then if you were to upgrade that spec a little bit too much, it doesn't, you know, again, not that they would sell it for a loss, but it would be like not, there is, I'm sure, a percentage inside Apple below which they will not go for, for margin on anything.
02:26:02 ◼ ► Uh, we'll, uh, of course, if you're an upgrade plus member, you'll be able to hear us talk a little bit more.
02:26:07 ◼ ► I think we're going to talk about James Bond a little bit and upgrade plus, um, no upgrade, no ask upgrade this week, but, um, it will return at some point when it's not quite as short a show as this was upgradefeedback.com to send in messages.
02:26:29 ◼ ► Upgrade plus, if you want to get Mike something for his, uh, having a baby become a member, uh, we're on YouTube search for upgrade podcast.
02:26:36 ◼ ► Uh, thanks again to our sponsors this time, vital age, Google Gemini turbulence forecast and Oracle, John Gruber.
02:26:45 ◼ ► I always, uh, always a pleasure to have you over here, just as it's always an honor to be on the talk show.