00:00:00 ◼ ► What you can do, John, is you can just sit this one out, because everyone knows that the show is really about Marco and me, and you're just a Klingon. So you can just sit this one out.
00:00:08 ◼ ► No, not that kind of Klingon. Anyway, all right, let's get the show on the road. Hey, Marco, I have incredible, incredible news for you and for me. And I know we briefly talked about this privately, but I wanted to bring it up one more time publicly. Marco, on Nugs.net, which we've talked about a fair bit recently on account of me being freaking obsessed with Goose these days,
00:00:33 ◼ ► It's not helping at all. Anyways, Nugs is finally, one day later, broadcasting or archiving, whatever verb you want to use. They're offering up for listening, for streaming, Dave Matthews Band's concerts, which is incredible news for you, boy, because I have to tell you, the only way I used to be able to get a Dave Matthews Band concert was to either trade for it when I was a child, you know, with tapes or CDs,
00:00:59 ◼ ► or there's some places where you can find torrents and the idea is that that sticks with the spirit of the band's taping policy, which is that you have to share, because with a torrent, you're sharing, but you're not supposed to go, like, stream it from somewhere or something like that.
00:01:14 ◼ ► We're going to move right past that. We're going to move right past that. But these are all audience recordings. So this is people who bring, it used to be DAT tapes, and now it's like mixed pre's, like I'm talking to you through right now, and hook them up to microphones on towers.
00:01:28 ◼ ► And the quality has gotten way better than it was in 96 when I started listening to Dave Matthews Band, but certainly pretty crappy still in the year, in the year 2026.
00:01:37 ◼ ► Yeah, it's still a microphone in the audience. Like there's only so good that can be compared to the soundboard.
00:01:40 ◼ ► That's exactly it. But these are soundboard recordings from Dave Matthews Band. They have finally joined the ranks of their peer jam bands, and we're just going to cruise right on.
00:01:53 ◼ ► They're peer jam bands, and they are offering their concert recordings the following day. This is monumental news for me, and I'm sure for you.
00:02:00 ◼ ► Yes, obviously. What has been missing from my life is a way to get higher quality Dave Matthews Band recordings of all the things I want to listen to from the Dave Matthews Band.
00:02:10 ◼ ► Exactly right. So our long national nightmare is over. Our long international nightmare is over. And I just wanted to make sure that I called that to your attention, Marco, that you can now stream Dave Matthews Band concerts the following day on NUGS.
00:02:23 ◼ ► Yeah, and to be fair, even though Dave Matthews Band is not my cup of tea, I have been so much enjoying for many, many years now that Phish and then later Goose would put for sale for about $10 each every live show they did, direct masterings from the soundboard with very high quality.
00:02:44 ◼ ► With the same mastering you would get if a band released a live album to iTunes and Spotify, that same kind of mastering level. They're doing that every show, and they release it the morning after the show or later that night for $10.
00:03:00 ◼ ► Phish started doing this years ago, and as Goose has gotten popular, they've been doing it, and it is such a joy for your favorite band to basically release a new set, a new album, every night of a tour, so you get, what, 20 or 30 a year?
00:03:16 ◼ ► It's amazing to have that much music coming from a band that you love, and because these are jam bands, plus Dave Matthews Band, the shows are all different.
00:03:27 ◼ ► So you get a different performance, a noticeably quite different performance, quite different set list every night.
00:03:34 ◼ ► Obviously, there are some songs you hear a lot, but you're getting a different performance and a different work every night they play.
00:03:44 ◼ ► By being a fan of these bands, you end up getting a huge amount of new music every year, and it's just a wonderful thing to be a fan of these bands.
00:03:54 ◼ ► So for Dave Matthews to have finally joined that mechanism, I'm happy for the fans like you who get to enjoy that same thing.
00:04:01 ◼ ► Also exciting, you had a vacation that you just went on, and I would love to hear an after-action or trip report, or I guess I should say, in the vernacular of our dear friend John Siracusa, what was your vacation results?
00:04:27 ◼ ► It is full of other American tourists, and the Italians are very kind and very accommodating of Americans.
00:05:05 ◼ ► Like, you know, I couldn't get, you know, regular drip coffee anywhere in Italy because everything's espresso.
00:05:36 ◼ ► Now, you know, look, I've read the New York City subway all the time, so I'm used to this.
00:06:16 ◼ ► And when I'm traveling, I always have, in my front pocket, I always have my wallet and my passport.
00:06:23 ◼ ► My passport never leaves my person when I'm traveling, like, when I'm traveling internationally.
00:06:28 ◼ ► And so the passport was between the wallet and my leg, and so I think the combination of shorts plus that made me not feel it instantly.
00:06:36 ◼ ► But I noticed, like, obviously part of the, like, I did a bunch of research afterwards.
00:06:41 ◼ ► Obviously part of the scam was when I was shoved into the subway car and I stumbled slightly.
00:06:54 ◼ ► Locketing in apparently specifically Rome and Paris is, like, a really professionalized thing.
00:07:07 ◼ ► I haven't, but, you know, as I, at first I was, I mean, again, like, I realized instantly, like, oh, that's it.
00:07:13 ◼ ► Like, I knew, but, you know, I didn't want to, like, get into, like, you know, an altercation with anybody in the train in case it was any of the people behind me.
00:07:19 ◼ ► So I'm like, I don't want to, like, well, now I know, okay, now let's go start canceling cards, you know.
00:07:27 ◼ ► And even more fortunately, I still had my phone and my passport, which are the two things that would be harder to replace in that context.
00:07:41 ◼ ► You know, the only real loss was, you know, a couple hundred dollars worth of cash that I probably shouldn't have even been carrying.
00:07:51 ◼ ► It was more of an offense and more of a, like, I literally just, like, I was in Rome for five minutes.
00:08:36 ◼ ► And when we were in Rome, this was pre-Declan, we stayed near some, like, plaza where apparently
00:08:45 ◼ ► And I remember I had my hands deep in my pockets every time I walked through there because I had
00:08:51 ◼ ► the fear of God placed in me, including but not limited to when I was walking to the Vatican.
00:09:05 ◼ ► But, like, I ride the New York City subway usually at least once a week, and I have never had any
00:09:13 ◼ ► And, like, it sounds like the Italians really don't intend to put any kind of effort behind
00:09:35 ◼ ► But now you get to go down the path of potentially, if you so choose, buying 84 new wallets to figure
00:09:50 ◼ ► John, you guested on upgrade number 624, which was really a Designed in California segment.
00:10:02 ◼ ► Yeah, so they're releasing bits of Designed in California in the upgrade feed, both separately
00:10:12 ◼ ► Designed in California is a spinoff, I guess, podcast series by Jason Snell and Mike Hurley
00:10:30 ◼ ► we will link in the show until by the time you listen to this, the Kickstarter may be over
00:10:34 ◼ ► If you just go to designed.fm, that's fast, past tense, designed.fm, that currently redirects
00:10:41 ◼ ► to the Kickstarter, and I'm assuming eventually it will redirect or be an actual website.
00:10:44 ◼ ► They're going to do something like 50 episodes, at least 50 episodes of the history of Apple.
00:10:53 ◼ ► I'm not sure if they've released everything that we recorded so far, but anyway, whenever
00:10:59 ◼ ► The bit in Upgrade 624, which we will also link, was about Apple's need for a new operating
00:11:21 ◼ ► I enjoy the couple of rest of the rest of history episodes that I've listened to, but I don't
00:11:30 ◼ ► But these done by good friends of mine about stuff I really, really, really care about.
00:12:17 ◼ ► When booting Mac OS from an external drive, Doug Winefield writes, there may be a workaround
00:12:29 ◼ ► modifying a file on the system so that we can trick it into thinking that your external
00:12:45 ◼ ► I would be scared to try this, not because of the system integrity protection, but just
00:12:48 ◼ ► because essentially lying to the system and telling them that your external drive is an internal
00:12:51 ◼ ► drive just smells like a formula for disaster, you know, that is just lurking out in the
00:13:05 ◼ ► But if you are determined to install Golden Gate on an external drive, you can follow these
00:13:13 ◼ ► I can say I still have Golden Gate on my portable laptop, and it is so far pretty enjoyable
00:13:25 ◼ ► Mine hasn't had that problem so far, although I have to say that the first beta of Xcode
00:13:45 ◼ ► So then I could run it from Xcode, but not debug it, which really puts a damper on debugging.
00:13:56 ◼ ► Steve Riggins writes, I'm on day six and a half of indexing my iPhone with the iOS 27 beta
00:14:15 ◼ ► And like we said last episode, the rumor slash word on the street is that Apple is going to
00:14:26 ◼ ► Whenever 26.6 comes out, they will spend, I don't know, five, 10 days or whatever indexing,
00:14:40 ◼ ► Then with regard to Apple's AI tech talk, this was the thing that happened right after the
00:14:46 ◼ ► Yoken Marshall writes, what I didn't get from the tech talk discussion is whether I will be
00:14:51 ◼ ► able to casually tell Siri AI something like, I put the screws for the bed in the closet in
00:14:55 ◼ ► the guest room and have it still remember that two years later, or will I still have to
00:15:07 ◼ ► So like that's the kind of thing I would put in Apple notes or something, you know, like
00:15:10 ◼ ► this is, this is going to happen when people like people who haven't been playing with the
00:15:15 ◼ ► LLM chatbots get this on their phone because everyone or, you know, Mac users or Apple users
00:15:31 ◼ ► But this question, you know, points towards like, but it is kind of a different thing because
00:15:36 ◼ ► in the past, if you were to do something like this with Siri, your assumption would be, I
00:15:40 ◼ ► I have to tell Siri to put this in reminders or notes or like, I have to instruct, I have
00:15:49 ◼ ► But if you are actually experienced with these type of chatbot things, you're like, well, can
00:15:59 ◼ ► And you can say things like, remember that I like to use spaces and not tabs in my code,
00:16:11 ◼ ► to tell how all these things are implemented, but it's essentially like, it's just going
00:16:14 ◼ ► to write words in a text file and put that into and add that to all the other crap that
00:16:21 ◼ ► So it's going to be the system prompt, all your memory stuff, any skills you have, your
00:16:41 ◼ ► And I wouldn't trust that little text file that the thing writes off to the side behind
00:16:46 ◼ ► the scenes to survive for a long term, not just with Siri, but with any of these things.
00:16:50 ◼ ► I don't know what the policy is for compacting or truncating or keeping long term the things
00:17:07 ◼ ► Tell it to use the app of your choice to store this information so then you can open the app
00:17:20 ◼ ► Have a note that already does that and have the agent write to that note and then look at
00:17:26 ◼ ► And even then, I would be a little bit careful because someday it might wander by and say,
00:17:31 ◼ ► I can fix this for you by summarizing it or some crap like that and you lose all your information.
00:17:36 ◼ ► In general, like don't count on the current world of AI to for like long term stability of
00:17:45 ◼ ► any sort, because it's just it's everything is moving so quickly and changing so quickly.
00:17:49 ◼ ► People are, you know, like the big companies are changing their products left and right.
00:17:58 ◼ ► And so for something like like long term memory, long term note or data or fact storage, use
00:18:05 ◼ ► an app that has a proven track record of doing that, like Apple Notes or, you know, bear, you
00:18:17 ◼ ► But, you know, put the data in something like that and then use AI to index and search that
00:18:25 ◼ ► You know, if you're using something like, you know, Gmail, maybe Gemini can search it in a
00:18:31 ◼ ► If you're using Siri, you know, use use Apple Notes and, you know, Siri will be able to read
00:19:00 ◼ ► You introduced, John, some interesting thought technology to me, I think in Rectifs, and I
00:19:05 ◼ ► think it was forever ago, but the idea of a squirrel list, which I have a pinned note in
00:19:11 ◼ ► And that's where I write where things are that I know I will forget where I put them in the
00:19:18 ◼ ► And then it's also every time I go to my squirrel list these days, it's like, why did you
00:19:32 ◼ ► And when I replaced it, I know I bought extras because I could tell this is a new newish faucet
00:20:09 ◼ ► This guy that Sayrer links to has three such videos, but says, Sayrer, I saw one from straight
00:20:48 ◼ ► in not a selfie, while we were standing on the pier in somewhere unpronounceable in California.
00:20:52 ◼ ► The person taking the picture was facing south, so Morro Bay and Morro Rock were in the background.
00:20:56 ◼ ► The person who took the picture managed to frame it such that my head hides Morro Rock.
00:21:00 ◼ ► If I were to use spatial reframing on it, would it know to fill in Morro Rock, or would
00:21:08 ◼ ► Yeah, I don't know for a fact, but I would put very good money on, no, it has no idea where
00:21:13 ◼ ► you are, and it knows your location, but it's not going to use any kind of awareness of photos
00:21:18 ◼ ► taken by other people in that location, which, again, would be a privacy nightmare that Apple
00:21:23 ◼ ► It's just going to use the training data of all the photos that its image generator has
00:21:42 ◼ ► Now, again, I don't know for a fact, because I didn't make this feature, so if someone at
00:21:46 ◼ ► Apple knows otherwise, but I would put good, good money that that's not the way these things
00:21:56 ◼ ► All right, let's talk about Tesla and CarPlay, or in other words, let's have Casey pop off.
00:22:01 ◼ ► Alec Hertel points us to an article on NotATeslaApp.com, which is entitled, Apple announces Maps feature
00:22:10 ◼ ► And Nahal Malek, from the aforementioned website, writes, reports emerged last fall of Tesla actively
00:22:18 ◼ ► Follow-up reports from earlier this year indicated that CarPlay integration was still in the works,
00:22:22 ◼ ► with Tesla reportedly working directly with Apple to bring the interface to its vehicles.
00:22:26 ◼ ► At the time, the main holdup was said to be how the navigation would be handled between
00:22:30 ◼ ► Tesla's, whatever they think, their full self-driving, except it isn't really full self-driving system,
00:22:38 ◼ ► Because supervised self-driving relies heavily on the car's native navigation, Tesla and Apple
00:22:44 ◼ ► were working together to ensure that turn-by-turn directions stay in sync across Tesla's and
00:22:49 ◼ ► If this supervised automatic driving doesn't know where the CarPlay map is going, features
00:22:55 ◼ ► like automatic lane changes, which I don't understand why that's a problem, but anyway,
00:23:01 ◼ ► During a WWDC 26 session covering the latest updates to CarPlay, Apple announced a new feature
00:23:11 ◼ ► Route sharing allows navigation to pass, navigation app, excuse me, to pass a trip to the vehicle
00:23:16 ◼ ► as an array of route segments, which are geographic coordinates that are sent to the vehicle whenever
00:23:21 ◼ ► Apple notes that, quote, some vehicles with driver assistance systems work best when the
00:23:26 ◼ ► For example, vehicles may support automatic lane changes or adjust their guidance systems
00:23:32 ◼ ► So, I really, really want this to happen, not because I want Teslas to be more appealing
00:23:38 ◼ ► to anyone, if that's even really possible, but because if Tesla finally caves, because they
00:23:45 ◼ ► were, you know, the kings of, no, we're too good for CarPlay, then maybe Rivian will cave
00:24:02 ◼ ► I like how they didn't name Tesla in WWDC session, you know, because they're, but it's like the
00:24:16 ◼ ► can't do this because we don't, you know, there's not enough sharing around information
00:24:28 ◼ ► Yeah, I just, I do think it's interesting because this does not strike me as, if you're, if you're
00:24:34 ◼ ► coming at this as a Tesla fan, which is a fantasy world that I find hard to inhabit, but if you're
00:24:39 ◼ ► coming at this as a Tesla fan, this does not strike me as something you would do from a
00:24:43 ◼ ► position of strength because you've banged this drum for so long that, oh, we're too good
00:25:02 ◼ ► I am struggling to find any reason to do that other than, man, it would be nice if we sold
00:25:14 ◼ ► It just occurred to me because not only do you have access to what will eventually be just
00:25:19 ◼ ► hours and hours and hours of Dave Matthews band on goose.net or excuse me, nugs.net, but
00:25:38 ◼ ► And I tried this earlier and I already forgot what I tried, but bemotrisinol, an effective
00:25:43 ◼ ► chemical filter that's used in sunscreens made in Asia and Europe for decades to the list
00:25:53 ◼ ► So this is, you know, as I was going through my sunscreen journey, I believe it was last
00:25:57 ◼ ► year or the year before I had realized that, um, avobenzone, which is the chemical filter
00:26:02 ◼ ► used in almost every U S sunscreen, um, except for the mineral ones, but all the chemical sunscreens
00:26:09 ◼ ► And it turns out avobenzone is both not incredibly effective relative to modern, uh, sunscreen filter
00:26:16 ◼ ► And also the problem that I was having was it's incredibly irritating to most people's eyes.
00:26:27 ◼ ► If I, if I had sunscreen on, because even if like a little tiny bit traveled, oh, and avobenzone
00:26:37 ◼ ► And so if you had sunscreen anywhere on your face, odds of it getting in your eye, uh, were
00:26:43 ◼ ► So at that point I switched over, uh, I tried European sunscreens and Japanese sunscreens.
00:27:01 ◼ ► And then it doesn't migrate through your skin and it's not as irritating to eyes, like by a
00:27:40 ◼ ► Um, so, uh, but there's this whole world of sunscreens that now the U.S. has approved one
00:27:48 ◼ ► And so therefore we are likely to see better U.S. sunscreens that are not irritating to people's
00:27:54 ◼ ► eyes or not as irritating to people's eyes, uh, and work better against, you know, different,
00:28:02 ◼ ► I'm going to still keep buying my, uh, my Roto Super Moisture UV gel just because I like
00:28:23 ◼ ► I just assumed looking at this story that, uh, yeah, they'll, they'll put this ingredient
00:28:30 ◼ ► Well, to be fair, like, I don't think, I mean, I don't, I haven't looked at it exactly, but
00:28:34 ◼ ► I don't think it would make sense to have both just because they probably cover similar UVA
00:28:39 ◼ ► So like, I don't, it probably wouldn't make sense for the same product to include both.
00:29:01 ◼ ► And at the end of the day, they all had the exactly the same problem because they were all
00:29:10 ◼ ► We are going to dig up some freaking ancient follow-ups that we're finally going to, uh,
00:29:19 ◼ ► These are not that remarkable, but it's hilarious to me how long these have lived in our internal
00:29:28 ◼ ► And Andrew Leahy writes, your mention of diffing the environmental impact report on the latest
00:29:34 ◼ ► I fed historical environmental impact reports into TOS tracker, which is a terms of service
00:29:46 ◼ ► Uh, and you can go to the TOS tracker website and we will put a link in the show notes where
00:29:52 ◼ ► If you go to an individual product, you can compare directly across whatever metrics Apple
00:29:56 ◼ ► And so there will be another link for, for example, the M1 MacBook Air versus the M5 MacBook
00:30:03 ◼ ► These, these long lasting, uh, follow up, like lots of things have died out here, but these
00:30:08 ◼ ► It's just because I thought like we talk about this and diffing like this is a pain and who
00:30:14 ◼ ► And if you're wondering what kind of progress is Apple making on the environment stuff, are
00:30:18 ◼ ► they just doing the same stuff year after year and just retouting it over and over again?
00:30:21 ◼ ► And then finally, uh, in episode 680, we were talking about, or we had questions about how
00:30:29 ◼ ► Uh, this was keyed off of a wall street journal video that we were talking about in again, episode
00:30:34 ◼ ► 680 back in February and friend of the show, Guy Rambeau writes, no need to rely on rumors
00:30:40 ◼ ► The software images they distribute to security researchers include details about the hardware
00:30:48 ◼ ► Each one of those chips is a single PCC node or private cloud compute node running as a standalone
00:30:55 ◼ ► And there's an orchestration layer that handles distributing work within that ensemble, which
00:31:01 ◼ ► You can also see there's a cloud or was at the time anyway, a cloud OS job listing, which
00:31:10 ◼ ► services on Apple Silicon servers, including driving hardware and software initiatives to
00:31:26 ◼ ► It says the private cloud compute virtual research environment or PCC VRE is a set of tools and
00:31:32 ◼ ► images that can boot a version of PCC software and simulate a PCC node on a Mac with Apple
00:31:44 ◼ ► It's not, we don't know that this is going to happen, but now that they've moved to using
00:31:48 ◼ ► NVIDIA servers and other people's data centers, I do wonder how long they're going to continue
00:31:54 ◼ ► That Wall Street Journal video like showed us inside the factory where they have those big
00:32:00 ◼ ► them building their hardware, racking the hardware, supporting it, writing an OS called
00:32:17 ◼ ► It was a great chip back in the day, but boy, we've moved on compared to today's NVIDIA chips
00:32:25 ◼ ► Is Apple going really going to keep up with the state of the art or are they just going
00:32:34 ◼ ► We'll make sure it has all of the same properties as the PCC that we did where, you know, they
00:32:51 ◼ ► But for now or in the past, they have their own servers that they built in their own factories
00:33:04 ◼ ► I can't imagine it would be like there's there is not a lot of worlds where this makes sense
00:33:15 ◼ ► Microsoft, like all these other companies are running giant data centers that are specialized
00:33:27 ◼ ► And I kind of see how they got there, like in the old regime, the old regime that was wiped
00:33:37 ◼ ► In the pre-WWC 2024 regime, the idea of PCC is like, what if we could do this thing where
00:33:42 ◼ ► we can do stuff in the cloud, but in a secure way and where we have great silicon and like
00:33:47 ◼ ► it's very efficient and we could make our own servers and we could put our own OS on it.
00:33:52 ◼ ► And like then we would have it's basically like, well, you could run on your device and
00:34:18 ◼ ► And the world moved on and it's like, okay, well now the servers are still M2 ultras and
00:34:25 ◼ ► This is, you know, I'm not going to bang this horn drum too much, but like if Apple wants
00:34:30 ◼ ► to compete in the high end of hardware anywhere, including on the server, you have to make new
00:34:34 ◼ ► new high end chips on a fairly regular basis because the state of the art in things that
00:34:58 ◼ ► And if you can't compete hardware wise, the whole effort is pointless, even if your software
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00:37:05 ◼ ► On June 17th, which is we record this on the evening of the 25th, it was a week and a day
00:37:10 ◼ ► ago, Tim Cook took one on the chin for John Ternus and did an interview with Rolf Winkler
00:37:18 ◼ ► Rolf writes, Apple plans to raise prices on its products to offset the surging cost of memory
00:37:23 ◼ ► and storage chips, Chief Executive Tim Cook said in an exclusive interview with the Wall
00:37:35 ◼ ► And we've been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become
00:37:41 ◼ ► Cook declined to offer details on timing or scale of the planned price increases, nor which
00:37:49 ◼ ► But they included a chart in the Wall Street Journal, price changes from the first quarter
00:37:58 ◼ ► And there's, you know, little blips and blurbs for DRAM memory and NAND storage, how expensive
00:38:04 ◼ ► And it got a little bit more in 25, and then toward the end of 25, it just hockey sticks.
00:38:09 ◼ ► And the top of this chart, which is what DRAM is estimated to be at the end of 2027, 900%
00:38:52 ◼ ► This is on me, because my pun is so bad that Casey didn't even recognize it as a pun, which
00:39:18 ◼ ► Yeah, I should have done your thing and had team and strikethrough and then had Ternus.
00:39:38 ◼ ► When we talked about the RAM crisis and everything and what Apple's doing, and we talked about
00:39:50 ◼ ► They lock in a price for a certain amount, and they do that potentially a year or two in
00:40:05 ◼ ► So even though we saw that Apple was holding the line on prices, it's like, well, if the
00:40:10 ◼ ► commodity prices don't turn around and Apple runs out of all its deals, eventually, they're
00:40:23 ◼ ► Now, we don't know whether, like, they had to be announced now, and so it was always going
00:40:29 ◼ ► to be Tim Cook because Ternus doesn't take over until September, or whether he was doing
00:40:35 ◼ ► Because remember, on the 17th, we didn't know when the price increases were coming or what
00:40:38 ◼ ► So on the 17th, people could have been saying, well, it'll probably be the iPhones in September,
00:40:45 ◼ ► iPhones are, like, hundreds of dollars more expensive, so let Tim Cook on its way out the
00:40:49 ◼ ► door, soften everybody up, and then when Ternus announces it, it's like, well, we've already
00:40:54 ◼ ► Now, you know, that turned out not to be the case, as we see in a second, but this is, you
00:40:59 ◼ ► know, this is one of, like, the, instead of a strategy tax, it's like a strategy credit
00:41:04 ◼ ► or whatever, not quite the same thing, but, like, when you have something like this happen,
00:41:07 ◼ ► you have a transition, there's lots of downsides to a transition, change is scary, and there's
00:41:27 ◼ ► Like, announce, be the bad guy, announce the price increases, don't make your new CEO do
00:41:36 ◼ ► And as we'll see, it wasn't really taking one fraternist, it seems like it might have been
00:41:40 ◼ ► just like something that needed to be announced now, and Tim Cook is currently the CEO, so
00:41:44 ◼ ► But yeah, and so that chart, the chart is terrifying, please, we'll put a link to the image, but
00:41:55 ◼ ► And then there were some tangents here to the story to say just this chart here, again,
00:42:07 ◼ ► Righto, so from the Wall Street Journal, three companies dominate the market for DRAM memory,
00:42:26 ◼ ► Micron and SK Hynix shares have risen more than 800%, while Keoxia and SanDisk have risen
00:42:46 ◼ ► So reading from CNBC, few workers can say that their bonuses have been so large that the
00:42:54 ◼ ► But in South Korea, the phenomenon is playing out as workers from tech industries receive
00:42:57 ◼ ► bonuses worth millions of won, prompting the Bank of Korea to warn of the upward pressure
00:43:03 ◼ ► According to an unidentified union source cited by Reuters, a memory chip worker with a base
00:43:08 ◼ ► salary of 80 million won, or about 52 grand US, is expected to receive a total bonus of around
00:43:20 ◼ ► Imagine you're working in the memory chip factory for 50k a year and your bonus is going to be
00:43:30 ◼ ► I think like some of those, their union labor and then unions had negotiated a, like a profit
00:43:35 ◼ ► sharing deal before all this happened, which was like, you know, we get some piddling percentage
00:43:47 ◼ ► And so what seemed like a reasonable deal of profit sharing with the union now becomes,
00:43:56 ◼ ► Uh, and then, uh, there was a Reddit post that I presume John stumbled upon, which is quite
00:44:37 ◼ ► If I'm still quoting now, if you actually paid $420 for 32 gigs Ram, I'd call the police
00:44:47 ◼ ► It's, it's, it's the hot dog, uh, the, the meme with the guy in the hot dog suit saying
00:44:52 ◼ ► I'm sure I've seen that, but I don't know it offhand, but no matter what, how do you not
00:45:08 ◼ ► I mean, it's sad and terrible if you're not an employee of those memory companies, but it
00:45:33 ◼ ► We'll put in both for the prior one we were discussing in this one, we'll put in an Apple
00:45:38 ◼ ► But anyways, one way or another, Apple has said the consumer electronics industry is facing
00:45:44 ◼ ► The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary, extraordinary surge
00:45:53 ◼ ► We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where
00:45:58 ◼ ► we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today's increases for
00:46:17 ◼ ► But the, the 50,000 foot view is that basically everything that isn't an iPhone, if I'm not
00:46:33 ◼ ► And I'm just going to jump to the, the, what I was going to say later, but I can't resist.
00:46:51 ◼ ► The nice Apple TV, the nice Apple TV that has thread and ethernet is $250 to put things in
00:47:03 ◼ ► to think we've all joined in my familial journey over the years to put things in perspective.
00:47:08 ◼ ► My daughter, Michaela was not in elementary school when the last Apple TV was released.
00:47:16 ◼ ► I don't have the buyer's guide in front of me out, but it was thousands of days, like 1300
00:47:22 ◼ ► And, uh, she was not even a kindergartner yet when that was in, when that was released.
00:47:29 ◼ ► As I stole for time, 1,346 days ago when the Apple TV was most recently released October of
00:47:34 ◼ ► My daughter, who was not yet in kindergarten, just grad, or I shouldn't say graduated, just
00:47:40 ◼ ► finished second grade, has gone through three years of school in the time since we have had
00:47:58 ◼ ► But I have to say this, I find this one of the least objectionable price increases, actually.
00:48:08 ◼ ► But the thing about the Apple TV is like, I'm honestly, I don't quite know why Apple hasn't
00:48:14 ◼ ► It's because as time passes, it's competition in the realm of thing you use to watch streaming
00:48:27 ◼ ► And the answer is I'd pay more than 250 to not have to use like smart TV software or like
00:48:37 ◼ ► But that particular one doesn't bother me that much, although it is, I believe, the highest
00:48:42 ◼ ► And what we're going to mostly be talking about here are base prices, because obviously we're
00:48:49 ◼ ► And this is for like, they say Macs and iPads, but Vision Pro is in there too, which is great.
00:48:53 ◼ ► The average price increase is $258 and the average percentage increase is 21.5%, which is
00:49:02 ◼ ► But like, depending on what you're looking at, as the base price goes up, the percentage
00:49:36 ◼ ► And you can look at this chart and kind of see like products with RAM and SSD, the more
00:49:49 ◼ ► But if you look at the price increase, it's like $200, $200, $100, $200, $300, $500, like
00:50:01 ◼ ► And this makes me start thinking about the timing of this, like the whole, you know, we're
00:50:08 ◼ ► It seems like something came to a head at this point where like we can't wait until September.
00:50:15 ◼ ► Like we can't just wait until September and just have like the new phones be more expensive.
00:50:24 ◼ ► Now, does that mean every single one of these products just ran out of its one or two year
00:50:32 ◼ ► So it could be that some of these products have been coasting on not having Apple style margins
00:50:38 ◼ ► And other ones could have another year of runway with based on the RAM and SSD chips they already
00:50:44 ◼ ► But they're not going to do it based on like exactly when the things like they're not going
00:50:49 ◼ ► Like if any if any one of these products needs to be increased so we don't lose our precious
00:50:53 ◼ ► margins, we're going to do all of them now and we're going to do all of them by round numbers.
00:51:05 ◼ ► So it just so happens the low end products get like 100 added and the other ones get no,
00:51:15 ◼ ► It says Apple's statement says we have shielded our customer from these increases so far.
00:51:19 ◼ ► I think shielded is the correct word because Apple's deals have shielded the customers from
00:51:28 ◼ ► Because, hey, if we have a contract that says you're going to give us this many RAM chips
00:51:32 ◼ ► at this price and we haven't used all those RAM chips yet or the contract doesn't run out,
00:51:40 ◼ ► But the second that contract is up and we have to buy at market prices, we're not going to
00:51:46 ◼ ► And so they were shielding and then they're no longer shielding, but they're not no longer
00:52:02 ◼ ► caught by surprise by this or a super low price that maybe they actually have had reduced margins
00:52:07 ◼ ► But then I look at the price increase list and I say, well, whatever products you had been
00:52:11 ◼ ► suffering decreased margins on, I think you're in for another few months of what I imagine
00:52:17 ◼ ► will be potentially better than normal margins, especially on the products that still have locked
00:52:31 ◼ ► I know we don't cover the minutiae like that, but a, and across the board price increase like
00:52:35 ◼ ► this on basically every Mac and every iPad plus division pro in round number amounts is
00:52:48 ◼ ► And I would assume, and we'll see, but I would assume that when they come out with new Macs
00:52:53 ◼ ► and new iPads in the future, they will simply adopt these prices as the new normal prices.
00:52:58 ◼ ► Like even if and when commodity prices go back down, I don't expect Apple to have an announcement
00:53:02 ◼ ► and say, Hey, remember in 2026 when we had to increase all our prices because commodity prices
00:53:08 ◼ ► the AA bubble popped and now commodity prices are back down because there's a glut of RAM
00:53:39 ◼ ► Or the AI bubble burst before that and AI companies have to start actually selling services at
00:53:44 ◼ ► the cost that makes me, you know, like the whole giant influx of free money to, with which
00:53:53 ◼ ► So what do you think will happen first that the new factories will get built in three or
00:53:59 ◼ ► I'm not predicting, uh, this is not financial advice, but I would expect these prices to be
00:54:21 ◼ ► Like I would, I looked today like the, like a maxed out, uh, MacBook pro right now is now
00:54:27 ◼ ► a little over $10,000, uh, which, you know, before I think they maxed out around the 7,000
00:54:32 ◼ ► Um, so it's, it's, it's, it's especially like I was looking the, the eight terabyte SSD on
00:54:49 ◼ ► Um, now that being said, you know, Casey, you brought up the Apple TV example and the Apple
00:54:57 ◼ ► Um, and in that time there's been about 15% inflation, like just inflation alone covers a
00:55:06 ◼ ► And like Ben Thompson has been making this point a lot that basically in inflation adjusted
00:55:10 ◼ ► terms, Apple products have actually been getting a lot cheaper over the last, you know, five,
00:55:14 ◼ ► Well, the phones in particular, some, some of the max questionable, but definitely the phones.
00:55:18 ◼ ► Because you know, the, the reality is like, this is, we're talking about one reason why,
00:55:24 ◼ ► why a particular type of thing is now more expensive, but we've been going through a pretty
00:55:34 ◼ ► and I think a lot of the world has too, um, that, you know, look around our lives, nothing
00:55:40 ◼ ► costs the same now as it did even three years ago, because everything is more expensive.
00:55:45 ◼ ► You know, we have not to get, you know, political much about this, but like we have, in addition
00:55:55 ◼ ► We also have ridiculous tariff chaos from our current president that throws the entire supply
00:56:11 ◼ ► There is nothing in my life that costs today what it did three years ago, except I guess
00:56:19 ◼ ► So, like, I do think it is, you know, I think Apple has been, um, basically eating inflation
00:56:31 ◼ ► Uh, I, I think this is just what these things are going to cost for the foreseeable future.
00:56:36 ◼ ► Um, you know, when more capacity comes online in two years, maybe supply and email get in balance.
00:56:50 ◼ ► You know, it's also, it's equally possible it's way too much and there'll be a big glutton.
00:56:58 ◼ ► dynamic, but we are in the middle of a very inflationary period of all costs of everything
00:57:14 ◼ ► I think Apple has done a great job so far of not letting it show, uh, and, and not having
00:57:26 ◼ ► So I think this is a good opportunity to, you know, extend the lives of devices you have.
00:57:32 ◼ ► Um, you know, look for deals on used things maybe if you need, you know, if you need to
00:57:36 ◼ ► get that, get a discount to, to make, to put something back into your price range, um, you
00:57:42 ◼ ► know, do what you can to be more efficient and, and pressure app developers and, and other
00:57:47 ◼ ► people who were, who were making very memory hungry, uh, apps and stuff like, you know, maybe
00:57:54 ◼ ► Concern with that, but this is a really good time to already have a computer that you like.
00:58:02 ◼ ► And this is also going to affect Apple kind of broadly by whenever they release new products
00:58:08 ◼ ► in the coming years, demand is going to be a little bit softened by the fact that they're
00:58:16 ◼ ► like, you know, this, this fall, we're heading into a pretty significant iPhone season.
00:58:24 ◼ ► Even before this, you think like now imagine like, you know, so what, you know, the iPhone
00:58:54 ◼ ► Well, it depends on what they do with margins because like speaking of the upgrade price
00:58:58 ◼ ► table, the Gruber had in his thing, the upgrade prices for this stuff are a concentration of
00:59:04 ◼ ► this problem to like, because like the whole, you know, your whole Mac, your whole iPhone
00:59:08 ◼ ► has lots of different components that not all those components are getting more expensive,
00:59:13 ◼ ► If you're upgrading one of those specific components, like, oh, I want to get a Mac, but
00:59:24 ◼ ► Some of them are a hundred percent increases because that's where the problem is in the,
00:59:40 ◼ ► Um, and speaking of the, the foldable phone and stuff, the foldable phone is more expensive
00:59:47 ◼ ► It's got more battery, but screens and batteries aren't the things that are going up in price.
00:59:57 ◼ ► So maybe that will actually take less of a hit because the things that it has more of are
01:00:06 ◼ ► Obviously just there's inflation or whatever, but like, and it's a new product and it's complicated
01:00:17 ◼ ► all I can think about is like Apple strategy of on-device AI seems so smart a couple of years
01:00:23 ◼ ► It's like, well, they have great Silicon and everyone else has to have these big expensive
01:00:27 ◼ ► And Apple's gonna, you know, if Apple tried to run data centers for its billions of iPhone
01:00:37 ◼ ► windfall, uh, uh, a year or two ago, or Apple put more RAM in all its devices so they could
01:00:48 ◼ ► Like they're increasing their RAM even more above and beyond what they did for like the
01:01:05 ◼ ► So Apple strategy of we're going to run a local models because we have the best silicon is
01:01:15 ◼ ► Like the rumors of all the upcoming devices are they will in fact have more RAM than the
01:01:19 ◼ ► old ones specifically so they can run the, whatever, you know, the, the Apple foundation
01:01:27 ◼ ► But like that Apple is putting more RAM and all this devices above and beyond what that
01:01:34 ◼ ► That's going to hurt prices way more than you would think because yeah, it seems like those
01:01:44 ◼ ► But these Mac things, I feel like they're running it, probably running it in inventory and
01:01:48 ◼ ► some of these are going to be replaced and their deals are expiring or they didn't have
01:01:53 ◼ ► But with the phone, I still have some faith that maybe some of the phones introduced this
01:02:03 ◼ ► As with the big price increases we just saw here, it probably behooves Apple that even if
01:02:08 ◼ ► they do have good locked-in rates for their components for the, for the iPhones in September,
01:02:15 ◼ ► In a year, this will probably still be going on or potentially the, like the rumors are
01:02:19 ◼ ► the rumors that predictions are this is going to get worse next year, not better, but like
01:02:28 ◼ ► And that means Apple should probably increase the prices on all of its phones by a big amount
01:02:32 ◼ ► so they can keep that price the same in 2027 and maintain their incredibly high margins.
01:02:51 ◼ ► I want to say I paid roundabouts of $5,000 for this computer when it was new, when the M3 Max
01:03:01 ◼ ► So it was $5,000 then today, although I did option the nanotexture display because I want
01:03:28 ◼ ► For the past month, I've been pricing out used and refurbished Apple Silicon stuff, including
01:03:41 ◼ ► And I wonder if those prices are going to go up too, because I didn't pull the trigger on
01:03:53 ◼ ► But speaking of that, Apple has, by the way, also raised the prices on their refurbished
01:04:00 ◼ ► And you would think, wait a second, the refurbished ones, those are already built and assembled
01:04:10 ◼ ► People want them because they don't want to buy the new ones because they're too expensive.
01:04:18 ◼ ► Although I did see someone complain about this and I did not confirm it, but a question
01:04:24 ◼ ► And the person was complaining that Apple hasn't increased the trade-in prices, but I did not
01:04:32 ◼ ► Has your trade-in gained more value just because the price of all these things has gone up?
01:04:48 ◼ ► And then we should note that this all happened, like I said, today as we record this, Apple
01:05:01 ◼ ► It's also worth noting, we mentioned it before, but like these are Mac and iPad increases.
01:05:41 ◼ ► find ways to, you know, decontent them to keep their margins the same while keeping the price
01:05:59 ◼ ► I mean, obviously they're going to come out with the AirPods with the whatever camera, IR camera,
01:06:03 ◼ ► And those will be more expensive simply because, you know, they have more stuff in them and they're
01:06:06 ◼ ► the fanciest and the newest, but the plain old AirPods, the ones that are like the ones
01:06:13 ◼ ► I wonder if those will actually stay more or less the same simply because they don't use
01:06:24 ◼ ► We we we think this is not good for your business, because if you raise the prices on all
01:06:39 ◼ ► And, you know, because in Apple's next earning call, they're going to be like, we sold more
01:06:48 ◼ ► I would also point out, though, like, you know, when you're thinking like the AirPods are
01:07:00 ◼ ► And I do think, though, you know, you have to consider that, OK, well, right now these component
01:07:10 ◼ ► Well, the companies that, you know, like all the different companies that make all the components
01:07:52 ◼ ► I don't think there's any major product category that's going to escape some effect of this.
01:07:58 ◼ ► Everyone is going to have to raise their prices on almost everything, almost everywhere.
01:08:19 ◼ ► We had three people either reach out or we had seen three people talking about how they
01:08:27 ◼ ► I bought a MacBook Pro a few weeks ago based on his warning about Apple prices increases
01:08:33 ◼ ► Aaron writes, four or five episodes ago, Marco recommended that if you were planning on buying
01:08:40 ◼ ► I bought a new MacBook Air for my wife in late May and that same machine is four hundred
01:08:45 ◼ ► And then a friend of the show, Greg Pierce wrote, guess I pulled the trigger on a new M5 Pro
01:08:52 ◼ ► The specs I bought two weeks ago for thirty four hundred dollars is now eight hundred dollars
01:09:07 ◼ ► Again, we're going to see more across everything and we're going to see significant ripple effects
01:09:16 ◼ ► So, you know, not only everyone's cost going up and everything like that, but also we're
01:09:20 ◼ ► going to think like how will this change the market for certain types of devices at all?
01:09:24 ◼ ► You know, as we know, when computing resources get very cheap, that enables stuff like Raspberry
01:09:30 ◼ ► Pies and like all sorts of like fun and new new types of gadgets, new types of new uses
01:09:37 ◼ ► for hardware that used to be expensive or that used to be expensive and then got cheaper.
01:09:51 ◼ ► you know, such low volume customers of these component vendors that they won't even be able
01:10:00 ◼ ► So, you know, this this could affect things like, you know, obviously, like on the medium
01:10:08 ◼ ► Yeah, as Xbox just announced the price increases and we'll talk about the steam machine next
01:10:13 ◼ ► episode probably right like, you know, what we're seeing in that world is like consoles
01:10:19 ◼ ► You know, people are kind of just kind of try to get more of what more more out of the current
01:10:29 ◼ ► This could affect other stuff like, you know, my my beloved e-ink tablet world or e-readers.
01:10:35 ◼ ► Like there's all sorts of electronic categories that like now that hardware is becoming more
01:10:45 ◼ ► Some of these categories aren't going to make it or they're going to kind of just be put
01:10:52 ◼ ► I think this is going to be in some ways a pretty dark time for the electronics business,
01:10:59 ◼ ► while in other ways like also AI is very exciting and opening up new possibilities for lots of
01:11:05 ◼ ► people in lots of contexts. So it's a really turbulent time and some of it's positive and
01:11:11 ◼ ► some of it's not. If your business or hobby life relies on certain electronics being available to
01:11:21 ◼ ► It might be too late. Yeah, no, on that topic and a call back to the episode we did about why
01:11:25 ◼ ► everyone hates AI. Yeah, it's like, oh, that's all well and good. You talk about that episode,
01:11:29 ◼ ► what other people think, but now they come for your Apple hardware and all you Apple fans like,
01:11:32 ◼ ► well, now suddenly I care about AI. It was fine when they were increasing prices, stuff that I don't
01:11:37 ◼ ► care about, but now they're increasing Apple product prices. This is this can't stand. But
01:11:40 ◼ ► this is basically it's all the same thing, which is like, obviously, there's a massive investment
01:11:45 ◼ ► investment across the entire industry in AI. That massive investment is allowing those companies
01:11:50 ◼ ► to buy up all the RAM in the world, like literally all the RAM in the world, right? They're not doing
01:11:55 ◼ ► that because they're so rich from the profitable, from the profit they're making from selling their
01:11:59 ◼ ► products. They're doing that with the money they have invested because people think these companies
01:12:04 ◼ ► are the future. And so they're piling all this investment in and they take that investment money and
01:12:08 ◼ ► they shove it to Nvidia and all the RAM companies and everything. That is, that's the bubble. It's
01:12:12 ◼ ► distorting the market with all this money flowing into it. And if and when this market distortion
01:12:19 ◼ ► comes for the thing that you care about, our case being Apple hardware, but it could be anything,
01:12:23 ◼ ► as Marco said, it could be, you know, garage door openers. They have chips and RAM and everything,
01:12:27 ◼ ► like it's anything, right? And, you know, as Marco said, that just the general price increase
01:12:31 ◼ ► everywhere, as we saw with a COVID-19 lockdown, people will take any opportunity to price gouge,
01:12:36 ◼ ► even if their costs haven't actually increased. If everyone else is doing it, they're just going to do it
01:12:42 ◼ ► AI RAM crisis. That's why, you know, when that happens to you, people are naturally going to
01:12:48 ◼ ► think, as I am right now, is this trade-off worth it? Oh, AI is cool and exciting and everything,
01:12:54 ◼ ► but there are things I hate about it. And also, would I be happier with a slower growth in the
01:13:00 ◼ ► AI industry in exchange for sane prices in Apple hardware or garage door openers or Raspberry Pis or
01:13:11 ◼ ► hell yeah, like, AI is exciting and everything, but do we need to destroy the entire world economy to allow
01:13:17 ◼ ► that industry to grow as fast as possible? Because people would look, it's like, what am I getting in exchange for that?
01:13:21 ◼ ► Okay, say you love ChatGPT. It's the best thing since life spread, but then you look at the things,
01:13:25 ◼ ► the costs on the other side of it, and you're like, even me as the biggest fan of this, I'm not sure this
01:13:29 ◼ ► balances out. Say you hate AI and everything about it, then you're looking at this and saying, oh,
01:13:33 ◼ ► so the thing I hate is making all the things I love worse? This makes me hate it even more. So,
01:13:39 ◼ ► yeah, this, like, I feel like this is, you know, it's, it's not imminent that something is going to
01:13:44 ◼ ► happen, but things are going to have to come to a head. Like I said, it's either the case where we
01:13:49 ◼ ► wait out three terrible years, which, like I said, will probably be worse than this year. Like, next year is
01:13:53 ◼ ► predicted to be worse than this year, not better. We were at all these years and they build capacity
01:13:58 ◼ ► or whatever. And then eventually the bubble burst or there's consolidation or whatever. And then it
01:14:02 ◼ ► comes back to sanity or maybe the bubble burst sooner. Maybe chickens come home to roost. Maybe
01:14:08 ◼ ► these companies go public and it turns out when you're public, you actually have to turn a profit
01:14:11 ◼ ► in a more reasonable time. Although look at Amazon, they spent a long time not turning a profit and they
01:14:15 ◼ ► did fine. So again, not financial advice, but like it seemed the current situation seems both terrible
01:14:20 ◼ ► and unsustainable in obvious ways that everyone is looking at. And that just like the financial
01:14:25 ◼ ► people are like, well, this is just the horse race. This is just, yeah, we know this is all going to
01:14:28 ◼ ► end in some kind of consolidation and it's not going to go on like this forever. And there'll be winners
01:14:33 ◼ ► and losers and blah, blah, blah. But this is what we're doing now. And screw the people who get
01:14:38 ◼ ► sideswiped by the damage we're making. And then the rest of us are just out here, like hitched to this
01:14:42 ◼ ► wagon. Like, I mean, nothing highlights this more than what was it? The stupid SpaceX IPO, which you may
01:14:50 ◼ ► companies into one giant cluster of evil. Um, anyway, when companies are that big, uh, these
01:14:57 ◼ ► funds that buy like, uh, you know, index funds for your, like your retirement accounts end up owning
01:15:02 ◼ ► them just because they're so big and they buy like the top 500 companies or whatever, as part of their
01:15:06 ◼ ► index thing. And now SpaceX is part of that instantly because it's so big by market cap, because it's a
01:15:11 ◼ ► combination of Twitter and XAI and blah, blah, blah. And so all of a sudden people's retirement
01:15:16 ◼ ► accounts, people who do not buy individual stocks, this may be a more US centric thing, but anyway,
01:15:19 ◼ ► we have retirement accounts here because we don't have any kind of social safety net to speak of.
01:15:23 ◼ ► Um, if you have an individual retirement account or a 401k or whatever, and you have a bunch of index
01:15:28 ◼ ► funds, this is a wide ranging paragraph. Yeah. You have an index fund. And now that index includes
01:15:33 ◼ ► SpaceX, which is an AI company because they went public. And when this bubble bursts, oh, your 401k
01:15:37 ◼ ► gets screwed too. So we have that to look forward to as well. Not only enduring all the pain of this,
01:15:43 ◼ ► but when it does quote unquote end and things consolidate and the bubble burst and winnings,
01:15:48 ◼ ► losers are picked and companies have to actually start turning a profit. All our retirement accounts
01:15:52 ◼ ► get screwed. He's like, I never consented to buying any of this crappy AI stock. Well, tough luck. If you're
01:15:56 ◼ ► buying the S&P 500 or some other index fund, SpaceX is going to be in there. So yeah, things are not
01:16:02 ◼ ► looking great financially for us. And like I said, for me in particular, because I do have this Intel Mac
01:16:08 ◼ ► here. And at this point, any kind of arm based Mac is looking like it's going to cost a lot of money. So I may be
01:16:16 ◼ ► cruising on this for a while. I mean, we made fun of my old Mac pro that I had for over 10 years. And it's like,
01:16:21 ◼ ► well, that won't happen again. They did a processor transition right after you bought your new Mac.
01:16:24 ◼ ► Surely you'll get rid of that one pretty soon. Well, I'm on year seven. So tune in in three years
01:16:31 ◼ ► to see if I'm still running this Intel thing. Well, you can't on account of the OS, right?
01:16:35 ◼ ► I can just keep running the OS. I'm not running 26 now. I mean, yeah, I'll do increasing amount of
01:16:40 ◼ ► dev work on my M1 MacBook Air, which is what I'm doing, which is what's booted into Golden Gate right now.
01:16:45 ◼ ► Oh my God. I'm sorry, John. I really am. I mean, the good news is you have precedent for spending
01:16:49 ◼ ► as much as a civic on a computer. So yeah, I don't, I, but I don't like this, but your voice
01:16:54 ◼ ► is haunting me. Casey's remember on the previous episode or a couple episodes ago, you were like,
01:16:58 ◼ ► do you think you're going to spend as much money as your Mac pro and your new Mac? I'm like, no,
01:17:02 ◼ ► that can't because I subtract $6,000 because I'm not buying a new monitor. Knock on wood. Um,
01:17:08 ◼ ► but now maybe you're right. Maybe, maybe the eight terabyte M5 max max studio with a 64 gigs of Ram
01:17:26 ◼ ► I mean, I'm really hoping now, cause if that's a situation, like maybe, like, maybe I'll just get
01:17:31 ◼ ► like the, the, you know, is the max the smallest one? That probably is going to be the smallest one.
01:17:36 ◼ ► The problem is they don't let you get eight terabytes in the Mac mini. I'd be like, I'm going to
01:17:39 ◼ ► get a Mac mini. Yeah. If you want eight terabytes, you're, you got to get a max ship these days.
01:17:42 ◼ ► And then, and the smallest CPU that comes with is the max, right? Uh, yeah, I believe so.
01:17:46 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. And you have to get, and you have to get the fancier max because there's at least on
01:17:51 ◼ ► laptops, there's two maxes. And I, when I was pricing it a few minutes ago, I went to eight
01:17:56 ◼ ► terabytes and it was like, Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You need to get the super baller CPU before
01:18:01 ◼ ► you can get eight terabytes. Thank you very much. Maybe I have to become an external disc
01:18:04 ◼ ► person again and just have a bunch of discs and divide up my world into little pieces. I'm not
01:18:08 ◼ ► looking forward to it. If that is a problem for another day, because I mean, this just makes it
01:18:12 ◼ ► so much worse that like the, this, this exact same crisis essentially caused, if the rumors are to be
01:18:17 ◼ ► believed, the Mac studio that would have been announced to WWC to be pushed back because, you know,
01:18:21 ◼ ► because of this whole thing. And now it is pushed back past the price increase horizon. So if it
01:18:27 ◼ ► one Apple does roll out an M5 max based Mac studio, it will benefit from the price increases in both
01:18:33 ◼ ► the base price and the upgrade prices that we just read, because they are going to be this bad or
01:18:37 ◼ ► potentially worse. It's not great, Bob. No. And, and, oh, and, and by the way, just for the record,
01:18:45 ◼ ► in case this is unclear, space data centers make no sense because of heat and radiation and everything.
01:18:52 ◼ ► And so, yeah, that doesn't work just, just for the record, just putting that out there.
01:19:01 ◼ ► Right. Like in case anyone doesn't know science, just look into what it takes to radiate the amount
01:19:07 ◼ ► of heat that a typical data center rack needs to radiate into space. But Margo, isn't space cold?
01:19:13 ◼ ► Yeah. The problem is how do you transfer the heat from the chip to space? And it turns out there is a
01:19:21 ◼ ► way to do it. It's just really large. So, yeah, that's, that's not, that's not going to be a thing.
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01:21:28 ◼ ► All right, let's do at least a touch of Ask ATP. And Brian Webster wrote, I don't know, maybe a month
01:21:37 ◼ ► ago or so, given the soaring cost and unpredictability of RAM prices, and given that Apple already
01:21:44 ◼ ► manufactures its own SoCs and many of its own cell modems, would it ever make sense for Apple to start
01:21:48 ◼ ► manufacturing its own RAM? They ship high enough volumes of RAM that they would likely get an okay
01:21:57 ◼ ► supply constraints triggered by the AI boom. And most importantly, since they would only be paying
01:22:02 ◼ ► manufacturing costs without extra profit margins, they could finally lower those ludicrous RAM
01:22:22 ◼ ► Right? Okay, well, we're batting 500. Casey knows the meme and Marco doesn't. Again, I don't know how
01:22:34 ◼ ► No, I know. I'm very familiar with those characters from the terrible Star Wars prequels
01:22:39 ◼ ► that inexplicably, she falls in love with him and then dies of sadness. I mean, has there ever
01:22:58 ◼ ► answer is you can't just spin up, you know, a new RAM factory. And we were talking about
01:23:17 ◼ ► it and also why they will never manufacture it. Eventually, sane pricing will return. But
01:23:25 ◼ ► they wouldn't be able to bargain with vendors and multi-source nor meet surge demand. Also,
01:23:32 ◼ ► up domestic memory suppliers over the past 12 years. And there's still several generations
01:23:35 ◼ ► behind the leading edge. If Apple broke ground on a fab today, it would be five years before
01:23:39 ◼ ► the first wafers came out, 10 years before high volume yield on a decent process, and 15
01:23:44 ◼ ► years or more, or perhaps even never, before it would be cost competitive with current DRAM
01:23:50 ◼ ► That's the problem. Remember that episode we did where we talked about like the silicon fabbing
01:23:54 ◼ ► machines from ASML and everything? Like you say, well, they're not making processors, they're
01:23:58 ◼ ► making RAM. It's the easiest thing to make. It's very regular. And it actually is a little
01:24:05 ◼ ► facts remain the same. This is not a turnkey business. You don't just buy the kit and like
01:24:10 ◼ ► have a franchise and start a thing. These companies that have been doing this have been doing it
01:24:14 ◼ ► for decades and decades. And you can't catch them by just saying, well, we'll just make a
01:24:19 ◼ ► factory and do the same thing they're doing. It's incredibly difficult and complicated. And
01:24:24 ◼ ► anyone who has ever tried to do it, like the Chinese government example is great. What if
01:24:28 ◼ ► you had basically unlimited money, like the Chinese government is funding you, they want this industry
01:24:34 ◼ ► to come up and it's taking them a long time. And they're not a private company that has to have
01:24:38 ◼ ► investment that the Chinese government is backing it saying we want to be contenders here. And they
01:24:43 ◼ ► spent 12 years doing it. And there's still several generations behind those three big companies. And
01:24:47 ◼ ► Apple kind of sort of needs like the good RAM, like the best the industry has for a purpose in an iPhone.
01:24:57 ◼ ► But the iPhone's kind of got to have the RAM best suited to the iPhone. They're not bargain shopping for that in terms of like, we'll just get a two year old version of it. No, they want the best. And so yeah, Apple, even if Apple decided to do this today, it wouldn't help them unless this crisis goes on for a decade and a half, which God, I hope it doesn't.
01:25:14 ◼ ► But that's the kind of the timeline. But the earlier point, I think is more important that Joe made that like, it's a commodity business.
01:25:20 ◼ ► If Apple is just making RAM for itself, the only way you can survive in a capital intensive business like silicon fabrication is you spend billions and billions of dollars building the factories, machines and expertise to make chips.
01:25:35 ◼ ► And you need those things to be running and churning out money to make back your investment.
01:25:40 ◼ ► And so you can't have them be like a single customer. This is why Intel was in such trouble. You can't have it just be a single customer thing. It's like we just make what Apple needs.
01:25:48 ◼ ► Well, what about when Apple doesn't need any more chips for the year? Do you just let the factory sit there and be idle?
01:25:52 ◼ ► That's terrible that you lose tons of money doing that. You need to keep running that factory and selling people chips.
01:25:59 ◼ ► And so you end up essentially in the RAM business, selling commodities to the entire industry.
01:26:04 ◼ ► And Apple tends not to want to be in the commodity business like we sell components to the world.
01:26:10 ◼ ► But if you build a RAM fab, the only way it's a viable business is you have to sell RAM to everybody.
01:26:15 ◼ ► And suddenly you're not Apple making these special products just for your customers with big margins.
01:26:27 ◼ ► But again, you got to build the factories and learn how to do that over the process of 15 years.
01:26:33 ◼ ► But Apple essentially never wants to be in the business of manufacturing things for the entire world to use as parts in their products.
01:26:44 ◼ ► And as Joe points out, they play them against each other to get better rates and everything.
01:26:47 ◼ ► But it's those people's problem what to do with the excess capacity in their factories.
01:27:02 ◼ ► So if you spend a decade and billions of dollars building yourself up as a commodity business for RAM,
01:27:11 ◼ ► you will either lose money hand over fist or you have to become a different kind of company.
01:27:28 ◼ ► TSMC has that factory that they invest billions and billions of dollars into that they need to constantly turn out chips.
01:28:01 ◼ ► I remember a while back there were stories about TSA doing searches of mobile devices as people entered the U.S.
01:28:08 ◼ ► Does Apple provide any settings that could mitigate these issues while traveling similar to 1Password's travel mode?
01:28:19 ◼ ► I've only got a couple of devices on the beta OSs and I haven't made it through the wait list yet.
01:28:25 ◼ ► But if you allow Siri when unlocked and if it allows you to go searching your personal context without, you know,
01:28:46 ◼ ► I would absolutely do that as I was approaching like immigration or customs or anything like that just to be safe.
01:28:53 ◼ ► And at that point, you can't use Siri no matter what until you type in your password and unlock your phone again.
01:29:03 ◼ ► But I think the reality is, so, you know, so that solution of like locking out the phone so biometric authentication doesn't work,
01:29:24 ◼ ► For a border interest situation, like you have to get through these people to get where you're going.
01:29:33 ◼ ► Like if you won't let, if you won't give them access to what they want, they can just deny you access to the country.
01:29:42 ◼ ► And I think in that case, like I think the, for, especially like for non-U.S. citizens trying to enter the U.S.,
01:29:59 ◼ ► Like if they lock out their phone, then the border control can say, okay, well, I'm just not letting you in the country then.
01:30:10 ◼ ► I think if, in this context, if one of our terrible border agents wants to ask you to show them your, you know, your Instagram account or whatever, I think your only real option is to do it.
01:30:22 ◼ ► Or, again, or like cancel your vacation or cancel the conference you were going to and leave.
01:30:33 ◼ ► And whatever technical measures you're going to try to implement, I think, you know, best case scenario is you can hide apps.
01:30:41 ◼ ► Like that's, that I think is, you know, if you, if you don't want them to see that you have a certain app installed, you can just, you can, you can put it in the hidden folder and make it require face ID.
01:30:51 ◼ ► That's, that's the best way to make sure an app, like, doesn't appear to exist on your phone so that if they, you know, make you search for it or whatever, it won't show up.
01:31:02 ◼ ► But if they're asking for your social media handles and they're going to look at that, like, to say, I don't have Instagram, it's a pretty easy thing to go for them to go verify, you know?
01:31:10 ◼ ► So, like, I think that's, that kind of approach will work a lot better on certain types of apps than others.
01:31:15 ◼ ► If you don't want, if you want them to not see that you have, like, you know, signal installed, that's probably a lot easier of a lie to keep up.
01:31:22 ◼ ► Whereas if you say, I don't use any social media, they could very easily just check and find your profile if it's public, and then you're in trouble for a couple of problems.
01:31:33 ◼ ► But I think hiding apps is a much better way to do it than assuming that they won't convince you to unlock your phone.
01:31:44 ◼ ► So a technically savvy person, if it was working from the unlock screen, blah, blah, blah, could use it to be more successful, but just because the old Siri was so useless that you couldn't use it or anything.
01:31:52 ◼ ► But this assumes a fairly sophisticated attacker in the form of whoever is doing the screening here.
01:31:59 ◼ ► If you want to social engineer your way to mitigate this, my advice would be to drain the battery on your phone and just tell them it's broken.
01:32:10 ◼ ► Because you know how long iOS devices take when they're like, the battery's totally drained.
01:32:18 ◼ ► And if you just tell them it's broken and they can't turn it on, like, that's social engineering.
01:32:34 ◼ ► So, yeah, I would say the new Siri probably does make it slightly worse if you have a sophisticated attacker who knows that they can do things from the lock screen with Siri because you've configured it that way.
01:32:43 ◼ ► But you can not configure it that way, and you could also hold the power button on your phone and require a passcode, and you can also drain the battery completely before going to the airport if that doesn't freak you out.
01:32:52 ◼ ► I know your boarding pass might be on the phone, too, so you're going to have to print it out.
01:33:07 ◼ ► And will not arrest you for saying something on social media and won't shoot you dead in the street.
01:33:33 ◼ ► Every week, we do about 20 more minutes of content on some topic that just wouldn't fit in the main show because, as you know, a lot of stuff happens in computers.
01:33:41 ◼ ► So, this time on Overtime, we're going to be talking about Anthropics Fable and John's, quote, LLM bug releases.
01:35:03 ◼ ► We're going to jam it into the Overtime because it was, like, kind of AI-related things.
01:35:07 ◼ ► And I had this Overtime topic in before you wrote your blog post, which was just a happy coincidence.
01:35:11 ◼ ► But we figured we would separate it out because it's more like after-show material because it's you talking about your feelings and your feelings about AI.
01:35:18 ◼ ► Even though, like, again, the Overtime is going to be about Anthropics Fable and all the drama there and me using Fable.
01:35:38 ◼ ► Yeah, so when I was at the beach a week and a half ago, two weeks ago, whatever it was, during WWDC week, I had somebody write in.
01:35:50 ◼ ► And the particular something, if I recall correctly, was that in call sheet for the last several months now, you can turn on or turn off different sections of the Discover screen, which is to say the screen that you land on when you open the app cold.
01:36:07 ◼ ► And maybe you want to see now playing information from like Plex or Jellyfin or something, but you don't want that to be front and center at the top.
01:36:14 ◼ ► You want it to be toward the bottom of the screen so you can rearrange them and so on and so forth.
01:36:17 ◼ ► And I had had reports, sporadic reports, since I released that feature that for some people, their settings would get plowed over every time they restarted the app.
01:36:30 ◼ ► And I had no strong theories about what that was other than, well, maybe they're like force quitting the app before User Defaults has a section to like flush its, before it has a chance to flush its queue, if you will.
01:36:46 ◼ ► But I don't know, man, User Defaults is the mechanism by which most apps save like user preferences onto your device.
01:36:52 ◼ ► And it's got to be up there on the most, you know, battle tested, like almost flawless bits of the iOS SDK.
01:37:11 ◼ ► And I asked a follow-up question here and there and then got a log file from them, which was very kind of them to spend the time with me and give them, you know, or give me that log file.
01:37:33 ◼ ► So I thought to myself, well, let me talk to my buddy Claude and let me see what Claude code can come up with.
01:37:44 ◼ ► And the literal verbatim query that I asked of Claude was in usersettings.save, I save the user's preferred arrangement of sections of their main or discover screen on call sheet.
01:39:09 ◼ ► And it turns out that there was a very brief window of time when I allowed users to turn on or off sections of the discover screen.
01:39:23 ◼ ► And that was a released version of call sheet, not just test flight, like a honest to goodness released version of call sheet.
01:39:32 ◼ ► And then very briefly thereafter, I released into the wild the version that lets you rearrange things.
01:39:37 ◼ ► And it turns out the specifics aren't particularly important, but it turns out that the way in which I was trying to key off of, well, did they have the version that only did the on and off?
01:39:52 ◼ ► When I was keying off, when I was looking at that and trying to do like basically a migration, I screwed it up.
01:39:57 ◼ ► I screwed it up such that if you had run the version of the app that did the on off, which again, only existed for maybe a week at most, and then went and did the migration and went to do the newest version at the time, which was the one that allows the on off and rearranging, I screwed up the way I did that migration.
01:40:20 ◼ ► And every time it migrated, it would clear out what was there and it would reset it anew.
01:40:25 ◼ ► So the reason it was sporadic was because it was only people potentially who messed with this setting or at the very least that ran that one specific version of the app.
01:40:43 ◼ ► Occasionally, when you override the language settings or the region settings and call sheet, similar stuff happens.
01:41:04 ◼ ► But suffice to say, it looked at it for a few minutes and said, oh, this is your problem.
01:41:12 ◼ ► But it was fascinating that here I am at the beach and I'm obviously, like, paying attention to what's going on.
01:41:20 ◼ ► And when it presents a theory, I don't remember if I had it implement the fix, but at the very least, when it presented the theory, I looked at it and then I did end up opening up Xcode because now I have nerd sniped myself.
01:41:32 ◼ ► But it presents the theory and then I look at Xcode and say, oh, no, nope, this sounds right.
01:41:40 ◼ ► And so then I either implemented it myself or I think what I might have had to do is, like, do a first pass and then I rejiggered a fair bit of it.
01:41:53 ◼ ► But what was fascinating about this was this is two different bugs that, again, wholly my fault.
01:42:00 ◼ ► I'm not trying to deny that they're my fault, but two different bugs that were very pernicious and very tricky and that I had been trying to figure out what the heck was going on, again, on and off for months.
01:42:13 ◼ ► I would look at it, you know, for a few minutes here and then I'd decide I still don't get it.
01:42:18 ◼ ► And then I'd look at it for a few minutes another time and I still don't get it, both of these bugs.
01:42:26 ◼ ► And what was so striking about this, and I was sitting on the couch in the beach house and I was leaning forward because my laptop, my $5,000, soon to be $8,500 laptop, was sitting on, like, the coffee table.
01:42:40 ◼ ► And I've caught myself leaning back against the, you know, the back of the couch and thinking to myself, holy God, I have a coworker again.
01:42:52 ◼ ► It's, I think, eight years, just a week or so shy of eight years that I've been independent, which is also bananas.
01:42:57 ◼ ► But anyway, I have a coworker again because what this felt like was so, it felt like so much like me saying to a coworker, hey, I'm banging my head against the wall.
01:43:08 ◼ ► Can you take a look at this code and see what you can figure out and working through the problem together?
01:43:13 ◼ ► And let me tell you, one of the things, if not the thing that I miss most about being, about working with coworkers and particularly doing so in person, although, you know, maybe this would be just as fine, just this would work just as well remotely.
01:43:32 ◼ ► I miss so desperately being in, like, a conference room, standing in front of a whiteboard and working a problem or maybe standing, you know, maybe sitting in front of a projector and, you know, looking at a, looking at code together and working a problem.
01:43:46 ◼ ► And more than I have at any point in the last eight years, I felt like, at least when it comes to code, obviously, I have coworkers with you guys, with Mike, in other cases as well.
01:44:00 ◼ ► And as I said in the top of this blog post, as a pundit and as a person, I still don't know what I think about AI.
01:44:08 ◼ ► And I echo what you were saying, John, like, yes, there's so many amazing things that AI provides for us, like this very moment.
01:44:34 ◼ ► And as I hear myself talking, I'm a little uncomfortable with how much I feel like I sound like, oh, I just, I found myself a girlfriend.
01:44:43 ◼ ► Like, obviously that's not at all the same, but it almost was like a, not a relationship feeling, but like, oh, this is an interpersonal thing or on the verge of an interpersonal thing that I haven't had in so long.
01:44:59 ◼ ► And if I was really desperate, you would work with me, work through these problems with me.
01:45:03 ◼ ► But it takes so long to bring any human being up to speed on my code base and the way I like to write code that even if they would have taken either of you 10 minutes to spot the bug, it would have taken the three of us working together or the two of us working together 10 hours to get up to speed on the way my code works.
01:45:21 ◼ ► And as a developer, thinking myopically as a developer, this is such an incredible boon to my ability to write code and do work and fix problems.
01:45:51 ◼ ► You know, when you look at, even just what you're saying now, like even just the bug fixing and testing abilities of modern AI tools, it dramatically changes the landscape of software development.
01:46:04 ◼ ► Like, even if you're writing most of your code yourself, like the other day, I, look, if you're an Overcast user, there's a couple of things that you probably have with problems with the app.
01:46:17 ◼ ► And one of the most common obscure bugs that I get reported is basically unexpectedly large storage usage.
01:46:32 ◼ ► And I have thought for a while this is related to the background download daemon because it creates these weird like NSURL session D folders in various places and fills them with crap.
01:47:01 ◼ ► It's like a whole separate thing because I was so tired of having to deal with downloader bugs.
01:47:06 ◼ ► And I feel like let me actually write a good one and open source it so that nobody has to deal with downloader bugs.
01:47:13 ◼ ► And it turns out, you know, most of the things I've open sourced, they don't get a lot of users because I don't, I don't make the kinds of things people want.
01:47:19 ◼ ► And I don't support them in the kind of way that open source software needs to be supported to get a lot of community around it.
01:47:28 ◼ ► The other day, just last week, I asked Claude, hey, here's, here's this component in Overcast that's the downloader.
01:47:55 ◼ ► There was one case where I had like, you know, I was testing a Boolean condition with a knot on it and I had the logic backwards.
01:48:15 ◼ ► Like that's like programming involves a lot of Boolean logic and it turns out humans aren't perfect.
01:48:27 ◼ ► The only way this would have ever gotten fixed is next time I rewrote the entire component.
01:48:34 ◼ ► Well, maybe this was this was this would have been a hard one to come up in a test, honestly.
01:48:44 ◼ ► On the topic of Boolean logic, though, I've never even proposed this and everyone who has proposed it would have surely been shouted down with this exact argument.
01:48:55 ◼ ► So you didn't have to do if exclamation point condition you could do in less condition.
01:49:00 ◼ ► And, you know, anyone who hasn't used that thinks it's going to be the end of the world because they're going to oh, it's going to make me screw up the logic because I can't handle it.
01:49:12 ◼ ► And guard condition else is, I would say, worse than an unless keyword in terms of making you accidentally put the wrong logic in a condition, especially if you convert an if to a guard once you realize it's kind of a precondition.
01:49:40 ◼ ► I've come to enjoy the guards, but linguistically, it is kind of weird, but I like the function.
01:49:45 ◼ ► Anyway, you know, Claude found this bug and it could very well be related to some weird edge case downloaded behavior and the downloader never cleaning up those temp files that are abandoned by the system.
01:49:58 ◼ ► So like if if the background download demon abandons a file, like if the process crashes, maybe then that file might never be cleaned up.
01:50:07 ◼ ► And while it was there, it found a couple other little bugs that might affect background download terminations.
01:50:15 ◼ ► Oh, and by the way, and it was it was giving statements to me in in like the feedback chat stuff about like, oh, when users delete episodes, I never told it it was a podcast app.
01:50:35 ◼ ► And, you know, I come from a little bit different angle in that it's been a much longer time since I've worked with other programmers and I never work with that many of them.
01:50:47 ◼ ► I'm not coming from the corporate world where I'm used to having a lot more infrastructure around me, a lot more like testing and process and things like that.
01:50:58 ◼ ► The way I see this so far is like not only is this allowing me to write better software, the kind of bugs it's finding, you know, you know how to do next overcast fans.
01:51:10 ◼ ► I'm having a look at my priority podcast logic because the priority podcast insertion into into playlist with priorities set on them ever since the rewrite.
01:51:28 ◼ ► And of course, I'm not going to do it anyway, but Claude can and Claude also found some logical bugs in that.
01:51:35 ◼ ► And so I'm going to in the next few days, probably ship an overcast beta update that includes that download fix and these priority playlist fixes and people can start telling me how they work for them.
01:51:44 ◼ ► And these are these are like really obscure little logical things like the priority playlist thing was like a greater than less than was flipped backwards.
01:52:03 ◼ ► So it's allowing me to write better software and it's allowing it's allowing me to continue being one person team for longer.
01:52:15 ◼ ► To be honest, I've been honestly thinking about maybe trying to hire another programmer to help help me, you know, do more things because I feel a little bit stretched right now.
01:52:23 ◼ ► But Claude gets me some of the way there in terms of like if I have like certain bugs on my hit list, I can have it take a look and it fixes it.
01:52:44 ◼ ► But anyway, I also think like from what I've heard, Apple also uses Claude internally a lot over the last year or so.
01:52:53 ◼ ► Well, look at what happened at WBDC this year when they scrolled by those giant walls of text of oftentimes fairly small but nice little fixes.
01:53:11 ◼ ► No, it's because they are using Claude to fix their own bugs and to help them develop things more quickly.
01:53:23 ◼ ► So I think even though this is this is kind of a it's going to be a bumpy ride for lots of reasons, as we've talked about, both from for like a straight up like, you know, AI coding and security perspective, which we'll talk about more in the in the overtime.
01:53:36 ◼ ► Also to just everything we've been talking about, you know, AI itself is very disruptive and turbulent and causing a bunch of turbulence in the world and is not a universal gain for everybody.
01:53:45 ◼ ► But specifically in the area of software and software quality, I think it's a huge boon because everyone can start finding and fixing really weird, obscure bugs that a human never would have found.
01:53:59 ◼ ► And when you see Apple's giant wall of text, WVDC slide, you can tell that's what's going on here.
01:54:23 ◼ ► And just very briefly, and I also covered this very briefly in the blog post, but I'd like to reiterate here.
01:54:30 ◼ ► In my perfect world, I would have enough money coming in from CallSheet where I could hire somebody either, you know, half-time or full-time to be that person that we can work together to figure these things out.
01:54:46 ◼ ► It does make enough money to handle a, you know, monthly fee from Claude, which I'm now paying.
01:54:54 ◼ ► I mean, they did sponsor in the past and I was rolling on the freebies that they gave us when they sponsored.
01:54:59 ◼ ► But now I'm paying them and I'm choosing to because it has been that transformative for me.
01:55:05 ◼ ► Now, again, in a perfect world, I'd much rather have a human being to work with on this.
01:55:09 ◼ ► To be honest, I'd still probably ask Claude some of these questions, but I think there's something to be said for having a human and having a human do these things and make these decisions and use what makes humans uniquely wonderful and amazing to figure out some of these problems.
01:55:24 ◼ ► But since I don't have that and I cannot afford that with CallSheet alone, the next greatest thing I could do is ask Claude.
01:55:33 ◼ ► And I think that the thing is, what I'm saying in a roundabout way is, this isn't the question of hiring a human or hiring Claude.
01:55:45 ◼ ► So the question is, do I fix these bugs by using the tools that I have at my disposal or do I not, right?
01:55:59 ◼ ► I feel guilty about AI in the broad strokes like we were talking about, but in this one specific way, I don't feel too guilty about it at all.
01:56:07 ◼ ► And it is so rewarding having what isn't a person, but occasionally kind of feels like a person, to fire questions at and work with and figure out problems.
01:56:16 ◼ ► And again, even a lot of times I don't take the code that Claude writes or I vastly change it to work, to fit my preferences and style and so on and so forth.
01:56:25 ◼ ► But having it identify where a problem is, like Mark, like I said, like Marco said, is incredibly valuable, incredibly valuable.
01:56:38 ◼ ► Two things on the topics you touched on first, Marco, on the big wall of text and Apple fixing bugs.
01:56:44 ◼ ► I'm sure Apple's using all the same tools everybody is to find their bugs, but you still need the essentially corporate mandate that that's where they're allowed to spend their time.
01:56:51 ◼ ► Because every bug fix requires understanding the bug, finding it, verifying the fix, and the risk inherent in changing any code and blah, blah, blah.
01:56:59 ◼ ► And all of that requires a corporate mandate, an actual decision that, hey, this release, we're going to fix bugs.
01:57:04 ◼ ► Once that decision is made, yes, the tools make bug fixing way more efficient as before.
01:57:14 ◼ ► Maybe the decision was influenced by the increased power of the tools available to do that.
01:57:21 ◼ ► In other words, if Apple hadn't made this decision and these tools were available, they still would have been forced to do whatever features there have to do for the release.
01:57:31 ◼ ► Maybe they would have snuck a few in because they're more powerful, but nothing like what we saw.
01:57:37 ◼ ► And Casey, on your blog post, I do feel like even though you've spent a lot of time talking about the nitty gritty of the bug or whatever, I felt like the thrust of your post was what you were getting at at the end there, which is like the feeling of working with someone else.
01:57:49 ◼ ► Listen, I feel like your post essentially identified or crystallized for you a need that you have.
01:58:01 ◼ ► But like having that experience with the coding agent was like, you know, I really do miss working with people.
01:58:13 ◼ ► On the flip side of that, I would say that even though this evokes that feeling and reminds you that you want it to, you know, the AI thing is not a person.
01:58:23 ◼ ► It's I know sometimes it fools you into thinking it is, but it's like that's that's a dangerous trap.
01:58:30 ◼ ► Obviously, it's more dangerous the more these things are able to fool people into thinking that they're a little person that they're talking with.
01:58:38 ◼ ► And so, I mean, in all cases, when someone finds himself in that situation, it is highlighting a need, not fixing a problem.
01:58:56 ◼ ► So take if you find yourself using one of these things and finding it's like, I just I find myself just I just love talking to it.
01:59:12 ◼ ► And I feel like that experience and like that what you took away from it is not entirely.
01:59:20 ◼ ► But also, I've identified something that I'm not getting in my life, especially if it's something that you used to have.
01:59:26 ◼ ► I'm like Marco, who is far removed from that and never really had it to the same degree as you.
01:59:32 ◼ ► I mean, I mean, working on open source projects or other things where you're collaborating with someone on code doesn't make sense to do it for call sheet for the reasons you stated because you'd have to hire someone to do that because it's not like someone's going to help you with your app for fun.
01:59:43 ◼ ► But that's, you know, that's maybe argues for like, say, say you get super into jellyfin or home assistant or whatever, like dabbling in that environment.
01:59:58 ◼ ► And then you also mentioned like you could have had someone else like ask some other programmer, you know, to look at this thing and see if we could figure out the bug or whatever.
02:00:07 ◼ ► If you asked another programmer to do that, if you asked me to do that, I would have said, why don't you just ask the agent of your choice to find bugs?
02:00:13 ◼ ► Like that's because that and that highlights the role of these tools from my perspective is they are tools.
02:00:24 ◼ ► There's, you know, fuzz testers and Valgrind and all like this is not the first tool that humans have ever made that helps find bugs in programs.
02:00:35 ◼ ► And so if you were asked another human today to come in and help you find bugs in your program, this would be the tool that they would pull out.
02:00:48 ◼ ► But ignoring the tools available to you as a programmer is counterproductive unless you're taking some kind of moral stand against it, which is fine.
02:00:55 ◼ ► But I'm saying most people who you asked would would would grab for the same tool that you were already going to use anyway.
02:01:02 ◼ ► They are, in fact, tools for programming tools with questionable origins and bad externalities and whatever.
02:01:09 ◼ ► But in the particular case of programming, as I've argued in the past, I personally believe that it is possible, not currently happening, but possible to make a ethical, environmentally responsible, created under ideal circumstances, blah, blah, version of this simply because code like to give an example.
02:01:30 ◼ ► If Apple trained its own coding agent, if it was not terrible at doing that, let's say they were actually good at doing it, they train their own coding agent on all the source code Apple has ever created.
02:01:40 ◼ ► That would be an incredibly powerful agent for writing for Apple platforms just based on the code that Apple owns because it wrote it.
02:01:50 ◼ ► And they would hire people to like, you know, like just they could make an Apple centric coding agent and then run it on, you know, in data centers run 100% for renewable resources.
02:02:00 ◼ ► You know, like do all the things like it is possible because we see the technology is there and it's like, well, isn't the rest of it just details?
02:02:08 ◼ ► So if you if you're living in Memphis and you got XAI data centers spewing out smoke next to you, it is not a it is not a theoretical thing.
02:02:16 ◼ ► But like my techno optimism says, but I can see how it would be possible to both have this useful tool and not destroy the world and bankrupt us all and blah, blah, blah.
02:02:31 ◼ ► So I do feel like this kind of tool will inevitably become an essential part of every programmer's toolbox eventually, hopefully not in the current form that we're currently currently have it available to us.
02:02:45 ◼ ► And perhaps after a long, dark period of it being so expensive that nobody can use it, because if we were paying the true cost of the things that we're doing right now, none of us would be using it either.
02:02:54 ◼ ► Because in the same way that call sheet can't doesn't make enough money to hire another programmer, it also doesn't make enough money to pay for the tokens you've been using.
02:03:01 ◼ ► If you look at the actual cost of you're getting whatever you're paying for your agent for a monthly thing, that is not the true cost of what you're getting.
02:03:13 ◼ ► And so someday, maybe by the time that ends, inference will have gotten so much more efficient with dedicated ASICs and everything, and we'll all be running on renewable resource data centers and all that stuff.
02:03:24 ◼ ► So it's a weird time to be in, but I do, I did enjoy your blog post, less for the technical aspects of it, which, by the way, we will get into more in overtime, because it's more in that vein, but more in terms of like, what I felt like your thrust was in the post, which was like, I miss programming with people.
02:03:41 ◼ ► Yeah, which is, which is a very strange conclusion going in to say, oh, I use these cool AI tools to do coding or whatever.
02:03:51 ◼ ► You just go, you explain how the tools are good and helped you, but because it reminded you of what it was like back when you work with people.
02:04:00 ◼ ► And that's, I mean, if you're ever listening to this program, it's like, well, I want to be a cool indie developer and support myself and do all these things.
02:04:09 ◼ ► And one of them is if you came from a world where you were working with other people, even if you're not particularly social like me, just working with people in their capacity as fellow programmers on a problem or working with people on any kind of problem, programming or otherwise, is fun and, you know, rewarding.
02:04:25 ◼ ► And when you're working on your own, unless you can hire a staff, and even if you can, by the way, because your staff aren't necessarily going to be your friends, especially if you're like your boss or whatever.
02:04:34 ◼ ► It's a downside of being an indie developer is like indie developer loneliness, I guess.
02:04:43 ◼ ► I think the thing I missed the most from working in an office is lunch, like with other people, just being able to hang out.
02:04:55 ◼ ► I mean, I was lucky enough to work in very, very progressive, isn't the word I'm looking for, but places where they did not micromanage every second of my day for the most part.
02:05:05 ◼ ► And I remember like at my most recent jobby job, we, this is when the Switch was brand new or very new.
02:05:13 ◼ ► There were a handful of times that we would go down to the cafeteria and all of us would do like, would, would do eight player Mario Kart races with our Switches for a little while over lunch.
02:05:22 ◼ ► And like that, you can do that to a degree over the internet, but it's just, it's fun and different doing it in person.
02:05:30 ◼ ► I mean, that was the thing that struck me so much about this experience was it reminded me of having coworkers and I do miss that quite a bit.
02:05:43 ◼ ► I am so thankful to everyone listening to my words right now because you, you listening to me makes my life, Marco's life, John's life possible.
02:05:53 ◼ ► I'm not trying to complain, but as John said, there's something to be said for having coworkers, for having people.