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698: And Do What?

 

00:00:00   How's things?

00:00:00   I just basically ran into the room.

00:00:02   Good busy is better than not busy, I would argue.

00:00:06   Yeah, I think so.

00:00:07   I am never bored.

00:00:09   Like, when was the last time either of you were bored?

00:00:12   Oof.

00:00:13   Legitimately bored?

00:00:14   Yeah.

00:00:15   Sometimes on plane flights I get bored because I can't do anything on plane flights.

00:00:19   Like, I can't watch a movie.

00:00:20   I can only listen to podcasts.

00:00:21   And sometimes, if it's a long plane flight, like, you're podcasted out and then what's left.

00:00:25   That's fair.

00:00:27   Yeah.

00:00:27   And the thing about planes, too, is like, why don't you talk to the person next to you?

00:00:30   I cannot hear a damn thing on planes.

00:00:31   Like, it's so...

00:00:32   Forget about the noise-canceling headphones.

00:00:33   Just trying to have a conversation with the person next to me is just like, I feel like

00:00:37   I'm shouting.

00:00:37   We're in a club.

00:00:38   None of us want to be here.

00:00:39   Let's go somewhere quiet.

00:00:40   But there's nowhere to go.

00:00:41   Well, also, like, the person next to you does not want that.

00:00:44   Ever.

00:00:45   Like, they want to do their...

00:00:46   I'm talking about my wife.

00:00:46   Oh, okay.

00:00:47   Well...

00:00:47   Well, that may be true.

00:00:48   Maybe.

00:00:49   That may be true, but still.

00:00:50   She's got stuff to do.

00:00:52   She's got knitting projects.

00:00:53   She's watching a movie.

00:00:54   Like, having a ball, but I have to stare out the window at the horizon, so it kind of

00:00:58   sucks.

00:00:58   Yeah.

00:00:59   That's fair.

00:01:00   Yeah.

00:01:00   I just...

00:01:01   I realize, like...

00:01:02   You know, because, of course, whenever you are around, you know, children, and especially

00:01:06   teenagers, you will frequently hear the complaint, I'm bored.

00:01:10   Mm-hmm.

00:01:11   This seems to be something that only children really have.

00:01:15   Because, like, with every spare moment of time, I'm either choosing to do nothing.

00:01:21   Like, if I need to, like...

00:01:22   If I need a break, I'm like, I'm going to stop and just watch TV for the rest of the night

00:01:26   or whatever.

00:01:27   Or, there's a million things I want to do with every ounce of time I have.

00:01:31   Like, I have so many projects going always all at once.

00:01:35   I'm juggling a million different things.

00:01:36   I have computer projects.

00:01:38   I have 3D printing projects.

00:01:39   Of course, I have, like, you know, my actual work, my programming projects, multiple programming

00:01:44   projects.

00:01:45   I have the restaurant now, which is open for the season.

00:01:47   Like, I have so many things going on all the time.

00:01:50   There's a million things around my house that need to be done, like different projects and

00:01:54   tasks and cleanups and everything.

00:01:55   You're saying there's a million things you haven't done?

00:01:57   Is that a reference to something?

00:01:58   Just you wait.

00:01:59   Well done, John.

00:02:01   Well done.

00:02:02   See, whatever that is, I have to watch or listen to or experience that.

00:02:05   It's fine.

00:02:05   It's fine.

00:02:06   Just keep going.

00:02:07   You've seen Hamilton.

00:02:08   You just didn't pluck it out.

00:02:09   I have not seen Hamilton.

00:02:10   You haven't seen Hamilton?

00:02:11   I don't know.

00:02:12   I keep making Hamilton.

00:02:13   Robert says, but very frequently, Marco says things that are so close to Hamilton.

00:02:16   I'm just like, come on.

00:02:18   They can't be.

00:02:18   Anyway.

00:02:19   Sorry.

00:02:19   Continue.

00:02:20   That's it.

00:02:21   Like, I've just, I've, I've never, the idea of being bored is so incredibly foreign to

00:02:26   me.

00:02:27   Like, I, I just don't, I haven't been bored in a decade.

00:02:30   Yeah.

00:02:31   I feel like my recollection of summers, particularly around, around either Declan or Adam's ages

00:02:37   was, I, and I had friends that I would like play with or hang out with, depending on how

00:02:42   old we're talking about.

00:02:43   But I remember summers just being defined by boredom.

00:02:46   Now that was still better than being in school and bored.

00:02:48   But I remember, I remember just being so bored and I feel like I could have done within reason,

00:02:56   whatever the crap I wanted.

00:02:58   Like my family growing up was not super into limiting like video games or anything like that.

00:03:03   Like I could have done whatever.

00:03:04   And constantly, I remember whining to my mother, I'm bored.

00:03:07   Like, I don't know what my deal was, man.

00:03:08   But yep.

00:03:09   I hear you.

00:03:10   Well, you, I think you were a normal teenager, like that's just, or a normal kid, but you

00:03:15   know, whatever age we're targeting here, or like, I think it's, I think it's maybe less

00:03:18   so with teenagers because they, they are more easily able to find their own stuff or, you

00:03:22   know, talk to their friends.

00:03:23   Yeah.

00:03:23   I don't think I ever complained that I was bored when I was a teenager.

00:03:25   I'm sure I did when I was like a toddler, but I don't remember that.

00:03:27   But I was a teenager.

00:03:28   No way would have.

00:03:29   I complained that I was bored.

00:03:30   Unless my parents were taking me somewhere and forcing me to be like, let's go look at the

00:03:34   big, biggest, world's biggest ball of twine or something.

00:03:36   Then I would have complained that I was bored as a teenager.

00:03:38   That's fair.

00:03:38   But they didn't do that.

00:03:39   So I didn't have that problem.

00:03:40   I mean, even those things are even boring for adults.

00:03:42   That makes sense.

00:03:43   All right.

00:03:45   We have a new member special that we recorded just a few days ago as we were recording this.

00:03:51   We have ATP dev Mac asked Mac apps.

00:03:55   John, what the heck does that mean?

00:03:56   Well, we explained at the top of the show, but this is a response to a bunch of listener

00:04:01   questions that we got about what makes a really good Mac app essentially, especially for people

00:04:05   who are like, I'm new to the Mac platform or I've never developed a Mac app.

00:04:08   And you guys always talk about like, this is not like a real Mac app.

00:04:11   It's weird or it's not the right, you know, what, what makes a great Mac app?

00:04:14   How can you tell?

00:04:15   And the device, which we fall back on a few times in the episode, but isn't actually very

00:04:21   helpful, which is like, well, you know, when you see it, well, maybe we know when we see

00:04:24   it, but not everybody does.

00:04:24   So we tried mightily in this episode to see if we could nail down a few concrete things

00:04:29   about what makes a really good Mac app.

00:04:31   And if you're wondering about the title, again, we explained it at the top of the member

00:04:34   special where that phrase comes from, but it basically just means what makes a great Mac

00:04:38   app?

00:04:38   I feel like we could have three more specials just on the same topic because I feel like

00:04:43   we just scratched the surface of it.

00:04:44   Like we didn't even get into like, it's can Apple still make good Mac apps and stuff like

00:04:49   there's so many other aspects of this.

00:04:50   But we tried the best we could to tackle this topic from our different perspectives

00:04:55   and to sort of feel around the edges.

00:04:57   And I think there's lots of useful, actionable stuff in there, obviously, if you're a developer

00:05:01   and if you're not a developer and you're just sick of hearing us talking about, oh, that's

00:05:05   not a good Mac app.

00:05:05   What do you even mean?

00:05:06   Well, we try to explain in this member special.

00:05:08   So check it out.

00:05:09   Indeed.

00:05:10   I thought this was a fun one.

00:05:11   And it is one of those very difficult things, like John said, of how do you define what is

00:05:16   sort of undefinable?

00:05:18   But I think we did a pretty decent job of it.

00:05:20   And, you know, the people who have already listened seem to have very nice things to say,

00:05:23   which we always appreciate.

00:05:24   So check it out.

00:05:25   And Marco, if one isn't a member, but if you were interested in hearing ATP dev Mac asked

00:05:31   Mac apps, what would you do?

00:05:32   You would head to ATP.fm slash join and join our wonderful membership for all of these wonderful

00:05:38   benefits, including our exclusive member content, ad free episodes, and so much more.

00:05:44   We're going to get Marco an air horn so he can fulfill his morning zoo.

00:05:48   I already have a viber slap and a bell.

00:05:51   What else do you want?

00:05:52   You got to do it.

00:05:52   It's not a real air horn.

00:05:53   It's just a soundboard air horn.

00:05:54   And your voice, you're like your voice, you're like morning, you know, radio DJ voice still

00:06:03   sounds like someone making fun of a radio DJ and not someone doing an impersonation of

00:06:07   a radio DJ.

00:06:08   So the sarcasm just comes through.

00:06:10   I think the problem with doing any kind of, you know, kind of put on like that is that

00:06:14   the writing in your head needs to needs to keep up with the speed of speech.

00:06:18   And I was I'm bottoming out there by the end of that.

00:06:21   Like you're just going to read the URL.

00:06:22   Well, all right.

00:06:25   Let's do some follow up.

00:06:26   I have some exceptionally quick follow up with regard to nugs.

00:06:30   I don't I don't have it in front of me.

00:06:33   I apologize to whoever pointed this out to me, but somebody pointed out that you can add

00:06:38   nugs as a source within the Sonos app.

00:06:40   So with Sonos speakers, some people just airplay to them.

00:06:45   And I do that every great once in a while.

00:06:47   But generally speaking, one of the things I love so much about Sonos is that they will play

00:06:52   things on their own.

00:06:53   You know, you can go into the Sonos app and pick which speakers you want to play things

00:06:56   on and what you want to play.

00:06:57   And then they will just handle it in your phone or whatever device is not involved at all that

00:07:02   from that point going forward.

00:07:03   So I have Apple Music on mine when I was still a Spotify subscriber.

00:07:07   I had that on there.

00:07:08   But I didn't realize that there are like 100 or 200 other services you can add.

00:07:12   And nugs is one of them.

00:07:14   So if you are interested, like Marco is in the Dave Matthews band, or if you're interested

00:07:19   like both of us are in Goose, you can check that out and go into your Sonos

00:07:23   app and add that as another source.

00:07:25   I had no idea that was a thing.

00:07:26   Then, John, apparently you had a prophecy and it has come true.

00:07:32   Yeah.

00:07:33   Last episode I was talking about, I forget it was, I think it was in the after show.

00:07:36   I was talking about a bug I had been chasing.

00:07:38   Maybe it was an overtime, but there was some overlap.

00:07:39   Bug I was chasing in one of my apps and I thought I had finally fixed it.

00:07:44   And I said in that episode, and here I am saying this, but of course, as soon as I finish this

00:07:49   episode, I'm sure there will be another crash report showing that I haven't fixed it.

00:07:52   And guess what?

00:07:53   There was indeed.

00:07:54   It was like a 24 hour grace period, I guess.

00:07:57   Another bug report saying, hey, that crash on quit inside app hit code is still there.

00:08:03   I was thinking about it last night when I saw this and I was like, you know, since it's

00:08:07   only, since it's like one every three days on average, this could just be like one person's

00:08:13   computer where they have some weird debug thing turned on for app kit.

00:08:17   Cause it's like an, it's an assertion inside app kit while it's deallocating stuff.

00:08:20   And it's like, uh, you know, the, the thing that's causing the crash is an assertion that

00:08:24   says, and there should be nothing left in this dictionary while we're deallocating stuff

00:08:28   inside app kit.

00:08:29   And there is something left there apparently on this person's computer.

00:08:32   Uh, and then it just, the assertion fails and it crashes on its way out the door.

00:08:36   By that point, all the code in my app is finished executing and it's just deallocating stuff.

00:08:40   So I don't know what it is.

00:08:43   Uh, I have so much debugging about this.

00:08:45   As I said on the show, when I talked about this, I've never been able to reproduce this.

00:08:49   I cannot make it happen.

00:08:50   I just can't this.

00:08:52   I put in so much debugging.

00:08:53   I like, I tried everything I could think of.

00:08:56   It just never, ever, ever, ever, ever happens for me.

00:08:59   And yeah, even put it in debugging and say, Hey, that assertion, I know what it's checking

00:09:02   because I had an LM decompile app kit for me and says, yep, this is what it's checking.

00:09:06   And this is, and you can check it yourself.

00:09:07   And so on my way out the door, I check and I always say, make sure this thing is empty.

00:09:10   And of course it's always empty as far as I can tell.

00:09:12   And then, you know, anyway, some, someone out there is having this bug.

00:09:16   Uh, so it's still there.

00:09:17   So I just want to update everybody on that.

00:09:19   And yes, I did curse myself by, uh, saying that this would happen.

00:09:22   As the prophecy foretold.

00:09:24   Uh, John, I do have some good news for you though.

00:09:27   Mythos is back.

00:09:28   Hayden Field over at the Verge writes, after a rollercoaster negotiation process with the

00:09:32   Trump administration that dragged on for two weeks, Anthropics Mythos 5 is finally back

00:09:37   in action at least somewhat for a select group of organizations, according to a letter from

00:09:41   the government to Anthropic that was viewed by the Verge.

00:09:43   Babel 5, however, sorry, John, the public facing Mythos class model appears to still be in limbo

00:09:48   with no apparent timeline for a rollout agreement.

00:09:50   Yeah.

00:09:51   Oh, well, I guess the security researchers can get access to Mythos again.

00:09:55   Lucky them.

00:09:55   Mm-hmm.

00:09:57   Uh, with regard to indexing for the forthcoming Siri AI, a word on the street is that spotlight

00:10:03   indexing only downloads a certain number of mail messages a day.

00:10:07   So depending on the size of your mail archive, it could take a long time to complete.

00:10:12   Well, that doesn't surprise me because it's like, it's one of those things.

00:10:15   We want to be friendly.

00:10:16   So just do X messages per day, but then they don't think about like, well, what if someone

00:10:19   has X times a million messages in their mail?

00:10:21   But I am excited to see that it seems like it's actually going to download all the messages

00:10:27   rather than just, I'm just going to take the top 100 and that'll be it.

00:10:30   So anyway, this is related to people saying they were waiting like a week for their indexing

00:10:34   to be finished with installing the iOS 27 beta.

00:10:37   So yeah, here we are out here hoping that the rumor about, uh, the 26.6 OS is, is true

00:10:42   and that will do all the indexing for us while we wait for 27 to be released, but we'll see.

00:10:46   All right.

00:10:47   Then Aaron Ramist had some corrections for both you and for I, Aaron writes on the last episode,

00:10:54   John said that you can't get an eight terabyte SSD on the Mac mini.

00:10:57   This isn't true anymore.

00:10:58   Apple does offer eight terabytes of Mac mini, even with the base M4 pro.

00:11:02   I think you mean for you and me.

00:11:03   Did I say you and I?

00:11:04   Second correction.

00:11:07   Anyways, uh, so John, did you do any further research about this?

00:11:11   Yeah, I don't know why I didn't see that option.

00:11:12   Maybe it's one of those ones where you got to change it for something else.

00:11:14   But anyway, I priced it out just to see what it would be like to get a Mac mini with eight

00:11:17   terabyte SSD and it starts at $5,400.

00:11:20   Cool.

00:11:22   That is for, that is for a binned M4 pro that is down two CPU cores and four GPU cores and

00:11:27   24 gigs of RAM and just plain gigabit ethernet.

00:11:30   $5,400 Mac mini.

00:11:32   So, yeah.

00:11:33   What would it take to have a stock Mac mini, but in a gold case?

00:11:38   You think it would be more or less?

00:11:39   Solid gold or just plated?

00:11:41   Uh, solid.

00:11:42   Well, it's probably a lot of gold.

00:11:44   Gold's pretty expensive.

00:11:44   Solid would be a lot.

00:11:46   Yeah.

00:11:46   So, like the whole idea, I was musing about a Mac mini is like if I could get like some

00:11:50   kind of ARM computer to tide my over or if I don't care about power, what can I get?

00:11:54   But the problem is the SSD.

00:11:55   The SSD is the problem.

00:11:55   I was doing some more pricing out of things with like various discounts and stuff.

00:11:59   And in most cases with Apple's pricing, an eight terabyte SSD costs more than the computer.

00:12:04   Like the upgrade, even on a Mac studio, very often in most configs that aren't ultras, the

00:12:08   eight terabyte SSD upgrade from whatever the stock is costs more than the whole rest of the

00:12:13   computer combined.

00:12:14   Anyway, Aaron continues, similarly, Casey said you have to get the top of the line

00:12:18   max chip to get the eight terabytes on the MacBook Pro, which is not technically true.

00:12:22   On MacBook Pro, eight terabytes is an option with the base M5 Max.

00:12:26   However, the base M5 Max only supports 36 gigs of RAM.

00:12:29   So if you want any additional RAM, then you'd have to upgrade to the top of the line max chip.

00:12:33   I think this is what got me because if you recall, I was on the air.

00:12:37   I was pricing out basically my existing M3 MacBook Pro.

00:12:40   But if I were to buy it today and I have 64 gigs of RAM, so I miss I conflated the issue

00:12:47   being SSD where it wasn't the issue.

00:12:50   The issue actually was RAM that caused me to go to the super top of the line M5 Max.

00:12:55   So I regret the air.

00:12:57   That's always been the case with Apple's configs in recent years.

00:12:59   We're upgrading to some other unrelated thing.

00:13:01   We'll be like, whoa, we got to change a bunch of other specs because they're really limiting

00:13:05   the amount of configs they'll sell to you.

00:13:08   And so they're it's like it's getting to be like optioning a car.

00:13:11   It's like, well, if you want the entertainment package, then you have to get the, you know,

00:13:15   interior, you know, whatever thing like leather seats or things are connected in weird ways.

00:13:20   So, I mean, I don't really blame them given the difficulties of component pricing, but it

00:13:25   does make configuring these things even trickier than normal.

00:13:29   All right, let's go to price increase corner.

00:13:31   We're going to start with the Apple TV.

00:13:32   Chris Carley wrote in with a point that I think, John, maybe you intended to make this on the

00:13:36   previous episode.

00:13:37   Chris writes, a big Apple TV price hike makes sense since, unlike many other products, the

00:13:42   Apple TV doesn't have other expensive components to mask the changes in price of RAM and of storage.

00:13:47   The Apple TV is, in terms of cost, mostly just an old iPhone chip with RAM and storage.

00:13:51   Yeah, I didn't mean to make this point and somehow we moved on to another topic before I could.

00:13:56   But, yeah, we're complaining of, like, the Apple TV, 54% increase to the base price, 67%

00:14:02   increase for the good one.

00:14:03   It's just brutal.

00:14:04   But, like, what is the Apple TV if not a bucket of RAM and storage?

00:14:09   Like, there's not much else in there, right?

00:14:10   It's just the SoC that has the RAM on it and then storage and, I guess, like, you know, whatever

00:14:16   Wi-Fi chip and stuff.

00:14:18   It's like, there's nothing else in there.

00:14:20   It's similar to the point that I did end up making about, like, when you do it, when you

00:14:24   look at how much the RAM upgrade have increased, they haven't increased by 20%.

00:14:28   They've increased by, like, 70% or 100% because that's it.

00:14:31   That's the source of the problem.

00:14:32   It's the RAM.

00:14:32   Well, I'm not saying the Apple TV is not overpriced, you know, for the power that it has and hasn't

00:14:37   always been pretty expensive for what you get.

00:14:39   But if one product was going to have the highest percentage increase, it would be the product

00:14:43   that is just basically RAM and storage in the cheapest possible box.

00:14:47   Right-o.

00:14:48   All right, let's talk Steam Machine.

00:14:49   Jay Peters over at The Verge writes, after months of waiting, Valve has finally announced

00:14:53   that the Steam Machine, its new living room-friendly PC, will start at $1,050 and go on sale beginning,

00:14:59   actually, as we record this today, June 29th.

00:15:01   That is not cheap, especially when you're comparing it to, like, a PlayStation.

00:15:05   But I guess, John, it might get worse.

00:15:08   Yeah, if you, I mean, so it is like a little PC and you can spec it up.

00:15:11   And so if you get the maxed out 2-terabyte model with a controller, because apparently the

00:15:14   cheap one doesn't even come with a controller, then it's $1,428.

00:15:18   The Steam Machine was looking really exciting back when we talked about it many moons ago

00:15:23   as, like, a tiny living room PC that is as friendly as a console or tries to be as friendly

00:15:28   as a console and is small and adorable, but it plays PC games.

00:15:32   It's basically the desktop plugged-in version of the Steam Deck.

00:15:36   It's the, you know, Valve's Linux platform where they heroically find ways to play Windows

00:15:41   games in Linux and gets good performance.

00:15:43   And it's not a big, fancy gaming PC, but what if you don't want to build a big, fancy gaming

00:15:47   PC?

00:15:47   And what if you also don't want to run handheld?

00:15:49   Get a Steam Machine.

00:15:49   It's like a little PC GameCube.

00:15:51   It's so adorable.

00:15:52   And it was like, well, no pricing is announced.

00:15:53   So what do you think it'll be like?

00:15:54   Oh, I don't know.

00:15:55   Maybe this will be, like, as much as the PlayStation 5 Pro, like $700, $600 or $700, maybe even $800.

00:16:01   Nope, it's over $1,000.

00:16:02   And in fact, it was delayed because they hadn't announced pricing.

00:16:06   And then the date came when people expected them to announce pricing.

00:16:09   They're like, we're going to wait to see what's going on with the whole.

00:16:12   And that was, you know, that was a while ago.

00:16:15   And now they've announced pricing and the pricing is bad.

00:16:17   I mean, I did see a bunch of YouTube videos being like, we're going to build a Steam Machine

00:16:22   competitor by building our own PC.

00:16:24   And I felt like most of those videos should have focused on how the PC is also more expensive

00:16:28   to build now because it's not like the Steam Machine is the only thing that is getting hit by this price increase.

00:16:33   But yeah, kind of bad timing on Valve's part.

00:16:37   Although I guess they're probably glad they didn't launch the Steam Machine at like $750 several months ago

00:16:43   because anyway, yeah, tough luck.

00:16:47   Jay Peters continues, while console makers sometimes subsidize their hardware to bring prices down,

00:16:52   Valve is choosing not to do that with the Steam Machine.

00:16:54   Here's what Valve said in remarks provided to The Verge.

00:16:56   While this might seem like an easy solution, it doesn't align with our beliefs about how healthy ecosystems are built.

00:17:01   If there's anything we are religious about at Valve, it's our belief that open systems are better in the long run for ourselves and our customers.

00:17:07   When companies sell their hardware under cost for competitive advantage or buy exclusive content for it,

00:17:12   they're doing that to build a more closed system, one where you don't get to choose what software you will want to use.

00:17:17   We don't want that for PC hardware, and we don't think you should want it either.

00:17:22   You shouldn't feel like you have to buy Valve hardware.

00:17:24   You should be able to view it as just one option alongside all the devices for playing games

00:17:29   and select the one that makes sense for you.

00:17:31   This means you get to decide which device fits your personal trade-offs around things like price performance,

00:17:35   form factor, peripheral support, and everything else you care about.

00:17:37   That's the strength of the open PC platform, and subsidizing hardware runs counter to it.

00:17:42   I haven't seen anyone push back on this because everyone's like, rah, rah, yeah, open is great.

00:17:46   But it's like, this answer doesn't make any sense to me.

00:17:50   Because, like, all that open stuff, that's not really in Valve's control.

00:17:55   Like, they're not, I mean, I suppose they could make, like, a proprietary console, but they're not.

00:17:59   They're making a gaming PC.

00:18:00   And as influential as Valve is, they don't actually control what constitutes a PC game.

00:18:06   Microsoft with Windows still has more control over that, even though they're not even running Windows.

00:18:10   Like, I've talked to this before, how they're out there basically trying to say,

00:18:14   we're going to make Windows games run on a thing that's not Windows.

00:18:16   And we know we're not in the driver's seat here.

00:18:18   We are reactive.

00:18:19   Whatever the Windows games do, we'll try to figure out a way to get them to work on our weird Linux adapter layer.

00:18:24   But people aren't writing games, at least thus far, directly for Valve.

00:18:30   Maybe some developers are, but, like, they want to sell on Windows.

00:18:33   If you make a PC game, you want it to run on Windows because you're really limiting your market if you can't.

00:18:36   Now, why would Valve sell at a loss?

00:18:39   See, the one way to do it is, like, hey, we're going to sell our consoles at a loss so so many people will buy them.

00:18:44   And then once we get them on our consoles, of course, our consoles only run, you know,

00:18:48   the PlayStation only runs PlayStation games and it will get exclusive to the PlayStation and all that other stuff.

00:18:51   So I get what they're getting at in terms of the closed ecosystem.

00:18:54   But another reason people subsidize stuff is to get people in the door, to people who don't have a gaming PC, to buy a gaming PC.

00:19:03   Because if you are able to do that, then you can make it up in the games.

00:19:07   And guess what?

00:19:08   Valve does make money by selling games for this platform.

00:19:12   They have the biggest PC game store on the Internet.

00:19:16   And so they could sell at a loss and make it up by selling all those damn games.

00:19:22   Hell, they make money even when someone buys a game and plays it on their Windows PC as long as they buy it from the Steam store.

00:19:28   That's exactly the model.

00:19:30   Now, I know it's not a closed ecosystem or whatever, but, like, you know, a random company like Alienware can't sell gaming PCs at a loss.

00:19:38   They'll go out of business.

00:19:39   But Valve is one of the few companies in the PC gaming ecosystem that could sell hardware at a loss because they make money in every game sold.

00:19:47   Similarly, Microsoft with the Xbox could sell the Xbox at a loss, hoping to make it up.

00:19:51   With the Xbox games that are sold.

00:19:53   But again, Valve makes money when you buy a game from the Steam store, even if you don't play it on a Steam machine.

00:19:58   So I'm not saying they should sell at a loss or whatever, like, do whatever they want to do.

00:20:02   But, like, the answer about how we need to keep an open ecosystem when we don't want to lock you in, it's like, you selling your thing from low cost doesn't lock me into anything.

00:20:11   You still play PC games, games that I can play on my Windows PC if I don't want to buy your Steam machine.

00:20:15   So a little bit incoherent.

00:20:18   And I'm not going to say disappointing that they're not selling it below cost, but I bet they're selling it close to cost.

00:20:23   Because if you look at what's in the Steam machine, this looks like they're probably not making a lot of money on the hardware.

00:20:29   And how can they sell this without making a lot of money on hardware?

00:20:32   Because they make so much money in that store.

00:20:34   Because the margins on taking a cut of everyone else's PC games is much better than the margins on selling a hardware box.

00:20:42   Speaking of Xbox, Jay Peters yet again.

00:20:44   Microsoft is increasing the prices of Xbox consoles again.

00:20:47   Starting on August 1st, five 12-gig models will be $100 more expensive, while one-terabyte models will be $150 more expensive.

00:20:53   This means that the Xbox Series S will start at $500.

00:20:56   The Xbox Series X without a disk drive will start at $750.

00:21:00   And the Series X with a disk drive will start at $800.

00:21:04   Microsoft also says it will be sunsetting its two-terabyte Xbox Series X.

00:21:10   Microsoft last raised prices in October by $20 to $70 and says it had hoped to avoid further hikes.

00:21:16   Quote, unfortunately, console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x.

00:21:20   And we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027.

00:21:23   Big yikes.

00:21:25   Expect another doubling.

00:21:26   They just dropped the high-end model because they're like, we know we can't sell it.

00:21:30   We're having enough trouble selling Xboxes as it is.

00:21:32   And the two-terabyte model will probably cost $900 or something.

00:21:35   So we're not going to try that.

00:21:36   I think the PlayStation 5 Pro currently costs $900 or something close to that.

00:21:39   So I got a bargain when I bought mine at whatever it originally was sold at.

00:21:43   But yeah, everyone's raising prices.

00:21:45   And for the Xbox Series X, I don't know if these things are sold at a loss.

00:21:49   Although Microsoft gives a good example of how they had raised prices by $20 and $70 and then had to raise them again.

00:21:54   That's definitely a Microsoft thing to do.

00:21:56   Whereas the Apple thing to do is hold out as long as you can and raise prices on almost everything by a huge amount that you hope will stick.

00:22:02   But we'll say maybe Apple underestimated how much it had to raise prices to.

00:22:07   Speaking of all these raised prices, a Micron executive suggests that Apple's aggressive purchasing tactics might have helped fuel the memory shortage.

00:22:14   Ooh.

00:22:15   Rolf Winkler in the Wall Street Journal writes that Tim Cook said, there's less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases.

00:22:25   That's Tim's quote.

00:22:26   Then Rolf says, Micron chief business officer Sumit Sadana said the company couldn't make investments during the memory market's last downturn when Micron's gross profits went negative.

00:22:37   In part because certain customers took advantage to pay rock bottom prices.

00:22:41   Sumit said, we told a couple of the customers who are being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive.

00:22:48   He said, without naming Apple, adding that low prices discouraged capital investments.

00:22:53   Quote, a lot of the industry investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins.

00:22:58   So this is, you know, I mean, go to the press and, you know, passive aggressively subtweet as we used to say, Apple or whatever.

00:23:07   But, you know, it's, it's, it's quite, uh, quite a fantasy world to believe that, uh, you know, this company saying basically like Apple drove a hard bargain.

00:23:16   And if they had, if they had bought our ramp for more money back when things were okay, then we would have had more profit.

00:23:21   And you know what we would have done with that profit?

00:23:23   We would have built more factories.

00:23:24   So we wouldn't be in this problem.

00:23:26   Would you, is that what you would have done with the extra profit?

00:23:30   If, you know, if only, if only they would, would have agreed to pay higher prices, we wouldn't have given ourselves bonuses or done stock buybacks.

00:23:36   No, no, we would have built, we would have built factories because we would have said, we want to, you know, prepare for the future.

00:23:42   Now there probably is some truth to that because obviously the more money you make, the more investments in the future and so on and so forth you make.

00:23:47   But this is, this is really kind of like, well, look who, look how the tables have turned because back when Apple was in the driver's seat, they were driving these hard bargains and saying, you get nothing.

00:23:57   You get one cent per chip and you'll, you'll like it because we're buying a bajillion chips and those one cents add up.

00:24:03   But like giving them the most razor thin margins or I said, making, making things go negative.

00:24:07   And now that they're making huge profits and are richer and like, you know, Apple, you should have been nicer to us before, which, you know, whatever business is business.

00:24:14   But which is probably true.

00:24:15   Yeah, because like, you know, it's the notion that these companies are so like forward thinking and magnanimous and don't take all their money and, you know, again, give it to bonuses to the top executives and do stock buybacks to make people like, I'm not saying it's 100% that, but history has shown that when the profits are good, most companies do not use it to do forward thinking things.

00:24:39   Maybe Micron is different and maybe they would have done something different, but anyway, it's, uh, it's kind of like a kicking the rest of the industry while they're down.

00:24:45   Uh, Steve Trout and Smith, friend of the show, weighed in on this and wrote Apple starved the Silicon industry, excuse me, Silicon supply chain for years.

00:24:53   It was widely discussed back when GPU prices started to skyrocket.

00:24:57   Famously, Palm blamed Apple for not being able to source components for its web OS devices.

00:25:01   Uh, and then we have a way back machine link to, um, to the verge where Chris Ziegler wrote, uh,

00:25:08   citing an anonymous source, quote, we told HP, we needed better displays for the pre three.

00:25:13   They'd come back and say, Apple bought them all.

00:25:15   Our suppliers tell us we need to build them a factory if we want the displays.

00:25:19   And they weren't willing to put the billion dollars up front to do that.

00:25:22   Yeah.

00:25:22   At various times, Apple has cornered the market on certain commodities, but the other thing Apple has done,

00:25:26   as we know from the Apple in China book, spend billions of dollars to make people make factories for them.

00:25:31   So it's, it's tough to be competing with Apple for components and Apple, you know,

00:25:37   Apple cornered the market on flash memory for the nano for a long time.

00:25:40   Uh, Apple likes that situation where it's the one screwing over everybody else.

00:25:44   And now Apple's getting screwed over along with everybody else.

00:25:47   So, uh, what goes around comes around, I guess.

00:25:49   But yeah, I would, I would hope that this entire industry can eventually, uh, get its feet under it

00:25:55   again and try to get things more in balance and have capacity that, uh, more closely matches demand

00:26:01   without any one customer screwing everybody over, whether that be Apple or Nvidia or who else.

00:26:06   Well, and I think this also like, you know, a, this is a good use of Apple's cash hoard now,

00:26:10   because like if they want to front the money to build another factory for somebody, you know,

00:26:16   exchange for, you know, all of its output for a number of years, that's, that's something

00:26:20   they've done before.

00:26:21   It's right out of their playbook.

00:26:21   They do it actually, I think all the time.

00:26:23   Um, and this is a good time to be doing that kind of thing.

00:26:27   Um, but that being said, I think another angle of this is that Apple, when they were dictating

00:26:32   all those terms, um, and this is, again, this is a great reason to read that Apple and China

00:26:37   book, uh, it goes into a lot of this.

00:26:38   We never really talked about it on the show.

00:26:39   It's a very good book.

00:26:40   Um, it really is really, really, really is.

00:26:42   Yeah.

00:26:43   I, I strongly recommend, I don't read a lot of books.

00:26:45   That was one.

00:26:45   Um, and it was really good.

00:26:47   You know, when you had, you know, back in the day, you had like Tony Blevins going around

00:26:50   like dictating terms to people and Tim Cook being his ice cold, you know, dictator self

00:26:56   like that's Tim Cook leads by edict, like just do it like ice cold, do it.

00:27:05   And Apple's able to negotiate that kind of way, which is not really negotiation when they

00:27:09   are in positions of power.

00:27:10   And we've seen this over and over again, that Apple is really only able to work out good

00:27:16   deals for itself when it has all of the power.

00:27:19   They don't really show a lot of strength in negotiation when they are not able to just dictate

00:27:26   terms.

00:27:26   So that is one area where I am curious to see how this situation plays out today, because

00:27:32   part of the reason Apple is in this situation is that for the last couple of decades, they've

00:27:39   done so well that they have been able to dictate terms to all of their suppliers and have the

00:27:43   suppliers basically say, OK, well, we have to basically play ball because they're our biggest

00:27:47   customer or they're going to give us the highest price or they're going to buy all of our output

00:27:51   for X years or whatever.

00:27:52   Whereas now with AI chip demand, Apple is no longer a lot of these suppliers' biggest customers.

00:27:58   You know, NVIDIA, for instance, is probably going to I don't know.

00:28:02   I don't know what the numbers are off the top of my head.

00:28:04   But like if you look at between NVIDIA and Apple, like who has more sway over, say, TSMC?

00:28:10   NVIDIA is TSMC's biggest customer.

00:28:13   Yeah, like and that's that's got to irritate Apple.

00:28:16   And it definitely hurts their negotiating position when it comes to getting access to the highest

00:28:21   end nodes, getting getting like allocation of the supply.

00:28:24   That's, you know, how much of their supply are they willing to give Apple and at what prices

00:28:28   and on what terms?

00:28:29   Apple hasn't been in the position to need to really negotiate that rather than dictate

00:28:35   for a very long time.

00:28:38   And I don't think anybody who's there who's there right now has that skill, at least certainly

00:28:42   the people who have been dealing with supplier relations, you know, for the last couple of

00:28:47   decades.

00:28:47   I don't think any of them have had a lot of chances to exercise that skill.

00:28:51   It's very much like they're a relationship with developers.

00:28:54   Oh, it's exactly like their relationship with developers.

00:28:56   It's like like, oh, we're developed.

00:28:58   We've been working together with developers.

00:29:00   We're one big happy family.

00:29:01   But imagine I mean, this has actually happened, but imagine if the tables ever did turn and suddenly

00:29:06   developers had power, Apple would be like, why are they so mad at us?

00:29:09   We've been working together so great for all these years.

00:29:11   And it's like, no, the whole time we've been hating this.

00:29:13   Like the suppliers who have been under Apple's thumb, Apple thinks like, this is great.

00:29:17   You know, we've worked together for so long.

00:29:18   Why don't they have any loyalty to us?

00:29:19   And it's like, they've hated it because you've treated them so badly.

00:29:22   And yet they've been nice to your face because you give them billions of dollars.

00:29:25   But like the second they don't have to do what you say anymore, like Apple is shocked.

00:29:29   Like, I thought all this time we were friends.

00:29:30   It's like, no, no, no, no.

00:29:32   And on that topic of like, who's going to give money to make a new factory in exchange

00:29:38   for all its output, the RAM makers now are going to be like, we're not going to take that deal

00:29:43   either because we make so much more profit selling high bandwidth memory that the AI people make

00:29:47   than we would making like the whatever LPDDR or whatever Apple needs.

00:29:50   Like the RAM that Apple uses in its products has lower margins than the RAM that the AI people

00:29:56   want.

00:29:56   And so these companies are like, if we're going to build another factory, we're going to be

00:29:59   building high band with memory in it because we make more money for every one of those.

00:30:03   And Apple, I know you don't want any of this, but like, we would rather not take your money

00:30:07   to build a factory and then have to use that factory to make like memory for iPhones.

00:30:11   We'd rather build it ourselves and sell the memory to all the people making AI servers because

00:30:16   we make more from like, that's the main problem with this is that the AI, you know, people making

00:30:21   AI servers, both the silicon, like the NVIDIA silicon and like all the RAM and everything

00:30:24   goes into it, those customers will pay more for their stuff that like that enterprise data

00:30:29   center stuff has higher margins than selling RAM for Macs and iPhones.

00:30:34   That's a lower margin business.

00:30:35   So that's, that's part of the problem.

00:30:37   Um, maybe not so much with TSMC, but definitely with the RAM maker.

00:30:40   So hopefully this will work itself out.

00:30:42   Like in the end, money solves everything.

00:30:43   And Apple may have to throw more money than they're used to at various things.

00:30:47   And, you know, and, and Apple could play this well, like try to, you know, if they can

00:30:52   correctly predict how things are going to go, maybe that maybe they can get in a situation

00:30:56   where there's a glut and an oversupply and the price goes down and they're, they're feeling

00:31:00   like they're back in the driver's seat.

00:31:01   But, uh, for now they have other strategies that they're trying.

00:31:05   All right.

00:31:06   And that brings us to Apple is asking the Trump administration to approve Chinese RAM.

00:31:11   Zach Hall at nine to five Mac writes the financial times reports that Apple is seeking a

00:31:15   clearance from the Trump administration to purchase memory chips from a banned Chinese company.

00:31:19   So looking at the financial times post, Apple is lobbying the Trump administration for clearance

00:31:24   to buy memory chips from CXMT, a Chinese company that the Pentagon has put on a ban list because

00:31:29   of alleged connections to the people's liberation army, according to six people familiar with the

00:31:34   matter.

00:31:34   The PLA people, people's liberation army is the military wing of the Chinese communist party

00:31:40   and the primary armed forces of the people's Republic of China.

00:31:44   The iPhone maker has waged a lobbying campaign to get the blessing from the white house to

00:31:49   help ease the financial pressure on the company from the rise in memory chip prices.

00:31:52   Apple is not barred from buying chips from CXMT or YMTC, another Chinese memory chip maker,

00:31:58   but the Pentagon is, Pentagon has put both companies on its Chinese military company ban list.

00:32:04   The so-called 1260H list contains dozens of Chinese groups with alleged ties to the PLA that

00:32:10   undermine U.S. national security.

00:32:12   The Commerce Department last year added CXMT to a package of Chinese groups that it intended to place

00:32:18   on a trade ban list called the entity list.

00:32:21   But the White House told it to hold off on new export controls because the administration was in

00:32:25   the middle of a tough, in the middle of tough negotiations with China to try to reach a truce in

00:32:29   in the trade war.

00:32:30   But most of the people familiar with the matter said it was unclear if Apple would get any guarantee

00:32:34   from the administration, especially a promise that the U.S. would not later put CXMT on the

00:32:38   entity list.

00:32:39   So this is a little bit weird in that apparently they could buy from them, but it seems like the

00:32:44   government's saying, we're probably not going to let you.

00:32:46   And so Apple is sort of preemptively going to the government, to their wonderful friends in the

00:32:50   government and saying, hey, we really want to buy this RAM from the Chinese companies because,

00:32:53   you know, we need RAM and they have RAM and forbidding us to buy from them is really going to

00:32:59   make things bad.

00:33:01   And I know you're thinking about not letting us buy from them, but could you pretty please

00:33:05   change your mind on that?

00:33:06   And we'll see how that negotiation goes.

00:33:07   This actually is, you know, as much as we constantly complain about corruption and everything in

00:33:12   the Trump administration, this type of thing where companies lobby the government to allow

00:33:17   them to do business with other international companies that they want to do business with

00:33:20   happens all the time and is a actual somewhat normal function of government.

00:33:24   What's not normal is how the decision will actually be made, unlike decisions that are made

00:33:29   based on facts and evidence and what's best for the country.

00:33:32   This will be made on, let's say, other criteria, but the actual situation is not that foreign,

00:33:37   so to speak.

00:33:38   So we'll see how that works out for Apple.

00:33:40   Like, I mean, they'll try anything.

00:33:42   They'll, you know, try anything to get their RAM chips for less money.

00:33:46   And this type of thing of like, look, you're not going to build a factory overnight, but what

00:33:50   we can do overnight is start buying from a new customer that previously we were staying

00:33:53   away from because it was, you know, they were supposedly going to be banned.

00:33:56   So we'll see how it goes.

00:33:58   We are sponsored this episode by Factor.

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00:35:54   There was a very interesting report from Mark Gurman on June 25th, which reads,

00:36:04   Apple plans to debut a base M6 processor as early as this year.

00:36:08   But in a first, the company will skip higher-end versions of that chip.

00:36:12   Apple instead aims to introduce the next Pro and Max chips with the more advanced computing

00:36:16   and graphics power in 2027 as part of a new M7 generation.

00:36:21   Apple's taking this unusual step in order to fast-track technologies that it originally

00:36:26   planned to release later.

00:36:27   The change should help meet growing demand for on-device AI capabilities and more graphics-intensive

00:36:31   software.

00:36:32   Apple plans to introduce the base M7, codenamed Delos, which is apparently an island off Greece,

00:36:38   as early as the first half of next year.

00:36:40   Apple is also planning higher-end M7 Pro, M7 Max, and M7 Ultra chips, all dubbed Andros internally.

00:36:47   The M7 Pro and M7 Max are scheduled for as early as the end of 2027, while the M7 Ultra is on track

00:36:53   for 2028.

00:36:54   The M7 line is designed primarily around major advancements to on-device AI processing.

00:37:00   The base version is slated to support about 240 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth.

00:37:04   And John took the liberty of looking it up.

00:37:06   And the M5 has 153 gigs a second, and the M6 will have 200 gigs a second, according to Gurman.

00:37:13   And I will repeat, the M7 will allegedly have 240 gigabytes per second.

00:37:18   The M5 Ultra chip, codenamed Sotra D, will have around 36 CPU cores and 80 GPU cores.

00:37:26   Apple has also tested support for up to 768 gigabytes of memory in the M5 Ultra Max studio,

00:37:33   though the component constraints could complicate its debut, you know what I'm saying?

00:37:36   Or make it cost $80,000, you think?

00:37:38   Right.

00:37:39   Then, the following day, on the 26th of June, Gurman writes,

00:37:42   Apple's first-ever touchscreen laptop will rely on the company's current high-end M5 chips,

00:37:46   rather than the next-generation silicon,

00:37:48   though the company is working on a follow-up model with future M7 processors.

00:37:52   The M7 laptop models are planned for as early as the end of 2027.

00:37:55   So, here we go.

00:37:57   Total destruction of the rumored plans that we've been talking about for a year,

00:38:01   which is like, you believe they're going to...

00:38:02   I know the M5 Pro and MacBook Pros came out this year,

00:38:05   but supposedly the rumor is they're going to come out with the M6 ones this year, too.

00:38:08   And those are going to be the ones that are redesigned,

00:38:10   and they have OLED screens, and they have touchscreens,

00:38:13   and they're going to have the M6 line,

00:38:15   and maybe they're going to be called MacBook Ultra.

00:38:16   And, yeah, that plan is now, like, the stuff...

00:38:20   I guess the stuff you care about, like, OLED, still rumored.

00:38:23   Touchscreen, still rumored.

00:38:25   Redesigned, still rumored.

00:38:26   M6, no more.

00:38:27   Just the same M5 Pro and Macs that are in the current laptops will be in the new ones,

00:38:32   which is somewhat disappointing.

00:38:34   But on the other hand, it is a second MacBook Pro release within the same calendar

00:38:38   year, and the thing most people are excited about of those laptops

00:38:41   is the OLED screen, the redesign, and to a lesser extent, the touchscreens.

00:38:45   So it's not that disappointing.

00:38:46   But I do wonder if these end up being called Ultra,

00:38:50   or if they are price-like Ultras.

00:38:52   It might feel kind of bad.

00:38:53   It's like, it's an Ultra that's exactly the same speed as the existing...

00:38:58   It's not going to be any faster, like, unless they come up with better cooling or something.

00:39:01   It's going to be exactly the same speed as a MacBook Pro you could have bought months and

00:39:06   months ago.

00:39:06   It's just going to have a nicer screen and a touchscreen and all that other stuff.

00:39:10   And I'm not sure what they're going to put the base M6s in that we just talked about.

00:39:15   The base M6 seems great and everything.

00:39:16   But, like, the fact that they're not even going to do an M6 Max, a Pro Max, or Ultra,

00:39:21   that it'll just be the no-suffix M6, like, that's kind of disappointing that the M6 generation

00:39:27   will not get any of those other chips.

00:39:29   It does make some sense, based on the rumors that Gurman has talked about here, of, like,

00:39:33   you know, apparently whatever was planned for the M7 generation, these things, whatever things

00:39:38   on the chip that make on-device AI better, Apple's like, look, we have limited resources,

00:39:43   limited time.

00:39:44   Why don't we fast-track the M7 stuff?

00:39:47   And just because the M6s, maybe they're just like, well, they're, you know, a couple percent

00:39:51   better than the M5s, but, like, we want to get to that next step as soon as possible.

00:39:54   So, rather than clogging up the supply lines of TSMC, the limited capacity that we get in

00:39:59   TSMC, or maybe not TSMC, stay tuned, why don't we just go right to the M7?

00:40:03   And why don't we just start getting those out of the door ASAP?

00:40:07   Because, apparently, the design is done and they're ready to go, and they are a bigger leak

00:40:11   over the M5.

00:40:11   So, yeah, it seems like the M5 is going to have a fairly long life as the top of the range

00:40:17   in Apple's products, with, you know, the M7 ones coming out sometime next year and the

00:40:22   M7 Ultra in 2028.

00:40:24   Jeez, Louise.

00:40:26   So, does that mean you're not getting a new computer until 2028, John?

00:40:29   No, no.

00:40:30   People have asked about that.

00:40:31   I can't wait, though.

00:40:32   Are you kidding?

00:40:32   I needed that new computer yesterday.

00:40:34   I cannot wait.

00:40:35   I'm sure the M7 Ultra will be great.

00:40:37   No way in hell I'm waiting until 2028.

00:40:40   I'd be perfectly happy with an M5 Max.

00:40:45   You know, I've been fighting my hard drive capacity trying to offload more things.

00:40:50   We'll have more on that in a future episode, probably, because there's some excitement going

00:40:54   on there.

00:40:54   But, anyway.

00:40:55   Oh, jeez.

00:40:55   Oh, great.

00:40:56   No, I'm not waiting.

00:40:56   I'm not waiting.

00:40:57   I'll buy as soon as I can.

00:40:59   Now, I'm not interested in the laptop, so it's not disappointing to me personally, but I do

00:41:04   wonder if this throws a monkey wrench into their branding.

00:41:05   Like, if the whole plan was actually to call these a MacBook Ultra.

00:41:08   Are they less Ultra if they have the same chip that you could have got months ago?

00:41:13   I think they are less Ultra.

00:41:14   They're still cool.

00:41:15   They're still, those will be, you know, nice laptops.

00:41:17   But, yeah.

00:41:19   Another casualty of Ramageddon.

00:41:21   So, if you wanted to try to get to the front of the line in one of these fabs, what could

00:41:27   you do?

00:41:27   Well, a user on Twitter called Jukan writes, from the GFHK monthly call, Apple and Intel

00:41:34   already signed an agreement in December 2025.

00:41:36   The M7 chip will use Intel 18A-P and is expected to enter production by the end of 2027, while

00:41:44   the smartphone chip will use Intel 14A and is expected to enter production by the end of

00:41:49   2028.

00:41:50   John, what's GFHK?

00:41:52   I tried mightily to find out by Googling it.

00:41:56   There's a lot of things with those initials that could be plausible.

00:41:58   The closest I get was GF Holdings Hong Kong, but the GF stand for some other words that I

00:42:05   couldn't pronounce, and there's lots of GF companies with those same two words.

00:42:08   Anyway, I think it's some big financial institution somewhere near Hong Kong, maybe.

00:42:14   Yeah, I don't, the sourcing on this, I don't know anything about this user or what they're

00:42:17   saying, but like, anyway, you can keep reading.

00:42:20   Like, there's a little bit more smoke around these rumors.

00:42:23   Gavin Bonshore, who formerly was a senior editor at Anantech, who is now at Bontech Labs, writes,

00:42:31   Intel's 18A process is the company's 1.8 nanometer class node, the one that Panther Lake is currently

00:42:38   manufactured on.

00:42:38   It combines ribbon-fet gate all-around transistors with power via backside power delivery.

00:42:43   And this delivers up to 25% higher performance or 36% lower power consumption compared to

00:42:48   Intel's previous Intel 3 process, with around 30% improved transistor density.

00:42:53   The 18AP variant, which is what the M7 is reportedly targeting, is essentially a refined version of

00:43:00   the base 18A node.

00:43:01   For the M7, Apple may require some of Intel's advanced packaging techniques to hit its performance

00:43:06   targets, potentially involving combinations from the Foveros family, which is a 3D chip

00:43:11   The first mobile candidate for Intel's fab may not be the A21 for the iPhone 19 in 2027.

00:43:22   Current reports instead point toward the unnamed SOC, pointing toward an unnamed SOC, targeting

00:43:28   mass production on Intel's 14A node by late 2028, which suggests Apple will continue relying on TSMC for

00:43:34   smartphone chips for the immediate future, at least for the higher-end models.

00:43:40   Apple's one of the most demanding chip customers in the world, and winning any Apple production

00:43:45   gives Intel Foundry a proof point that other potential customers, including Amazon, Qualcomm,

00:43:49   and Broadcom, will pay close attention to.

00:43:52   Every M7 that meets Apple's performance targets is essentially a data point for every other company,

00:43:56   evaluating Intel Foundry as an alternative to TSMC.

00:43:59   TSMC has effectively held a monopoly on the world's most advanced consumer chip manufacturing for several years.

00:44:04   If Apple begins splitting its most advanced chip production between TSMC and Intel,

00:44:08   it changes the competitive dynamics of the Foundry business in a way that matters well beyond these two specific companies.

00:44:13   So we did talk about the super vague rumors about Apple working with Intel on something-something,

00:44:18   and now they suddenly got a lot more concrete with the rumor that M7, that Apple is going to try to get out ASAP,

00:44:24   that they're skipping the M6 Pro Max and Ultra to get to the M7 faster, they're going to make Intel fab that.

00:44:31   And the rumor being that they're going to still use TSMC for their phone chips, because, you know,

00:44:36   it's more important in bigger capacity, but it is true that their biggest chips,

00:44:40   obviously, like, physically biggest, most power-hungry, most complicated, most transistor chips,

00:44:44   are the big giant ones they put in Macs, not the phone chips.

00:44:47   And so going to Intel for those would be quite a feather in Intel's cap if they can pull it off.

00:44:53   As we talked about, Intel is taking some slightly different paths with its chip technology.

00:44:57   They have some things that they got to first, or at least touted more strongly,

00:45:01   like the backside power delivery, where you route the things that give power to the chips from the bottom instead of the top,

00:45:06   because when you send it through the top, you've got to weave it through all the logic and everything.

00:45:09   They have some interesting technologies.

00:45:11   The question always was, can they actually get them working and shipping and get the yields right?

00:45:16   And Intel is actually shipping some chips of its own on an earlier variant of this supposed 1.8 nanometer class node.

00:45:23   So it's not like it's a complete unknown.

00:45:27   If this ends up being true, and, like, that M7 Ultra in 2028 is fab by Intel, wow, what a world.

00:45:35   TSMC probably doesn't care, because they'd still be doing all the phone chips,

00:45:41   but this is the whole point of, like, Apple doing any kind of deal with Intel, investing it.

00:45:45   It's like, it's to Apple's advantage for TSMC not to be the only source for a billion reasons,

00:45:50   and it's probably to the world's benefit for there to be other competitors to TSMC,

00:45:56   just so there's a more competitive marketplace.

00:45:58   So this is kind of actually an exciting rumor for Intel, unless they totally blow it,

00:46:03   and then it's not going to be exciting for them.

00:46:05   But this is future news.

00:46:07   But boy, what a world we're living in, where there's going to be a Mac chip from Intel again, but not x86.

00:46:13   Yeah, this is really wild.

00:46:16   I mean, that being said, though, like, Intel has shown a remarkable ability to screw things up in recent years.

00:46:22   No, that was the old Intel.

00:46:23   It's not the new Intel.

00:46:24   Is it?

00:46:25   Like, I don't think they've proven that yet.

00:46:27   Well, they did ship their own chip.

00:46:29   Panther Lake is shipping on the 18A process, so it's not like, I mean, maybe Panther Lake has bad yields,

00:46:35   but, you know, like, they're shipping something.

00:46:38   So it's not like they can't make this.

00:46:40   Right.

00:46:40   They're shipping a chip on it, and the 18AP is the refined version of that.

00:46:44   So I have some faith that they will ship something.

00:46:47   But Panther Lake is a far cry from an M7 Ultra.

00:46:50   That's the thing.

00:46:52   Like, I think, ultimately, Intel is too important to U.S. national security for anyone to let them fail.

00:47:01   And that's wonderful for the U.S.

00:47:05   It doesn't necessarily mean that Intel is going to be able to become a foundry, you know, for other manufacturers,

00:47:12   have all of the expertise and trust and processes that somebody like TSMC would have to make cutting-edge chips for somebody else yet.

00:47:21   That all stands to be seen.

00:47:23   Like, maybe that'll happen.

00:47:25   I don't think they've shown any of that really so far, at least not at that kind of scale.

00:47:33   Like, it'll be worse.

00:47:34   It'll be harder to work.

00:47:36   Apple, when Apple works with Intel on this, it'll be harder for Apple.

00:47:39   It'll be harder for Intel.

00:47:40   There'll be more conflicts.

00:47:41   Everything will be worse.

00:47:42   But the thing is, both parties are highly motivated to just, you know, slog through the worstness because they're, like,

00:47:52   Intel's obviously motivated because they're, like, we want to stay in business, right?

00:47:55   Their foundry thing is, like, we totally want to do chips for your Apple, right?

00:47:58   So they're highly motivated.

00:47:59   And Apple's highly motivated because they're, like, TSMC has a new boyfriend.

00:48:03   It's NVIDIA.

00:48:04   I'm talking about NVIDIA this, NVIDIA that.

00:48:06   So they're both motivated to deal with all that crap that you just said, which is totally true.

00:48:10   Like, Intel is not going to be as good as the TSMC.

00:48:13   If everything's going to be worse, the yields are going to be lower.

00:48:15   There's going to be more problems.

00:48:16   But, like, it's good that they're both motivated to deal with it.

00:48:21   They're, like, look, we're in this together.

00:48:23   You want to do it because you want to survive.

00:48:24   We want to do it because we need these chips.

00:48:26   And TSMC is not returning our calls like they used to.

00:48:29   And so I think they'll make it work.

00:48:31   Like, assuming this rumor is true, I think they will mostly make it work.

00:48:34   And it's still, still your point stands, which is, like, okay, so they do make it work.

00:48:37   What if the chips suck?

00:48:39   What if it's, like, the Intel, whatever, the Intel cell mode where everyone didn't want to get the Intel one.

00:48:43   They wanted the Qualcomm one because the Intel one was worse.

00:48:45   That could still happen, too.

00:48:46   So, fingers crossed here, right?

00:48:48   I mean, look, for lots of reasons, like, I do think, you know, anybody paying any attention to global politics or the chip business should be a little concerned how little of a contingency plan that we have if there is a conflict over Taiwan.

00:49:07   So, that's a pretty significant risk to the world these days, and especially to the chip business.

00:49:15   And so we all want there to be a strong Intel.

00:49:19   We want there to be strong, you know, non-Taiwanese chip manufacturing around the world, especially in our own country.

00:49:26   That would be great.

00:49:28   But that's a really difficult thing to set up, and it takes decades of investment and prioritization and just huge amounts of change and infrastructure that, you know, we've, I think, started to do some of that.

00:49:42   But I think it's going to be a very long time before we could even be remotely competitive with TSMC in Taiwan.

00:49:52   So, like, how do we get from here to there?

00:49:55   I don't know.

00:49:56   But, you know, anything that steps on the gas a little bit in that area, I think, is a very good thing, because it's a very hard problem, but also a very important one.

00:50:06   But it's kind of unfortunate that our best hope is Intel, because they have not really shown a ton of capability in that kind of area.

00:50:16   Like, I do think Intel's process, like, there's got two things going for it.

00:50:22   One, they're not trying to do literally exactly the same thing as TSMC.

00:50:26   It is a little bit different, so it's good to have some kind of differentiator.

00:50:29   And two, it's within shouting distance.

00:50:32   Like, it's not, you can quibble and say, well, TSMC is better for reasons X, Y, but they're not in a different ballpark.

00:50:38   Like, they used to be, like, not even close.

00:50:39   Now, I'm not saying Intel has caught up to TSMC, but they are now plausibly in the conversation.

00:50:46   The thing they have running against them is not so much like, oh, you're terrible at fabbing things and so on and so forth, because, again, they've done a lot of work to close that gap significantly.

00:50:55   And Intel has been making chips for a long time, so they're not starting from zero.

00:50:58   It's not like a situation where, like, why don't you just make a new RAM fab or, you know, make a new chip fab?

00:51:02   Like, Intel has been in this business, right?

00:51:03   They lost their lead.

00:51:04   They still won't have it back, but they're still in the conversation.

00:51:07   Their problem is what is very new to Intel is being a foundry for other people's chips, and that's where they suck ass compared to TSMC.

00:51:14   TSMC has been a foundry for other people's chips for ages, and they're used to working with customers and all their tools and everything.

00:51:21   Like, that is the problem that Intel has, because even though they've been fabbing chips forever, they have not been a customer-oriented service company that says we will fab chips for anybody.

00:51:33   And that was the whole transformation they made, where they split off the part that makes, like, you know, the actual Intel chips from the part that fabs them.

00:51:40   And the part that fabs them says we're just going to be a fab to the world.

00:51:43   You've got a chip.

00:51:43   You want it fab?

00:51:44   We can do it.

00:51:45   And we had a story many shows ago where Intel was like, if we can't get a customer, we can't build these factories.

00:51:51   Like, we're trying to build the factories for our future processes or whatever, but we literally can't.

00:51:56   We're not going to build them unless someone signs up to buy the chips they're going to come out of them.

00:52:00   And they were very blunt about it.

00:52:03   Like, you know, our attempt to be a fab depends on somebody signing on the dotted line and saying, we will buy chips from the factory you will make.

00:52:11   If nobody does that, then our fab business is just going to fail, and we're just going to fab all our chips at TSMC like everybody else.

00:52:16   Maybe Apple has stepped in and prevented that from happening.

00:52:19   I don't know.

00:52:19   It's not like they were naming names or announcing deals back then.

00:52:22   But that's the situation of their fab.

00:52:24   It's so new.

00:52:25   It's such a new business to them that they don't even know if it's a viable business.

00:52:29   And everyone who has worked with them said, yeah, TSMC is better at this.

00:52:31   They're so much easier to work with.

00:52:33   They've been doing it forever.

00:52:34   They know how to fab chips for other people.

00:52:37   And Intel, you've only been fabbing chips for yourself for so long that you suck at it.

00:52:41   So that's one of the main risk parts here.

00:52:43   But again, both parties, Apple and Intel, they're both highly motivated to make this work.

00:52:48   And I think they'll just suffer through it.

00:52:49   They'll suffer through it.

00:52:50   And best case scenario for Intel, this is a learning opportunity for them.

00:52:54   They'll get better at it.

00:52:55   Best case for Apple, they can finally be the most important customer again because I would presume they will become Intel's most important customer for its fab.

00:53:05   If only because, like, you know, hey, you couldn't have even built this factory if it wasn't for our orders, for our Mac chips.

00:53:10   But on the other hand, the Mac chips are such low volume compared to the phone chips.

00:53:14   Like, they do say they have a phone chip off in, like, 2028 or whatever.

00:53:17   Like, the rumor is they're going to have a phone chip at some point.

00:53:19   But I bet that's contingent on a lot of other stuff going well before that.

00:53:23   Oh, yeah.

00:53:23   Exciting times for Intel.

00:53:26   Exciting times for Apple.

00:53:27   Not so exciting times for people interested in high-end Mac chips.

00:53:30   It's going to be an M5 season for a long time.

00:53:35   Do you think maybe Apple can convince Intel to do it for free for exposure?

00:53:39   Yeah, right.

00:53:40   You never know.

00:53:43   All right.

00:53:44   Let's talk new Siri.

00:53:46   John, you put this in the show notes as most things end up in the show notes.

00:53:51   What do you want to talk about here?

00:53:51   All things end up in the show notes.

00:53:53   Thank you.

00:53:53   Thank you, Marco.

00:53:54   Yeah, sorry.

00:53:55   Sorry.

00:53:56   Sorry.

00:53:56   My bad.

00:53:57   I contributed some things to follow up, but that doesn't count, does it?

00:54:00   No, it counts, but I also contribute things to the show notes, but that doesn't count.

00:54:04   So, the new Siri, I changed all your jokes after the fact to make them funnier.

00:54:10   I punch it up for you.

00:54:11   The first thing I wanted to put in about the new Siri, I'm assuming you've all, well, I know

00:54:16   Marco has installed Golden Gate.

00:54:17   Casey, have you installed Golden Gate anywhere?

00:54:19   No, I do have the beta running on my iPad, and I did install it on the Vision Pro, but I

00:54:26   don't think I've actually used it since installing it.

00:54:28   The Vision Pro story.

00:54:30   Yeah, yeah.

00:54:30   I tried it.

00:54:31   I'm not using it, of course.

00:54:33   Yeah, well, you've got it on the iPad, at least.

00:54:35   Like, I think this is everywhere.

00:54:37   This is the Mac icon we're looking at in the show notes.

00:54:39   We'll put a link to this image.

00:54:40   But I'm pretty sure this is the branding they use everywhere.

00:54:42   It's probably also the icon for, like, the little conversation app on the iPad where you

00:54:46   can go look at past conversations with Siri AI and stuff, right?

00:54:49   And this, like, Siri's look and brand has changed a lot over the years.

00:54:56   Recently, it's been leaning pretty heavily into the, like,

00:54:59   I don't know, you'd say, like, red and blue rainbow swirl thing going on.

00:55:03   But in the 27 releases, they've gone with, they have a new sort of mostly monochrome logo.

00:55:10   This one has some rainbow tinges on it to remind you of the old Siri, but it's like a circle

00:55:14   with, like, a wavy line in the middle.

00:55:16   It's not the yin-yang symbol, whatever that's called.

00:55:18   But it looks a little bit like that.

00:55:21   But it's, like, horizontal instead of vertical.

00:55:25   And everyone thinks it looks like a Pepsi logo.

00:55:27   So Brad Ellis posted, I don't know if you recognize this, but he posted a bunch of images from a

00:55:36   classic internet meme, which was a real thing.

00:55:40   It was the Pepsi logo redesign brand manual from 2008.

00:55:44   We'll put a link to that in the show notes, put a link to the PDF.

00:55:48   The PDF is a real thing, kids.

00:55:51   In 2008, this was not a joke.

00:55:52   This was not a parody.

00:55:53   This was a, as far as I know, an actual real thing from the Pepsi rebranding.

00:55:59   From whatever company that came up with the rebrand of the Pepsi logo saying,

00:56:02   here's what it means.

00:56:03   And it had some of the most ridiculous things you will ever see in your life.

00:56:06   You're like, they cannot be serious.

00:56:08   I think, apparently, they were.

00:56:10   Anyway, they just put the new Siri logo into this document.

00:56:14   And it fits in perfectly because it looks kind of like the rebranded Pepsi symbol that nobody liked.

00:56:19   And so now there's a Pepsi logo on all of our Macs.

00:56:22   And I don't know.

00:56:23   Like, I didn't really like the rainbow-colored one.

00:56:25   And I kind of like this will fit in better in the menu bar with the monochrome stuff.

00:56:29   But it does look a little Pepsi-ish.

00:56:32   And then it didn't take long for people to, you know, take this and run with it.

00:56:36   Joanna Stern in one of her videos used it as the head as like a Mr. Siri.

00:56:40   See the images?

00:56:42   We'll put a link to her YouTube video.

00:56:43   You can watch it.

00:56:44   But, like, it's like a person with a giant pizza flopped over their head, like pizza dough or something.

00:56:50   Like, the two eyes and the mouth are in the bottom part of the Pepsi logo

00:56:55   and the top part of the Pepsi logo is just a big floppy thing on their head.

00:56:58   It's a sad-looking Mr. Siri.

00:57:00   And I don't know.

00:57:01   I know it's just, like, a tangent to go off about, like, the Siri branding.

00:57:05   But I do think this is the most significant Siri-y, like, visual identity branding change that has happened in a long time.

00:57:11   And I think it's a little weird.

00:57:13   Oh, it's not good.

00:57:15   I mean, like, from what everyone has said, the new Siri is generally, so far, excellent for people.

00:57:21   I haven't actually really had enough time with it to say.

00:57:25   My one minor irritation is that doing things like creating reminders via Siri now seems slower?

00:57:33   Oh, yeah.

00:57:34   Everything's going to be slower because, yeah.

00:57:35   Yeah.

00:57:36   Whether it does it on device or not, it is doing a lot more processing than it used to.

00:57:39   I'm sure that's the case.

00:57:40   Yeah.

00:57:41   That part is not amazing, but if it is really as smart as everyone says it is when asking more complicated things, you know, maybe overall the upgrade will, I'm sure it'll overall prove to be worthwhile.

00:57:52   You know what will fix that for you, Marco?

00:57:54   Buy a new iPhone.

00:57:55   I'm sure it'll be very affordable.

00:57:57   Oh, yeah, definitely.

00:57:58   Yeah.

00:57:59   So, anyway, it's, other than that, it does seem like people seem to like it a lot.

00:58:07   But that logo, like, as I'm seeing it on my laptop, I don't, I don't love it.

00:58:12   I mean, I'll get used to it.

00:58:14   I didn't love the weird rainbow blob that we had before this, that was in the menu bar all the time either.

00:58:18   But both in the menu bar and in the dock, I do not prefer this new logo.

00:58:25   It really does look like a Pepsi logo, though.

00:58:28   I think the problem with it is, I mean, yes, first of all, that the Pepsi logo thing, like, that was incredible.

00:58:34   And all the memes around that were incredible.

00:58:37   I think the problem with it is that it's actually, there's not enough logo there.

00:58:42   Like, it's, it basically just looks like a circle with a squiggle in it.

00:58:46   Like, there's not anything else there.

00:58:48   I think it needs to be, like, a little bit more of a symbol.

00:58:53   A little bit more recognizable.

00:58:54   Because right now, when you see it, like, in the dock, it just looks, it almost looks like a placeholder icon.

00:58:59   And in the menu bar, it's just this circle with a squiggle.

00:59:04   Like, it, it needs something else.

00:59:06   Yeah, color would help.

00:59:07   But then in the menu bar, it can't really have color.

00:59:09   So they're kind of trapped by their own decision to make everything monochrome in the menu bar.

00:59:12   No, I mean, not, not color.

00:59:14   Just like more, like, the symbol needs to be a little bit more, a little bit more detailed.

00:59:19   Have, like, one other element.

00:59:20   Have some kind of, a little more to it.

00:59:22   It seems like it's been, like, smoothed away through maybe committee or something.

00:59:27   Like, it's, like, this has had too much sanded off of it.

00:59:31   It needs, it needs a little bit more.

00:59:32   Well, see, the Siri never had a corporeal body.

00:59:35   Like, it was always, it was always defined by those, by, by clouds of color.

00:59:40   And so once you take away the color, it's like, what's left then?

00:59:43   Now you've just got a cloudy blur.

00:59:44   Like, it has never had a, I don't know if never, maybe there was early on, there was one back before Apple bought the Siri company.

00:59:50   But, like, yeah, they didn't, it never really had, like, a strong logo identity, nor has it had, like, a, I mean, if you look at your menu bar now, like, there's not a brand identity for, like, the sound thing in the menu bar, right?

01:00:02   Or the, the time machine thing, or the clock, or the, even Spotlight just being a magnifying glass.

01:00:07   There's nothing like that for AI agents right now.

01:00:10   Apple could, I mean, I guess this is it, but, like, come up with a logo that says, instead of saying, this is for controlling your displays, this is for controlling your sound, this is for controlling Bluetooth.

01:00:20   This is for Wi-Fi.

01:00:21   This is for AI agent.

01:00:22   And I guess this is their symbol for that.

01:00:24   I mean, obviously, it's the branded for Siri, but, like, if there, you know, if there was a generic symbol, we haven't come upon it at all.

01:00:31   If we did, I think what we would say, I think the industry has decided that sparkle is the thing that means AI agent.

01:00:39   Gemini leaned into this by, by actually having a branded single sparkle.

01:00:42   But for a while, apps started sprouting sparkles all over the place.

01:00:46   Sparkles in the toolbar, sparkles on edges of buttons, sparkles in your face.

01:00:50   And it's like, sparkle means AI agent.

01:00:51   Apple has gone with Pepsi logo means our specific AI agent.

01:00:55   Well, but also, like, the, like, the other AI products out there all have logos.

01:01:00   You know, Chatty PD has that weird kind of, like, flower thing.

01:01:03   Claude has the splat.

01:01:04   Gemini has the diamond.

01:01:05   Wait, what does Claude have?

01:01:07   I have no idea what the Claude logo is.

01:01:08   It's like a, like an asterisk.

01:01:10   Oh, they're like the hand-drawn asterisk?

01:01:12   Yeah, I think I know what you mean.

01:01:13   It's a very splatty asterisk.

01:01:15   Yeah, have you seen, have you seen, speaking of things that wouldn't look good in the menu bar,

01:01:18   Apple does have its, um, I think it's like their Apple intelligence thing.

01:01:22   It looks like, um, two rings twisted around each other.

01:01:25   Do you know that one?

01:01:25   Uh, I don't think so.

01:01:27   It's like, it's like two strands going in a circle and the strands are twisted around each other.

01:01:32   Oh, I think I know what you mean.

01:01:33   They even animate it, so they, like, they weave in and out of each other and straighten

01:01:36   and twist.

01:01:37   The problem with that one is those two strands that make up the circle are so fine that it

01:01:41   doesn't read, it doesn't read as a, uh, at menu bar sizes, it's too small.

01:01:45   You can't see the lines anymore.

01:01:47   So that's just like their Apple intelligence thing.

01:01:49   And if you look at WWC sessions, I think they have an animated version of it where the lines

01:01:52   weave in and out each other, like two snakes and become straight or whatever.

01:01:55   Like, they do have some other branding about this, but yeah, I think they, I think they're

01:01:59   in a little bit of a bind.

01:02:00   Not that the branding matters too much because it's mostly faceless.

01:02:02   I think their biggest problem aesthetically, I didn't, don't have anything in the notes

01:02:05   here about it, but like, um, those stupid black gradient windows, at least on the Mac,

01:02:09   because now that's the look of quote unquote spotlight as well.

01:02:12   So you do command space and it's just like this giant, uh, sort of web 2.0 looking gradient

01:02:17   black hole that fades to gray.

01:02:19   And all of the Siri AI things are in that little black hole.

01:02:22   I don't like it.

01:02:22   I mean, I think this logo is fine.

01:02:25   Like it, it doesn't offend me as it appears to offend many, but I don't think it's particularly

01:02:30   great either.

01:02:31   Like it's fine.

01:02:32   It's very middle of the road.

01:02:33   Oh, the other thing I'll complain about visually with the new Siri so far is that, um, when I

01:02:39   am just pulling down to use, I guess what used to be called spotlight to, to launch an app,

01:02:44   if I do want, you know, you pull down, you start typing the app name on the iPhone, that

01:02:47   is slower.

01:02:48   And it's, I think it's trying to be a little too smart, a little too quickly on that now

01:02:54   because it's like, what are you trying to launch?

01:02:56   It's like, what are you trying to do?

01:02:57   Are you trying to like start a long request?

01:02:58   No, I'm just, I'm literally typing the name of an app on my phone and I want to just tap

01:03:02   the icon and launch it.

01:03:02   But that, that is now a little bit slower too.

01:03:05   I mean, it's the same thing on the Mac.

01:03:07   Like the, if you used to just command space to launch an app, that command space window

01:03:11   can now do so much more and is uglier.

01:03:13   And so, yeah, there's the fight between, oh, you're just typing the first three letters

01:03:17   of an app versus, are you asking me some question that I'm going to send off to a server and do

01:03:22   like the, it's the same box.

01:03:23   It's, I mean, we, we went through this with the address bar and browsers years ago, where

01:03:26   it used to be a place where you typed a URL, then it became a place where you Google.

01:03:29   And now it's a place where like, we'll do all sorts of crap.

01:03:32   Well, you type stuff, we'll, we'll auto-complete to bookmarks and sites that you've gone before.

01:03:37   And like, just, so here we are again.

01:03:39   There's, there's a word for this from back in the day.

01:03:41   What is it like?

01:03:41   Um, I don't remember.

01:03:43   There's a term for like a universal box where you type text and you do everything from one

01:03:47   box instead of separating it.

01:03:48   And I don't remember what it was, but, uh, there, those are everywhere.

01:03:50   And now we have one more of them.

01:03:52   Omnibar or something like that.

01:03:54   There, there you go.

01:03:55   You got it.

01:03:55   Something like that.

01:03:56   Oh, see, look at me.

01:03:56   All right.

01:03:57   Well, continuing on with the new Siri, a friend of the show, Guy Rambo writes, I'm doing an experiment where

01:04:01   every time I use chat GPT to help me search for something, I'm also asking the same question

01:04:05   in the Siri app.

01:04:06   So far, my experience has been that the Siri app typically responds with the same information,

01:04:10   but more quickly and with better formatting and source citations.

01:04:13   Impressive.

01:04:14   Yeah.

01:04:14   Well, I, I've tried it a little bit of, we'll get to that in a second, but most of the people

01:04:17   who have tried to say, are you wondering, you know, did Siri AI quote unquote fix Siri?

01:04:22   And the answer is it behaves like the other AI agents, which is high praise when you're talking

01:04:30   about an Apple thing, because that's like, it kind of like Intel.

01:04:32   We just wanted Apple to be in the conversation.

01:04:34   No one is saying like, is, is Siri AI better than chat GPT or worse or whatever?

01:04:38   It's like, we just want it to be in the ballpark.

01:04:40   Like we want it to not, not suck terribly.

01:04:42   And so people have been trying it say you can quibble sometimes one's better, sometimes the

01:04:46   other, but at least now it's in the conversation.

01:04:48   At least now it, it seems to do the same things that the other agents do.

01:04:52   Maybe not as well, maybe not as thoroughly.

01:04:54   It may be like the formatting better or worse, you know, maybe it's faster or slower, but at

01:04:58   least it's in the conversation.

01:04:59   So thumbs up on that.

01:05:00   Meanwhile, uh, another friend of the show, Dan Morin asked Siri, make a keyboard shortcut

01:05:05   to open clipboard history in a single keystroke to which Siri replied the keyboard shortcut

01:05:09   to open clipboard history on windows is windows key.

01:05:11   This shortcut opens a panel that displays a list of recently copied the items, allowing

01:05:16   you to select and paste an older item instead of the most recent one.

01:05:18   Now he's, he's asking us on a Mac.

01:05:21   For those of you not familiar, uh, Apple had a keyboard, uh, clipboard history to spotlight

01:05:25   in the previous release or maybe one release before I forget.

01:05:27   I know it was in Tahoe, right?

01:05:28   Um, but people are annoyed that it's a two keystroke sequence.

01:05:31   You got to do like command space and then like four command four or something to get to the

01:05:35   keyboard history.

01:05:35   So, uh, Dan's trying out the new Siri and saying, make me a keyboard shortcut that gets

01:05:40   me to clipboard history in one keystroke.

01:05:42   And you notice that prompt, that message doesn't say anything about a platform, but he is asking

01:05:47   it on a Mac.

01:05:47   I think I can't tell.

01:05:48   Maybe this is on a, on a, uh, it's gotta be on a Mac, right?

01:05:51   Anyway, why in the world would it come up with an answer that tells you how to do clipboard

01:05:57   history on windows because that's how these things work sometimes.

01:06:00   And I'm not saying this shows that Siri is worse or better.

01:06:03   I'm saying it works like all the other agents where sometimes it just does the wrong thing.

01:06:08   And honestly, I don't even know if windows key plus V is the correct answer for this.

01:06:13   Who knows?

01:06:14   Didn't check it, but, uh, yeah, maybe not the, uh, the answer that he wanted.

01:06:18   So it's not as if, you know, the old Siri used to make fun of, I asked some question.

01:06:21   It gives a comically wrong answer, at least now it's failing more interestingly and, you

01:06:26   know, and can succeed at some other things.

01:06:28   And so my experience with it, like this, this, the next part here is just me, my very first

01:06:32   experience with Siri.

01:06:33   Cause I had just seen some videos.

01:06:34   I just installed golden gate and I just seen some videos of like people doing stuff with

01:06:38   it by like selecting files in the finder and then asking it to do things with the selected

01:06:43   files.

01:06:43   I'm like, Oh, that seems handy.

01:06:44   Cause I, I, I figured what that tool is that I haven't sold.

01:06:47   I'm sorry to the developer of this every time I can never remember the name of this app,

01:06:50   but there's, there's various tools that will let you do that.

01:06:52   Now, even on an ancient old Mac OS 15 that I'm running, select multiple files, bring up

01:06:57   an LL and prompt and, and have it do something like, you know, pull the text out of these images

01:07:02   or scale them or whatever.

01:07:03   Like, you know, but you're basically just talking to an agent somewhere, you know, whatever it

01:07:07   is, an open AI agent or whatever, and having it do stuff, but with, with things that

01:07:11   you select.

01:07:11   And so Siri can do this now as well.

01:07:13   So I wanted to try that out.

01:07:15   So I selected a file that was on my desktop.

01:07:16   Uh, and the, my prompt was, what is this file?

01:07:20   Question mark.

01:07:20   Uh, and the first answer was amazingly good.

01:07:25   It was, I had selected a Perl script.

01:07:27   Of course it was on my desktop.

01:07:30   Of course it was.

01:07:31   Here's the answer.

01:07:32   Uh, Siri, I said, this is a Perl script named thrash.pl designed to stress test an application

01:07:37   by repeatedly launching and terminating it.

01:07:39   The script forks multiple child processes to open the accessorize.app, monitors them,

01:07:44   and automatically kills them after a random, random duration up to five seconds before launching

01:07:48   a new instance to maintain continuous load.

01:07:50   How it works.

01:07:51   Process management.

01:07:52   The script uses a SIG child handler to asynchronously clean up the exited child process without blocking

01:07:56   the main loop.

01:07:56   Continuous load.

01:07:57   It starts by launching 10 instances of the target application.

01:08:00   Whenever the number of active children drops below five or fewer, it automatically spawns

01:08:04   five more to keep the system under pressure.

01:08:05   Target application that currently configured to execute a local development build of accessorize.app

01:08:09   located on your desktop.

01:08:10   This is all correct.

01:08:11   It doesn't actually know the context, uh, because it's not, I guess, scanning my whole system.

01:08:15   This was a thing I was using to stress test switch glass.

01:08:18   The accessorize.app is not the interesting app here.

01:08:21   That is just an app I made in Xcode that does some particular stuff while it's running.

01:08:25   Like it fiddles with its state in a way that switch glass can detect.

01:08:28   And I wanted, I was basically torture testing switch glass to say, is there some kind of

01:08:33   crash when there's like massive amounts of activity of like tons of apps, uh, launching

01:08:37   and quitting all at random and inside the accessorize app, fiddling the things that switch

01:08:42   glass can note about them or whatever.

01:08:43   So I'm like, just, you know, and it's configurable to do more than 10 or whatever.

01:08:47   Um, so it didn't just say, this is a Perl script.

01:08:52   It read all the code in it.

01:08:53   And, you know, again, we're surprised to know on, on this podcast, these agents are good

01:08:58   at understanding code.

01:08:59   And it explained to me that, and this is, this is like, this is like, I don't know, less,

01:09:02   less than half a page of Perl code.

01:09:04   It's not a complicated script, but this is a more or less accurate description of what's

01:09:09   in there.

01:09:09   And I was like, wow, that's, you know, and it's not like, oh, Siri is amazing.

01:09:14   I would expect that from any of the modern AI agents.

01:09:17   I would never have expected that from Siri in the past.

01:09:19   Yeah.

01:09:19   And now it can do that.

01:09:21   So I'm like, that's awesome.

01:09:22   Uh, and then me being me come back to my computer later that day, I select the same file.

01:09:26   I say, what is this file?

01:09:27   Question mark.

01:09:28   Exactly the same prompt.

01:09:30   Here's what Siri.

01:09:31   I said then based on the dot PL extension, thrash dot PL is likely a Perl script.

01:09:36   These are plain text files containing code written in the Perl programming language, often used

01:09:40   for text processing, system administration, and web development.

01:09:42   The end.

01:09:43   Like what happened?

01:09:46   What happened to your AI?

01:09:47   That's, I mean, true.

01:09:50   You got that right.

01:09:51   It is in fact a Perl script and you're right about Perl.

01:09:54   What happened?

01:09:55   What happened to all the stuff about telling me about what's in there and what it does or

01:09:58   whatever.

01:09:58   And this variability is one of those things that is, I feel like a hallmark of Siri AI and

01:10:03   some other products as well, which is, um, especially like a various chat GPT things and like their

01:10:09   default mode, like we'll, we'll figure out which model to use based on stuff criteria.

01:10:15   I don't know.

01:10:16   Time of day, how much load our servers are under, what plan you're on this, that, the other thing.

01:10:20   It seems pretty clear to me that in the second answer, Siri AI chose to use a less powerful model.

01:10:27   Maybe it used a local model for that one and you use the server model for the first one.

01:10:30   Um, but either way, very different answer to the exact same prompt on the exact same day about the exact same file, which has not changed.

01:10:40   And that also makes me think, huh, Siri AI, you're just like the other one.

01:10:44   You never know what you're going to get.

01:10:47   And unlike like the fancier models where you can be like, always use the big, super mega ultra model, super thinking all the time.

01:10:53   I don't think you have that option in Siri AI.

01:10:56   Uh, you'll more likely to get a better model if you have like an M4 or better, whatever the specs are that makes you use the more advanced local one.

01:11:04   But this variability in answer really makes it difficult to, I'm not going to say rely on, but just to like, to get consistent results.

01:11:13   Because imagine that I hadn't asked about the, I hadn't had the exact same letter for letter prompt about the exact same file.

01:11:18   Imagine instead that I made two separate requests.

01:11:20   You may come away thinking, well, it's really good at that first request, but when I ask it about the other kind of thing, it's bad at it.

01:11:26   And that's not true at all.

01:11:27   Maybe, maybe it's just that the first time I went to a server and the second time it did local.

01:11:30   And so as with all things related to LLMs, it's very difficult to form, uh, concrete judgments based on what they do, because what they do is often not what you think they're doing.

01:11:48   Like, this is the problem with it.

01:11:49   They, they seem like they're doing something that they're not.

01:11:51   So in this case, it seems like it's good at question X and bad at question Y.

01:11:55   Question X was about sports and question Y was about, uh, knitting.

01:11:58   And you'd be like, oh, they're great at sports with bad at knitting, but that's the wrong conclusion because you don't know what's going on behind the scenes.

01:12:04   It's not like they're telling you, I did this one to the server and this one to a local thing.

01:12:07   And so you end up drawing the wrong conclusions and you never ask it in knitting questions.

01:12:10   And really that's not the problem at all.

01:12:11   So I don't know what to think of this.

01:12:14   I'm not, you know, I mean, kind of like the vision pro that you upgrade and then never use.

01:12:18   I did play with this for a little while.

01:12:20   And then I, you know, went back to mostly basically ignoring it.

01:12:24   Um, although I was also playing with the new version of Xcode and it's built in functions for doing agentic coding stuff or whatever to see how those work compared to how they were in Xcode 26.

01:12:36   And when I set that up, I'm like, oh yeah, you have to configure like, you know, one of the third party agents in Xcode.

01:12:44   Cause I'm pretty sure there's, it doesn't use, like you can't configure Siri AI as far as I can tell as an Xcode 27 agent.

01:12:51   Maybe that's not true.

01:12:52   And if, if so, I'll follow up next episode.

01:12:53   Someone can tell me, but Apple seems like Apple's not competing in that realm.

01:12:58   Like that's not what Siri AI does.

01:13:00   And so I couldn't, you know, I, I, I would have liked to have seen what it could do.

01:13:05   Now I did see, I've been watching WWC sessions still about this.

01:13:08   And one of them talked about how the, um, what, what's in Xcode 27.

01:13:14   They like, they provide stuff for the agents that integrate with it.

01:13:17   For example, they have a, um, agent friendly, uh, incarnation of all their documentation.

01:13:24   I don't know the details.

01:13:26   It's like vectorized or somewhere or some way, uh, made with like embedding so that the agents can be more easily digested rather than just feeding it the text or whatever.

01:13:33   I, I don't know the details, but the point is Apple has supposedly done work in Xcode 27.

01:13:37   So that agents that are running in Xcode 27 have in theory, a leg up on agents that are just like browsing the web.

01:13:46   Uh, and here's where Casey says, well, it doesn't matter if it's a, you know, a special vectorized version of it or the web version.

01:13:53   If the documentation is not there, it doesn't really matter.

01:13:55   Right.

01:13:56   But, but like it shows that, that, that it's not, you know, if you're saying, why would I ever use an agent inside Xcode?

01:14:01   Why wouldn't I just go use the agent of my choice outside Xcode to buy code stuff?

01:14:05   Apple's answer is, well, if the ones that are actually used from inside Xcode, they have more direct access to Xcode functionality.

01:14:12   They have more direct access to resources.

01:14:14   I mentioned on an earlier episode that they made a bunch of, um, essentially skills for agents that teach it about their technologies and you can export them and use them with third-party agents.

01:14:24   But any agent that you use within Xcode gets access to them automatically with no extra work from you.

01:14:29   So I guess Siri AI is not in that, but like, I hope someday Apple does, you know, at least maybe take a third-party agent and train it up on all their internal stuff.

01:14:38   Like, cause that's what we want.

01:14:39   We want an agent, you know, agents can train on stuff and stack overflow and all sorts of open store stuff that they've taken without permission and blah, blah, blah.

01:14:47   But as I said in the past episode, Apple can train models on its own proprietary source code that no one has access to.

01:14:54   Maybe they don't want to do that because like a lot of these agents, you can make them spit back like the New York Times suing to say, hey, we can make, we can make this agent spit back verbatim passages from New York Times article.

01:15:02   If they trained an agent on their own source code and let the public have access to it, could we get it to spit out like the source code to AppKit by, uh, you know, cajoling it in the right way?

01:15:11   Maybe that's why they're afraid of it, but that's what I want Apple to do.

01:15:13   It's like you have the source code to all your frameworks and we don't have the source code to all your frameworks.

01:15:19   So please train a model on that source code and make that be the model that I get to use from Xcode.

01:15:25   But anyway, all this to say is that I think Siri AI is, uh, not terrible.

01:15:32   It is, again, it is in the conversation with the other agents.

01:15:36   It does things that those agents do.

01:15:39   It is night and day difference from the old Siri, uh, and, uh, that's something at least.

01:15:45   Yeah.

01:15:46   I mean, it, it does seem like they've really finally done it.

01:15:50   They've like, they've really launched a Siri that is smart and, and has the intelligence side handled.

01:15:58   And so now I think what we need to see is, you know, what remains to be seen, first of all, is like scale speed and reliability because, you know, all the parts that are not locally running have to depend on a lot of infrastructure that, you know, has significant scaling challenges ahead of them.

01:16:14   That's always kind of been one of, one of Siri's weakest points has been, how does it actually perform for everyone everywhere all the time?

01:16:22   And so far they have not done well at that, but this is a whole different architecture with probably all different infrastructure also, because it's such, it's such different requirements to run all these, you know, modern LLM flagship level things.

01:16:34   So this is going to be totally different than whatever Siri was running on before.

01:16:38   So that's promising in the sense that they have another chance to get it right.

01:16:41   Maybe they will this time.

01:16:43   And then the other part is app support.

01:16:45   Uh, that's going to, that's still a huge open question.

01:16:49   I don't think we yet have great tooling, uh, for as developers yet to, to know, like, are we plugging in correctly to the new Siri system with our app intents?

01:17:00   Is it reading them?

01:17:01   Is it indexing them?

01:17:02   Like, I think that's still a little bit early in the current betas, but, um, I haven't actually tried it.

01:17:06   So I, I could be wrong about that, but that's kind of what I'm hearing.

01:17:08   But we, you know, we have that challenge of like, are apps going to be able to really get in there and adopt this?

01:17:15   Like, is that going to be ready this fall?

01:17:17   And then secondly, from that, will developers do it?

01:17:21   As I was saying last time, like, you know, do developers have the right, like the incentive to do this?

01:17:28   Or do developers want to not be like disintermediated and to not have Siri, you know, be the face of their app to their customers?

01:17:38   Would developers rather have customers go into their apps to do what they want to do?

01:17:43   And I think for most big companies, the answer is definitely the latter on that.

01:17:46   Um, for most small developers, like, like us, we want to do things right by the platform because we're nerds and we're Apple fans.

01:17:53   So we'll probably do it.

01:17:53   But that all remains to be seen.

01:17:55   I think it's going to be a very interesting fall and winter, uh, to see like which big companies adopt this at all.

01:18:02   And how does all of this scale as everyone gets it?

01:18:06   The thing I'm mainly watching for as this rolls out, in addition to the things that you mentioned, is what does their iteration look like?

01:18:13   Because every other big competitor in this space changes all the time.

01:18:18   There's new versions coming out all the time, minus the government stopping them from coming out, which is currently a problem.

01:18:22   But, you know, that's there.

01:18:24   They don't wait an entire year to make any change in their agents.

01:18:28   They're always tweaking them a little bit.

01:18:29   Even if it's not like, oh, GPT 5.4, 5.5, 5.6.

01:18:32   Even in between there, there are little tweaks here and there that they make.

01:18:36   Apple's not, has never been on that type of cycle.

01:18:39   Certainly it's never been on that type of cycle with Siri before.

01:18:41   Now that they are using this third party stuff, will they have like an interim release?

01:18:45   Like, I don't know, like a 27 by 27.3 or 27.4.

01:18:50   It's like now actually we've swapped in all new models because we've got slightly better ones.

01:18:54   That would be great.

01:18:56   But that hasn't really been the way there.

01:18:58   If they have been doing it at the Siri, it hasn't made any kind of noticeable change for the better.

01:19:02   It's just me, the lateral move or made things worse.

01:19:04   So I hope they keep up with this.

01:19:06   I don't know the nature of the Google deal.

01:19:08   And it's still not clear exactly how those models came to be.

01:19:11   But you can be sure that Google is continuing to make new and better models, new and better Gemini models for itself.

01:19:17   Hopefully Apple's deal has something that is not just like a one-time thing.

01:19:21   It's like we get access to these models, which are, you know, we're probably like maybe they were new when the deal was signed or new-ish when the deal was signed.

01:19:27   But over the course of the next year, if those just stay the same, the rest of the industry is going to keep moving forward.

01:19:32   And Apple's going to be using, you know, late 2025, early 2026 models when everyone else is, you know, moving along.

01:19:38   So I hope they have at least a plan to continue to develop that.

01:19:43   The whole rest of the stack also obviously needs to be developed and debugged and improved and made better.

01:19:48   But underneath it all, in the end, are the models.

01:19:52   One thing they could iterate on and I hope they'll iterate on is their world knowledge thing that we talked about in an earlier episode where they're not doing Google searches for facts, but they have their own sort of world knowledge index.

01:20:01   Apple's got to keep that up to date.

01:20:02   Apple's got to make sure good info is in there and fix mistakes and keep adding new stuff because the world changes every day.

01:20:09   And so that world knowledge thing needs to keep up with sports scores and holidays and national events and celebrities who are alive and dead and taking stuff from call sheet, right?

01:20:18   Like it's just, they can't just like we'd have a world knowledge thing and we'll just leave it until next WWDC.

01:20:24   Nope, you can't do that either.

01:20:26   So here's hoping.

01:20:28   But like these, we mentioned these things because they historically have not been Apple's strength, to say the least.

01:20:33   But Apple's strengths can change.

01:20:35   So hopefully they're, with the new leadership, hopefully they realize it's not enough to have this big coming out party at WWDC 2026 and roll out these betas and say, now we're done until next year because you're not.

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01:22:42   All right, let's do at least a touch of Ask ATP.

01:22:44   And Amar writes, one of the expectations from Apple after they moved to M-Series chips was that they would have complete control over release cadence.

01:22:51   However, it turns out this cadence is even more haphazard than the Intel era.

01:22:54   We currently have a situation where the M5 was released first on an iPad of all products, while the desktops are languishing on M4 or even M3 chips.

01:23:02   I should note that this has been in the show notes for at least a couple of months now.

01:23:05   But it's still relevant somehow.

01:23:07   Can I also just interrupt here for a minute?

01:23:09   This is not more haphazard than the Intel era was.

01:23:13   We were there.

01:23:14   Trust me.

01:23:16   I lived it, man.

01:23:17   Anyway, Amar continues, to make matters worse, it seems as if the Mac Studio may not even get M5.

01:23:23   We're eight months into the M5 life cycle.

01:23:25   It makes no sense to bring M5 to the Mac Studio now.

01:23:28   If you're in the market for the absolute balls-to-the-wall desktop that would last you seven or eight years, John Syracuse, you have nothing because investing in a M3 Ultra makes zero sense.

01:23:39   None of this is because of the RAM crisis.

01:23:40   Apple still ships tons of products with RAM.

01:23:43   Is this really by design?

01:23:45   I'd be shocked if it is.

01:23:46   Or has something gone really, really wrong?

01:23:48   Well, the premise of this is that they would have complete control of a release cadence.

01:23:53   They would have more control.

01:23:55   But complete control they can never have because they don't fab their chips and they don't control the world.

01:24:01   So they are sideswiped by the RAM crisis.

01:24:04   They are sideswiped by NVIDIA becoming TSMC's best customer.

01:24:07   Like, stuff happens.

01:24:09   And I don't know how old this was in the notes, but like, everything in it, it's slightly outdated.

01:24:15   Because of the news we just read, but like, it, the, we kind of got spoiled by the M1, M2, M3 cycle where it seemed at least somewhat predictable and under control.

01:24:28   And I bet if Apple did have complete control, they would continue a orderly progression like that.

01:24:35   But they don't.

01:24:36   But they don't.

01:24:37   And they have to be reactive.

01:24:39   And so the current chaos that you're seeing where it's like, M6, never mind.

01:24:43   We're not even doing those M6s.

01:24:45   Oh, the Ultra is going to get, we're not going to do an Ultra for the M4.

01:24:47   We'll just put the M3 Ultra in there, but much too late.

01:24:49   And then M5 and the Mac Studio, that's going to be later too.

01:24:53   And actually, it's going to be the only thing, because we're skipping all the M6s, and we're going to do the M7, and Intel might fab it.

01:24:58   Like, that's the world.

01:25:00   That's the world we're living in right now.

01:25:01   And Intel wasn't more chaotic, but it was worse in that there were long periods where we had nothing.

01:25:08   And then when we did get something, it wasn't good.

01:25:10   And so at least now it's like, there's this menu of things that we think are going to be awesome.

01:25:15   And sometimes the things get taken off our menu or pushed out into the future.

01:25:18   But every one of those M things, speaking of the M chicks in particular, every one of those M things was tailor-made to Apple specifications for specific product needs.

01:25:27   And maybe some of them don't ship and get delayed or whatever.

01:25:30   But when we get them, it's a thing that Apple very intentionally made that works really well.

01:25:36   Whereas Apple and Intel, their relationship was basically Apple trying to cajole and coerce and beg Intel to make the kinds of chips they wanted.

01:25:46   And Intel saying, well, I guess we'll put a really big integrated GPU because you need it for your laptops.

01:25:51   And so we'll put this in one of our chips and just, is this what you wanted?

01:25:54   And Apple's like, I mean, kind of.

01:25:56   But like, it was just, it was never, you know, Intel, Apple was an important customer to Intel.

01:26:02   Apple wanted very specific things and Intel would give them a little bit of what they wanted based on the chips they had and the things they could add for them.

01:26:10   And I bet Intel thought it was bending over backwards.

01:26:12   Like, can you believe we're doing this custom integrated GPU just for Apple, this one customer?

01:26:16   Can you believe we're doing this?

01:26:17   And then Apple's like, but we would change a lot of stuff about that chip, not just the GPU.

01:26:22   And so, yeah, and Apple gets to make its own chip.

01:26:24   So I do think things are better than Intel, but the current situation with the, you know, the rumored M6 Pro Max and Ultra cancellation, the already passed lack of an M4 Ultra, the studio waiting forever for an M5 and still doesn't have it.

01:26:39   I think when the person was writing this, they maybe didn't expect this to be the case, but it still doesn't have it.

01:26:42   And I'm going to be happy to get an M5 Max in like December.

01:26:46   So, yeah, it's a tough old world that we live in, but it's still better than Intel.

01:26:49   Yeah, like I think the reality is that what Apple Silicon brings us is Apple gets to design exactly the chips they want.

01:27:01   Unfortunately, the chips they want need to be manufactured by somebody.

01:27:06   And that is both incredibly complicated and difficult.

01:27:11   And there's lots of different variables and conditions that go into that.

01:27:14   And also, as mentioned earlier, Apple is no longer TSMC's biggest customer or most important customer necessarily.

01:27:21   And so they have to compete for other vendors for that manufacturer's time and for the yield on those high-end lines.

01:27:29   And so, you know, we like to think like, oh, just when you go to the next chip, like every year, you just make another one and make it better.

01:27:37   Okay, yeah, I mean, sometimes you can do that.

01:27:40   But what does it mean to make it better?

01:27:42   Well, you might be redesigning something that might take a lot of time.

01:27:45   It might be really complicated.

01:27:46   You might be trying to figure out how do you squeeze more performance out of the same feature size without being able to shrink down the process yet.

01:27:55   And then when you do shrink the process down, well, what if the new process works a little bit differently than the old one?

01:27:59   Like, how did they shrink it?

01:28:00   And what does that mean for all the different little tiny gates and stuff that are in the chip?

01:28:04   And sometimes things need to be built a little bit differently or things need to be designed a little bit differently when you change the process.

01:28:11   It's a very complicated, like, implementation of the idea of make a new chip every two years or every year.

01:28:19   Like, that sounds so simple, but the reality of that is incredibly complicated.

01:28:23   And if there is any little bump in the road when tackling any of those challenges, that can push the date out or that can make a whole type of chip maybe not worth making or impractical to make.

01:28:36   Or it would make the yield so low that it would be way too expensive and, you know, it wouldn't really sell at those prices.

01:28:42   Or you can actually design something thinking it'll work.

01:28:46   You can start manufacturing it thinking it'll work.

01:28:48   And then the yields might just suck for a while or forever.

01:28:52   Maybe on that whole process, like back when they made, like, the N4P or N4E, whatever that was.

01:28:57   Like, B was the one that only Apple ever bought.

01:29:00   Right.

01:29:00   Because, like, it turned out that was just super expensive and not amazing yields forever.

01:29:05   Like, just as kind of the nature of the process.

01:29:07   Like, all of those things are really complicated.

01:29:09   So, by Apple bringing in the design, that helps a lot.

01:29:12   But it doesn't avoid the inherent complexity of the rest of that system.

01:29:18   So, Apple does a really good job, generally, in lots of ways, of hiding the reality of the complexity of their supply chain and design process from the customers.

01:29:30   That's part of the reason why the recent price changes were so surprising.

01:29:34   Because Apple, like, Apple went through all of COVID without really ever being out of stock of anything for very long.

01:29:42   And without really being short-supplied on components and without really changing any prices, they were the only ones.

01:29:50   Everyone else had massive supply chain problems during those years.

01:29:54   Again, for very good reasons.

01:29:55   But Apple didn't.

01:29:57   Now, I'm sure behind the scenes, they were, you know, putting out fires constantly.

01:30:01   But they hid all that from us.

01:30:05   They masked it all with just execution and competence and buffers and whatever else they were doing.

01:30:11   We never felt that from the outside.

01:30:13   Apple presents the impression of simplicity.

01:30:17   We've gone from the M4 to the M5.

01:30:20   It is 15% faster in this way.

01:30:23   It is 30% faster in this way.

01:30:25   Everything kind of costs the same.

01:30:26   And here you go.

01:30:27   But behind the scenes, that's really complicated.

01:30:30   And they're hiding a lot from us.

01:30:31   So, sometimes they're able to, most of the time, they're able to hide that complexity.

01:30:35   Sometimes they're not.

01:30:37   So, in a case like when you have the really huge ultra chips, that's kind of an edge case.

01:30:45   Like, those are the hardest ones to make in certain ways.

01:30:48   They are probably the lowest volume sellers.

01:30:51   They, you know, they probably have the lowest yields.

01:30:54   That's a complicated chip to make.

01:30:56   And things that work for a chip generation, for all the other chips they make, might not work for the ultra chip or whatever it is.

01:31:06   Like, so, I am not surprised to see bumps like that.

01:31:10   To see, oh, sometimes the big studio is going to skip a generation or whatever.

01:31:14   That happened before with Intel.

01:31:16   And Intel had their good reasons.

01:31:18   And it's happening now with Apple.

01:31:20   And Apple has also good reasons.

01:31:23   That is just inherently inevitable when you're doing things with this complexity.

01:31:29   If these M6 rumors are actually true, it will be interesting sometime in the future to find out, did Apple actually design an M6 Pro, an M6 Max, and an M6 Ultra, and basically just had to throw in all that work?

01:31:44   Because, like, the rumor is that, like, this is motivated by multiple crises.

01:31:52   One, the difficulty of getting manufacturing.

01:31:54   But two, the idea that, like, AI, doing local AI is super important.

01:31:57   And apparently the M7 design has some kind of advancement that is a significant advantage for on-device AI.

01:32:04   And so, I can see Apple saying, I know, I know, like, the M6 Pro, Max Ultra, they're great chips.

01:32:09   You all did a great job.

01:32:10   And it's going to be a shame to throw it away.

01:32:11   But, like, if we can get the M7 six months sooner by just not doing the M6, we should do that because it's more important.

01:32:20   Like, and I honestly, I think that's a reasonable call.

01:32:23   Like, if the M7 actually is better, I would rather have that six months early and just skip the M6s.

01:32:27   But, if you just paid all your employees to design those things, maybe they've been test-fabbed.

01:32:33   Like, it's just such a shame to say, yeah, we spent, teams spent, you know, years working on these chips.

01:32:39   And we just have to go, sorry, that's, I mean, it's like, you know, people who make a movie that never gets released.

01:32:44   Like, the movie is finished and done.

01:32:45   The studio kills it for a tax write-off.

01:32:47   I feel bad if that's the case.

01:32:49   Now, maybe this rumor is not true and those M6s are going to come out.

01:32:51   And maybe they just literally never designed them.

01:32:53   Although, I don't think that's the case because the design timelines on these are long enough that they have to.

01:32:57   They've been working on them.

01:32:58   Or, maybe they made the decision three years ago and it has nothing to do with the RAM crisis.

01:33:02   We don't know because, again, they're just rumors.

01:33:04   But, there are many plausible scenarios that are just a damn shame.

01:33:08   You know?

01:33:09   Like, especially if you're on that team.

01:33:11   And, like, I bet, like, M6s, like, what they've done with the M series has shown, you know, there are good years and bad years.

01:33:18   But, none of them have been stinkers.

01:33:19   Like, sometimes they're interesting in weird ways or whatever.

01:33:22   But, like, all the M chips are good, you know.

01:33:25   And, they've all made advancements in some way for certain applications.

01:33:29   And, again, I think we were spoiled by, like, they're going to come out with an M series.

01:33:33   It's going to have a number on the end.

01:33:35   And, there's going to be a non-suffix one, a pro, a max, and an ultra.

01:33:38   And, the ultra is going to be two maxes together.

01:33:39   And, they're just going to increment that number every year.

01:33:41   And, it's going to be smooth sailing.

01:33:42   And, that family just is disintegrated.

01:33:44   Like, it's like that cadence is apparently not plausible in the current world.

01:33:50   Because, if you map it out and you see the release cadence and how they've kind of spread and distributed and holes have been formed where certain chips just never arrive.

01:34:00   And, we're getting more holes and more delays and more, like, you know, as Amara points out, like, it seemed really weird when, like, a new M chip would debut on an iPad.

01:34:11   Where does the M stand for my pad?

01:34:13   Like, it's supposed to be a Mac chip and it comes out on an iPad first.

01:34:16   That's just the way it worked out.

01:34:17   And, yeah.

01:34:18   So, I'm still happier in this error.

01:34:21   I'm even as disappointed as Amara with the lack of high-end chips.

01:34:23   And, I do remember, in case someone's going to write in about this, way back at the beginning of the M series or maybe somewhere in the middle, like, there was some rumor from someone saying, yeah, all those quad chips, like the rumored M1 that was going to be, like, four maxes stuck together.

01:34:37   That chip was canned.

01:34:39   We couldn't do it.

01:34:40   And, at some point, there was a rumor or something that was saying, like, and, by the way, don't keep your hopes up for any other sort of, like, quad-type chip.

01:34:47   Because the roadmap has been laid out and the earliest there could even possibly be a monster chip like that is the M7 generation.

01:34:54   And, that was years ago when I came out.

01:34:57   And, all they were saying was, I've seen the roadmap for M1 through M6 and it's not on there.

01:35:04   So, they weren't saying that the M7 one was going to be that.

01:35:07   They were saying that it's not M1 through M6.

01:35:09   And, I think we were on, like, M2 or M3.

01:35:11   And, you're like, oh, really?

01:35:11   Not until M7?

01:35:13   M7 is the future.

01:35:14   That's so far away.

01:35:16   Well, here we are.

01:35:17   The M7 may arrive.

01:35:19   And, I mean, back then they weren't saying that the M7 generation was going to concentrate on on-device AI because that wasn't really a thing back then.

01:35:26   But, now it is.

01:35:28   So, again, I don't expect a quad-type thing for the M7.

01:35:30   I would still love to see an ultra that's not two maxes stuck together.

01:35:33   But, it doesn't seem like that's in the cards either.

01:35:35   So, yeah.

01:35:36   Like I said, I'm not waiting for the M7.

01:35:37   But, I am excited that this rumor says that Apple is so excited about the M7 that they're willing to sacrifice, you know, what, three quarters?

01:35:46   So, I can't do fractions.

01:35:47   Most of their M6 line, all of their M6 line except for the single, presumably single die, no suffix M6, that they're going to sacrifice all of those just so the world can get the M7 a little bit sooner.

01:35:58   And I say, go for it, Apple.

01:36:01   All right, let's continue with Matthew Southworth, who writes,

01:36:04   I enjoyed the discussion about languages in the overtime segment of episode 696, including Apple's assertion that Swift can be used as a replacement for languages from C to Perl.

01:36:12   It occurs to me that if code is being developed agentically, the choice between a lower or higher level language might differ.

01:36:19   If no human is going to review the code, shudder, maybe the bots should work closer to the metal for more efficient code.

01:36:24   Conversely, maybe the wealth of available libraries for open source frameworks would make sticking to those frameworks more effective.

01:36:31   I understand what Matthew's going for here, and I'm curious to hear what you two think.

01:36:34   But the thing that struck me about this is that, and maybe it's just that I haven't seen it, but I got to imagine there's not a lot of, like, ARM or x86 assembly code posted online.

01:36:46   I shouldn't say not a lot.

01:36:47   Nowhere near as much assembly code, for example, posted online as there is C, C++, Swift, Perl, PHP, et cetera, et cetera.

01:36:55   So if you're relying on a thing that needs a whole corpus of data to train upon, I would think you would want that thing to be the language that it has the most data about, you know, something like a C++ or perhaps Perl or whatever, you know, where the LLM knows so much about whatever the language is.

01:37:18   And it's seen so much code from whatever the language is that it's going to, it's more likely to do a good job as opposed to, like, assembly, which I got to imagine there's not near as much assembly floating around the world as there is Perl.

01:37:31   I feel like Matthew's question here is, you know, again, one of the many traps that the LLMs lead us toward, which is it's so easy to map onto them the things that we have been exposed to in, like, science fiction media.

01:37:46   And that, well, yeah, we have these high-level languages for us, but computers are computers.

01:37:51   And so we don't, they don't need to, they're, they're unlike us and, and they're unlike us in the ways that I have seen computers be unlike us in the movies, which is things that are nonsensical to us computers can understand.

01:38:02   So why bother with these high-level languages when computers can just understand the, the binary language of moisture evaporators?

01:38:08   It's a reference, Marco and Casey.

01:38:10   Um, they, they'll, they can just understand the machine code.

01:38:13   So they don't need, and in some respects, like they're on the right track and that computers aren't like us and they have different strengths than we do.

01:38:20   But the other respect is they're like, LLMs are not movie computers.

01:38:23   Like, oh, computers understand binary things.

01:38:26   Therefore, they should need to use high-level languages.

01:38:28   But as you just pointed out, Casey, LLMs, how LLMs, how this specific technology works is training data is the thing that determines, like their training determines what they are.

01:38:39   And you need lots of data to train them.

01:38:42   And if you, if you're looking for lots of data, there's lots of C code, man.

01:38:47   There is less assembly.

01:38:49   And you can say, well, the C code turns into assembly when you compile it.

01:38:52   So why don't they just learn from that?

01:38:53   And that gets to my second point, which is computers also benefit from all the same things that humans benefit with high-level languages in that there are, they don't have to think about certain details when they're using a higher-level language.

01:39:08   And then there can be certain assumptions they can make about how the high-level languages work because languages like C and other languages provide some guarantees about how things work.

01:39:17   Not that you know exactly what assembly will be created by the compiler, but there are certain, that's what a high-level language provides.

01:39:24   It provides certain behaviors above and beyond the behaviors defined by assembly itself.

01:39:28   You do lots of things in assembly, but from C, there's a subset of those things.

01:39:31   These structures will always give these guarantees, so on and so forth.

01:39:34   Obviously, there's undefined behavior and all sorts of stuff in C, but I'm just saying, like, the benefits of high-level languages, those benefits also benefit LLMs.

01:39:42   It makes them able to write code without worrying about the low-level concerns the same way it does to us.

01:39:51   Even though we operate differently, that combination of things I feel like can't be overcome, the massively larger amount of training data and the fact that they can work better in high-level languages.

01:40:00   Then I'll add a third one, which is if you're paying per token, you want to use a higher-level language because the bottom line is there's fewer characters produced.

01:40:08   There's just fewer, at the minimum, there's fewer output tokens, but probably there's also fewer input tokens because if you're feeding it some source code and say, what's wrong with this?

01:40:17   I'd rather feed it a paragraph of C instead of a much longer or several paragraphs of assembly because, yeah, it takes more instructions.

01:40:24   I think that's the nature of high-level language.

01:40:26   So I know what Matthew's getting at, but I just think it's like it's about barking up the wrong tree.

01:40:31   Like, they're not movie computers.

01:40:33   They're not magic.

01:40:33   They don't, you know, speak in binary.

01:40:36   And, you know, wouldn't they be more comfortable in binary because they're computers or robots?

01:40:39   Like, they're large language models.

01:40:41   They deal with text, pieces of text.

01:40:44   They don't deal with them the way humans do exactly.

01:40:46   Like, they don't even go a letter at a time.

01:40:48   Those tokens aren't necessarily single letters.

01:40:50   It's like, how can it make sense of things when it's doing, like, pairs of letters or three?

01:40:53   Like, it doesn't make any sense.

01:40:54   It's like, yeah, so they're not exactly like humans, but they are, in fact, large language models.

01:40:58   And they turn a lot of stuff into numbers and build these giant, you know, anyway.

01:41:02   But I should, we should have eternal links to those three brown, one blue video.

01:41:09   Yeah, I know what you're thinking of.

01:41:10   Yeah, the way they work is not like the way humans work.

01:41:13   But in the end, you should at least consider how they work,

01:41:16   which is they get trained on data.

01:41:18   And yeah, there's a lot more C code than assembly.

01:41:20   Yeah, I think the, I kind of mused a couple of months back, like, have we developed the last programming language?

01:41:31   In the sense that, or at least like the last widely used programming language.

01:41:35   In this, and what I mean by that is like, do we have any reason to make new languages now, really, for mass use?

01:41:43   Because my thinking on that was like, LLMs have now been trained on all the languages that we have, you know, like that people publish code for in large volumes.

01:41:54   They are not surprisingly, really good at JavaScript, because there's a lot of JavaScript out there right now.

01:42:03   They're, they're, they're pretty good at Swift, they're pretty good at C, they're, and they're, you know, as you kind of get down, like, you know, the less commonly published languages on the web these days, you know, they're, they're okay at PHP, you know, I'm sure they're okay at like Ruby and Perl and Python.

01:42:18   You keep going down, like, a little bit lower in the, in like the usage list, like, I'm sure they have, they've seen a lot of Java, and maybe they, maybe they've seen a little bit of Objective-C, maybe they've seen a little bit of, of regular C, you know, probably a lot of C++, but maybe not so much Rust.

01:42:33   Like, like, you start to get, like, the lesser used languages, and if you're doing LLM-based development, based on what they've been trained on, as John was saying, probably they're going to be best at the languages that they have seen the most.

01:42:49   So, my thinking generally on that is, like, we probably want LLMs to be writing whatever is the most popular language that can be used to develop the type of app or on the platform that they're, that they're building.

01:43:03   So, if you're making a web app, you probably want it to be making JavaScript in, you know, on the back end and the front end for that.

01:43:09   If you're making an iPhone app, you probably want to be using Swift, you know, like, that kind of thing.

01:43:15   And now that we've had all these languages, you know, out there and training the LLMs, willfully or not, does it make sense to invent a new language now that would be kind of from scratch from the LLMs perspective?

01:43:32   You know, if we're, if we're going to use LLMs to help us write code or to write it for us most of the time in the future, which does not seem that remote of a possibility, shouldn't we use a language they've been trained on?

01:43:45   Which kind of means, why would we ever make another language again?

01:43:48   But that being said, LLMs are also getting really sophisticated all the time.

01:43:55   That, and that keeps getting, you know, more and more of the case.

01:43:58   As they get smarter, they, they have more training, they have more parameters, they have more sophistication in their harnesses and, and their prompting and everything else.

01:44:07   What we are seeing, I think, is that over time, LLMs will actually not even care what the languages they're asked to generate because they're, they're thinking kind of higher level.

01:44:17   They're, they're seeing higher level patterns and they will have just as easy of a time generating one language as any other language because they're just kind of outputting patterns.

01:44:25   And the training data was more about like building those mental patterns than the specifics of, it must be this language, you know, printed out this way.

01:44:34   So I think ultimately, right now, the answer is, if you're going to have an LLM write code, make it a popular language.

01:44:42   But I bet in the fairly near future, the answer will just be who cares, it doesn't matter.

01:44:48   Let the LLM write whatever it wants to write.

01:44:49   I don't know if there's anything in the way LLMs currently work that will help it and not care about the language because in the end it has to make, it has to know the syntax and output it and it very much will parrot back code structured to similar what it's seen.

01:45:03   So I don't, I don't think it's becoming language independent, but to your earlier question, I think it's important to ask like, why do we make new languages?

01:45:10   Forget about LLMs.

01:45:10   Why, why, why do we ever make new programming language?

01:45:13   Why don't we, aren't we in the same situation of like, well, all these programmers were trained in the languages that exist and we should just keep using them.

01:45:19   Why bother making a new language at all?

01:45:21   Because when you make a new language, people don't have experience with it.

01:45:24   They haven't seen it before.

01:45:25   They don't know it.

01:45:26   Now they have to learn it.

01:45:27   And it's just, it's a big hassle.

01:45:28   But the reason we do it is because the new languages offer some benefit that the other language didn't.

01:45:34   Just look at Apple with Objective-C and with my Copeland 2010 articles where I was saying, hey, Apple needs a modern language.

01:45:41   Everyone was loving Objective-C in 2010.

01:45:43   And I was like, no, they have a, they have a looming language crisis.

01:45:46   They need another language because Objective-C is too low level.

01:45:49   They need a modern language.

01:45:51   And there was pushback from Objective-C developers saying, Objective-C is great.

01:45:54   I don't see why you think we need something different.

01:45:56   We've all been using it.

01:45:57   All the frameworks are written in it.

01:45:59   All the apps are written in it.

01:46:00   And I'm like, why do you need another language?

01:46:02   It's just, it's going to be worse in every way.

01:46:03   Like people are going to suddenly start with zero years experience with this new language.

01:46:07   They weren't LLMs, but they have the same issue, which is like, well, we're already trained, so to speak, on Objective-C.

01:46:14   And everything's written in Objective-C.

01:46:15   So what the hell are you doing?

01:46:16   And the answer was, existing languages have problems.

01:46:20   It's difficult to write correct, bug-free, secure code in these languages because they have undefined behavior.

01:46:25   They have pointers, like, you know, manual retainer release before the days of ARC, all that other stuff.

01:46:31   Like, we've shown that it's really difficult to write this correctly.

01:46:33   LLMs are no different.

01:46:35   They will make more mistakes in a language that allows them to make more mistakes.

01:46:39   They'll make more security problems.

01:46:41   They'll make more bugs if it is more possible in the language.

01:46:45   That's why a memory-safe language will, humans will make fewer memory bugs in a memory-safe language, and so will LLMs.

01:46:51   And that's why we keep making new languages.

01:46:54   That's why we made C instead of doing everything in assembly.

01:46:56   That's why we made all these higher-level languages is because they provide a way for a thing of some skill, whether that's a person or an LLM, to write fewer lines of code, which is fewer tokens for LLMs, but it's less work for humans, and to make fewer mistakes because of the design of the language.

01:47:12   And I don't think that will change because, like, it's not as if Swift is going to be the end-all, be-all.

01:47:18   You know, it just seems like C is going to be the end-all, be-all when everyone moves on to C, but then, you know, C plus C.

01:47:23   And Objective-C come along, and it's like, well, I guess that's a little bit better.

01:47:26   And then the memory-safe languages.

01:47:27   Why is Rust popular?

01:47:28   Why is everyone rewriting all their C plus plus in Rust?

01:47:31   Because human, LLM, either way, fewer security bugs, fewer, you know, memory bugs.

01:47:37   You're like, just, it's just safer, right?

01:47:40   And for all the benefits that we see in Swift, all the things that the Swift compiler does and the Swift language does are so focused on trying to make certain kinds of bugs, if not impossible, then either really hard to do, or a lot of Swift design is like, we have to allow you to do this.

01:47:57   But every time you do it, we're going to put something in the code so it's easy for both the human and LLM to find.

01:48:03   For example, if you search your Swift code for the word unsafe, U-N-S-A-F-E, that should point you to a lot of places where you're doing a thing that bypasses some protection.

01:48:13   And that's easy to grip for.

01:48:15   It's easy to RG for, for recursive grip and these agents.

01:48:19   And so there will be some language after Swift that is better than Swift in the ways that Swift was better than Objective-C.

01:48:26   And humans will want to use it, and so will all the agents.

01:48:29   If we get to the point where humans don't want to make a new language because they can't imagine a way that a language can be better, then we'll be at the end of history and we don't need to know any more programming languages.

01:48:39   But that's not going to happen in my lifetime for sure.

01:48:41   I mean, I don't know how long Swift was going to go, but Swift does still let you do a bunch of unsafe stuff.

01:48:47   And 200 years from now, someone's going to think it's barbaric that all the unsafe stuff that we can do in Swift is like, why did they even allow that in a language?

01:48:54   Like, well, they had to because it was trying to replace C code and the certain things you can't do and blah, blah, blah.

01:48:58   And there are 200 years in the future.

01:49:00   It's like, our languages don't allow that at all.

01:49:03   Like, we have so much safety guarantees and mathematically provable correctness and impossibility of, you know, security flaws in these five realms.

01:49:13   And we're fighting these other realms that you hadn't even thought of for quantum computers and stuff like that.

01:49:17   But of course, we got all those basics solved.

01:49:19   So, yeah, I think we'll continue to have new languages and I think everyone will benefit from them, language models and human alike.

01:49:27   Finally, Phil Kim writes, do you collect vintage computers?

01:49:30   If not, which three vintage computers would you like to have in your collection?

01:49:33   I do not.

01:49:34   I will say, this is not an official answer of mine, but I will say I happened to hold the MacBook Adorable earlier today.

01:49:43   And I keep thinking about like the Intel CPU conversation from earlier and I held this thing and it just is so amazing.

01:49:52   And I know we've talked about this a hundred times, make it 101 now, a modern cut of that with Apple silicon on the inside would be so amazing.

01:49:59   But anyway, to actually answer Phil's question, I grew up on ThinkPads, that's what I'd want.

01:50:03   I would want a ThinkPad 701C, which is what you would know as the one with the butterfly keyboard.

01:50:07   Kids, look at Wikipedia, we'll put a link in the show notes.

01:50:09   And I would also want a ThinkPad T30, which was, I think, I'm pretty sure that was my college computer.

01:50:14   I freaking love that thing.

01:50:16   It was incredible at the time.

01:50:18   I would probably ask for two ThinkPads.

01:50:21   John, you would want the entirety of every Mac that has ever been made.

01:50:25   So, Marco, I think your answer will be much more interesting.

01:50:27   What would you want?

01:50:27   Honestly, I don't think I would really use one.

01:50:33   I think that the answer...

01:50:35   Oh, I'd never use it.

01:50:35   Yeah.

01:50:35   Yeah, the answer is like I really shouldn't go buy vintage computers because I just won't use them.

01:50:41   Whenever I've bought, you know, like I bought my Palm Pilot that I talked about.

01:50:46   Like I bought a Palm 5X a couple years back off V-Bay because you can get one like brand new condition for like 25 bucks.

01:50:53   And it was fun playing with it for like, you know, an evening.

01:50:56   But as it turns out, modern computing devices are way better than old ones.

01:51:02   Who knew?

01:51:03   You know, if I was going to have...

01:51:04   If we were going to do a video show and I wanted to have a background that looked cool on video.

01:51:09   Right.

01:51:10   I'd get, you know, I'd get like a trash can Mac Pro and put it on a shelf.

01:51:13   You know, stuff like that.

01:51:14   Like I, you know, I would have that kind of fun vintage computer stuff basically as scenery behind me in a video.

01:51:20   Which many people do for this reason.

01:51:22   But to actually use them.

01:51:24   To actually try to like keep them running and use them.

01:51:27   One of the problems you quickly face, which is something that you don't really face with game consoles.

01:51:31   Is that computers really rely a lot more on their ecosystem around them.

01:51:38   You know, especially once computers became mainly internet terminals.

01:51:44   Well, how, if you have a vintage computing device of some kind.

01:51:48   First of all, what kind of Wi-Fi radio does it have?

01:51:52   Does it even have a Wi-Fi radio?

01:51:54   Does it have networking?

01:51:55   If not, how are you going to get any software onto it?

01:51:58   What is it going to do?

01:52:00   And then, if you can get it to actually like connect to the internet, if it's that kind of device.

01:52:06   Will it support any modern TLS protocol to be able to connect to any server today?

01:52:14   Probably not.

01:52:15   If it is, say, an old iOS device.

01:52:18   Will it have like the right code signing support server side still running to let it do any, you know, install any software.

01:52:27   You know, run any app.

01:52:28   Like, you start running into problems like that with a lot of kind of mid-vintage computer equipment.

01:52:35   Now, if you go back far enough to stuff that didn't really use the internet for anything.

01:52:39   Or didn't need the internet for anything at least.

01:52:42   You start having more options of like what you can get running and do something with.

01:52:46   But then, you know, it is more of a novelty.

01:52:49   It's like, okay, well, I can, you know, boot up classic Mac OS and do what?

01:52:54   Like, what am I going to do with it, right?

01:52:57   Like, and that's, I mean, that is how I used my entire first computer for much of the time that I had it was like, yeah, I would, you know, have a couple of games.

01:53:11   I would have QBasic and I would turn it on and do what?

01:53:16   Like, for hours.

01:53:17   Like, sure.

01:53:18   But to do that today, I don't know.

01:53:21   Again, I'm never bored.

01:53:22   So, I'm never looking for something like that.

01:53:24   Like, I always have a million of the things I want to be doing.

01:53:27   So, I don't think that kind of hobby is for me.

01:53:30   But it's the kind of thing that I like watching, like, when other people on the internet do cool stuff with vintage computers.

01:53:37   I like watching to see what they do with it.

01:53:39   It's a fun thing to kind of see breeze through, like, a social feed or a blog post or a YouTube video.

01:53:44   But that's not for me.

01:53:47   I find it fascinating, this question about collecting vintage computers.

01:53:51   Marco goes to, what are you going to use them for?

01:53:53   And I will point out, much like collecting books, collecting books is a different hobby than reading books.

01:53:58   Sometimes they're combined, but not always.

01:54:00   So, the idea that you would actually have to use these computers you collect, it's like, no.

01:54:06   Sometimes collecting is the end product, and it's not the using of computers.

01:54:11   And on your second point about what are you going to do with them, I think it shows the bifurcation in both your knowledge of the scene and also in, sadly, the technology.

01:54:21   You're very familiar with old iOS devices.

01:54:24   And one of the shames about them is if they don't have a good jailbreak available for you,

01:54:31   it's sometimes difficult to get those more locked-down iOS devices to, you know, do interesting things.

01:54:38   Because, like, again, if you don't have access to a good jailbreak, you're limited to what they used to do.

01:54:44   And if, like, the servers aren't up or the software doesn't work or, as you said, the TLS, blah, blah, blah.

01:54:47   But in the realm before closed-down platforms, man, people are adding Wi-Fi to Mac Pluses, okay?

01:54:54   Like, there are web browsers written for classic Mac OS with modern TLS.

01:54:57   People are writing them today.

01:54:59   Today they're writing them.

01:55:01   They're writing them in, like, people.

01:55:02   I think someone just is writing a bunch of apps in Swift.

01:55:05   Steve Troutman-Smith was just porting his apps in Swift to classic Mac OS so it can run, like, a 128K Mac and stuff.

01:55:12   Like, this, for the computers that are not locked down, people just write stuff or have LM's write stuff.

01:55:18   So, yeah, none of the old web browsers work.

01:55:20   Fine.

01:55:21   They write a new one.

01:55:22   If they write a new web browser to run on a machine with 128 kilobytes of RAM that had never seen the Internet.

01:55:29   And, you know, they have a little, for Wi-Fi hardware, they have, like, you know, little peripherals that you can buy and plug into your Mac SE.

01:55:36   And now your Mac SE is on Wi-Fi.

01:55:38   And it doesn't even know what TCP IP is.

01:55:40   But it's, like, there's, like, an Apple Talk interface to it.

01:55:42   And just the stuff out there for vintage computers, that's a whole separate hobby.

01:55:46   There's collecting them.

01:55:47   Then there's, I have them, and I'm going to, like, make them work in the modern Internet.

01:55:50   Someone wrote a Slack client for it.

01:55:52   Someone recently was showing a Markdown editor on a classic Mac.

01:55:55   Like, this is stuff.

01:55:56   It looks so weird to see, like, on a 9-inch monochrome black-and-white screen on a computer from the 80s.

01:56:02   And someone's writing Markdown.

01:56:04   And they, you know, like, do two asterisks around something or one or whatever it is in Markdown.

01:56:08   And then the text slants and becomes italic.

01:56:11   It's just, people have weird hobbies.

01:56:13   For me, I do collect vintage computers.

01:56:19   I don't collect them to use them.

01:56:20   Mostly because I don't have time and space and place to use them.

01:56:23   So it's more of just a collecting, collecting thing.

01:56:25   But the other thing is, I only, for the most part, collect things that I use.

01:56:30   Like, I already did this.

01:56:31   I lived it.

01:56:32   I had these computers as my one and only main computer that I used for years and years and years.

01:56:36   Or I had similar computers.

01:56:38   Like, for example, I have a Mac 2FX because I always wanted one.

01:56:41   I never had a Mac 2FX because it cost so much as a car.

01:56:43   But I bought mine for 20 bucks.

01:56:45   Many, many, many years later, I just always wanted to own one because it was such a cool computer.

01:56:50   But I had its peers.

01:56:52   I had computers of similar power within a few years of that or, you know, whatever.

01:56:58   And like Marco, I don't particularly have any desire to use older, worse computers.

01:57:03   A, I already did that.

01:57:04   I used them when they were older, worse.

01:57:05   And B, I like new computers that are better.

01:57:08   But I do like collecting them as little art objects and sentimental things.

01:57:14   That's why I have a NexCube and a NexLab.

01:57:16   That hardware is so gorgeous.

01:57:18   And I did, in fact, use them when they were contemporary and in college and thought it wouldn't be cool to have one of these someday.

01:57:24   And I bought those for like 20 or 30 bucks at the MIT swap.

01:57:28   So I have so many things.

01:57:29   Which three vintage computers would I like to have?

01:57:32   I think I have basically everything that I want.

01:57:35   For a while, I wanted to get an E-Mate.

01:57:36   I always was on the lookout for one.

01:57:38   But I didn't really want one.

01:57:39   Like I'm not super into them.

01:57:41   It's just a shame that I never found one.

01:57:42   So E-Mate's kind of in there.

01:57:44   But honestly, the E-Mate's kind of ugly.

01:57:46   I don't have a Newton 2000 or 2100 or whatever.

01:57:50   But, I mean, I think I saw one of those and it's just too much.

01:57:54   I'm fine with not having that.

01:57:56   Because I never actually used that one at the time.

01:57:58   I don't know.

01:58:00   I don't think there's...

01:58:01   I do have a Trashcan Mac Pro.

01:58:03   I've got all the big Mac Pros that I want.

01:58:06   It's kind of sad that my 2008 Mac Pro, the front of it was dented by a vacuum cleaner.

01:58:13   It's tough.

01:58:14   It was back when it was on the floor.

01:58:15   It's one of the reasons my 2019 Mac Pro was elevated up off the floor.

01:58:18   No danger to vacuums.

01:58:20   Maybe I'd like wheels for it.

01:58:22   I just have the one wheel instead of the four wheels.

01:58:24   I don't know.

01:58:25   I'm sure I could think of something.

01:58:26   But here...

01:58:27   I mean, my wife was listening to this and saying,

01:58:29   you do not need nor of interest in computers.

01:58:31   And she's right.

01:58:31   I need to get rid of...

01:58:33   I need to get rid of tons of computers before I think about even getting another one of them.

01:58:38   I did bring the Trashcan in because it's small and I did want one of those.

01:58:41   So I got a Trashcan.

01:58:42   But yeah, I think the main thing...

01:58:45   The main thing is, which 30 computers are you going to get rid of?

01:58:48   Not which three would you like to have in your collection?

01:58:51   Thank you to our sponsors for this episode, Factor and Quince.

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01:59:08   A new offering from Ubiquity.

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01:59:17   Thank you so much to everybody and we'll talk to you next week.

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01:59:54   At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:59:59   So that's Casey Liss

02:00:00   M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-Marco-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U

02:00:00   m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m-n-t-m-arco-r-m-n-s-i-r-a-c-u-s-a-c-ra-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-

02:00:30   wrong, but I can't figure out what the heck it is. So I have four, I generally have my devices

02:00:39   in a, in a focus mode that only lets through like a handful of contacts. And I had, I didn't think

02:00:47   about it until just this moment that I should have tested this issue outside of that focus mode to

02:00:51   see if that focus mode might be part of the problem, but let's assume it isn't. But the,

02:00:55   the issue that I have is particularly on my watch, this is most egregious on my watch.

02:01:00   I will feel the tap tap when those people that are blessed through that focus mode text me. I'll

02:01:08   feel it to feel the tap tap when I'm not in the focus mode, which is not common, but it happens

02:01:12   when I'm not in the focus mode. And I'll feel a tap tap when people text me that are, you know,

02:01:16   just regular people or people that are not special enough to be in my, you know, almost all the time

02:01:20   focus mode. However, I am almost positive that I never get a haptic notification when

02:01:29   Aaron texts me, which is crappy because the one person I want to always get a tap tap from

02:01:36   is my wife.

02:01:37   Is this an elaborate, uh, set up here for you to try to, for us to try to like, excuse you

02:01:43   from something that you're partially, partially, no, no, it's not that I'm not answering your text.

02:01:48   They never tap on my phone. Listen to the next ATP and I'll explain it.

02:01:53   Uh, yeah. I mean, I, I, that is a little bit of this, but like she, we haven't had any particular

02:01:59   conversation about this in a fair bit of time now, but there are times that she wants a semi

02:02:03   urgent response from me and very understandably gets a little perturbed when I'm like, I didn't

02:02:10   even see your text. Now I will note that I had way back when set up a custom, like, um,

02:02:17   haptic notification on the phone for when she calls. Like you can, there's a way, I think

02:02:22   it's an accessibility. There's a way to set up a custom buzz basically when she calls. And

02:02:27   since my phone is always silent, my watch is always silent insofar as it doesn't make verbal

02:02:31   or not verbal, but it doesn't make audible noise. Um, but there's gotta be something I have done

02:02:37   wrong that, that is causing me to not receive the tap tap when she sends me a text on my watch.

02:02:45   And for the life of me, I can't figure it out. I did look and in the contacts app, there is,

02:02:51   there are a bunch of different, um, like, uh, uh, toggles that you can do. And one of them is,

02:02:59   you know, silence notifications. I'm sorry, that's not in context. That's in the messages app.

02:03:03   One of them is silence notifications. I'm looking at my phone when I say this. Now,

02:03:06   maybe this exists on the watch and I've somehow turned it on and I don't know it, but on my phone,

02:03:11   I see, I'm sorry, it's hide alerts, which is off. And then I generally don't send read receipts,

02:03:16   read receipts, whatever you pronounce it, but I have those on for her. I have show and shared with

02:03:21   you turned on. I have share focus status turned on, which I also don't typically turn on for most

02:03:25   people. So she is like as special as I can make her be in the, in the, in the, in the,

02:03:32   in iMessage on my phone. And for whatever reason, I cannot figure out why my watch does not do a tap

02:03:39   tap when she sends me a text. Oh, actually that's mostly true. Interesting wrinkle. It seems to be

02:03:46   when she, it's only when she sends me a text in the conversation between only she and I,

02:03:51   we are on a zillion different group chats where she will break through, like for example,

02:03:56   in focus mode, which is what I want for the record. She will break through in a group chat where none

02:04:01   of the other people in the group chat are blessed in this particular focus mode and she'll break

02:04:05   through in the group chat messages. But if she sends me a private message, so to speak,

02:04:08   I don't get it both in the sense that I don't receive it. And also I don't understand what's

02:04:13   happening. So that's, I, I, I am, this is a call for help. This is, this is one of the advantages

02:04:19   of being on the show is that you can ask for help and, and crowdsource this. What have I done wrong?

02:04:24   It's gotta be something I've done. What have I done wrong? Please help me.

02:04:27   I would love to know because I have exactly the same problem.

02:04:31   Are you serious?

02:04:32   A lot of husbands seem to have a technical reason why they're not answering their wife's texts

02:04:35   in a timely manner. Interesting.

02:04:36   And this, and this is not good for spousal relations.

02:04:39   It is not, Marco. Let me tell you, I can confirm.

02:04:43   It is really not. And I would, please, if you figure out the answer, let me, so, okay, my

02:04:50   theory, so I, I wear an Apple watch and I'm usually, when I am like not getting these messages,

02:04:57   it is almost always when I'm at my computer. Now, I'm always at my computer. So that's, that

02:05:03   might not be anything. But, but I, yeah, I, I don't know what it is, but there is something

02:05:12   about like me being at my computer where I, my theory is that like one of the devices is

02:05:20   kind of saying, I got this. I'm currently being used. I'll alert the user. And then the other

02:05:25   ones don't. I don't know. My, another theory is, you know, if I'm in the middle of doing something

02:05:32   in the middle of my tremendous monitor, if a notification comes up in the corner,

02:05:36   maybe I just don't see it. Like maybe it, if I'm really focused on something.

02:05:41   Sorry, honey, it was too far away.

02:05:42   Yeah. I mean, like.

02:05:43   No, truly, this happens to me a lot. Cause remember I'm going three up and if I'm looking at the

02:05:47   leftmost monitor and the notification is, is actually on the upper right-hand corner of my

02:05:52   center monitor.

02:05:53   But don't you have it blessed to like make sound for her too?

02:05:55   You don't have sound notifications. Come on.

02:05:57   Just, just for the one person.

02:05:59   On your Mac?

02:06:00   I mean, I would love to do that if such a thing is possible. I thought I did do that actually,

02:06:04   but.

02:06:04   Maybe the answer is maybe on the Mac. So you can set notifications to show momentarily

02:06:10   or to stay there until you interact with them or dismiss them. Maybe the answer is just to turn

02:06:17   message notifications on in the way that they just stay there.

02:06:19   Yeah. I think I did that for her.

02:06:21   Yeah. You say that until you have stacked up 8,000 notifications.

02:06:24   Anyway. So I am genuinely gobsmacked that you also have this problem, Marco. And I wish I could

02:06:29   tell you like, yes, there have been some issues between she and I from time to time when she really

02:06:33   needs a response and I just don't give it to her. And she's right. Like, I'm not trying to paint

02:06:37   myself as correct. I am not. She is correct.

02:06:40   What does she do with it? She call you in that case?

02:06:42   Uh, well, sometimes we're in the, you know, we're in the same house. That's the other thing

02:06:45   that's hilarious.

02:06:46   She can call you in the same house.

02:06:47   Well, she'll just scream my name instead of calling.

02:06:49   That works too.

02:06:50   Yeah. But, you know, something I want to talk about in a future episode of ATP is just how ridiculous

02:06:55   and hilarious it is that when you have a couple that works from home, how much of our

02:07:01   conversation during the day is done via text message. We're in the same freaking house.

02:07:05   Like it's so not necessary. Our house is not that big.

02:07:07   My son will call me from his bedroom. I'll be downstairs and he will call me a phone call

02:07:11   from his bedroom.

02:07:13   Yep. I mean, this is, we, we don't live in big houses. This is a regular size house, but

02:07:17   yeah, this is what we do.

02:07:18   Yeah. He could just yell. I would hear him.

02:07:19   Yep. Anyways, but I, I, I've got to imagine that I have been, apparently we, Marco and I

02:07:25   have set something wrong, but I will be damned if I know what, and it stinks.

02:07:30   Let me give you my third, third data point here that might help you. Um, I have this

02:07:35   problem, but in reverse, my wife tells me, Oh, I didn't see your text because my phone

02:07:40   didn't vibrate or my watch didn't vibrate rather.

02:07:43   And I, what I think is I think Marco was on the right track with like, we know Apple devices

02:07:48   in theory coordinate with each other. So they don't all have notifications. So one of them's

02:07:52   got to say, I've got this. And the other data point is I don't wear a while Apple watch, but

02:07:58   my wife does. I don't have a problem of not seeing her messages. She doesn't see mine.

02:08:03   she's wearing an Apple watch. Now, my question for all of you is like when you're wearing the

02:08:08   watch, okay, maybe the watch doesn't vibrate and you expected it to, but does the notification

02:08:13   show on your phone? Yes.

02:08:16   Does your phone vibrate?

02:08:17   Sure. No, it doesn't because it is the, the watch has handled it. Right?

02:08:21   Well, I mean, obviously the watch hasn't handled it because you're saying your watch isn't vibrating,

02:08:24   but like, I do wonder if adding the watch to the mix is the thing that, that it exposes

02:08:29   whatever Apple bug I'm, I'm, first of all, I'm saying I'm calling this an Apple bug because

02:08:34   so many people, I like my wife and everyone else is always asking me questions exactly like

02:08:38   you just phrased it, which is like, I expect to get a notification and I don't. And very,

02:08:42   very rarely it is a question of settings, much more likely it is. You've got a dozen Apple

02:08:47   devices. And honestly, I don't even know what's supposed to happen here, but we can demo

02:08:51   it. We could be two feet from each other. And my wife will say, send me a text

02:08:54   message. I'll send it. And she's like, Nope, no vibration, no notification, you know?

02:08:57   And the, but then the next time I'll do it, it will or whatever. So I think it's Apple

02:09:01   bugs plus Apple watch that causes this problem. And the solution is all get rid of your Apple

02:09:05   watches. I don't wanna. I know. The other thing I would say Casey is I, uh, very

02:09:10   suspicious of your focus mode as well. So I would do some experimentation without the

02:09:12   focus mode. Just turn everything off. Turn like I am open to the entire world because

02:09:17   honestly, who's trying to text you during the day? It's fine. Just leave yourself open to

02:09:20   the world and see how bad it actually is. If I recall correctly.

02:09:23   So my general, I haven't messed with this in literally years, but my general focus node,

02:09:28   um, like routine is that when I sit down to work at about eight in the morning, I go into

02:09:36   a work focus mode and you two knuckleheads can break through. Mike can break through. There's

02:09:39   a couple other people that break through, but generally speaking, it's one of those situations

02:09:43   where I will see it when I will see a message when I go to the messages app, you know what I

02:09:47   mean? Like I, it's not going to notify me. Um, if, if, if some random schmo sends me a text

02:09:53   and then in the, once the kids are home from school, granted it's summer now, but once

02:09:56   the kids are home from school, I go into this, this kind of universal focus mode, I call it

02:10:00   personal. What that basically means is family can break through and basically no one else.

02:10:07   Um, I actually genuinely don't remember if I have you guys and Mike on there or not, but,

02:10:11   um, for the most part in the personal focus mode, which is what I live on basically from

02:10:15   the time the kids get off the bus until their bedtime, then it's pretty much only family that

02:10:22   can break through. And then in the evenings, typically I'm pretty sure they all get turned

02:10:27   off and I am in like wide open, no, no focus mode, wide open mode. Um, and I, I think you're

02:10:33   right. I do need to experiment with this. I think it's worth experimenting with my custom

02:10:36   vibration, even though that is only for phone calls, if I'm not mistaken, but I should experiment

02:10:40   with that. But I, I just don't understand why she, the one person I always freaking want to get

02:10:48   texts from or notifications from is the only person I consistently don't get them from. And

02:10:52   specifically in the conversation with just the two of us. Cause like I said, she will poke

02:10:58   through on group chats, like a group chat will be popping off when I'm in the personal focus

02:11:01   mode and I will see only her messages, which is chef's kiss. That's exactly what I want because

02:11:07   whatever it is she's saying, wherever she's saying it, I want to know what I want to know

02:11:09   immediately. But for whatever reason, when she sends something in our private channel message,

02:11:16   whatever you want to conversation, I guess, then it won't, then it won't notify me and it's

02:11:19   driving me fricking crazy.

02:11:20   I mean, you're highlighting the fact that she's special and that she has different settings

02:11:24   than everybody else. So maybe unspecial her and make her have the same settings as everyone

02:11:27   else. Also do some experiments with her two feet away. At least at the very least, this

02:11:31   will give you more plausible cover when she thinks you're ignoring her messages and you

02:11:34   say you don't, because if you do that experiment for a while until she's sick of like send me

02:11:38   a text message, like when she's like literally sitting next to you, hell put your watch on her

02:11:41   wrist and say send a text message. Right. Of course, if it backfires on you and it constantly

02:11:47   vibrates every time she does it, she's going to give you quite a look. But, uh, uh, I'm taking

02:11:50   all you at face value here and say, this is not elaborate cover for your past sins, but

02:11:54   is in fact an actual technical problem, which I have no problem believing because Apple's

02:11:57   notification system is very buggy. So, and like I said, I'm on the other end of it. I'm on

02:12:01   the one who's the watch wearing wife is telling me, Oh, I just never, never vibrated. I don't

02:12:05   know why.

02:12:06   All right. So let me ask you. So I'm looking at my personal focus and I'm looking at my iPhone

02:12:09   and I have turned on intelligent breakthrough and silencing, which I don't think that's really

02:12:15   relevant because of anything that would make them come through. Not, not, not to come through

02:12:18   anyways. So in the people category, I have, you know, you guys, Mike, Aaron, and a couple other

02:12:25   people, basically like a couple of family members and, um, like the, basically the school trunk line.

02:12:30   So then I also have some apps that can break through, although not many and below the people

02:12:35   in apps section, there's an options, uh, thing or navigation link, basically where it says notification

02:12:41   options. And it appears to me that everything on the screen is under the auspice of silence

02:12:48   notifications. So there are, uh, four different options, show unlock screen on or off. I have it

02:12:54   off hide notification badges. I have it off silence notifications. I have as always. And, and then I'm

02:13:00   sorry, a different section is appearance dim lock screen, which I also have off. So it's, so if I'm

02:13:05   reading this right, silence notifications is show on lock screen off, hide notification badges off

02:13:09   silence notifications always. But again, that's for the silence notifications. And then additionally,

02:13:15   there's an option for appearance dim lock screen, which I also have off. So I don't think that's it

02:13:19   either. It's got to be something I've set up wrong, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what.

02:13:24   Do you only want to, do you only want answers from spouses or do you take it from single people?

02:13:28   I will take it from anyone. Truly. I know you're kidding, but I'll take it from anyone. If you have

02:13:32   an answer, I'd love to hear it.