00:00:06 ◼ ► I have one specific problem that I'd like to discuss. So I have what I've always called,
00:00:12 ◼ ► and I know it's not an official name by any capacity, an AirPods Pro Mark II. So what I
00:00:16 ◼ ► mean by that is there were the AirPods Pro and then there was the second iteration of the AirPods Pro
00:00:23 ◼ ► where it's still a lightning charging case, but it got like the buds themselves got a lot more
00:00:30 ◼ ► That's the AirPods Pro 2, but the 2s, they had like a quiet like 2.1 version, or I guess
00:00:37 ◼ ► maybe they called it like 2.0 in OpenAI notification. So the AirPods Pro 2 have had two versions,
00:00:46 ◼ ► the lightning port case version and then the USB-C case version. You can't just buy a USB-C case for
00:00:53 ◼ ► the lightning port version because it's actually like a slightly different hardware revision and
00:00:57 ◼ ► USB-C version, which is still called AirPods Pro 2, but as the USB-C case, that version has that
00:01:06 ◼ ► Yes, yes. I know exactly what you're talking about. So I have had these AirPods Pro Mark II. I know that again,
00:01:12 ◼ ► not the right name, but I'm just gonna call it that because that's what I think of it as.
00:01:14 ◼ ► Well, wait, well, which one do you have? Do you have the first revision of the 2s or the second?
00:01:20 ◼ ► So they're called AirPods Pro 2, the first ones. I don't know why you want to put Mark in there.
00:01:26 ◼ ► Because I drive a Volkswagen. That's how we talk. Anyways, so my AirPods Pro Mark II, I've had them
00:01:32 ◼ ► for a year or two. I forget exactly when I got them. I believe it was a Christmas gift a couple of years
00:01:36 ◼ ► ago now. I think it doesn't really matter, but I've had them long enough that it's not entirely
00:01:43 ◼ ► The buds themselves still work great. The battery is still lasting sufficiently long for my needs.
00:01:51 ◼ ► I am going to be traveling this week, so maybe I'd change my tune if I have them in for like four or
00:01:56 ◼ ► five hours at a time, which is very unusual for me. But generally speaking, in day-to-day stuff,
00:02:00 ◼ ► the batteries are great. No worries. However, I'm having the first-worldiest of first-world problems.
00:02:05 ◼ ► The charging case doesn't seem to want to Qi charge anymore, which is okay, but it gets worse
00:02:13 ◼ ► because remember what I just told you? It is what kind of charging case, gentlemen? A lightning
00:02:17 ◼ ► charging case. Oh no, I'd replace them. Well, so here's the thing. I concur with your assessment.
00:02:24 ◼ ► However, we keep getting these rumblings that there's going to be a Mark III. I know not the right
00:02:29 ◼ ► term. Mark III coming soon. It's going to come any day now. It's happening. It's happening. And so I feel
00:02:34 ◼ ► like, is now really the right time to do this? I don't know what to do. So we'll see how grumpy
00:02:39 ◼ ► I get while I'm traveling over hooking up the lightning cable, which I can already tell you,
00:02:43 ◼ ► I'm getting pretty grumpy about it. And maybe I'll just like insta-buy some while I'm on my trip or
00:02:47 ◼ ► whatever. You're going to be more upset about missing out on when the threes come out because
00:02:51 ◼ ► then just plug them in. Plug them in for a few months. You'll be fine. People plugged in their
00:02:55 ◼ ► iPod cases for years and we all survived. It was terrible, John. It was terrible, I tells you.
00:03:06 ◼ ► The funny thing is, is that it does occasionally work. So I don't know what the problem is. I did
00:03:12 ◼ ► try, I looked up like a KBase or whatever about it. And one of the things they said was like disown
00:03:18 ◼ ► it from the iOS side, you know, disconnect and forget it from the iOS side and then mash down
00:03:23 ◼ ► on the button on the back for something like 10 seconds or whatever. And that'll effectively
00:03:26 ◼ ► clear them out and set them up as new, which I did assuming it would not make a difference.
00:03:32 ◼ ► And it made no difference. So, uh, every great, like one out of every 10 times it will charge via
00:03:39 ◼ ► Qi, but it generally doesn't. And I am unreasonably annoyed by it. And my brain knows that John,
00:03:51 ◼ ► your heart's going to be sad when the threes come out anyway, unless you're planning, unless
00:03:54 ◼ ► you're signing up now to also buy the threes when they come out, you're going to feel so much worse
00:03:58 ◼ ► when the threes come out and you're like, Oh, I can't get them. Cause I just bought new twos.
00:04:01 ◼ ► You are right. You are right. You can just get the case replaced. Isn't that like 80 bucks or
00:04:05 ◼ ► something? That'll satisfy your need to buy something. I don't have a need to buy something.
00:04:09 ◼ ► That seems like you do stuff to work. Uh, yeah, yeah. As, as a quick aside, um, I think we talked
00:04:15 ◼ ► on that. I believe we talked on the show that I've discovered that, um, that electric cars,
00:04:19 ◼ ► the market for electric cars here in America is kind of bottoming out right now. And, um, and I've
00:04:25 ◼ ► noticed that the really unaffordable Porsche Taycan or whatever you call it, the electric Porsche,
00:04:31 ◼ ► um, that is almost affordable when it's bought used. Here it goes. This is how it begins.
00:04:37 ◼ ► Speaking of having a need to spend money. I don't need to spend money on a stupid car. My car has
00:04:43 ◼ ► under 30,000 miles on it and I've had it for eight years. It, it gets driven at least every other day,
00:04:49 ◼ ► but I go nowhere. So I have no reason to get rid of my car. I love my car. I don't want to lose the
00:04:56 ◼ ► third pedal. And yet I see that the electric life is kind of calling my name. And I can feel,
00:05:03 ◼ ► I feel like there's, I, I, I see this with other people. I can't remember. There was some podcaster
00:05:08 ◼ ► that was going through the same thing. And I was like, Oh, I know exactly what this feels like.
00:05:11 ◼ ► But, um, anyways, I can feel like my subconscious trying to like convince my conscious brain that,
00:05:18 ◼ ► Oh, it's time. It's not. And it's not, this is a terrible decision. I know intellectually,
00:05:23 ◼ ► it's a terrible time, but our country is crumbling and I'm like, Oh yes, I'm going to buy an electric
00:05:27 ◼ ► Porsche cause I'm a jerk. Uh, it's just such a terrible decision. And yet I can't help myself.
00:05:32 ◼ ► I'll try to talk you out of this last episode. I don't forget if it made it to the air or not,
00:05:35 ◼ ► but I'll, I'll try again. The reason they're cheap is because the second revision and the Mark two,
00:05:40 ◼ ► as you would call it, that car came out and it's so much better. That's why you can find the quote
00:05:44 ◼ ► unquote Mark ones for less money. Cause nobody wants them. Don't buy it. I know you're right.
00:05:52 ◼ ► No, I, Oh God, I cannot afford, no matter how many shirts we hawk, which we will be doing momentarily,
00:05:57 ◼ ► I cannot afford a new Tycon Tycan. I'm so sorry. I really should figure out how to pronounce that.
00:06:06 ◼ ► You should get some kind of like more normal electric car, like a W I three based on your
00:06:12 ◼ ► driving habits, maybe an I four. Now I don't know. I don't think I can do another BMW. Not only do I
00:06:18 ◼ ► don't, I don't think I can do another BMW and leaving me out of it. I'm pretty sure the historical
00:06:23 ◼ ► commission will 100% veto any future BMW. There's a prayer since it's electric and hypothetically
00:06:30 ◼ ► much less to go wrong. But, um, yeah, I don't, I think she would poop all over that idea.
00:06:35 ◼ ► You know, like, uh, I know you've soured on BMW for a bunch of good reasons, but, uh, Porsche
00:06:43 ◼ ► Don't ruin my moment. It's not, you're not saying I want to stay away from those expensive cars
00:06:47 ◼ ► like BMW. Hmm. Porsche. Uh, it's so true. So when you said, you know, I have a need to spend
00:06:56 ◼ ► money, I don't have a need to spend money on an AirPods case. I am, I can feel within me the need
00:07:01 ◼ ► to spend money on a stupid car growing and I need, I need John. I need you to convince me not to,
00:07:06 ◼ ► because you're the voice of reason. We all know Marcos didn't say just do it, but you're the voice
00:07:10 ◼ ► of reason. You need to tell me not to, because I know you're right. Intellectually. I know you're
00:07:14 ◼ ► right. I already do. I already did. I told you like, this is not the time to buy that particular
00:07:17 ◼ ► car. You just need to wait and you need to save a lot more money based on your apparent
00:07:27 ◼ ► fund and put money into it for like five years. That won't be enough, but I hear you. Here's
00:07:32 ◼ ► the thing too. Like you already have like the big family car and what, what you've described
00:07:37 ◼ ► is that your, the role of your car is shorter range and not usually hauling everybody around.
00:07:45 ◼ ► Correct. So you shouldn't have a giant Porsche. Like, you know, ideally you would get like,
00:07:51 ◼ ► you know, something reasonable. Like, you know, I'm a big fan of the Ionic five, at least the
00:07:55 ◼ ► way it looks. I've never actually been in one. Um, there's all sorts of like reasonable,
00:07:59 ◼ ► like small ish EVs that are not that much money. Um, and honestly, again, I, I, I can say from like
00:08:07 ◼ ► what I said last episode and before, like BMW's EV drivetrain is awesome and very mature. And so I,
00:08:15 ◼ ► I think you should maybe look at an I4 if you're itching to buy a car. Um, the problems that you had
00:08:20 ◼ ► with BMW were largely because you had a, uh, one of the higher end engines in the engine time.
00:08:29 ◼ ► Um, and it was out of warranty. And so there are ways you can avoid this. You can get one
00:08:35 ◼ ► in warranty. You can get one that doesn't have an engine. Uh, you know, there's, there's ways to do
00:08:40 ◼ ► this that would be, you know, less of a risky experience and would, would limit your, uh, you know,
00:08:47 ◼ ► potential costs. Like there's ways you can do that. Uh, so I wouldn't, and certainly as John said,
00:08:52 ◼ ► like, I'm not going to like, I wouldn't recommend that you, you know, in fleeing BMW for reliability
00:08:57 ◼ ► concerns, go over to Porsche. Forget. Oh, no, it's a reliability thing. It's just the maintenance costs
00:09:01 ◼ ► and the parts. Parts and maintenance are just so expensive for those brands. Like you, you stare at
00:09:05 ◼ ► the dealership for two seconds, hundreds of dollars fly out of your wallet. Like everything is expensive.
00:09:09 ◼ ► I mean, the reason, no, no joke, no snark, no exaggeration. The reason I got rid of the BMW was
00:09:14 ◼ ► because it was going to the dealer every month, every other month, something like that. And every
00:09:19 ◼ ► time it entered the dealer's parking lot, it didn't leave without me being at least a thousand dollars
00:09:24 ◼ ► poor. And that's not exaggeration. It was literally a thousand dollars every single time, sometimes many
00:09:29 ◼ ► thousands of dollars. It was bananas. It's absolutely a terrible idea to get a Porsche leaving aside the
00:09:35 ◼ ► fact that I really can't afford it. I just, it's like just barely outside of what I consider to be
00:09:40 ◼ ► reasonable. And so I feel like I can afford it, even though I really can't. Um, but no, Marco, you're
00:09:45 ◼ ► right. You're both right. The Ionic five. I, I think I would maybe go a different route, like one of the, um,
00:09:51 ◼ ► other cars that's, that shares the same platform, but we're saying the same basic thing. Uh, the, the on Ionic
00:09:57 ◼ ► five is great for my needs. And this is what you were talking about a minute ago, Marco, for my needs, what I
00:10:02 ◼ ► really want, or excuse me, what I really need is a Chevy Bolt, which is what my parents have. And it's
00:10:07 ◼ ► not a particularly pretty car and it's not a particularly luxurious car, but it is the perfect
00:10:14 ◼ ► car for the sorts of driving I do. But because I'm a car guy, I don't really want one. So I'm just going
00:10:21 ◼ ► to continue to drive my, uh, Dino juice mobile until it falls apart. And when that happens, go test drive
00:10:26 ◼ ► an I-4. No, you should, you should, at this point, you should keep driving your current car until it
00:10:30 ◼ ► gets old enough that you won't mind teaching your son to drive on it and then he'll crash it and then
00:10:35 ◼ ► you'll get a new car. Here's the thing. If you think that I need a new car, which I don't, and I
00:10:42 ◼ ► should get an expensive car, which I shouldn't, then one thing you can do to help that process is go to
00:10:46 ◼ ► atp.fm slash store. This is such a great job. I am an expert and a professional. So here's the
00:10:52 ◼ ► thing. The ATP store is back and it is back until Monday, April 28. And this is the second episode.
00:10:59 ◼ ► We've talked about it. So now I get to do my little speech. Here's the thing. Every single time we do a
00:11:04 ◼ ► time-limited sale like this, every single time, there's at least one, usually three to five people
00:11:08 ◼ ► that reach out and say, Oh no, Oh no, I'm that guy. Or I'm that person. Really? I'm that person.
00:11:17 ◼ ► I've done it. I'm the one that missed it. I thought I would remember and I didn't. So if you're driving
00:11:23 ◼ ► your Porsche Taycan or if you're driving your BMW i4, whatever you may be driving, then you should pull
00:11:29 ◼ ► over and go to atp.fm slash store. And John will walk through at least very quickly some of the wares
00:11:34 ◼ ► that we have on offer. And if you're walking, pull over to the side of the sidewalk or get out of the
00:11:39 ◼ ► way of the people that are still walking. Go to atp.fm slash store. John, what is up for grabs?
00:11:45 ◼ ► So this is a reminder of what we've got. The new shirts this time, we've got M3 Ultra shirts,
00:11:49 ◼ ► including our Joke M3 Ultra shirt. And that brings me to the most common question since we announced
00:11:54 ◼ ► the sale last episode. People are always asking about this, but then are asking even more now that
00:11:59 ◼ ► the store is up. They usually say something like, I just got a new Mac and it's got an M-whatever
00:12:04 ◼ ► processor in it. And when you were selling the shirts for the M-whatever processor, I didn't have this
00:12:09 ◼ ► Mac, but that Mac broke. And now I have this one and I want to get a shirt that matches my processor.
00:12:14 ◼ ► And I always tell those people, uh, buy the shirt for the chip that you want, not the chip that you
00:12:18 ◼ ► have, which is a, uh, homage to the, uh, uh, dress for the job you want, not the job you have, uh,
00:12:24 ◼ ► advice back when people used to dress up for work and like in the eighties and stuff. Anyway,
00:12:28 ◼ ► uh, that's what that is. Uh, the idea is that, you know, if you, you know, don't, yeah, you can buy a
00:12:33 ◼ ► shirt for the chip that matches whatever computer you have, but let's say you don't have an M3 Ultra,
00:12:38 ◼ ► which you probably shouldn't. You can still buy the shirt for it because it's Apple's most powerful,
00:12:42 ◼ ► uh, you know, chip that they make. Um, the, the reason I give this advice is because we don't sell
00:12:49 ◼ ► these M shirts forever. There is lots of chips and lots of variants. The usual way it works is
00:12:54 ◼ ► Apple announces the chip and puts it in a Mac. And then whatever the next sale we have, uh, is
00:13:00 ◼ ► whatever chips were announced in that period, we sell at that point. And we usually don't sell them
00:13:06 ◼ ► again. So if you've seen people like on YouTube or whatever, wearing like a beat up M1 Ultra shirt,
00:13:10 ◼ ► that's because we sold it when the M1 Ultra, like shortly after the M1 Ultra was released
00:13:14 ◼ ► or at least announced. And we haven't sold it since. So don't think you're going to be able to buy an M3
00:13:19 ◼ ► Ultra shirt three years from now, because you probably won't. Uh, I mean, I, so thus far we
00:13:23 ◼ ► haven't brought back, uh, especially like the, the fancy variants we do have in the on-demand store
00:13:28 ◼ ► in between sales. We sell like the M1, M2, M3, M4, but just the plain ones with no modifier.
00:13:32 ◼ ► And those are on-demand stuff. That's not for you. You're listening to the show. You shouldn't
00:13:35 ◼ ► buy it in the time limit of sale because the printing quality is much better on these ones
00:13:40 ◼ ► that, you know, we have to take the orders, then they print them, then they give them to you. And
00:13:43 ◼ ► that's it. The on-demand ones, they print as soon as you order them, but the printing quality is not
00:13:47 ◼ ► as good. So we sell them in between if you're desperate for a shirt in between, but really this is,
00:13:51 ◼ ► this is your time to shine if you're actually listening to the program. So if you think you might
00:14:03 ◼ ► well, what about the M4 Max? That's in the Mac studio too. Yeah, but it was in a bunch of computers
00:14:06 ◼ ► before and we already sold it. So yeah, we have no M4 Max, uh, or M4 Pro or any of those shirts
00:14:13 ◼ ► available. It's just M3 Ultra and the Joke M3 Ultra. So that's our system. It's not ideal for some
00:14:17 ◼ ► people who like, I didn't know I was going to buy a new computer and now I want the M shirt to match it.
00:14:21 ◼ ► The only solution obviously is to buy every M shirt and then whatever computer you buy,
00:14:25 ◼ ► you'll always, unless you bought an M2 Ultra, sorry about that. Uh, we never made that shirt.
00:14:29 ◼ ► Anyway, uh, we've got a Mac Pro Believe shirt, which is very important for certain disciples of
00:14:34 ◼ ► the Mac Pro. We are trying to, as the kids would say, manifest, uh, a decent Mac Pro. If not,
00:14:39 ◼ ► we'll just get a crappy Mac Pro with an M3 Ultra knit and we'll cry together. Uh, the Pro Max Triumph
00:14:43 ◼ ► shirt is back. Uh, very popular, uh, as we've sold it many times in the past, then it went on a long
00:14:48 ◼ ► break and now it's back and it's still very popular. So check that one out. We've got our performance
00:14:52 ◼ ► shirt and a bunch of colors and our usual MTV stuff and the mugs, which it seems like we're
00:14:56 ◼ ► going to have for the rest of our lives because no one is buying them. Oh well. Oh, and also a hat.
00:15:01 ◼ ► Anyway, that's the, that's the M chip situation. That's the store. This is the second show we're
00:15:06 ◼ ► talking about this week. There'll be one more show, which I believe we are also recording on
00:15:10 ◼ ► a Monday, one more show where we announced this and that's it. So don't think you can, as Casey
00:15:15 ◼ ► said that you're like, Oh, I'm sure they'll remind me out again. Yeah. We will remind you one
00:15:18 ◼ ► more time. This is your second to last warning. If you want anything from the store, get it now.
00:15:23 ◼ ► And especially if you actually are going to WWDC, please buy a Mac Pro Believe shirt and wear it to
00:15:27 ◼ ► WWDC and find John Ternus and make him look at your shirt until he gets it. Yes. Yes, please. Uh,
00:15:34 ◼ ► also John, one clarifying question for you. Are there chip designs on the back of any of these that
00:15:39 ◼ ► are being sold right now? No chips in the back of anything. Someday I may be inspired to do another
00:15:43 ◼ ► chip, but the M three ultra wasn't it. Good deal. All right. Well, let's do some followup and let's
00:15:48 ◼ ► start with, can we, can we just skip the tariff stuff? How? We wish we could skip it. We wish we
00:15:55 ◼ ► could all skip it. We wish we could skip this entire presidency, but unfortunately that's not the reality
00:15:59 ◼ ► we live in. Seems not. All right. So let's just dig in. Let me put on my big boy britches and let's just
00:16:04 ◼ ► talk about it. All right. So Trump has decided and just bear with me here. Trump has decided to exclude
00:16:08 ◼ ► smartphones, computers and chips from higher tariffs reading from the New York times on the 12th of
00:16:13 ◼ ► April. As we record this, it is two days later on the 14th. Uh, anyways, on the 12th, the New York
00:16:18 ◼ ► times wrote after more than a week of ratcheting up tariffs on products imported from China, the Trump
00:16:22 ◼ ► administration issued a rule late Friday that spared smartphones, computers, semiconductors, and other
00:16:26 ◼ ► electronics from some of the fees and a significant break for tech companies like Apple and Dell and
00:16:31 ◼ ► the prices of iPhones and other consumer electronics. A message posted late Friday by us customs and border
00:16:36 ◼ ► protection included a long list of products that would not face the tariffs. President Trump imposed
00:16:40 ◼ ► in recent days on Chinese goods as part of a worsening trade war. The exclusions would also
00:16:46 ◼ ► apply to modems, routers, flash drives, and other technology goods, which are largely not made in the
00:16:49 ◼ ► United States. The exemptions are not a full reprieve. Other tariffs will still apply to electronics and
00:16:54 ◼ ► smartphones. The electronic electronics exemptions apply to all countries, not just China. Still, any relief
00:17:00 ◼ ► for the electronics industry may be short-lived since the Trump administration is preparing
00:17:08 ◼ ► also apply to some downstream products like electronics, since many semiconductors come into
00:17:12 ◼ ► the United States inside other devices, a person familiar with matter said. I didn't realize you
00:17:16 ◼ ► needed a person familiar with matter to know that particular tidbit, but that's all right. These
00:17:20 ◼ ► investigations have previously resulted in additional tariffs. Again, this was this past Friday. We are
00:17:25 ◼ ► Tim Cook's butt-kissing has finally paid off. He gets another exemption. Apple is saved.
00:17:34 ◼ ► See, and that's the thing. Like, this is why, like, look, Tim Cook's obviously a smart guy. He knows how to
00:17:40 ◼ ► play the system. When you are the CEO of any major tech company today, and especially one as big and
00:17:47 ◼ ► important as Apple, the job of being a CEO at that level is somewhat technical, but it is largely
00:17:54 ◼ ► diplomatic. Tim Cook is basically serving as a diplomat between his massive company and countries
00:18:02 ◼ ► around the world, including our own country that he's in. This is the job. However, you know, obviously
00:18:09 ◼ ► we've had lots to say about how he's been doing that job and his other job over the course of the last
00:18:14 ◼ ► few years, but I think in this case, like, he is probably playing this game as best as he can,
00:18:21 ◼ ► given the circumstances that they're in, which are largely his fault. But people who try to play
00:18:28 ◼ ► with Trump always get burned. He probably knows that, but he also probably knows, like, at least he is,
00:18:35 ◼ ► like, able to talk to him sometimes. But Trump is not working on any kind of, like, you know,
00:18:41 ◼ ► long-term strategic level. He's impulsive, and he's a compulsive liar, and he doesn't really know what
00:18:47 ◼ ► he's doing. He basically governs by chaos. Tim Cook is doing the best he can to try to, like,
00:18:54 ◼ ► you know, have his foot at the table and get what he wants done. And by the way, this is not just about
00:18:58 ◼ ► tariffs. It's also about getting the government out of Apple's affairs and, you know, stop suing us,
00:19:02 ◼ ► stop regulating us, etc. Like, it's not all, you know, flowers over there. But this is what happens
00:19:09 ◼ ► with Trump. He turns against everyone. We are here yet again with more chaos. This is how Trump
00:19:18 ◼ ► After this announcement, one of the celebratory posts I saw someone make, which was, again,
00:19:25 ◼ ► short-lived, as we'll get to in a moment, was that Tim Cook's two primary, two, top two skills that
00:19:36 ◼ ► Yeah, because he's been dealing with China for, you know, for just decades, right? And so dealing
00:19:41 ◼ ► with China is a very similar situation where there's someone who is, you know, who is going
00:19:47 ◼ ► to do things that don't make sense to you, but you have to kind of kiss up to them, but you don't
00:19:50 ◼ ► really agree with them. And he's been doing that for years and years, which should have been his clue
00:19:54 ◼ ► to maybe hedge his bets against China. But we are where we are. Anyway, so he made his play for it,
00:20:34 ◼ ► This is not like a permanent sort of exemption, Lutnick told Karl, saying that they will be
00:20:45 ◼ ► When asked if the new tariffs will include products like iPhones, many of which are built
00:21:45 ◼ ► Like, if you let them talk, they either reveal that they have no idea how anything works,
00:23:10 ◼ ► Like, most economic policy actually does best when it's, especially at the large U.S. government level,
00:23:50 ◼ ► and to have them be erratic, and to have them be changing, like, every day, or every few days,
00:23:55 ◼ ► like, oh, now this, oh, now this, oh, there's going to be this exception, now that exception.
00:24:07 ◼ ► Because even, again, even if you, suppose you were going to build a factory in America because of this.
00:24:17 ◼ ► So, like, there's only, you only have a certain range that you even have to worry about this guy
00:24:23 ◼ ► And his range of, you know, his time range of power is probably even shorter than that.
00:24:44 ◼ ► If the environment is so unpredictable and chaotic, no one's going to make long-term investments.
00:24:52 ◼ ► Because they know that before too long, either he'll be out of office or he'll change his mind again.
00:24:58 ◼ ► So, this entire, the entire concept of this makes no sense, will not achieve what he wants,
00:25:06 ◼ ► and all it's doing is causing chaos in our country and the financial markets around the world, even.
00:25:25 ◼ ► up to and including the constant refrain that tariffs will increase prices and that other countries pay for them.
00:25:44 ◼ ► And I'll just add, as a reminder, that, like, the amount of years and money you would take to build iPhones in America
00:25:52 ◼ ► is double-digit years and a vast amount of money, and that's assuming anyone ever wanted to do it.
00:25:58 ◼ ► But certainly, they're not going to go down that path because we all just assume this is a temporary situation
00:26:23 ◼ ► But you had said a moment ago, John, that nobody really wants to build the iPhones here anyway.
00:26:28 ◼ ► And I think that that's important to note that I think you're – and maybe I'm out of touch.
00:26:34 ◼ ► But I feel like the average American that I know doesn't particularly want to be screwing in the same screw for 8 to 13 hours a day, you know, 5 days a week.
00:26:43 ◼ ► I think that most Americans I know would find that sort of work or labor to be below them.
00:26:49 ◼ ► And so, even if you could stand up the physical factory, and even if you could do that in a timely manner, which I don't think you really could, where are you going to find the people?
00:27:04 ◼ ► It's the skilled labor that does all the fancy machines that, you know, machine all the parts.
00:27:11 ◼ ► And there was – I think you might have seen one of my reposts on Mass Down or something.
00:27:14 ◼ ► Someone did a survey of – a recent survey, as in like a couple days ago, of Americans saying,
00:27:28 ◼ ► And then the second question was, would taking a job, manufacturing things in a factory be an improvement in your job situation?
00:27:47 ◼ ► I mean, and the thing is like because they're thinking of the factory job like, oh, I'm on a semi-line doing a boring thing.
00:27:53 ◼ ► But also, the other reason we can't do it is we don't have people with the skills and the smarts and the experience to do the complicated stuff.
00:28:00 ◼ ► All those CNC milling machines that carefully, you know, make all the little parts that go into the thing.
00:28:06 ◼ ► And then we don't have the supply chain of all the companies that make the screws, that go into the thing.
00:28:19 ◼ ► The only thing we have is the land to build the factories on and probably the power to power them.
00:28:36 ◼ ► And I've always thought that, like, you know, when something's wrong with, you know, your body, you go to some doctor about it.
00:28:43 ◼ ► You know, you go to, if you're, you know, something's wrong with your teeth, you go to a dentist.
00:29:06 ◼ ► Even if you don't think you, like, quote, need anything, you still go to your doctor once a year for, like, a checkup or a physical.
00:29:14 ◼ ► Now, traditional in-person therapy can cost hundreds of dollars per session, and this adds up fast.
00:29:43 ◼ ► With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, and it's convenient.
00:29:48 ◼ ► You can join a session with a click of a button so you can fit therapy into your busy life.
00:29:52 ◼ ► And if you're with a therapist that's not working out for you, you can switch therapists at any time, no problem.
00:30:15 ◼ ► All right, so we had an Ask ATP with regard to cross-platform photo management, and Kevin Militello writes,
00:30:40 ◼ ► Then BAPT writes, I would like to recommend Image App as a cross-platform photo syncing solution.
00:30:48 ◼ ► I have been, as you guys know, getting deeper and deeper into the self-hosted rabbit hole,
00:31:02 ◼ ► And I've not tried it myself, but I've heard many, many, many very, very good reviews of it.
00:31:11 ◼ ► It's open source and self-hosted, and its mission statement is basically to offer a Google Photos alternative.
00:31:19 ◼ ► but you do get to keep ownership of your library and pretty much guarantee that it will keep running forever.
00:31:25 ◼ ► The one big caveat is that it warns you pretty explicitly about is that it's still under heavy development,
00:31:44 ◼ ► Hey, you really want to have another copy of all your photos because bad things may happen.
00:31:51 ◼ ► Yeah, the self-hosted ones, I didn't recommend any of those just because it seemed like the person was saying,
00:32:08 ◼ ► For someone who wants kind of a handoff solution or like I don't want to have to be bothered with it,
00:32:58 ◼ ► Yeah, I misspoke in the last thing I said 4K 120 because I was so excited that it can output 4K to the TV and can do 120 frames per second,
00:33:17 ◼ ► but not at the same time, which makes sense because that is a current generation console capability and Nintendo just doesn't do the current generation console thing anymore.
00:33:25 ◼ ► But anyway, we'll put a link in the show notes to the spec page, which tells you Nintendo's spec page for the Switch 2.
00:33:30 ◼ ► It says that it does a maximum of 4K at 60 frames per second in, quote, TV mode, like when it's docked and connected to your TV.
00:33:49 ◼ ► Then with regard to the kickstand, like elbows or lumps or whatever they are, Stuart Gibson writes,
00:33:53 ◼ ► Regarding the Switch 2 stand nubbins, those exist on the improved stand on the current Switch OLED 2.
00:33:59 ◼ ► They do act as a touch point when fully opened, but also have a multi-point hinge, which allows it to sit fully flush to the back of the console.
00:34:05 ◼ ► See, Marco should have told me this because I've never actually even seen a Switch OLED.
00:34:11 ◼ ► The two-point hinge is to, you know, again, help the, if you know how a two-point hinge works, to help it fold out more.
00:34:16 ◼ ► Like, I guess people might be familiar with them from kitchen cabinets, where you open the cabinet and it has a two-point hinge inside it to let the doors open up more.
00:34:25 ◼ ► And then apparently there existed open-world racing games before Mario Kart, which I've heard of all of these except one,
00:34:36 ◼ ► So we've gotten word from many listeners, Burnout, Need for Speed, The Crew, which I'd never heard of, and Forza Horizon are all open-world racing games.
00:34:47 ◼ ► I think the thing that's notable is that, like, I guess maybe I never thought of Mario Kart as, because I've heard of all these games.
00:34:53 ◼ ► I've never thought of Mario Kart as a type of game because it's, like, what is the world?
00:34:57 ◼ ► Like, in these things, they're generally set on Earth with cities and highways between them and stuff.
00:35:14 ◼ ► And then one of the things that broke a lot of people's brains, including very much my own, was that Mario Kart has been stated as being $80 MSRP.
00:35:32 ◼ ► I just didn't have the link for it, so I just wanted to put the link in the show notes.
00:35:34 ◼ ► This is the graph I was talking about that shows the inflation-adjusted price for video games.
00:36:09 ◼ ► But they're trying to trick you because you always have to buy a DLC, and you have to subscribe, and you have to buy the battle pass, and you have to do this.
00:36:18 ◼ ► Like, World of Warcraft was charging people subscriptions ages ago, but, you know, and maybe they'll sell DLC tracks for Mario Kart or whatever.
00:36:25 ◼ ► But the bottom line is, especially for sort of like, you know, when you pay $80 for Mario Kart World, you get what you get.
00:36:39 ◼ ► So if they sell the next Zelda thing for $80 or whatever, again, I bought Ocarina of Time for $70 in a gold cart for the Nintendo 64.
00:36:58 ◼ ► When you look at this graph, look back at the early days of home consoles with, like, the Atari 2600 and stuff, and look at those prices.
00:37:10 ◼ ► I don't know what game that's supposed to be represented there, but it could be worse is all I'm saying.
00:37:21 ◼ ► The Dropbox file provider API update is not tied to the app version and is not an account-level change either.
00:37:30 ◼ ► It does require a minimum Mac OS version of somewhere between 12.3 and 12.6, as well as the Dropbox app from late 2022-ish or newer.
00:37:43 ◼ ► Yeah, this next item will tell you how I ran across this, but I have confirmed that if you are eligible, not only is it not a separate download, but you can change it.
00:37:54 ◼ ► So I recently installed Dropbox on a fresh account, and it did the file provider one sort of by default.
00:38:00 ◼ ► But if you Google for it, which I had to because it's not clear, there is a way to say, I don't want the file provider thing anymore.
00:38:12 ◼ ► And then during the onboarding, clicking some advanced link and then going to this thing and opting out.
00:38:19 ◼ ► The process is silly, but it is nice that it's not tied to your account, the, you know, switching back and forth.
00:38:38 ◼ ► So, yeah, I took the account that I had installed on and I signed out and signed back in and opted out of file provider.
00:38:47 ◼ ► And then several people wrote in, you have bought your daughter a laptop because of tariffs for school in the fall.
00:38:58 ◼ ► I got that laptop today, and I've been setting it up and setting up Dropbox for people and putting accounts on it and stuff.
00:39:04 ◼ ► I'm actually setting it up now to essentially be the photo laptop for my Long Island vacation because I always take whatever our best laptop is to be the photo laptop for a Long Island vacation.
00:39:12 ◼ ► And that is now the M4 MacBook Air that I got my daughter, but I'm also putting her account on and all that stuff.
00:39:20 ◼ ► Like, there are really no bad specs for this machine unless you have more data than will fit on the SSD.
00:39:59 ◼ ► Most of her stuff is cloud synced, but for my Long Island vacation, I like to have enough
00:40:04 ◼ ► space to put a substantial portion of my photo library on the laptop, just so sometimes you
00:40:12 ◼ ► I like having access to, at the very least, the favorites from my big photo collection if
00:40:35 ◼ ► You should, you can just buy the stock while it could buy 16 gigs of RAM, whatever size
00:40:47 ◼ ► I love that you are so petulantly against having a laptop that you now enlist the rest of the
00:41:06 ◼ ► When I had a work laptop, I used to bring that as my vacation laptop because it was the best
00:41:17 ◼ ► If you take an iPhone mini and make it a trifold, like the Huawei Mate XT, you get nearly the
00:41:26 ◼ ► There's a video on MKBHD that MKBHD did on the Huawei Mate XT, which I watched, which was
00:41:46 ◼ ► Yeah, that was like the problem we were talking about in his last video of like, if you just
00:41:50 ◼ ► have a, uh, a phone that opens and closes like a book, a foldable phone that opens and closes
00:41:54 ◼ ► like a book when it opens, it's not well proportioned for 16 by nine video, which is most TV and movies
00:42:02 ◼ ► And so if you compare it to an iPad mini, maybe it's the same in area, but because the aspect
00:42:08 ◼ ► ratio is so much more square, if you try to watch a video on your quote, and you're like,
00:42:18 ◼ ► So you can solve that by having a trifold because now you have, you know, one extra vertical
00:42:24 ◼ ► strip instead of just opening like a book, take another one of those quote unquote pages
00:42:33 ◼ ► Like you can look at the video to see when you fold all three pieces up, they did a good
00:42:43 ◼ ► So it's quite a trade-off to get a screen that is larger than a phone and also well proportioned
00:42:51 ◼ ► And if you're not watching video on it, I guess, you know, you can use that space for all of
00:43:01 ◼ ► And then finally, Jonathan Clayton writes with regard to Mac mini SSDs, some company from
00:43:07 ◼ ► Malaysia of unknown reputation called Iboff, I-B-O-F-F, claims to have reverse engineered
00:43:14 ◼ ► They are taking pre-orders for 250 gigs, 500 gigs, one terabyte, and two terabyte modules
00:43:21 ◼ ► According to them, they've made a quote, legally distinct quote board layout that will be recognized
00:43:36 ◼ ► So I mean, you know, take this with a serious amount of salt, but I see what they're going
00:43:45 ◼ ► Yeah, it's super compelling to me money-wise because I'm thinking of my future computer
00:43:49 ◼ ► and it's like, oh, especially since this, I'm pressing up against the four terabyte drive
00:44:02 ◼ ► And so like, I just, I mean, granted these modules for Mac minis, there, maybe they'll do
00:44:08 ◼ ► Like who knows and who knows how well they work or whatever, but it just, it seems like
00:44:19 ◼ ► You know, like kind of wish OWC would do them, but they would probably get sued by Apple or
00:44:23 ◼ ► Like it's, it's kind of fly by 90 because we're like, where do they get the, where do they
00:44:42 ◼ ► And if you could get essentially the same components as Apple is using and put them on a board that
00:44:53 ◼ ► Like they're trying to sort of clean room, reverse engineer this because they can, they can
00:45:19 ◼ ► You know, do you really want to spend, even though it's cheaper than Apple, it may be a
00:45:26 ◼ ► They only offered two terabyte, but I'm keeping my eye on this because I tell you, whatever
00:45:30 ◼ ► next Mac I get, if I can get third party storage for sane prices, I may actually risk it, especially
00:45:45 ◼ ► When we all said, get the lowest amount of storage you can get to get the lowest amount of RAM
00:46:00 ◼ ► And then if I buy one of the third party ones and it's a disaster, oh, well, I'm out that
00:46:35 ◼ ► not required viewing by any stretch of the imagination, but they made a pretty compelling,
00:46:43 ◼ ► And again, I mean, obviously the company who put up the video about themselves is going to
00:46:47 ◼ ► I mean, I get that this is, you know, self-serving or whatever, but I thought it was an interesting
00:46:51 ◼ ► video and I, and they went through kind of the behind the scenes as to the choice, some
00:46:55 ◼ ► of the choices they made, why they made them and how actually they could have done better.
00:47:01 ◼ ► Uh, again, if you have some time to kill, I definitely recommend spending a few minutes.
00:47:04 ◼ ► So like I said, like the thing that gives me encouragement about this is it's, it's just
00:47:24 ◼ ► Like there are lots of barriers to making this, but I feel like it is, it's plausible that you
00:47:33 ◼ ► We were sponsored this episode by Mack Weldon, my favorite brand of clothing and my most worn
00:47:49 ◼ ► Most of my t-shirts, all of my workout gear, many of my other things, you know, pants, like
00:48:01 ◼ ► So my favorite is the silver fabric and they make all sorts of pieces with silver fabric.
00:48:08 ◼ ► It's a little bit of silver fibers in it and this makes it antimicrobial, which means it's
00:48:18 ◼ ► So all summer long, I'm wearing those, but honestly, I'm wearing them in the winter too.
00:48:29 ◼ ► They now have a tech linen fabric and they have a few new tech linen items they've launched.
00:48:43 ◼ ► I don't think I've ever worn out anything from Mack Weldon and I wear them every single
00:48:50 ◼ ► So you got to see for yourself, go to MackWeldon.com and you can get 25% off your first order
00:49:11 ◼ ► And look, every single day you're wearing a t-shirt or underwear or all of these things,
00:49:35 ◼ ► All right, so I think we're only going to have time for one topic today because it's going
00:49:42 ◼ ► to be a doozy, and that is there was a report on the information a few days ago as we record
00:49:51 ◼ ► And there's a few different, there's a lot in this article, and you can see a summary of
00:50:00 ◼ ► I think, you know, John has done the yeoman's work of splitting this into different topics.
00:50:12 ◼ ► And it says in the information article, some of Apple's struggles in AI have stemmed from
00:50:19 ◼ ► For example, its militant stance on user privacy, which has made it difficult for the company
00:50:28 ◼ ► More than half a dozen former Apple employees who worked in the AI and machine learning group
00:50:33 ◼ ► led by JG, which that group is known by AIML for short, told the information that poor leadership
00:50:41 ◼ ► They singled out JG's lieutenant, Robbie Walker, who oversaw day-to-day operations for Siri as
00:50:46 ◼ ► lacking both ambition and an appetite for taking risks on designing future versions of the voice
00:50:51 ◼ ► Among engineers inside Apple, the AI group's relaxed culture and struggles with execution have
00:50:57 ◼ ► even earned it an uncharitable nickname, a play on its initials, AIMLESS, A-I-M-L-E-S-S.
00:51:09 ◼ ► Like, just when the group that's responsible for Siri is, like, other people in the company
00:51:18 ◼ ► Honestly, I kind of took that as promising, that, like, you know, we've always felt from
00:51:30 ◼ ► So it is kind of comforting to know, like, no, lots of the company did realize how bad it
00:51:43 ◼ ► But, like, remember that the org chart diagram, maybe early 2000s, that was, like, how each
00:52:04 ◼ ► He was, like, the hub of a wheel with lines radiating any out from him, which is, like, yeah,
00:52:14 ◼ ► And the Microsoft one was a bunch of different divisions all holding guns on each other.
00:52:21 ◼ ► It's like some amount of rivalry within your company is healthy, like everyone wants to do
00:52:26 ◼ ► But it shouldn't be to the level where maybe they're undermining each other, or maybe there's
00:52:48 ◼ ► It has built up a reputation for efficiency and execution with its work on Apple's operating
00:52:55 ◼ ► Former Apple employees have reserved Siri as a hot potato continuously passed between different
00:53:03 ◼ ► However, none of those reorganizations led to significant improvements in Siri's performance.
00:53:09 ◼ ► Obviously, when you have these stories, the information sources this to a bunch of people
00:53:15 ◼ ► So anytime you're talking to ex-employees, you have to wonder, do they have an axe to grind?
00:53:26 ◼ ► But it is interesting to see that Federighi's group actually within the company seems to
00:53:34 ◼ ► We have complaints about what they're doing with software and the quality and all sorts of
00:53:46 ◼ ► Federighi, it seems, when given a task, do this thing every year, have a new revision of these
00:54:04 ◼ ► I don't know if it's the same three people who have just a grudge against Federighi, but
00:54:10 ◼ ► Is it because he's in the videos and he's got nice hair and everyone thinks he's funny?
00:54:28 ◼ ► He may oversee that, but there is a dedicated group for interface design and I save most of
00:54:41 ◼ ► For example, until recently, he wasn't in charge of Siri, although he had been at some point
00:54:49 ◼ ► Like, if you think, well, he's in charge of all software and you don't like Siri, therefore
00:54:59 ◼ ► So the internal structure of how Apple arranged things is not always clear from the outside.
00:55:08 ◼ ► Again, maybe these are people from his groups or of course they're going to say, oh, Craig's
00:55:31 ◼ ► And you could disagree with his tastes and decision making, but he is an effective operator within
00:55:38 ◼ ► Like he is not, he does not struggle to accomplish the goals that he sets out for himself or the
00:55:45 ◼ ► Again, you could say maybe the goals that he's setting or that are being set for him are the
00:55:50 ◼ ► wrong goals, but he is actually executing them, which is part of the job of someone at his
00:55:55 ◼ ► So that's why I personally usually don't come for Federighi because it's not because of his
00:56:06 ◼ ► And if I, like for someone like that, I feel like I could persuade him to get the things done
00:56:19 ◼ ► And I don't want to get too caught up in this tangent that I'm now starting, but I've heard
00:56:40 ◼ ► Unlike, uh, JG, you didn't have to say, you have to try to say his full name at least once
00:56:51 ◼ ► You know, but like, and I'm not saying we, we've discussed this, uh, at length and there's
00:56:58 ◼ ► link for because I didn't think we'd go off on this tangent, but like, oh, you're such a
00:57:01 ◼ ► nice guy, but maybe, maybe you can't be a nice guy to be effective within an organization.
00:57:27 ◼ ► Uh, it doesn't mean that he, you know, you shouldn't be mean and cruel to people, but you
00:57:37 ◼ ► And again, everything I've heard is that Craig is smart, technical, decisive, going to make
00:57:45 ◼ ► wrong calls occasionally, but again, an effective operator within the organization of Apple and
00:57:50 ◼ ► All I've heard about him is that he's a really nice guy, very smart, very knowledgeable.
00:57:59 ◼ ► The people I've spoken to within Apple have almost universally said good things about Federighi
00:58:04 ◼ ► and not to say that he's perfect by any means, you know, like you were saying a minute ago,
00:58:12 ◼ ► and apparently has an uncanny ability to understand really complex technical problems almost immediately.
00:58:22 ◼ ► I met him once for two seconds and he had no idea who I was, which is what I would expect
00:58:30 ◼ ► And by the way, I want to say someone who's worked in big companies with big executives.
00:58:34 ◼ ► I, whenever I hear those stories of like, oh, Craig, he really knows his technical stuff,
00:58:40 ◼ ► It, what it means is that he's not entirely clueless, which is, which is like the normal,
00:58:47 ◼ ► Like he used to be a programmer, but he's been out of it for so long or whatever that he,
00:58:50 ◼ ► that he's not entirely clueless and that he understands that sometimes it actually is important
00:59:00 ◼ ► But also I think he's the type of person who would feel the urge to, as he said in various
00:59:10 ◼ ► Because, because his skills are not up to date because that's not effective use of his time
00:59:22 ◼ ► I think Craig mostly understands that it's good that he has that background and that background
00:59:28 ◼ ► should be part of his decision-making because you see so much in big companies where there'll
00:59:32 ◼ ► be a technical executive who will become an executive for enough time that they no longer
00:59:45 ◼ ► It means he needs to ask smart questions to people who know the real answers, who give him
01:00:06 ◼ ► It just means that he is properly using, properly taking into account technical considerations
01:00:12 ◼ ► that worse executives discard because they're like, well, I don't need to understand that
01:00:21 ◼ ► All I need to know is the finished product and I don't need to understand anything about how
01:00:31 ◼ ► With regard to John G and Andrea's, uh, Siri leadership in 2018, when JG arrived from Google
01:00:37 ◼ ► to run the newly formed AI group, he was, or excuse me, his hiring was seen by the tech
01:00:42 ◼ ► And I remember this, we talked about this, that, oh man, they pulled like the king of AI
01:00:48 ◼ ► And I mean, I stand by that from what we knew at the time, even actually from what we know
01:00:52 ◼ ► now, uh, even before G and Andrea took control of the assistant members of the group working
01:00:56 ◼ ► on Siri felt like second-class citizens at Apple series engineers were frustrated by the
01:01:00 ◼ ► software engineering team's control over iOS updates, feeling they weren't prioritizing
01:01:05 ◼ ► So this is a problem of when you're not in the one big software group, like, well, isn't
01:01:14 ◼ ► And that means that like, if, you know, I can understand the frustration of like, well,
01:01:20 ◼ ► there's this train going every year where they release a new version of iOS and a new version
01:01:30 ◼ ► Or do they just kind of have to like, are they just getting shoved along by the freight train
01:01:36 ◼ ► Uh, when you see stuff, I mean, everything in this article is kind of like organizational
01:01:45 ◼ ► Then maybe it should be better incorporated in the process that produces a new version of
01:01:57 ◼ ► the iOS updates and their complaints go on Herb is like, well, you know, Craig's in charge
01:02:06 ◼ ► Then Tim talked to us like, are you up the chain to try to get Tim and Cook's attention
01:02:09 ◼ ► to go back down the org chart back into Craig to get what you want is never going to work.
01:02:16 ◼ ► If you consider Siri to be an integral part of iOS, which it seems like organizationally
01:02:28 ◼ ► It is as foundational as many other foundational technologies in Apple's OS's things like the
01:02:34 ◼ ► code, like foundation at the code level, you know, Swift core libraries, networking libraries
01:02:56 ◼ ► But if anything, Siri has become more integral to Apple's products because we just got done
01:03:04 ◼ ► Apple keeps introducing products that essentially hinge on Siri to be any good starting with like
01:03:09 ◼ ► the HomePod, but continuing to like this HomePod with a screen thing and other, like other things
01:03:17 ◼ ► Like things that don't have a screen or that it's convenient for you to use with the verbal
01:03:21 ◼ ► interface end up, you know, who knows if they're using quote unquote real Siri or whatever
01:03:25 ◼ ► But the point is Apple's branding for like a voice thing that you can talk to, to do stuff
01:03:34 ◼ ► They can't release the HomePod with a screen until they get the better Siri because it's
01:03:42 ◼ ► The software engineers for their part felt the Siri team couldn't keep up with supporting
01:03:52 ◼ ► Those who have worked with him described him as relaxed, quiet, non-confrontational, a contrast
01:04:00 ◼ ► Federighi's tough and demanding management style contrasts with JG's laid back approach.
01:04:05 ◼ ► When they were in meetings together, Federighi is known to bombard his colleagues with questions
01:04:10 ◼ ► After he joined, some of his colleagues told Gene Andrea that he should shake up Siri's
01:04:16 ◼ ► So Federighi being described as type A and demanding, it seems like maybe that personality type is
01:04:24 ◼ ► more successful within Apple, especially like JG was joined up and he's put in charge of
01:04:56 ◼ ► You don't come in and fire everybody because you don't know which person, you know, who's
01:04:59 ◼ ► responsible for what, but coming in and having your colleagues say, well, of course you're
01:05:12 ◼ ► Maybe he just thought it was the right call, but it reads as in this narrative of like,
01:05:26 ◼ ► Like coming in as the fixer, like we've hired a big, uh, important person from outside who's
01:05:38 ◼ ► With regard to Robbie Walker, one Siri leader often criticized by colleagues was Walker who joined
01:05:47 ◼ ► In the eyes of his critics, Walker was unwilling to take big risks on Siri and focused on metrics
01:05:52 ◼ ► that didn't move the needle much on its performance rather than having a grand vision for overhauling
01:05:56 ◼ ► For instance, he often celebrated small wins, such as reducing by minute percentages, the
01:06:04 ◼ ► Another pet Walker project was removing the hay from Hay Dingus voice command used to invoke
01:06:31 ◼ ► But I mean, I think this what this what this reporting shows and, you know, obviously we
01:06:38 ◼ ► have to disclaim that like this is obviously being reported by like, you know, employees
01:06:45 ◼ ► So, you know, I'm sure there's lots of different opinions on how this team should be led and
01:06:50 ◼ ► And the people who were on the losing end of those fights are the ones talking to the information
01:06:53 ◼ ► and saying like, this is how this is why they were all wrong or they're all idiots or whatever.
01:06:57 ◼ ► But that being said, it sure does seem like the priorities of the Siri team have been focusing
01:07:09 ◼ ► on features that are like really kind of surface level, you know, paint job kind of features
01:07:31 ◼ ► OK, that's nice, you know, but it still doesn't work a lot of times and gives bad answers and
01:07:37 ◼ ► And like none of those things seem like they were getting nearly enough work on them, whereas
01:07:52 ◼ ► Second of all, now that you don't have to say hey anymore, it actually triggers itself automatically,
01:08:01 ◼ ► So you'll be doing something that has nothing to do with it, you know, in the next room over
01:08:06 ◼ ► and your HomePod will say hmm or it'll start playing random music when you weren't talking
01:08:13 ◼ ► to it or it'll in the middle of your conversation with someone else, but it and say, I'm sorry,
01:08:23 ◼ ► So they're doing things like, OK, these are minor kind of, you know, cosmetic or interface
01:08:35 ◼ ► And if you are, you know, if you're tight for engineering resources or, you know, money
01:08:42 ◼ ► from the higher ups, which we got to like if we're tight from that, maybe things like that
01:09:08 ◼ ► They're like, you know, moving around some, you know, Titanic deck chair, like instead of
01:09:49 ◼ ► And it's anything, although the most damning evidence against hay dingus is that they made
01:10:20 ◼ ► By all means do rearrange the textures, but like there is another problem that is much bigger.
01:10:27 ◼ ► They should have been doing stuff like in the meantime, can we get, you know, cause Siri
01:10:32 ◼ ► And say, you've got a team trying to get rid of the hay because I think that'll, that could
01:10:36 ◼ ► pay dividends for a more conversational product, like a thing with the screen, or we could make
01:10:40 ◼ ► Like by all means do all those things, but, but I don't think that's what the entire team
01:11:03 ◼ ► Walker told colleagues he wanted to focus on the next release of Siri rather than commit
01:11:08 ◼ ► Without his knowledge, the project's engineers bypassed him to continue working on those capabilities
01:11:18 ◼ ► If someone in charge of some important group of things tells some part of their group not to
01:11:45 ◼ ► Because this is the thing I believe what they're referring to is the thing that we've mentioned
01:11:57 ◼ ► And again, maybe that wasn't the thing they should have been working on, but it's, it's
01:12:03 ◼ ► And Walker's getting a lot of crap in a lot of these reports of saying like he was, because
01:12:06 ◼ ► you know, he, I assume he's under JG and more directly in spark and charge of Siri, apparently
01:12:28 ◼ ► And I feel like, uh, like Walker should have been telling his boss, like, Hey, this is what's
01:12:35 ◼ ► I told them not to do this and they're doing it anyway, but they're doing it with another
01:12:47 ◼ ► But you do have to occasionally look at your org chart and say, in light of our current, uh,
01:13:10 ◼ ► And then when the advent of LLMs definitely doesn't reflect like the future direction of
01:13:15 ◼ ► So, I mean, to Apple's credit, they did eventually figure this out and rearrange things.
01:13:21 ◼ ► But yeah, like anytime I've ever seen that happen, like, uh, my boss says no, but this other
01:13:33 ◼ ► Someone needs to be noticing this is happening and saying, this is a sign of an unhealthy
01:13:42 ◼ ► Uh, it's weird too, because I'm, I am, and we are so dissatisfied with the state of Siri
01:14:09 ◼ ► And certainly Rockwell does, uh, after delivering the vision pro because whether or not you think
01:14:21 ◼ ► Um, but just because Federighi is pulling this back under his wing, it doesn't necessarily
01:14:39 ◼ ► not quote unquote obvious what should be done, which the advent of LLMs is like, oh, we totally
01:14:44 ◼ ► need to, they, their, their capabilities are good fit with what we're trying to do with
01:14:53 ◼ ► Now it's much clearer than before when they, we bought this company, we don't even know this
01:15:11 ◼ ► Like they eventually did, or someone from Amazon earlier and asked them, Hey, why are your assistants
01:15:16 ◼ ► And they probably would have said, oh, because it's structured nothing like Siri and that company
01:15:32 ◼ ► So it got bounced around, but yeah, once JG appeared and once LLM's appeared, it's like
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01:17:52 ◼ ► Other resentments between JG's AI ML group and Federighi's software engineering group also
01:17:56 ◼ ► Some in the software engineering group were annoyed by the higher pay and faster promotions their
01:18:02 ◼ ► And they were bitter that some engineers in the AI group seemed to be able to take longer
01:18:05 ◼ ► vacations and leave early on Fridays while they in the software engineering group faced
01:18:11 ◼ ► Distrust between the two groups got so bad that earlier this year, one of Giannandrea's
01:18:15 ◼ ► deputies asked engineers to extensively document the development of a joint project so that
01:18:27 ◼ ► We're going to, this is going to keep showing how like, you know, terrible the AI team is
01:18:31 ◼ ► probably, but I do want to step back by one paragraph and say the workaholic culture is
01:18:52 ◼ ► And, you know, Silicon Valley has kind of this, you know, this, this workaholism sickness and
01:19:00 ◼ ► And there is this culture of, you know, if, if you're doing either really important work
01:19:06 ◼ ► or you're in some kind of crunch mode, like you can't take a weekend, you got to work all
01:19:11 ◼ ► And if you don't, you're not a team player or you're not good enough or you're not devoted
01:19:25 ◼ ► So the idea that like the AI team was like lazy or whatever, because they were taking weekends
01:19:38 ◼ ► Like if the only way you can get good output is to overwork your people, you have a management
01:20:00 ◼ ► So this, uh, the kind of, this type of work culture, this aspect of work culture does exist
01:20:06 ◼ ► And I think the one problem that Apple has had probably forever, but certainly in the jobs
01:20:16 ◼ ► This game industry is even more notorious for crunch and burning through people and just,
01:20:21 ◼ ► you know, not, not so much workaholics, but just like, uh, you know, a wood chipper that
01:20:26 ◼ ► Uh, and part of the reason the game industry has that reputation is the thing that Apple
01:20:48 ◼ ► Um, people who get into the game industry, much like the entertainment industry, like they
01:20:54 ◼ ► And not only do they really want to be there, there is not an infinite number of slots.
01:20:58 ◼ ► It's not the same as Hollywood where there's a tiny number of slots or whatever, but like
01:21:01 ◼ ► it's the games industry is big enough to absorb a lot of people, but it is not trivial to break
01:21:16 ◼ ► There's not hundreds of those jobs in the world because there's not hundreds of triple next
01:21:21 ◼ ► Um, so you have an industry that people really, really want to be in and you take these employees
01:21:36 ◼ ► They want to like make friends at work and do all this stuff where like they don't, these
01:21:48 ◼ ► We get our games out sooner and we can just, if, if we're missing a date, we'll just make
01:21:53 ◼ ► And, and we'll call it crunch and it'll just be part of the industry and it'll be great.
01:21:57 ◼ ► And that's one of the worst things about the games industry that it grinds people up like
01:22:03 ◼ ► People really want to work in Apple because they admire Apple and they like its products.
01:22:07 ◼ ► And so they get there and they're enthusiastic and they'd be like, we're working on the next
01:22:28 ◼ ► And it's tempting to do that because you have these people who are enthusiastic and who really,
01:22:33 ◼ ► But like so much of Apple culture is sort of based on the premise that of course, everyone
01:22:48 ◼ ► The jobs get rid of that too or whatever, but don't you just want to be a part of it so
01:22:53 ◼ ► And like, you have to figure out a way to balance employees' enthusiasm for doing their
01:23:00 ◼ ► job, which is a good thing with not grinding through them like human meat because it's not
01:23:11 ◼ ► Even if you're a good manager, even if you mean well, like your incentives are aligned to
01:23:20 ◼ ► And so into that environment, you add someone like the AIML group, which is from a more like
01:23:28 ◼ ► Google historically, if maybe if not today had a much different reputation, which was like
01:23:39 ◼ ► And you'll be able to just kind of float around and follow your interests and go from group
01:23:52 ◼ ► I'm going to say that the correct position to be is somewhere between the lackadaisical early
01:24:06 ◼ ► a bunch of like floofy head in the clouds, college kids, especially if they're like, they're,
01:24:15 ◼ ► So they're giving them more initial pay, giving them big promotions, and they work less than
01:24:21 ◼ ► It's like, well, this is the, you know, someone at Apple recognized if you want people who understand
01:24:35 ◼ ► And the poor Apple engineers who are just grinding away at some objective C code are like, you
01:24:47 ◼ ► But anyway, over here at AIML, we give promotions freely and big pay packages and everything so much
01:25:01 ◼ ► And it is like, so that documenting what you're doing so that when the thing fails, you know
01:25:08 ◼ ► You don't want anyone in your organization spending any amount of time on essentially butt
01:25:52 ◼ ► It's like, well, when we tried to do that last time, we got blamed for all the failures
01:26:13 ◼ ► that goes by the name intelligent systems and is run by one of Federighi's top deputies,
01:26:22 ◼ ► He hired his own team of hundreds of machine learning engineers because he didn't like AIML.
01:26:48 ◼ ► Does Tim Cook know that there's a team being made with hundreds of machine learning engineers
01:26:56 ◼ ► Like Apple is, you know, famously sort of tight with money internally in terms of they don't
01:27:04 ◼ ► Their teams are small and yet somehow Federighi gets a hundred, hundreds, multiple hundreds
01:27:13 ◼ ► Like I'm not saying he shouldn't have any machine learning people, but this seems like a duplication
01:27:18 ◼ ► of effort that should have been another huge set of red flags of like, shouldn't like having
01:27:24 ◼ ► machine learning expertise and stuff, shouldn't, shouldn't we have them all kind of like,
01:27:44 ◼ ► and grudges or whatever, just like explaining like, uh, intelligence systems or whatever.
01:27:55 ◼ ► Like, shouldn't the intelligence and some people like have lunch with them and say, what are
01:27:59 ◼ ► Maybe should we, should we work together and like, should we be cooperating more closely
01:28:18 ◼ ► enabled users to control apps with voice commands, often without the help from the Siri team
01:28:24 ◼ ► You don't say in one internal Apple presentation, a member of intelligence system showed a slide
01:28:29 ◼ ► depicting an animation of two mountains smashed together and flattened, which some saw as a
01:28:36 ◼ ► I cut that one out because he's been a fan of hill climbing, which is a machine learning,
01:28:40 ◼ ► Uh, and I'm not sure how two mountains smashed together is saying hill climbing is dumb.
01:28:51 ◼ ► And yeah, I can understand how, like, so it's just the teams feel like they're not getting
01:29:08 ◼ ► That's just, I can imagine the Siri team being territorial and saying, anytime you talk to
01:29:20 ◼ ► Well, and this is the kind of thing, like when you have groups fighting with each other like
01:29:28 ◼ ► know, organization versus JG's organization, like this is a problem that Tim Cook should
01:29:34 ◼ ► Like this, like when you have these two orgs fighting, like if they can't work it out amongst
01:30:00 ◼ ► What we hear a lot is that Cook's approach to conflict management is don't bring me conflicts.
01:30:12 ◼ ► The conflict just gets pushed downward in the organization into areas like this, where like
01:30:20 ◼ ► Like when, when these two orgs are both kind of like fighting to do the same things because
01:30:25 ◼ ► they don't like each other and don't like the way that each other are doing things like that's
01:30:34 ◼ ► But yet the, because conflict cannot be managed correctly above them, it's pushed down into these
01:30:48 ◼ ► I don't think it's a hundred percent because I think don't bring me conflicts is a valid
01:30:52 ◼ ► philosophy, but the whole point is it's supposed to breed people below you that can resolve
01:31:05 ◼ ► And I, that's why I think some of the failures also with Federighi and JG, because they both
01:31:18 ◼ ► And you could say, well, he, you know, Tim should figure out that they're failing there
01:31:26 ◼ ► And the one, like the one thing I think about Tim Cook in conflict is one of his very early
01:31:35 ◼ ► And he went for the more harmonious agreement, which is like, if I get rid of Forstall, everyone
01:31:47 ◼ ► That was an extremely high level decision that involved Johnny Ive, which is as close as you
01:31:55 ◼ ► And so I understand why he, uh, participated there, but I can also understand his philosophy
01:32:00 ◼ ► And so that's why I leave some of the blame for this to in fact be with, uh, Federighi and
01:32:05 ◼ ► JG, because maybe, maybe it's not them that were having the agreement, but it was the underlings
01:32:13 ◼ ► Everything is Tim Cook's fault in the end because he's the CEO is in charge of everything.
01:32:24 ◼ ► You have to also occasionally check in to see that the conflicts are in fact being dealt
01:32:34 ◼ ► Like that's, we don't know how much communication goes up and down the chain or what people discuss,
01:32:40 ◼ ► If everyone who, when they're meetings with Tim, just complained about the other groups,
01:32:57 ◼ ► But I would also say like the, the whole idea of don't bring me conflict, you are right
01:33:04 ◼ ► that like that should breed the, you know, the people under them to, you know, work things
01:33:10 ◼ ► But I think it's, it's based on a fantasy that that will always be fine or, or that is even
01:33:17 ◼ ► I think what happens in reality is if you say at the top, don't bring me conflict, that
01:33:24 ◼ ► It just prevents them from being resolved by the top, which means that they have to kind
01:33:46 ◼ ► Like they, they kind of worked around the conflict, kind of exacerbating it, making worse outcomes,
01:33:56 ◼ ► And so I, I do feel like the, you know, this should have involved higher levels stepping
01:34:05 ◼ ► I mean, they eventually did like, as with so many things, uh, as, as I think you've said
01:34:10 ◼ ► on past episodes a couple of times, Apple will eventually, assuming it stays alive, figure
01:34:33 ◼ ► Uh, it's also very difficult to deal with these things when everything's going gangbusters,
01:34:38 ◼ ► even if it's not these particular things that are going gangbusters, but just, oh, the company
01:34:41 ◼ ► Everybody loves iPhone stock price going up that hides a lot of this stuff because that
01:34:55 ◼ ► This is part of the difficulty of being, you know, one step down the org chart from a CEO
01:35:00 ◼ ► who says, don't bring me problems because I'm sure Craig tells his lieutenants the same thing.
01:35:06 ◼ ► And the opposite is way worse, which is all, all you ever do is that people complaining about
01:35:24 ◼ ► And the, like, it's one of the difficulties of being Tim Cook is how thin your attention
01:35:31 ◼ ► There are so many more things that he has to think about besides the quality of Apple's
01:35:37 ◼ ► But when you're the CEO, things like where are we manufacturing them and what are we doing
01:35:41 ◼ ► financially and how are we hiring things and antitrust and government, like there's just
01:35:47 ◼ ► so much to think about that, you know, this one can sneak up on you in a few, in a few dozen
01:35:55 ◼ ► So yeah, that's what, that's why we're, again, that's why we're talking about this is, this
01:35:57 ◼ ► is definitely one of the ones that did fester, didn't get addressed in a timely manner,
01:36:03 ◼ ► And now we get to see the, uh, the postmortem or the, the, uh, the glimpses of the postmortem
01:36:10 ◼ ► With regard to the, when will my mom's flight arrive demo during WWDC, uh, during an onstage
01:36:15 ◼ ► demo at WWDC 2024, when Apple executive asked Siri when her mom's flight would land, the
01:36:20 ◼ ► voice assistant accessed her email and real-time flight data to provide the current arrival
01:36:23 ◼ ► She then asked Siri to remind her about their lunch plans and the assistant plucked the
01:36:27 ◼ ► details from her iPhone's messages and plotted a route from the airport to the restaurant
01:36:41 ◼ ► At the time, the only new feature from the demonstration that was activated for test devices was a pulsing
01:36:46 ◼ ► colorful ribbon that appeared on the edges of the iPhone screen when a user invoked Siri.
01:36:52 ◼ ► So this is some interesting wording from the information here, and you can read it in a way
01:36:58 ◼ ► Uh, because what they're saying is like the Siri team was surprised by this demo because they'd
01:37:07 ◼ ► And so they didn't expect to see it demonstrated because why would you demonstrate a thing that
01:37:12 ◼ ► Maybe you've been working on it for a year, for two years, but you know, it's not in a state
01:37:20 ◼ ► And then the, this other part here, I felt like it was straight from the information from
01:37:31 ◼ ► It doesn't mean the only thing that had been developed was the pulsing colorful ribbon thing
01:37:36 ◼ ► It's that's the only thing that was activated for test devices again within Apple or whatever.
01:37:40 ◼ ► Um, so I think this is just basically an example of the team being blindsided by a demonstration
01:37:46 ◼ ► that essentially put them behind the eight ball to say, we know you've been working on this.
01:37:50 ◼ ► We know it's not ready where we can actually demo it, which is why we're not going to show
01:37:56 ◼ ► And as I said in past episodes, I feel like this is a type of thing that has happened many
01:38:02 ◼ ► Not that I'm endorsing it or saying it is a good thing, but from the famous Steve Jobs saying
01:38:07 ◼ ► we're going to open source the FaceTime protocol and everyone on the FaceTime team going, wait,
01:38:11 ◼ ► It's all the way down to half the other demos we've seen where we know the software is not
01:38:21 ◼ ► And the team is like, oh God, I guess we have to, I guess we have to get this thing working
01:38:29 ◼ ► Uh, this smells to me like that, but in case you needed confirmation that that demo was way
01:38:38 ◼ ► And that also that the team responsible for the feature was not apparently intimately involved
01:38:44 ◼ ► in giving a go, no go decision, because I guess product marketing does that, or it's, it's
01:38:51 ◼ ► But can you imagine being the audience and being on this team and going, you know, as market
01:39:05 ◼ ► open AI's models, Apple managers told their engineers in 2023, they couldn't include models
01:39:10 ◼ ► from outside companies and final Apple products and could only use them to benchmark against
01:39:16 ◼ ► Building large Apple models meant to compete with open AI was responsibility of JG's group.
01:39:21 ◼ ► However, they didn't perform nearly as well as open AI's technology, according to multiple
01:39:28 ◼ ► In his new role overseeing Siri, Federighi has already shaken things up and a departure
01:39:34 ◼ ► from previous policy has instructed Siri's machine learning engineers to do whatever it
01:39:38 ◼ ► takes to build the best AI features, even if it means using open source models from other
01:39:49 ◼ ► It's totally seems like an Apple-y thing, but also setting aside whether it's an Apple-y
01:39:58 ◼ ► a couple of years ago, but even today, there's so much uncertainty about the stuff that goes
01:40:04 ◼ ► into models and people getting sued over the things the models were trained on or whatever.
01:40:07 ◼ ► It's prudent to be able to have an answer when someone says, hey, what did you train that
01:40:14 ◼ ► That's it's one of the reasons Adobe makes such a big deal out of training all of its models
01:40:20 ◼ ► that are part of Photoshop on content that Adobe owns or licenses because they have an answer.
01:40:50 ◼ ► And so in this crisis situation, Federighi being more pragmatic and saying, all right, well,
01:40:55 ◼ ► we've, this has been gone on long enough that so far no one has been sued out of existence.
01:41:01 ◼ ► So if we use an open source model, I guess, worst case, whoever's responsible for building
01:41:06 ◼ ► that open source model, like they get sued or maybe we like, and it's like at this point
01:41:25 ◼ ► So that again, it seems like Federighi being pragmatic, but it is not a situation Apple really
01:41:32 ◼ ► I think this is, this is not like, this was not the wrong call for, for the stage Apple
01:41:50 ◼ ► If anything is possible that somebody could sue them for, you know, any kind of infringement,
01:42:00 ◼ ► want probably to involve themselves with other people's models shipping in their products.
01:42:09 ◼ ► So I, even though like, I think the right thing to do would have been for Apple to have
01:42:20 ◼ ► And what seems to have happened is they realized too late that this kind of product was a big
01:42:29 ◼ ► And in a rush, you might think, which maybe we'll get to later in a rush, you might think
01:42:37 ◼ ► But I understand why, given Apple's, you know, position and, you know, the way they usually
01:42:47 ◼ ► And then on the 11th of April, which was Friday, the New York Times had its own article.
01:42:57 ◼ ► The title was much broader than this, but the only part that I thought was interesting or
01:43:15 ◼ ► This is Trip Mickel, who had recently written a book about the design team after Johnny Ive,
01:43:27 ◼ ► JG, who was overseeing the effort, sought approval from the company's chief executive, Tim Cook,
01:43:34 ◼ ► At the time, Apple's data centers had about 50,000 GPUs that were more than five years old,
01:43:38 ◼ ► far fewer than the hundreds of thousands of chips being bought at the time by AI leaders
01:43:55 ◼ ► A lack of GPUs meant the team developing AI systems had to negotiate for data center computing power
01:44:02 ◼ ► The leading chips made by NVIDIA were in such demand that Apple used alternative chips made
01:44:08 ◼ ► I should also add that after the article was published, well, they added the following later on.
01:44:13 ◼ ► After this article was published, Trudy Muller, an Apple spokeswoman, said the company had fulfilled
01:44:34 ◼ ► So the earlier bit about, you know, Apple wanted to make its own models, but people inside Apple
01:44:42 ◼ ► Seems like he was trying to do the right thing, which is like, look, everyone else who's making
01:44:58 ◼ ► And I also imagine the CFO probably is not telling people what they should do in terms of chip
01:45:03 ◼ ► But it is an interesting contrast with DeepSeek, which was forbidden from getting the best of the
01:45:12 ◼ ► And so I had to figure out a way to essentially do what the CFO, the former CFO was saying here,
01:45:30 ◼ ► It seems like the organization, though, was like not ready to commit the amount of money
01:45:40 ◼ ► We're raising money and we burned all on GPUs, like just where we are in the phase where
01:46:14 ◼ ► I think we had a story many months ago about Apple using Google's resources, you know, instead
01:46:36 ◼ ► Open AI is buying tons of stuff itself and using stuff from Azure that Microsoft is letting
01:46:42 ◼ ► So I feel like this is, this is sort of like evidence of Apple, uh, not correctly prioritized,
01:46:51 ◼ ► not prioritizing, uh, Siri, AI, ML, uh, uh, LM stuff to the degree that it would produce
01:47:03 ◼ ► Cause I'm not going to say they didn't invest enough to do it because again, deep seek figured
01:47:10 ◼ ► Apple could have done that, but didn't, uh, but yeah, this is, this is not as bad as everything
01:47:15 ◼ ► else that we saw, even though all the things like, oh, they, he wanted to buy stuff, but
01:47:18 ◼ ► Tim Cook wouldn't let him, you know, like they, the company didn't invest as heavily or as
01:47:26 ◼ ► But if all that other stuff that we just went through about organizational dysfunction didn't
01:47:52 ◼ ► Tim Cook will be judged harshly in the future for like, they missed AI, like Apple missed AI
01:47:59 ◼ ► And this I think is a, is a good example of maybe why that happened or, or the mindset that
01:48:10 ◼ ► And I think what's going to end up happening is their products will be uncompetitive in lots
01:48:21 ◼ ► And they will either have significant, you know, losses to their market share in the future
01:48:28 ◼ ► potentially, or they will have to spend a huge amount of money buying AI companies or buying
01:48:39 ◼ ► And either way, that's going to be way more expensive than it would have been for them to
01:48:43 ◼ ► But it just seems like they, their heads were not in the right place over the last two years
01:48:55 ◼ ► They seem like they were, you know, they, they were, they had, they were fully hubris and
01:49:11 ◼ ► Now they are scrambling to catch up because like Microsoft missing mobile, Apple missed AI
01:49:17 ◼ ► and who knows when it will be, if they ever catch up, uh, I'm guessing it's going to be
01:49:23 ◼ ► So that, you know, this, this times article about like, you know, the, you know, Luca Maestri
01:49:31 ◼ ► It, if Apple knew what they were dealing with back then, they should have put all their, like
01:49:40 ◼ ► Certainly they had the money and instead they're, you know, they were being stingy because they
01:49:55 ◼ ► This is one of the most difficult decisions for a big company to make because there's always
01:50:04 ◼ ► And it's easy in the beginning to look at those and say, nah, we'll see how that turns out.
01:50:09 ◼ ► Like if it ends up to be a thing, then we'll look at it, but we can't go chasing after every
01:50:13 ◼ ► So when you see like how much money open AI was investing in its efforts, Apple's going
01:50:25 ◼ ► But like, we shouldn't be investing in the same amount that open AI is because it's not
01:50:38 ◼ ► Anytime, anytime there's a startup or a bunch of startups in the thing, getting tons of money,
01:50:42 ◼ ► we can't chase that and say, well, we need to be investing the same amount as they do because
01:50:50 ◼ ► So it's so hard as a big company to know which ones you should pay attention to and actually
01:51:00 ◼ ► do, but like, how long do you wait to decide, okay, well, open AI has been putting tons of
01:51:07 ◼ ► And I think that's kind of what Craig Federer is like the story of his revelation about chat
01:51:20 ◼ ► But even if he was like, maybe at that point you already have already waited a little bit
01:51:24 ◼ ► too long and it seems like they just have been slow to react to this and have been reacting
01:51:39 ◼ ► And like the soon as like the, like Bill Gates with the internet tidal wave memo, right?
01:51:59 ◼ ► executive of a sufficient high level has that eureka moment and says, oh my God, the internet,
01:52:06 ◼ ► I've just realized that the internet is going to be a really important thing and we should
01:52:34 ◼ ► But like there's that time before that where it's so hard to know, like, is this going to
01:52:42 ◼ ► And like, you know, with Apple, we've always talked about the car program of putting all
01:52:55 ◼ ► It's not even entirely clear that that's going to be the next big thing, but it is kind of
01:53:07 ◼ ► Just, you know, sitting there accumulating, like you might as well make these big bets.
01:53:11 ◼ ► I do wonder like in the pitch to say, okay, someone is convinced that actually, you know,
01:53:59 ◼ ► Like just, uh, it is frustrating, but I think it is hard even, even when you have so much
01:54:06 ◼ ► money, maybe especially when you have so much money to, uh, get out of the mindset of like
01:54:11 ◼ ► the dragon on the horde of like, yeah, I have all this money because I don't spend it on
01:54:16 ◼ ► But anyway, um, unlike mobile, I still continue to think that, um, so far, this is not guaranteed,
01:54:23 ◼ ► but so far, it doesn't seem like a thing that threatens Apple's platform because in theory,
01:54:27 ◼ ► if they get off their butts and do something more sane, they could be quote unquote, the
01:54:36 ◼ ► And chat GPT does not seem to be threatening them as a platform or any other company threatening
01:54:41 ◼ ► them as a platform yet, because they don't have a platform or a product other than like
01:54:45 ◼ ► a webpage that you can talk to and type things into, but that's not guaranteed to be true
01:54:49 ◼ ► And so I really hope, uh, the, uh, dragon slumbering on its horde of money has now woken up and we'll
01:54:57 ◼ ► No, honestly, like I think chat GPT has amazing products and, and I think they, it's way beyond
01:55:17 ◼ ► But like, like, you know, like, like in my car, like whenever I'm like driving and I want
01:55:21 ◼ ► to, I need some knowledge, I have a question about something I will, I will say, you know,
01:55:30 ◼ ► And then my question, I say that every single time now, because it's so much better than Siri
01:55:41 ◼ ► By the way, the reports have shown that asking chat GPT directly has way better results than
01:55:48 ◼ ► asking Siri to ask chat GPT, which doesn't make any sense, but that's the only thing we've
01:56:01 ◼ ► But regardless, like, you know, like chat GPT, like via CarPlay, via Siri is way better than
01:56:08 ◼ ► Um, you know, the, when, if you're actually on the, on the device and able to use it directly,
01:56:13 ◼ ► you know, mapping chat GPT to like the action button is a pretty common thing on iPhones,
01:56:19 ◼ ► Of course, you can just tab open with the webpage or they have a Mac app that you can have a
01:56:25 ◼ ► Like I think of all the AI companies, you know, the different, whatever model is on top changes
01:56:32 ◼ ► Uh, but chat GPT or open AI consistently has the best products in front of their model.
01:56:38 ◼ ► Usually like they, they really do well with like, how can we take this technology, this
01:56:44 ◼ ► amazing, you know, model that we have and actually make useful user facing features and
01:56:58 ◼ ► Maybe down the road, Apple buys open AI for just a ridiculous, massive amount of money.
01:57:07 ◼ ► Cause together, that's another story maybe we'll have in a future episode, but, uh, that
01:57:20 ◼ ► But, uh, you know, cause that they're, they're working on whatever, like presumably something
01:57:27 ◼ ► He becomes even more fabulously wealthy, just spears into the wilderness and then Apple buys
01:57:45 ◼ ► They still can do it on their own because as you noted, like open AI has good products,
01:57:49 ◼ ► but the products they have, I was going to say, Apple should have no problem doing products
01:58:04 ◼ ► Well, I, it's not entirely clear that, that open AI is lead over the rest of the industry
01:58:14 ◼ ► Well, and, and I think it's less, I mean, I think the lead is, is more, uh, insurmountable
01:58:20 ◼ ► than I think a lot of commentators to give it credit for because yes, other people can indeed
01:58:34 ◼ ► We are already very rapidly moving past just the model itself being really good into lots
01:58:41 ◼ ► of different ways to use the models, to hook them up in different ways, to engineer their
01:58:53 ◼ ► Like there's all these different techniques, like it's getting more and more complicated
01:59:02 ◼ ► And open AI is pretty, it's usually the head of the pack and that's going to, you know,
01:59:09 ◼ ► before too long, their lead is going to be pretty large in ways that are not easy to replicate.
01:59:15 ◼ ► So things like mind share among people, what, you know, habits, apps, you know, actual like,
01:59:25 ◼ ► I hope Apple can do a good job themselves, but I, I fear that for all the same reasons that
01:59:33 ◼ ► Siri has sucked all this time, it seems like they don't have the culture or the talent to
01:59:46 ◼ ► for, in many, many ways, AI companies and the development of AI type stuff seem at odds with
02:00:04 ◼ ► What I think is most likely here is similar to, you know, things like, you know, Apple Music.
02:00:14 ◼ ► I was just about to bring that up to say that I no longer had confidence that Apple can make
02:00:49 ◼ ► They have so much lock-in infrastructure now that they can get by with a series of mediocre
02:00:56 ◼ ► offerings and the lock-in keeps us all using them and, you know, gives them the user base
02:01:03 ◼ ► Their technical boundaries make it hard for other apps to even integrate in the same ways.
02:01:19 ◼ ► And that lets them compete really effectively against others in the area, not because they
02:01:34 ◼ ► I hope that through various forces, internal and external, I hope they are forced to let
02:01:41 ◼ ► companies that are good at it, like OpenAI, put their models into different places in iOS.
02:01:48 ◼ ► Like, you know, replace Siri or integrate better, like, the way the current one's done, like,
02:01:53 ◼ ► Like, I hope that becomes the direction they go and Apple becomes more of the platform company
02:02:04 ◼ ► Like, when Apple makes really good OSes, they make really good developer frameworks, like,
02:02:12 ◼ ► It's when they start getting into all the services stuff and all the, you know, gatekeeping and
02:02:34 ◼ ► But what do you see in Apple's culture that's any different now compared to, you know, the last 10 years
02:02:45 ◼ ► I see it being the exact same, you know, handful of people running the company, the exact same
02:02:51 ◼ ► handful of people in all these leadership roles who don't really understand AI that well, who
02:02:57 ◼ ► don't tend to do very well at big data problems and machine learning types of problems or big
02:03:07 ◼ ► But then, you know, Google and other companies usually totally outclass them in a lot of these
02:03:24 ◼ ► But I wish that they would do something a little bit bigger and actually try to make something
02:03:32 ◼ ► Like, if you're going to, if you're going to become, if you're going to own the whole platform
02:03:36 ◼ ► and lock out everyone else in lots of different ways, you got to do a really good job yourself
02:03:51 ◼ ► I hope like in, you know, in two years we do an episode and we, and somebody points out
02:04:00 ◼ ► I don't see any evidence that they've changed what it would, that they would, that they've
02:04:17 ◼ ► Like it's better than this situation, but they're not really making like the really big,
02:04:21 ◼ ► like cultural changes or leadership changes at larger levels to really, to really make them
02:04:29 ◼ ► You know, what we get with Tim Cook being a diplomat, as we were saying, as I was saying
02:04:33 ◼ ► earlier in the show, like he's a diplomat and that is what the company needs a lot of the
02:04:45 ◼ ► And people keep saying like, oh, well, you know, he doesn't need to be a product person.
02:04:48 ◼ ► He delegates that, but I don't think he delegates that very well because he fundamentally doesn't
02:05:02 ◼ ► Like we're, we see things like that, that are just like, I don't know if Apple is too big
02:05:35 ◼ ► And it's like the Craig ready situation where you, it's, it is good to have an executive
02:05:40 ◼ ► who doesn't have to, you know, know how every technical thing works, but has had, it comes
02:05:47 ◼ ► from a technical background and incorporates that into his decision-making because he considers
02:06:05 ◼ ► Ideally, if you build your own CEO construction kit, right, you'd pick one that has product
02:06:10 ◼ ► And, you know, if you're building your VP, you pick one with technical knowledge, but you
02:06:15 ◼ ► Like you got Tim Cook's amazing skills in certain areas that led him to become the CEO, but he has
02:06:23 ◼ ► And so I, you know, every time I see him, and this is a story for maybe next week, every
02:06:34 ◼ ► But yes, it would be better if we had a CEO who had all of Tim Cook's good qualities, but
02:06:42 ◼ ► And, you know, that's again, he, he does the only thing he can do, which is, or the only
02:06:47 ◼ ► thing I think he should do, which is delegate that not because the CEO should always delegate
02:06:57 ◼ ► And yeah, that's, there are so many things, there's increasing number of things that are
02:07:01 ◼ ► wrong with Apple that you look at and you think this is never going to change until there is
02:07:10 ◼ ► There will be new leadership, but there's so many things that are, that you just see that
02:07:14 ◼ ► you just don't see possibly happening with the current leadership because they just don't
02:07:26 ◼ ► And maybe we could have a whole show on that at some point of just like all the things that
02:07:37 ◼ ► Every person on the Apple leadership page believes in that you just know they're not going to
02:08:03 ◼ ► This is a big new lineup and you know how much all of us, especially me and Casey, love
02:08:17 ◼ ► You can join us at atp.fm slash join to hear this and every other Overtime plus our member
02:09:34 ◼ ► So speaking of all this AI stuff and getting to what Marco was talking about in terms of like mindshare of like among people who are not listening to tech podcasts.
02:09:46 ◼ ► What becomes the Kleenex of voice assistants at this point among, you know, the non-tech enthusiasts?
02:10:02 ◼ ► And so that, you know, it's not like these things aren't penetrating to the mass market, but they're penetrating in a bad way when it comes to Siri.
02:10:09 ◼ ► But anyway, I was reminded of this when I was watching one of my many for I watch car rebuilding channels and I watch channels about people who are either rebuilding boats or live on boats or are sailing on boats, which is very strange for someone who gets massively seasick and will never be on a boat.
02:10:25 ◼ ► And I'm watching this one one channel that I've been watching for years and years, and it used to be like, hey, we live on a boat.
02:10:41 ◼ ► They have their old boat is just they docked it somewhere and they're constructing a new boat from scratch, which is a very fascinating thing.
02:10:51 ◼ ► And I'm watching mostly to see if they all die because they don't know what they're doing.
02:10:56 ◼ ► There are videos that I watch and I just shake my head and I go, you're all going to die.
02:11:00 ◼ ► It's like the scene that draws the YouTube can't recall because you probably haven't seen the movie or can't remember it.
02:11:07 ◼ ► Anyway, setting aside whether they all die on their boat that's been shot all the constructed.
02:11:11 ◼ ► In a recent episode, they were faced with the problem where they were just, I don't know, they're putting a tube inside another tube and filling the gap between them with like epoxy to put it in a tube for like the prop shaft or whatever.
02:11:22 ◼ ► Anyway, the YouTube part, the YouTuber, the person running the channel made it a point to have an entire episode saying, here's how I decided to solve this problem.
02:11:34 ◼ ► And, you know, the tools I used or whatever, and they've made videos like this for years.
02:11:42 ◼ ► And so they use both ChatGPT and DeepSeq, which kind of surprised me that DeepSeq had enough sort of mind share to even come up as an option.
02:11:51 ◼ ► I think maybe they made this video when it was like all in the news because there's a big delay when the videos come out, right?
02:12:04 ◼ ► And they did like a screencast sort of like a conversation with ChatGPT and asking like, if I have a tube this diameter and another tube with this diameter inside it and it's this long or whatever, what's the area of the thing?
02:12:23 ◼ ► And anybody who has used LLM-powered things to do math knows, in general, it is not their strength.
02:12:37 ◼ ► And most of these things have some kind of math engine behind the scenes that they will feed the math stuff to.
02:12:49 ◼ ► And similarly, there was another episode a little bit later, which is like, I have something that I have an electric motor and it gets hot and I need something to cool it.
02:13:00 ◼ ► How big of a, like, essentially heat sink do I need to dissipate this amount of heat in this amount of time?
02:13:04 ◼ ► And they're having this conversation with ChatGPT and DeepSeek saying, okay, here's the thing.
02:13:10 ◼ ► And they would say, okay, well, I made these assumptions about the temperature of the water and the temperature of the thing coming from the engine.
02:13:18 ◼ ► Not surprisingly, the two different LLM products came up with wildly different answers off by like a factor of three or four.
02:13:25 ◼ ► The thing that bothered me about this whole thing is I'm watching this waiting for the point where they say, but of course, this is all just like a fun exercise.
02:13:32 ◼ ► And I'm not going to actually build something based on what ChatGPT told me to do, especially since as I've just proven by asking two different LLMs and getting wildly different answers.
02:13:43 ◼ ► And the fact that they're so different makes me think that I don't know enough of what I'm doing to make use of these tools.
02:13:50 ◼ ► I'm like, well, wait, did we skip a step here where you talk to someone who knows what they're doing?
02:13:57 ◼ ► I worry that people think ChatGPT is the same as Googling something, which is not helped by the fact that the top, you know, above the fold thing on Google search results is now, you know, has been for years.
02:14:11 ◼ ► But with the advent of LLMs, it is much more prominent and much more likely to, you know, look like it's giving you the answer.
02:14:21 ◼ ► It was like, if you're don't try to use ChatGPT to win an argument, like if someone says, I think Tom Cruise is, you know, 60 years old.
02:14:46 ◼ ► Maybe we should look up somewhere where we think has a slightly higher chance of knowing Tom Cruise's age.
02:14:56 ◼ ► No, but you kind of know, in general, how frequently does Wikipedia know the age of famous people?
02:15:02 ◼ ► You have no idea, in general, how frequently does ChatGPT know the age of famous people because it'll say all sorts of things.
02:15:08 ◼ ► And so if you're trying to figure out the area between two cylinders or how big a heat sink you need for the cooler for your boat
02:15:15 ◼ ► or what Tom Cruise's age is, if you've asked ChatGPT and said, well, there you go, I figured it out.
02:15:20 ◼ ► It feels so much like when we all first got smartphones and someone would ask them a question and we just Google it and say, look, I got the answer.
02:15:27 ◼ ► But that, even though the actions are the same, I took out my phone from my pocket, I typed in a thing, I hit a thing and I read a result.
02:15:41 ◼ ► I just, I just feel like the, there's a disconnect between what LLMs are actually good for and what people are using them for.
02:15:48 ◼ ► And that disconnect may be dangerous, kind of in the same way that there's a disconnect between what driver assistance functions are actually good for and what people use them for and why they end up dying by going under a tractor trailer because they're not using the tools, quote, correctly.
02:16:01 ◼ ► But the tools are essentially designed to tempt them into not using them correctly, sometimes advertised in ways that are not used.
02:16:07 ◼ ► I feel like we're at that stage with LLMs and I really don't want this person to build anything on their boat base and something ChatGPT said because ChatGPT doesn't know what a boat is or how to build anything, please.
02:16:17 ◼ ► And I'm not saying that the first non-LM, non-AI search result on Google is also the right answer all the time.
02:16:23 ◼ ► I'm saying maybe you have to do more research than Googling to figure out how big the heat sink needs to be on your boat.
02:16:48 ◼ ► Like, oh, you know, everyone uses like the notebook LLM type things where you tuck your notes into it and makes a study guide.
02:16:54 ◼ ► But it's like they show me things like that and they say, well, what does it say there?
02:17:12 ◼ ► Like maybe study from the actual study guide materials instead of running through the LLM and hoping it doesn't mangle them.
02:17:27 ◼ ► But I mean, like, is that that different from doing a random web search and landing on some random web page?
02:17:35 ◼ ► Yeah, it's that different because the random web page, I think people have better instincts for its sketchiness.
02:17:43 ◼ ► Well, it's kind of what we gave Google, like what Google is supposed to do, like how many people link to it and blah, blah, blah.
02:17:49 ◼ ► But reputation wise, I think people have heard of Wikipedia and understand its reputation.
02:17:54 ◼ ► Like, that's why we have institutions like, you know, as crappy as we may complain about them, the New York Times, Wikipedia, IMDb, whatever.
02:18:01 ◼ ► Like, it's the reason why if we landed on some person's GeoCities page that says Tom Cruise is 50 years old, we trust that less of landing on Wikipedia.
02:18:10 ◼ ► And I know people aren't good at making that determination, but it's something to hang your hat on.
02:18:15 ◼ ► And the problem is, to get back to your earlier point, Marco, is that I think people are starting to think of ChatGPT as the institution that has a reputation in the same way that Wikipedia or the New York Times does.
02:18:25 ◼ ► And that is unfounded because ChatGPT is many things, but it is not like they, ChatGPT, you know, OpenAI, the company or the product, they don't have any information.
02:18:35 ◼ ► They are just gathering information from elsewhere, compressing it, grinding it up and spitting it out to you in some form that looks plausible.
02:18:41 ◼ ► But it is not the same thing as what Wikipedia or the New York Times are doing with their information.