00:00:00 ◼ ► I have something I want to discuss with you two. This is going to go badly for me because I'm enthusiastic about something and excited and you two will ruin it.
00:00:10 ◼ ► Well, actually, I think, Marco, you're going to be on my side on this one mostly. I went to a concert last night and let me just remind you, once again, live music freaking rules. It's so good. Now, you're both going to hate that I went to see the Dave Matthews band and that's fine.
00:00:28 ◼ ► Okay, fair enough. But live music is so great and there happens to be a brand new amphitheater thing at the river that runs through Richmond as many bigger, well, big-ish cities have rivers going through them and big cities as well.
00:00:42 ◼ ► But this is a brand new amphitheater that just opened this summer and we went and saw the Dave Matthews band there and it was freaking great and I love live music despite the fact that the one qualm I have with this particular amphitheater is that it is an amphitheater, an outdoor amphitheater right by the river, which is all well and good.
00:00:59 ◼ ► In Richmond, Virginia, where it's approximately 9 million degrees and 9,000% humidity. Other than that, though, it was excellent. I was wet by the time I got home, but it was very good. And I know that, Marco, you're not a Dave Matthews fan and that's fine. That's no problem. But I think you will at least agree with me that live music is pretty freaking great. And I just wanted to repeat that to everyone.
00:01:20 ◼ ► And with the disclaimer that you did reference Dave Matthews band and a river, and yes, we all know about the story.
00:01:25 ◼ ► Oh, God. Oh, I didn't even think about it. Thank you for getting ahead of that. I don't need to hear it again. Oh, God. I owe you one for that.
00:01:31 ◼ ► With that disclaimer, I actually, okay, I really hate Dave Matthews band. You're right. But I'm not sure I've ever seen a live musical act that I was hating the whole time.
00:01:43 ◼ ► Like, I love live music so much that I, while I have never been to a Dave Matthews band show, and I'm not really in a hurry to do that, I think if for some reason I would ever find myself at a Dave Matthews band show, I think I would have a fine time.
00:01:57 ◼ ► I think you would. I don't think you would love it by any stretch, but I think you would be just fine, like you said.
00:02:00 ◼ ► Yeah. Even if it took, you know, influences from whatever everyone else was doing around there to enjoy it.
00:02:05 ◼ ► Anyways, but it was very, very hot, which is a problem that I think you and I share right now.
00:02:12 ◼ ► Yes. My air conditioning is broken. Now, our house is all electric heat pumps for heat and AC. In the winter, the heat was broken. We have two separate condensers. We have one upstairs and one downstairs.
00:02:26 ◼ ► I first called service people out for the upstairs. You know, I'm like, hey, heat's broken. You know, I got like got the space heaters out of the basement, you know, started using space heaters as backup heat.
00:02:33 ◼ ► I was like, all right, this is holding for a little while, but like, you know, the heat's broken. We need to fix this. And, you know, had had our our plumber HVAC guy come out and all like winter and spring, he would come out periodically and say, I think I fixed it.
00:02:47 ◼ ► You know, if we got him here at all, which was always a challenge. Um, but when he would eventually come after bothering him every single day. And now I am not an organized person for me to function at all in the world.
00:02:58 ◼ ► I rely on technology very heavily. If I am asked by somebody, hey, um, come to my house tomorrow at nine. There is no way I'm doing that unless it goes into a calendar or reminder.
00:03:12 ◼ ► Like there is no, there's no other way that's happening. And when I have calendar events, they have two alerts on them. They have one that's like an hour or multiple hours before. So I kind of know what's coming. And then there's another one like, you know, 15 minutes before when I know, okay, I got to, I got to leave now. Cause even that, if I don't have those two alerts on my calendar entries, they won't happen. Like I won't be there. Um, reminders. There's always, there's always a time that they alert me.
00:03:38 ◼ ► I will always tell the dingus something like, remind me tomorrow at 9am. Good. You know, this thing has to be done today. And when those alerts come up, if I can't do it right, then I'll snooze it for, you know, and I, I did recently rant on Macedon, like the snooze options. I just hate them so much. Like what, like, you know, if you are snoozing something at 1230 PM and it says, remind me this afternoon, what does that mean?
00:04:05 ◼ ► What, when is this afternoon? If you say the one I pictured, I think it was like 9am. And one of the options was remind me in the morning. Cool. Is that today or tomorrow? What time?
00:04:18 ◼ ► That's why I just edit the time manually. I don't even bother. I just go to the reminder and change the time to be two hours later or whatever, exactly what I want. Cause I don't know what it's going to do.
00:04:28 ◼ ► Some of the, well, it depends, but sometimes if you tap on the notification, it'll take you to the edit thing. It's different on iPad and the phone. I know you don't care about iPad, but it annoys me that the iPad doesn't work the same way the phone does.
00:04:38 ◼ ► No, no, no. Tapping the notification itself is like a landmine to me because I know if I tap that notification, it's gone. It will never come back up. It will never remind me again. And therefore I won't do it.
00:04:50 ◼ ► And I know there's the app do DUE. It's supposed to be better about this by like reminding you about stuff until it's done. Constantly nagging you. Yeah. That's, that's its selling point.
00:04:58 ◼ ► I actually want to try that app because I still haven't tried that app, but it sounds like I probably should. So thank you do fans.
00:05:03 ◼ ► You need a reminder to use do. And then after that, you need to have do remind you to never stop using it.
00:05:13 ◼ ► To build on this, like Marco said, I either need to be reminded or it needs to be in a calendar. And that means it either needs to be in a calendar or it needs to be in the DUE app. I cannot say enough praises about it. It is the only way that I accomplish anything in my life between the calendar and that I would be lost without them.
00:05:32 ◼ ► Yeah. And so anyway, this is how I function. Plumbers and HVAC people in this area seem not to have gotten this memo. There is literally no way to get plumbers or HVAC people. For some reason, the electricians here are good. But the plumbers and HVAC people, there is no way to get them to come fix your problem unless you talk to them that day.
00:05:55 ◼ ► So you can you can call them and say, hey, I got this problem. Can you take on the job? And they'll be like, sure, I'll be there tomorrow. But they won't. You have to call them that morning and say, hey, are you coming today? And no matter what they say, it doesn't really matter. They will either come within a couple hours or never.
00:06:13 ◼ ► And so you have to keep calling. And I hate doing this because I hate being annoying to people like that. I hate being the squeaky wheel. Unfortunately, being the squeaky wheel not only works, but when dealing with this kind of person, it is often the only thing that works.
00:06:27 ◼ ► So I kind of have to force myself to be that person, which, again, I I find incredibly uncomfortable.
00:06:33 ◼ ► We need to combine our workforces because I have a reliable plumber, but no reliable electrician. You have the opposite. So we need to just make a make a portal or something to send workers through.
00:06:42 ◼ ► Oh, that would be amazing. So anyway, I had to eventually fire that plumber because it was like months were going by and nothing was happening. So I hired somebody else. That was a few months ago. More months went by. I still it's still not fixed.
00:06:55 ◼ ► So today I had another company come out for this time for like from the mainland. Like I'm like, all right, now I'm going to pay the big bucks to have the mainland people like get on the ferry, pay for parking. It's like, you know, hundreds of dollars just to get them here at all because they have to cover all that and all the time and everything.
00:07:11 ◼ ► I'm like, all right, finally, somebody. I got here today. They were they beat me here. They already done the work. It was fixed for four hours.
00:07:21 ◼ ► So I still don't have working AC. I actually have no idea if they think they're done. They just left in the middle of the day and like didn't call me, didn't tell me anything. Like, I don't know. By the time I got here, it was after hours. So I had, you know, anyway, all this is to say, I very much appreciate air conditioning.
00:07:39 ◼ ► I'm not one of these people who uses it like every single day, constantly all summer long. I like to open the windows when it's reasonable outside. It's not so reasonable in New York right now. So this is not one of those times.
00:07:49 ◼ ► But I definitely very much, very much appreciate the technology of the heat pump when it is working. And right now it is very much not working.
00:07:58 ◼ ► I even tried on like chat GPT. Is there any way I can fix this myself? And like, no, yeah, like the symptom is like it blows cold air for a few hours and that doesn't blow cold air anymore.
00:08:08 ◼ ► It's like, hey, well, that that can be a lot of different things, none of which I can do myself. All of it's like, you know, refill in the refrigerant and stuff like that. It's like they're obviously it's not stuff that like homeowners can do.
00:08:20 ◼ ► All right. Before we leave this topic, to be clear, are you soliciting or even accepting feedback from people who are not HVAC professionals?
00:08:30 ◼ ► Like if you have a theory, are you interested if you the listener has a theory, Marco, are you interested in hearing it?
00:08:36 ◼ ► Here's the thing. If you're not an HVAC professional, no, sorry. I'm also not an HVAC professional. I have my own theories. I don't I don't need anyone else's, you know, amateur theories. I have I'm my entire life is my own amateur theories.
00:08:47 ◼ ► So I have plenty of those. If you're a professional, please let me know. But what one thing I have found is that the the people who have tried to service it so far seem not to have like the programmer debugging mindset.
00:09:01 ◼ ► So, for instance, there's two totally separate units. They're only five years old and they failed in around the same way within a couple of months of each other.
00:09:17 ◼ ► Now, when the new people come in and they start saying, well, it must be your third party thermostats.
00:09:23 ◼ ► I'm like, you know, I don't think it's that because they worked fine for five years like they were great for five years.
00:09:30 ◼ ► And then all of a sudden they both break in a similar way around the same time when they start being worked on.
00:09:35 ◼ ► I don't think it's that there's like certain debugging things like, OK, if they both break in the exact same way, it is probably not like a random fluke.
00:09:53 ◼ ► Is it likely that two different bugs on two different systems came up at the around the same time and they don't talk to each other?
00:10:01 ◼ ► Like, I feel like this the debugging mindset of a programmer has not made it yet to the the HVAC schools.
00:10:24 ◼ ► And I would not be as chipper and chill as you are right now if I were going through that.
00:10:30 ◼ ► The good news is you your house may be warm enough that you might not need to use the oven to cook pizzas.
00:10:50 ◼ ► As a reminder, if you are a member, which you can become a member by going to ATP dot FM slash join, you can get a lot of stuff.
00:10:57 ◼ ► You can get a discount on time limited merch stuff, which just happened a couple of months ago for WWDC.
00:11:03 ◼ ► You can get a bootleg, which we put up minutes after we stopped talking, talking to each other each week.
00:11:10 ◼ ► You can get an ad free version of the show and you can get one other thing, which is member specials, which we try to do once a month.
00:11:23 ◼ ► But in our usual way, that's just too big of a topic to tackle in and just a member special.
00:11:31 ◼ ► You'll see how we narrowed it down and the potential for future maybe tier lists or future other episodes related to this.
00:11:44 ◼ ► Yeah, I will say this was the least violent, I think, that any of our tier lists have been.
00:11:54 ◼ ► No, I do mostly enjoy a violent tier list and I do think it makes for kind of exciting programming.
00:12:01 ◼ ► But I was very happy for the three of us, especially me, that we had a less violent one this time.
00:12:35 ◼ ► We talked about how Meta is looking to hire AI people and looking to pay them truly bananas amounts of money.
00:12:55 ◼ ► they said that Ruming Pang, a distinguished engineer, manager in charge of the company's Apple Foundation Models team, is leaving Apple.
00:13:01 ◼ ► Pang, who joined Apple from Alphabet in 2021, is the latest big hire for Meta's new superintelligence group.
00:13:18 ◼ ► At Apple, Pang had been running the Apple Foundation Models team, or AFM, a roughly 100-person team responsible for the company's large language models,
00:13:31 ◼ ► with several engineers telling colleagues they're planning to leave in the near future to Meta or elsewhere, the people said.
00:13:39 ◼ ► Meta has also hired Wanzi Li, a researcher from OpenAI, and Anton Bakhtin, who worked on Clawed at Anthropic PBC,
00:13:55 ◼ ► Yes, I think the big story here is, you know, yes, we did talk about the ridiculous salaries, I think, in overtime in an earlier episode,
00:14:12 ◼ ► And I thought it was really important for Apple to make sure that they keep those people.
00:14:25 ◼ ► but I thought it was still a good idea for them to have their own group and just keep working on it,
00:14:47 ◼ ► but it seems like just a big exodus, and like, maybe Apple was trying to keep them there,
00:15:04 ◼ ► and the company essentially either loses faith in you or decides to go in another direction
00:15:19 ◼ ► And then also on top of that, you know, Meta throwing buckets of money at these people.
00:15:23 ◼ ► So apparently whatever Apple has been doing to try to retain them has not been working,
00:15:31 ◼ ► It's also interesting to me because my understanding from friends in Silicon Valley is that Apple,
00:15:37 ◼ ► generally speaking, is considered, and this is not new news, but Apple's considered to be fairly cheap
00:15:42 ◼ ► in a lot of ways, but including, you know, compensation, and that they don't pay their engineers
00:15:52 ◼ ► And so it is not surprising that perhaps these, you know, well-sought-after individuals are looking
00:15:59 ◼ ► to bail in general, but then you also put on top of that, that, you know, Meta is looking
00:16:12 ◼ ► I don't know if that's a salary or if it's like, you know, RSUs being part of it or whatever.
00:16:16 ◼ ► But I mean, the other thing that we've talked about in the past episodes is that there's bitterness
00:16:30 ◼ ► rate for people in high demand like the AI folks, and then everyone else's Apple's like, wait
00:16:43 ◼ ► I mean, as we know, Apple has a whole bunch of AI-related problems, but add to it personnel
00:16:47 ◼ ► problems of like our traditional method of, you know, paying middle-of-the-road salaries
00:16:53 ◼ ► and compensating for it with the prestige of being an Apple employee and also with our ever-increasing
00:17:00 ◼ ► But now we're in this competitive market for AI where we're already behind and people are
00:17:06 ◼ ► But now we're sowing dissatisfaction with our own employees and we're still not keeping
00:17:12 ◼ ► Like I said, I'm not sure this is sustainable or that I don't trust these companies to know
00:17:18 ◼ ► to correctly know which of the individual people are actually worth tens of millions of dollars.
00:17:23 ◼ ► But that's also true of hiring executives and it hasn't stopped companies from paying executives
00:17:28 ◼ ► And sometimes the executives just make a total mess of the company and they still get that
00:17:44 ◼ ► Like regardless of what, you know, whatever you think of AI personally, the reality is it
00:17:49 ◼ ► is right now hugely valuable and everybody thinks that the value of it is only going up over
00:17:56 ◼ ► So if you are really good AI talent that can, you know, take a company's AI position and make
00:18:11 ◼ ► were more or less in demand and therefore, you know, higher salary offers in the market
00:18:19 ◼ ► You know, certain engineers have always been worth more if that's like if they're like on
00:18:22 ◼ ► the cutting edge of what everyone's, you know, whatever the current boom or bubble is about
00:18:40 ◼ ► And if Apple is going to keep being Apple and just thinking like, well, you should be honored
00:18:49 ◼ ► And, you know, whatever they are going to not pay for talent because they're if they're being
00:18:55 ◼ ► cheap about that, it's just going to end up with them having to pay a higher price later
00:19:00 ◼ ► So I mean, I wouldn't even they may be giving these people counter offers that are equal to
00:19:07 ◼ ► But again, if you're at Apple and they, you know, you say, well, Meta is offering me this
00:19:13 ◼ ► You say, yeah, but Apple, you just basically, you know, told that, told the change the company's
00:19:23 ◼ ► So I don't want to work here anymore, even if you pay me more, like sometimes sometimes
00:19:28 ◼ ► So for all we know, Apple is making, you know, competitive counter offers to Meta's offers
00:19:33 ◼ ► and the employees are just like, yeah, no, Meta told me I'd actually be able to do stuff
00:19:38 ◼ ► And that's, you know, for all the money, especially when you get into these big amounts of money,
00:19:41 ◼ ► people want to do things that they think are actually going to ship and make a difference.
00:19:47 ◼ ► They don't want to be the C team while Apple, you know, farms out the AI stuff to Anthropoc or
00:19:54 ◼ ► Yeah. The other thing too is like, you know, it isn't, it isn't necessarily just about like
00:19:58 ◼ ► whether your work will ship or not in any kind of, in any of these, like, you know, big technological,
00:20:22 ◼ ► To Meta, I feel like people are still holding their nose to go there, but that $10 million
00:20:29 ◼ ► I mean, yeah, Meta's always been pretty good about, about getting over the nose holds by just
00:20:35 ◼ ► But, you know, you look at like when, when in, in the boom of the app age, you know, like 2000, you know, eight to 2018, maybe like in that time, the cool place to make apps was on iOS.
00:20:49 ◼ ► And whether that was you working on the iOS team at a company or you working at Apple on iOS itself in some form or some app that runs, you know, that was the cool place to be.
00:20:59 ◼ ► And it was pretty hard at the time for like Microsoft to get really good talent to make mobile apps for Microsoft's platforms and Microsoft's things because it's like, that wasn't the cool thing to do.
00:21:11 ◼ ► Like when they launched Windows Mobile, they had a huge problem getting anybody to care.
00:21:16 ◼ ► And when you're like, when you're like the uncool company in something like that, oftentimes there isn't even enough money for you to really pay people to, to get them to want to come work for you.
00:21:33 ◼ ► And at the time, again, Microsoft is perpetually the uncool company, you know, even a better one, AOL.
00:21:39 ◼ ► AOL had a really hard time hiring and retaining talent in the early, you know, early to mid 2000s.
00:21:53 ◼ ► So if you were like a good, you know, web developer, you wanted to work on web backend stuff, like you wouldn't want to go work for Microsoft.
00:22:02 ◼ ► So now you look at the AI landscape now, even if Apple would pay good money, they have an uphill battle to get and retain good talent because Apple is an AI laughingstock.
00:22:15 ◼ ► The last, if you're, if you're like a good AI researcher, I think right now Apple might be the last place you'd want to be.
00:22:22 ◼ ► Not only does it have like the stink of failure, but all of this action that's happening in AI, Apple is not even a player.
00:22:29 ◼ ► Like they're, they're so far behind and showing no signs of catching up and also showing no signs of really even necessarily like respecting what's going on anywhere else.
00:22:41 ◼ ► Like, you know, you look at those, you know, the interviews, especially like the interviews that JAWS did over WBDC.
00:22:45 ◼ ► There's a lot of like dismissiveness and derisiveness and snideness towards the rest of the AI world in those in, in that attitude.
00:22:53 ◼ ► And I think that reflects Apple's position or at least the position of a lot of their higher up leaders.
00:22:58 ◼ ► And so if you're like a cutting edge AI engineer or researcher, you don't want to go work for Apple that they're, they're the stink of losers who hate you.
00:23:08 ◼ ► Why, if you, if you are like making all this cool AI stuff or researching all this cool AI stuff, why would you want to go work for a company that is both losing terribly in this market and also keeps turning their nose up at it and not giving it enough resources to succeed?
00:23:25 ◼ ► So I am like, they, they have a really big uphill battle that they seem to still not really have any interest in, in changing.
00:23:34 ◼ ► But again, I mean, what that will result in is they will eventually have to make at least one very big AI acquisition and that's going to cost them dearly, but that's how this is going to have to go.
00:23:50 ◼ ► And I can tell you that my favorite place to be in the summertime is not inside the kitchen.
00:23:55 ◼ ► I prefer to be out at the beach or at the pool or doing some sort of fun thing like that.
00:23:59 ◼ ► And what I don't want to be worrying about is going to the grocery store or figuring out an online order for the grocery store and figuring out recipes and all that jazz.
00:24:07 ◼ ► So what I like to do is go to HelloFresh where they will make it easy for me to make quick home cooked meals and do that so that I can get back out and enjoy the summer sun.
00:24:19 ◼ ► And additionally, this summer, HelloFresh made it even easier to enjoy these delicious, healthy and homemade quality meals with their new ready-made meals.
00:24:26 ◼ ► These heat-and-go HelloFresh meals are chef-crafted, flavorful dishes ready in just three minutes so you can go dig in and do summer right.
00:24:34 ◼ ► Again, the less time you have to spend in the kitchen or thinking about the kitchen, the better.
00:24:38 ◼ ► Now, if you're like me and perhaps really do like the experience of learning new recipes or new pairings or whatever, you can continue to do the classic HelloFresh, you know, choose a meal and they'll send you the ingredients thing.
00:24:51 ◼ ► And for us, they sent us a few meals, including sweet chili turkey lettuce wraps with bell pepper and candied peanuts.
00:24:57 ◼ ► What I loved about this was you're combining peanuts, which is a thing I think of as kind of its own thing, with turkey and bell peppers and lettuce wraps.
00:25:05 ◼ ► It's a combination that my simple mind wouldn't have come up with, and it was delicious.
00:25:08 ◼ ► They also sent us a chicken sausage rigatoni, which I am genuinely still thinking about because it was really, truly that good.
00:25:14 ◼ ► If you want to make your summer enjoyable and delicious, you can sign up for HelloFresh at HelloFresh.com slash ATP10FM and get 10 free meals with a free item for life.
00:25:44 ◼ ► We have some stuff to talk about with regards to Tahoe Beta 3, beginning with FireWire using adapters.
00:25:56 ◼ ► You can plug, you can, you know, people have these fun daisy chains of like taking a really old original iPod with a FireWire adapter to FireWire 800 to Thunderbolt to, you know, I don't know.
00:26:11 ◼ ► Anyway, you can get it to physically connect, but because FireWire support is not in Tahoe Beta 3 and doesn't look like it's going to be in Tahoe at all, even though it physically connects, it doesn't actually work.
00:26:22 ◼ ► So that kind of answers the question from earlier weeks that if you have a FireWire device and you can get adapter, does it matter that there's a FireWire, no FireWire driver?
00:26:31 ◼ ► Then we have some interesting discoveries from Sam Henry Gold, who writes, I figured out how to apply any arbitrary SF symbol to a folder in Tahoe.
00:26:49 ◼ ► Also writes Sam, because emoji labels are just handled as strings, you can put anything in the emoji config thing.
00:27:00 ◼ ► Yeah, this is actually great because historically there's been a lot of third-party apps for doing this.
00:27:09 ◼ ► Like if, you know, if you look, if you put these folders in your dock or look at them in the finder, like your home folder has always had a little house embossed on it.
00:27:14 ◼ ► And the applications folder has a little A and the documents folder has a little document.
00:27:17 ◼ ► What if you'd want to have a folder, I don't know, full of like your, you know, remote control car stuff.
00:27:25 ◼ ► There's been third-party apps for years and years that will make you that little custom icon and you'll paste it onto the folder.
00:27:31 ◼ ► And that works great until the next OS comes out and they change what the folder icon looks like.
00:27:36 ◼ ► And all of a sudden your custom folder icon doesn't look like the rest of the folders because they all look, you know, they change the base folder icon.
00:27:48 ◼ ► And you have to kind of keep up with that cycle and the app has to get updated and you have to remember where that car icon was.
00:27:53 ◼ ► And if they change the way it embosses, then the third-party app doesn't emboss it the same way that Apple does.
00:27:57 ◼ ► This technique is basically add an extended attribute, com.apple.icon.folder, hash sign, capital S, whatever that's there for.
00:28:05 ◼ ► And then the value is a JSON thing that says like sim colon camera.viewfinder, like an SF symbol name or emoji colon and then just any string.
00:28:16 ◼ ► And no matter how many times Apple changes what the folders look like, if you put this extended attribute on any folder, whatever, presumably if Apple keeps supporting this,
00:28:24 ◼ ► whatever version of macOS you're running will read that extended attribute and emboss the symbol name that you put in there or the text that you put in there onto the current version of the folder.
00:28:35 ◼ ► With the private symbol name thing, I'm not sure how that works because I don't even know how private SF symbols work, but can you like register your own SF symbol somewhere with the system?
00:28:47 ◼ ► Like one of the feedbacks I filed for this current beta cycle is the summary symbol that they use everywhere.
00:28:54 ◼ ► Like where Apple intelligence summarizes notifications with that little like kind of like three lines with an arrow on one of them.
00:29:03 ◼ ► And in fact, on the SF symbols page on apple.com like that advertises the app, that symbol is what they're showing in the example screenshots and it's called summary.
00:29:14 ◼ ► So there's a set of symbols that Apple uses themselves, but if apps try to use it, they don't work and they don't show up in the SF symbols app.
00:29:23 ◼ ► Well, so anyway, if you wanted to have a truly custom image, I wonder if they take like a data thing where you can put like a base 64 encoded SVG or bitmap or something.
00:29:30 ◼ ► But anyway, there's so many SF symbols that surely you can find one that is appropriate for your folder.
00:29:39 ◼ ► Although this does still leave room for a third party app to simply adopt this because people don't want to use the X adder command and stuff.
00:29:45 ◼ ► So a third party app could just, you know, say, hey, pick an SF symbol and put it on a folder for you.
00:30:14 ◼ ► Yeah, I wish when I took the screenshots for beta one that I had thought I had to be able to easily reproduce these.
00:30:19 ◼ ► But I took a screenshot of like the thing that I thought was a rendering error in Safari and Tahoe beta one where.
00:30:30 ◼ ► And also, if you have a page that has like dark regions and light regions, the toolbar will invert.
00:30:35 ◼ ► Because when the dark region comes below it, it has to switch from dark mode, light mode to dark mode and vice versa.
00:30:47 ◼ ► I had to go back to this same web page and scroll it to the same position as best I could.
00:30:51 ◼ ► And still, I didn't get exactly right because beta three has this new translate icon in the address bar.
00:31:19 ◼ ► Like the guardian.com has a theme color set in their CSS that previously was telling Safari, you know, make the whole toolbar really dark navy blue, the guardian color or whatever.
00:31:33 ◼ ► And so if your toolbar, if you're in light mode, your Safari toolbar should never turn to black either from the website asking for it or from you scrolling something underneath it.
00:31:40 ◼ ► But it still will show a vague image of the thing that's scrolling behind it, which is dumb, but an improvement.
00:31:50 ◼ ► I complained about these at the first beta that on the the the color reproduction on the M1 MacBook Air screen was insufficient for me to even tell which tab was active as the contrast was so low.
00:32:00 ◼ ► The screen could not discern between the lightish gray of the active tab and a slightly darker gray of the inactive tab in beta three.
00:32:23 ◼ ► No, I mean, I'll tell you, like I like in my actual use of these, I complained like the week before beta three dropped.
00:32:32 ◼ ► And, you know, I made it to it was it took some some doing to tell what tab was active in beta three.
00:32:44 ◼ ► It is still a very, very low contrast design in an area that I don't think that's a compliment, but it is getting more it's getting less low contrast.
00:33:03 ◼ ► No, and this was to be clear, like it was it was almost indecipherable on a MacBook Pro screen.
00:33:08 ◼ ► Like that's what I was using on my 14 inch MacBook Pro, like on the best screen Apple makes right now.
00:33:14 ◼ ► It was still like impossible to see, especially in laptop conditions, like on my XDR in ideal conditions with no sunlight on the screen.
00:33:22 ◼ ► I could always tell on the XDR, but on the laptop, which is in the same room, it was difficult.
00:33:31 ◼ ► You could do like a default right command that I believe only worked with terminal that would revert it to like the old style tabs, not like the capsule thing.
00:33:41 ◼ ► It was still low contrast, which is funny, but it's interesting that that option seems to exist, although I think it was for terminal only, but or maybe it wasn't.
00:33:50 ◼ ► If I find that I'll have it in our next episode or something, but the existence of those things like always gives people hope like, oh, I don't like the new capsule shape tabs, but I can always just use this default right command.
00:34:01 ◼ ► If you even have that for the life of this OS, it will probably go away in a version or two if it even makes it to release.
00:34:27 ◼ ► If you look at terminal under, you know, OS 26, and if you look at terminal under Sequoia, the terminal under Sequoia leaves more room for your content.
00:34:39 ◼ ► In their effort to get out of the way of your content, they are lowering information density.
00:34:47 ◼ ► One of the reasons for that, by the way, someone had a good screenshot that I didn't grab, but they did it on the phone, which we'll get to in a second.
00:34:51 ◼ ► But they showed like the same app and all they were talking about was, OK, how much room is left after we subtract out the controls for the content?
00:35:00 ◼ ► And the reason, especially on the iPhone, why the OS 26 is leave less room for content is the stupid rounded corners, because that requires everything to be pulled in.
00:35:13 ◼ ► So if you're wondering, for example, when you go to like system settings and iOS 26, why is it so much less information dense?
00:35:24 ◼ ► You can't nestle the, you know, essentially rectilinear text content into the corners of things.
00:35:30 ◼ ► And when you have a single item with incredibly big radius on the, on the, on the corners, it pushes all the content in and makes you necessarily mandatory margins on everything.
00:35:41 ◼ ► And the tabs are falling different than that as well, because they're capsules with big curves on them.
00:35:47 ◼ ► So, yeah, it's not like the words, like the text, the text in the tabs isn't any bigger.
00:35:58 ◼ ► You know, there's like, for instance, you know, they, when you, their strategy for, okay, how do we make content go behind everything?
00:36:08 ◼ ► So that, you know, as the content gets near, near the top or bottom edges, it, it, it goes into a blur instead of even just, instead of just going to the top or instead of a gradient blur where it's blurrier at the top and less blurry as you go down.
00:36:20 ◼ ► What that means though, is that like the area of your content that is fully visible and unobstructed, when you combine how, how high up the blur has to start with the, you know, the, all the, as you were saying, like all the corner radii of everything having been expanded.
00:36:39 ◼ ► What you end up with is kind of a tough combination of you have the controls themselves because they have to be so padded and get, get away from the edges so much.
00:36:54 ◼ ► Your touch targets, if you have a toolbar that has like, you know, say five items across the bottom for that to adapt to this new design, it has to be further away from the edges, which means it's narrower, which means all of the touch targets for that not only have moved, but so everyone's muscle memory will be slightly broken, but they're all smaller.
00:37:18 ◼ ► One of the ways that design solves this is by collapsing more controls into dot, dot, dot menus.
00:37:25 ◼ ► And, you know, the problem with that, of course, now is that everything has additional taps.
00:37:37 ◼ ► You have room for fewer of them, but the amount of space that you have for your content in full view without being obstructed or blurred is actually shrinking.
00:37:46 ◼ ► So you actually, you need a bigger screen just to fit, you know, the same amount of stuff on screen at once.
00:37:52 ◼ ► So the design ostensibly keeps, they keep saying over and over again, they're getting out of the way of our content.
00:37:59 ◼ ► But in fact, they're leaving less room than ever for our content, unless you count the blurred version of it that goes under toolbars and tools.
00:38:09 ◼ ► Like I think someone did measurements on the Safari toolbar, which does not have a blur, or at least they had an example didn't have a blur.
00:38:24 ◼ ► And like, and to be clear, like I, I hear a lot about, I hear a lot of people talking about the, you know, these designs on, on podcasts and YouTube and everything.
00:38:38 ◼ ► And I'm not saying this to slag anybody because using this on your daily phone has sucked until beta 3, which sucks less.
00:38:55 ◼ ► Beta 3, I think, is the first one that I can honestly say I don't feel like a moron for having installed.
00:39:01 ◼ ► That's not a recommendation to be clear, but if you must install the beta for your own curiosity or, you know, your work or whatever, beta 3 is basically fine.
00:39:28 ◼ ► And when you live with this design for even a few days, when you go back and look at apps that were made for the previous design or when you go back and use iOS 18, it feels really dated really quickly.
00:39:47 ◼ ► It also has significant functional problems that they are working on, that they are slowly revising.
00:39:58 ◼ ► And I think I can simultaneously say this is a cool design and I'm looking forward to, you know, everything evolving and looking more modern and being cooler like this in a lot of ways.
00:40:09 ◼ ► I can simultaneously say that while also saying the things they say about this design are bullshit.
00:40:28 ◼ ► Liquid glass is all about putting controls on top of your content that blink and flash at you and are shiny and draw your attention to them.
00:40:43 ◼ ► So, if I just take out everything they say about the design, if I try to ignore it, I actually like it a lot more.
00:41:05 ◼ ► I think they have the least credibility and the least talent designing for the Mac, which is sad, but that is true.
00:41:17 ◼ ► And it has lots of conceptual problems on the Mac that I don't think they're going to resolve.
00:41:25 ◼ ► On the iPhone, though, which is obviously the only platform they really gave a crap about when they designed this, it looks great.
00:41:36 ◼ ► As long as you just totally ignore all of the BS they say about it, because it is all BS.
00:41:54 ◼ ► One of the most distracting things in Liquid Glass is when you go from scrolling over light content to scrolling over dark content.
00:41:58 ◼ ► And the control elements pick up the colors, which can lead to a jarring flip from light to dark.
00:42:05 ◼ ► If you quickly scroll past darker content, it won't refract those colors in the controls.
00:42:18 ◼ ► I wish I'd remembered to test this before Beta 3, because I wondered if this was true in earlier betas, but presumably he did test it.
00:42:30 ◼ ► But, you know, it's hiding the problem in some cases while still allowing it to be there in other cases.
00:42:39 ◼ ► Again, if people haven't used the OS or haven't seen these videos, it's basically switching from light mode to dark mode.
00:42:45 ◼ ► And you're like, why would the controls ever need to change from light mode to dark mode?
00:42:50 ◼ ► It's because the controls are showing through so much of the background that if you have a control in light mode, which is a light background with dark text, but all of a sudden the thing behind it is black, you can't have dark text on a black background.
00:43:04 ◼ ► So the control switches to essentially dark mode where it's light text on a dark background.
00:43:18 ◼ ► Yeah, that was actually, that flashing, I talked about on the show, that was one of the worst things about betas one and two.
00:43:26 ◼ ► And it was very difficult to not constantly have your eye drawn to effectively the controls flashing very obviously at you as you would scroll down a page or a list.
00:43:43 ◼ ► And they actually achieve that, which I guess we're about to talk about, with some of the tweaks to where the really clear look is used in beta three.
00:43:52 ◼ ► So, and again, this is, this is one of those things where, you know, the, the, like, reactionary sphere overreacted to what beta three has done.
00:44:03 ◼ ► What beta three has done is in a bunch of common places, especially tab bars, which this is navigation used in, say, the music app, where you have, like, you know, the tabs across the bottom and then the search, the search blob.
00:44:16 ◼ ► And then, you know, the mini player that can shrink into the, into the tab bar as you scroll and everything tab bars in betas one and two used the, the very clear look.
00:44:25 ◼ ► And that, that's, that was one of the most common places where it would have to do this flashing back and forth between light and dark as you would scroll something colorful behind the tab bar.
00:44:32 ◼ ► And, you know, all of Apple's apps have these, like, accent colors that they highlight their icons with.
00:44:41 ◼ ► You know, you put that with blurred color behind it and it would just be totally unreadable so much of the time with so much, so many color choices.
00:44:49 ◼ ► Um, what they've done in beta three is that super clear material is no longer used in tab bars and in a few other places like that, like navigation style places.
00:45:00 ◼ ► Instead, they have frosted it pretty heavily, so much so that it doesn't need to change.
00:45:07 ◼ ► So if you, if you have like, you know, a very frosted glass look and in light mode, it's pretty light and dark mode, it's pretty dark.
00:45:15 ◼ ► And then, you know, light mode, you put black text on it, dark mode, you put white text on it.
00:45:19 ◼ ► If it's frosted enough, then you can scroll any kind of color content behind it and it won't need to flip to have enough contrast to be readable with the text.
00:45:28 ◼ ► And so what they've done in beta three is a lot of the places that use that super clear glass, like tab bars, they now use this kind of medium frosted glass.
00:45:42 ◼ ► Now, this has led a lot of commenters who obviously are not using this regularly to say they have totally reverted liquid glass or they've severely reverted it.
00:45:55 ◼ ► You know, they've given in to, you know, social media or whatever, like whatever it is.
00:46:01 ◼ ► I know Mark Gurman complained about that saying that, you know, giving into social media complaints, which I would, you know, sidebar.
00:46:14 ◼ ► And I guarantee you it was not just people on social media who were complaining about the terrible usability of this before.
00:46:20 ◼ ► But what they have done by basically frosting more of the glass does not negate the design.
00:46:33 ◼ ► This design is so different from iOS 18 that a simple frost level change on some of the controls does not make that big of a difference in practice.
00:46:43 ◼ ► And I can tell you, again, I've been using this stupidly on my daily driver since beta one.
00:46:51 ◼ ► But when you actually use it, that does not make a very big difference in practice in in a negative way.
00:47:08 ◼ ► They've tweaked the worst problem that gave them the most usability, legibility and frankly design problems.
00:47:27 ◼ ► Ideally, they wouldn't be doing this, you know, after they're, you know, ideally, they would have done these experiments internally.
00:47:38 ◼ ► Like, if you look at what just happened, you know, we'll get to it with the Jeff Williams transition and everything.
00:47:57 ◼ ► That's just what happens when you have weak leadership like that in this area or absent or missing leadership in this area.
00:48:06 ◼ ► And it is the public's job to give them feedback to say, look, this part doesn't work for us.
00:48:17 ◼ ► It's not a failure of design to put something out there and then tweak it in response to feedback.
00:48:29 ◼ ► Well, there's still the debate of how much of this could you caught internally and how much of it are you going to like – you have to choose at what point you show it to people.
00:48:36 ◼ ► And when there's obvious errors that anybody could have caught internally, that's a failure, I think.
00:48:42 ◼ ► And that's – again, I think – I don't think Apple has had strong design leadership since Steve Jobs died.
00:48:47 ◼ ► I think it's very, very clear that Tim Cook, for everything you can say about his operational, et cetera, benefits, he has never provided strong product or design leadership or empowered people beneath him to do that.
00:49:10 ◼ ► I'm going to say iOS 7, for all of this tweaking the font not to be quite as fine and maybe increasing some contrast here and there, has had a smoother initial beta and feedback period than Liquid Glass.
00:49:25 ◼ ► I also think – I mean, frankly, I think the 26-series OSs are buggier than we've seen in a long time.
00:49:38 ◼ ► And like you said, with all these changes that you just described for beta 3, it's not like they removed the clear material.
00:49:44 ◼ ► And the places where it still exists, like one – someone on one of my timelines is constantly posting pictures of one of the easiest places,
00:49:55 ◼ ► And that's the, like, the numpad for, like, dialing numbers on a telephone on your phone, like the grid of, like, nine numbers and zero on the bottom or whatever.
00:50:03 ◼ ► And if you have, like, music playing in the background with an album cover that doesn't work with that, the numbers are absolutely invisible.
00:50:20 ◼ ► Well, but there are, like – there are some places where the clear glass can be a cool effect.
00:50:32 ◼ ► But, you know, that – again, the process of design oftentimes is, like, look at this cool thing we're going to show off.
00:50:45 ◼ ► You start pulling it back, pulling it back, and then you get into a more settled state.
00:50:49 ◼ ► Right now, you know, they're so proud of themselves, and they think they're really cool, and they went really too far.
00:50:57 ◼ ► And it is our job as, quote, social media or whatever you want to call it, it is our job to give them the feedback during this time to save them from their own lack of strong design leadership.
00:51:18 ◼ ► And if the redesign totally falls over with something as common as purple album art in your music app, then they need to know that.
00:51:31 ◼ ► As long as it's happening before release, like, you know, most of the damage is being avoided.
00:51:43 ◼ ► If they had stronger processes in place internally, we wouldn't see as much of it, but we are.
00:51:50 ◼ ► This is the situation we've been dealt, so we'll do our best to steer it in the right direction.
00:51:57 ◼ ► I would say if you want to see the glass effect being used in a way that is both impressive and also totally dysfunctional, play a video.
00:52:18 ◼ ► Actually, I don't even know if YouTube does it, but if you, like, open up a video in some other app or in one of Apple's apps, play a video, and you'll see the liquid glass overlay controls.
00:52:38 ◼ ► Like, there's no, like, for them to say they're getting out of the way of the content, go look at the full-screen video controls.
00:53:07 ◼ ► Again, I think on the Mac, I think it's in a rough spot and will continue to be in a rough spot because they don't iterate this well on the Mac.
00:53:28 ◼ ► And so we're going to be in this era for the next year or two or three where stuff's going to look really cool and be less usable.
00:53:34 ◼ ► But we're going to like it because it's going to look really cool and it looks fresh and modern.
00:53:39 ◼ ► And then the pendulum will swing back and we will go a little bit more towards usability.
00:53:43 ◼ ► You know, maybe Apple's design leaders will go have some special trip in the woods and, you know, pick a new direction to go.
00:53:54 ◼ ► But for now, we're going to have some cool looking apps that are a little bit worse in usability.
00:54:05 ◼ ► Speaking of YouTube, you mentioned, oh, I forgot if YouTube uses the native controls or not.
00:54:14 ◼ ► Not the native Apple one with AV player or whatever that you can get in various circumstances.
00:54:19 ◼ ► But the YouTube native UI, when you look at YouTube in a web browser and they put the play and pause controls and the little gear menu and the closed caption thing, that interface.
00:54:46 ◼ ► But if you are one of the lucky few, and I apparently am, as they are either trialing this or rolling it out slowly, and you go to YouTube, you will see sort of bargain basement liquid glass-ish controls along the bottom of the video.
00:55:02 ◼ ► And I don't think it looks great, but it is so much of the prophecy, as foretold in earlier episodes, that whatever Apple does, other people very quickly copy.
00:55:13 ◼ ► And here, a fairly popular video site with a player that's probably seen by billions of people per day, going liquid glass.
00:55:42 ◼ ► I mean, it looks like a crummy interpretation of liquid glass, which is what I would expect.
00:55:46 ◼ ► Yeah, and it is less usable because they have the same problem of, like, well, what if the things behind it is light or dark and it changes the contrast?
00:55:59 ◼ ► This is when somebody had a phone and the phone was basically displaying what was behind on the other side of the phone.
00:56:19 ◼ ► This apparently was made by Gavin Nelson, and that got lost in translation over the various social media things.
00:56:33 ◼ ► And then, friend of the show, Guy Rambeau, with regard to HDR controls in iOS 26, writes,
00:56:38 ◼ ► Marco mentioned how the new HDR UI effects are limited to built-in controls provided by Apple.
00:56:43 ◼ ► New APIs in UI color and Swift UI's color can be used to increase the, quote-unquote, exposure of a color.
00:56:50 ◼ ► And this can be used to create effects similar to those used by Apple in system controls.
00:56:59 ◼ ► That's neat that it's not as difficult to do that, but they just simply extended the control things for this exposure thing.
00:57:16 ◼ ► There's not that many levels of brightness that are comfortable for humans to look at simultaneously.
00:57:21 ◼ ► Having a layer that is brighter than everything else, like the Siri layer, makes sense.
00:57:28 ◼ ► You can't- there's not enough- not much more dynamic range that people comfortably want to look at on their screen.
00:57:40 ◼ ► But anyway, if it's going to be a feature, it's nice that it is more readily accessible to third-party developers.
00:57:51 ◼ ► Maybe this is not such a great thing for third-party developers to have such easy access to, because, like, you know, you can see, you know, the Black Mirror version of this.
00:58:04 ◼ ► Yeah, like, okay, our ad is going to be a little bit brighter than everyone else's ads, and will perform a little bit better.
00:58:14 ◼ ► Yeah, like, you can see how, like, this will just make everything get brighter to compete for your attention more.
00:58:23 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, every technology is going to be used to annoy people, but, you know, that's life.
00:58:28 ◼ ► And the good thing is, at least on iOS, most apps, you know, they're accustomed to having the whole screen to themselves anyway,
00:58:41 ◼ ► If they're going to use it as part of the UI, it's something the third-party should have access to as well.
00:58:52 ◼ ► to, like, you know, use just the right time and just the right amount that it adds to the app
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01:01:01 ◼ ► All right, let's do some topics, and let's start with Apple, and we alluded to this earlier.
01:01:05 ◼ ► Apple has announced that their chief operating officer, Jeff Williams, is going to be transitioning to a different role soon, and that is to say he's retiring.
01:01:14 ◼ ► Apple today, July 8th, announced Jeff Williams will transition his role as chief operating officer later this month to Sabig Khan, Apple's senior vice president of operations, as part of a long planned succession.
01:01:25 ◼ ► Williams will continue reporting to Apple CEO Tim Cook in overseeing Apple's world-class design team and Apple Watch alongside the company's health initiatives.
01:01:33 ◼ ► Apple's design team will then transition to reporting directly to Cook after Williams retires late in the year.
01:01:39 ◼ ► Gruber had the following to say, left unsaid in Apple's announcement is who will take over Williams' roles overseeing Apple Watch and health.
01:01:49 ◼ ► and that's Symbol Desai, who already has the title of VP of health and frequently appears during the health segments of Apple keynotes, will report directly to Cook.
01:01:57 ◼ ► Mark Gurman adds, Williams has several senior design leaders reporting to him, and Apple will likely consolidate those teams under Alan Dye,
01:02:04 ◼ ► hey, Marco, vice president of human interface, and Molly Anderson, vice president of industrial design, with both reporting to Cook.
01:02:15 ◼ ► Yeah, this is a good compare and contrast to how different senior executives leave Apple and under what circumstances.
01:02:38 ◼ ► He's just a smooth transition out of the company to enjoy his well-earned riches in actual real-life retirement.
01:02:50 ◼ ► Anyway, so he was always kind of the emergency backup hot spare CEO because he's so much like Tim Cook and has a lot of the same skill set and seems to be well-trusted.
01:03:01 ◼ ► So if, like, Tim Cook got hit by a bus, we just assumed that Jeff Williams would be running the company until they found a permanent CEO.
01:03:06 ◼ ► But as a potential future successor to Tim Cook, it doesn't really make sense because their ages are too similar.
01:03:15 ◼ ► But all the stories about it have not been about, like, thanks for the great work, Jeff Williams.
01:03:26 ◼ ► And then, as Gervin points out, I think this is, like, after I've left, that the design team, like, various heads of the design department were reporting directly to Cook.
01:03:37 ◼ ► Like, when big, important people leave the company or things get shuffled around, they're often somewhat nonsensical reporting arrangements for a surprisingly long time.
01:03:50 ◼ ► I'm not sure we're going to hire someone for this, and we're not hiring this year anyway.
01:03:56 ◼ ► And if it goes okay and it's like, okay, fine, I have the capacity of they can report to me for now or whatever, people just forget about it.
01:04:03 ◼ ► And then you wake up two years later and, like, how long has this person been reporting to that person?
01:04:11 ◼ ► Like, I know, Mark, you keep harping on who's the head of this and who's the head of that.
01:04:18 ◼ ► You don't necessarily need every single function to be delegated up to a single person.
01:04:22 ◼ ► In fact, that is often an anti-pattern because if the subsections of your company go up to these single people, then that's like a single point of failure if they get hit by a bus, but also a single point of screwing things up.
01:04:35 ◼ ► If the one decider starts making bad decisions, sometimes having a more committee-like structure with two or three peers heading a department who can fight amongst themselves works out better.
01:04:47 ◼ ► But anyway, the reporting structure of having designed to report to Jeff Williams is like, well, what the hell does Jeff Williams know about design?
01:05:00 ◼ ► I am above them in the org chart, and I talk to them and ask questions, and we have all these stories about him being in meetings and asking questions.
01:05:08 ◼ ► And then Jeff Williams said, no, I demand you do it this way because that's not his area of expertise, and that's not what he's doing.
01:05:13 ◼ ► In the end, the lack of a, you know, when you say strong leadership in design, there's leadership in design.
01:05:23 ◼ ► It's whoever is heading design below him in those meetings, presenting him with things that turn out to be bad ideas that he's not pushing back against because he doesn't feel like that's his area of expertise.
01:05:34 ◼ ► So when you say strong design, what you mean is designers who make better decisions, strong as in strong skill set, not strong as in singular voice, because honestly, I think there is a singular voice for liquid metal when it's on dye.
01:05:46 ◼ ► And for better or for worse, very often for worse, more so than when it was like, I forget it was like Evans Hankey and somebody else who were like dual heading design after Johnny Ive left and they're reporting to Tim Cook or whatever.
01:06:00 ◼ ► But anyway, with Jeff Williams leaving, it's like, okay, those, I guess the design people report to Tim Cook, which is like, that's basically the same thing.
01:06:07 ◼ ► Tim Cook's going to listen and ask good questions about design, but in the end, he's not going to probably have any strong opinions, and he's probably not going to push back too hard against the designers because he doesn't feel like that's his area of expertise.
01:06:16 ◼ ► So, you know, like this, all this is, I don't think this is actually an org chart problem.
01:06:22 ◼ ► I think this is a, who, you know, who are the designers and what decisions are they making?
01:06:31 ◼ ► Andrea situation, uh, for better or for worse, they've decided that the leadership and the AI section of the company needed to be changed.
01:06:52 ◼ ► Let's try those two different people instead of the previous people who were there and hopefully we'll get a different result.
01:07:06 ◼ ► So I, I, I don't, I don't have any ill will told Jeff Williams that I don't actually think that the org chart situation was that ridiculous.
01:07:13 ◼ ► I just think, uh, a lot of people are mapping their dissatisfaction with Alan Dye onto org chart issues.
01:07:19 ◼ ► When in the end, if Alan Dye is still in the company, unless you hire a new person above him, which would probably make him leave, uh, we're, we're stuck with the Alan Dye we've got.
01:07:30 ◼ ► It's like, it's, it's up to very, very, very high up people to make changes or to, you know, delegate that in, in those ways.
01:07:37 ◼ ► And it's either Tim Cook or somebody directly below Tim Cook who makes those kinds of decisions and Tim Cook makes the decisions for who is directly below him.
01:07:44 ◼ ► And so their, their lack of strong, coherent design leadership for, for so long, uh, is ultimately Tim Cook's problem.
01:07:54 ◼ ► And it seems like this change by having, I mean, it seemed like Jeff Williams, from what we have heard, and this is, we haven't heard much, you know, bits and pieces here and there.
01:08:05 ◼ ► From what we've heard, Jeff Williams was leading a bunch of this stuff, but it was, it was more of an overseeing type role rather than like giving direction per se.
01:08:16 ◼ ► Cause he probably doesn't have a lot of strong opinions about, for example, design, like how it should be, you know?
01:08:21 ◼ ► And it's, I mean, it's interesting, like, you know, for, for a company like Apple that you think of, you think of them as having such good overall product design in so many ways.
01:08:31 ◼ ► For that kind of company, you would expect there to be strong design leadership at or near the top.
01:08:39 ◼ ► And for there kind of not to be, and for it to be, he kind of passed around here and there is a little bit weird.
01:08:52 ◼ ► And of course, and that, a lot of that was, you know, Johnny was seen as like, you know, like Steve Jobs level of clout and it was so important, you know, both to him and internally.
01:09:02 ◼ ► And also it was so important to the public, to the stock market, to the press that, you know, when Steve died, it was so important that they, that Apple keep Johnny like for image and for, for so many, like, you know, you know, it was very important.
01:09:16 ◼ ► And so he kind of, he, he had free reign to a level that I think most people would never, would never actually be given, um, who weren't like CEOs or founders.
01:09:25 ◼ ► Um, and the reality is that Apple, you know, when in Johnny's departure, which I think we all know came at the right time, if not late, um, he was never really replaced in terms of consolidating that power.
01:09:39 ◼ ► And right now, I don't think anybody who we know about, uh, which doesn't mean nobody, but I don't think anybody we know about has clearly like the, the talent and the clout and the design expertise or taste expertise to be that person right now at Apple.
01:09:58 ◼ ► Um, and that's kind of what you get with, you know, 12 years of weak design leadership or whatever it's been.
01:10:13 ◼ ► And even in a company like Apple, I feel like that is perhaps a single, single person reporting to the CEO in charge of all design is too much power in too small place.
01:10:22 ◼ ► I think it should be CEO, someone like Jeff Williams, and then one or two design people, one, two or three design people who make decisions that I agree with.
01:10:35 ◼ ► Because if you give that, because I don't expect Tim Cook to say, I demand stitch leather because he's not Steve Jobs.
01:10:51 ◼ ► What you do need is below that for there to be enough people to check each other and to also have good ideas.
01:10:57 ◼ ► If one of them, you know, goes off the rails, the other two could be like, no, we're not, we're not going to do that way.
01:11:06 ◼ ► And it seems like now the problem is, is Tim Cook, who's not putting his oar in, Jeff Williams, same thing, mostly hands off, asking questions.
01:11:12 ◼ ► And then Alan Dye, who's the final decider for the whole, for all of liquid metal and glass, if who's, who's going to disagree with Alan Dye's opinions, not the two people above him in the org chart.
01:11:22 ◼ ► And I'm sure there's tons of people below him in the org chart that disagree, but it's like, well, what are you going to do?
01:11:28 ◼ ► And yeah, so I, I, I would, I would prefer it if there was more diversity of design opinion at Apple.
01:11:47 ◼ ► Um, I think I'm just, maybe I'm just sad that it seems like neither the CEO nor his hot spare until moments ago, nor the people in charge of, you know, the, the, the, the software design at Apple.
01:12:23 ◼ ► Well, and Tim Cook in his infinite wisdom of, you know, design and product leadership put too much on Johnny Ive to, you know, in order to keep him, he put hardware and software together.
01:12:36 ◼ ► And we, now, you know, we have Alan Dye doing software and we have Molly Anderson doing hardware.
01:12:54 ◼ ► He needed an editor like many good artists, but he, you know, and he had that in Steve Jobs and never since.
01:13:05 ◼ ► And that's kind of how we got the Alan Dye era was because Johnny Ive, you know, kind of cleaned house and picked him.
01:13:12 ◼ ► And the problem is like, no one at the top seems to have really good software design skills.
01:13:22 ◼ ► Johnny Ive loved the hardware so much, fancied himself a software designer, wasn't a good software designer.
01:13:39 ◼ ► I mean, there's probably lots of people lower down in the org chart who would be great at it from, uh, in, in my opinion.
01:13:49 ◼ ► I don't know how to go too far into it in this episode since we're running along, but, but yeah, there, there is a problem here.
01:13:54 ◼ ► But I, like I, and there is, as we've discussed in the past, it seems like a lot of the expertise and knowledge has left Apple, uh, in the past several decades for obvious good reasons.
01:14:04 ◼ ► People getting old, people retiring, people getting wealthy from their stock options and retiring young either way.
01:14:10 ◼ ► Uh, and I, I continue to think like that a new CEO is the best potential for make different decisions.
01:14:17 ◼ ► Not a new design focus CEO, not a new, like, oh, I have the same tastes as, as Steve Jobs CEO, or even the same taste as Scott Forstall who brought us that leather or whatever.
01:14:25 ◼ ► But just like a new CEO who makes radically different decisions despite the fact that also they're not a good designer and also they're not a big product person.
01:14:35 ◼ ► Like it, it's a, it's a matter of what you value because you don't have to be good at these things to value them and to place different priority, different, different importance levels on different types of things.
01:14:45 ◼ ► And it seems like Tim Cook has mostly prioritized harmony and predictability over, uh, you know, like even like liquid glass, like, so changing the leadership in AI.
01:14:56 ◼ ► It's like that raises the Tim Cook level of like, I, Tim, even Tim Cook can tell we're failing here.
01:15:03 ◼ ► Um, I think no matter how liquid glass goes, uh, Cook is going to think, yeah, well, okay.
01:15:12 ◼ ► Like there's no, there's no amount of gnashing of teeth about, uh, liquid glass that is going to cause Tim Cook to rethink his approach to design leadership because in the end it's, you know, it'll be fine.
01:15:33 ◼ ► And so Tim Cook, that's way below the level of his, he's going to be like, great job, Alan.
01:15:36 ◼ ► You did, you know, because he doesn't think that like that Apple needs to be the very best of the best in design, as long as it's not a disaster, it's probably fine.
01:15:46 ◼ ► And so I think the only chance you have of any kind of like change in design leadership is Alan Dye retiring or a new CEO coming in and really changing, uh, priorities.
01:16:01 ◼ ► No, I, I think one thing I'm, I'm looking forward to this wave of all of this generation of Apple senior leadership slowly retiring.
01:16:29 ◼ ► They not only can't make big radical changes, but probably shouldn't like what's they have.
01:16:40 ◼ ► Um, but like overall, like we're not looking for them to like change to a different kind of company or anything like that.
01:16:45 ◼ ► What I want to see is like when you've had a certain leadership or ownership for, of a company or, or a business for a long time,
01:16:53 ◼ ► the people right below them or, or two levels down oftentimes have great ideas of what they, what they would do if they were in charge,
01:17:12 ◼ ► And so when leadership transitions happen, when those number two or number three people get elevated,
01:17:34 ◼ ► And I think, I think it's in corporate world, it's a little bit different in the political world.
01:17:37 ◼ ► And that these, these people do, they know how to get themselves in position so that they will be the next CEO.
01:17:47 ◼ ► Like they're not the person who's like railing and yelling about everything, but they do have it.
01:17:53 ◼ ► And they pitch their, their vision, like Serge Satya Nadella pitched the board of the vision.
01:18:12 ◼ ► Um, but there, but that's part of the thing about like, I can't know who those people are going to be because they're not going to be the people screaming about it.
01:18:19 ◼ ► If there's someone who's like in a second or third level of the org chart at Apple screaming about how they would do a better job than Tim Cook, they're never going to be CEO.
01:18:29 ◼ ► But, and like, so that's what I want to see is like, like what are the Satya Nadella level ideas or transitions that are, that are, that will come next with Apple's next wave of leadership.
01:18:40 ◼ ► And we don't know what, I mean, that could still be 10 years away, who knows, but like, it's going to probably happen sometime in the next five to 10 years.
01:18:48 ◼ ► I think a year or two ago, he said he didn't think he'd be there for the next 10 years.
01:18:51 ◼ ► Everyone thinks he's just going to stay long enough to see some Apple glasses, but, uh, the clock is ticking on Tim Cook by his own, uh, his own words.
01:18:59 ◼ ► And not, and to be clear, I'm not just talking about Tim Cook, but certainly a CEO transition, you know, that tends to.
01:19:18 ◼ ► Like, but stuff like that, like there are certain things, certain things that you could do at a lower level of company, certain things you can't.
01:19:23 ◼ ► And, you know, there's a whole bunch of important stuff that you, even the China stuff.
01:19:27 ◼ ► Uh, not, not that I think Tim Cook is doing the wrong thing there, but like you need, you need the CEO to do those types of things.
01:19:33 ◼ ► But these lower level design stuff could actually happen with a second or third level reshuffle.
01:19:40 ◼ ► Like if Jeff Williams get replaced by somebody who has really strong design opinions, Tim Cook won't interfere with that.
01:19:47 ◼ ► No, but, but, you know, but the reality is like if the CEO changes, some of the SVPs might then change, you know, that typically what happens in a leadership transition is like some of the next people down shuffle around or, you know, some of them might leave if they wanted to be CEO or if they don't get along with the new CEO, you know, whatever it is.
01:20:11 ◼ ► I mean, look, when Tim Cook took over Apple, you know, you had a clash between Scott Forstall and Johnny Ive and they couldn't work with each other.
01:20:18 ◼ ► And so the seat, the new CEO had to pick one and get rid of the other one like that, that kind of thing happens.
01:20:27 ◼ ► So that's kind of like what I want to see is like, what would, you know, Apple Satya Nadella do, you know, would it result in, you know, I think honestly, small potatoes stuff like improving the developer relationship, which as much as it matters to us, it's a small potatoes to Apple.
01:20:47 ◼ ► I think the more interesting questions are probably things like, would their relationship to AI change?
01:20:54 ◼ ► Be careful what you wish for, because an actual equivalent of Satya Nadella could be like, we're not doing the Mac anymore.
01:21:26 ◼ ► It's a shame that he has to keep learning these same lessons, but the Mac still exists.
01:21:31 ◼ ► But anyway, I think it's going to be an exciting and interesting and scary and overall probably good transitions happening at Apple over the next decade.
01:21:57 ◼ ► Working with all the amazing people at this company has been a privilege of a lifetime.
01:22:08 ◼ ► Beginning next year, I plan to spend more time with friends and family, including five grandchildren and counting.
01:22:14 ◼ ► I just want to call out that they're actually talking about like family and friends in a official Apple newsroom post.
01:22:24 ◼ ► That's the well, that's that was the euphemism of like he's leaving to spend more time with his family when somebody got fired.
01:22:36 ◼ ► I don't remember when I'm probably not going to bother putting it in the show notes, but like a month or two ago, maybe three months ago, I had talked about how my AirPods Pro.
01:22:59 ◼ ► And then a listener is kind enough to send me their leftover lightning case that they had after like a repair or something like that.
01:23:10 ◼ ► And I went to mow the lawn the other day and I went to put in my noise cancelling AirPods Pro 2 in and only one of them had a charge, only the left one.
01:23:22 ◼ ► I did know enough to turn on the accessibility thing where I could turn on noise cancelling on only one AirPod, which I did, made it fine, but I was annoyed.
01:23:33 ◼ ► And I eventually say, well, I think maybe what I should do is reset my AirPods, which at the time sounded like a great idea.
01:23:42 ◼ ► And then they, well, well, first I unpaired them in software, you know, on my iPhone and said, forget this device.
01:23:55 ◼ ► And then anytime I go to re-reset them, something, and I think it's the right AirPod that otherwise seemed like it had no charge, makes three tones.
01:24:10 ◼ ► I tried putting them in the old case, the original case, put them back in the new case.
01:24:16 ◼ ► So I go to the Genius Bar this morning and I'm wearing my Dongletown, my upgrade Dongletown shirt.
01:24:33 ◼ ► And so they bring out, most of the operation the Genius was doing on a Mac Mini, excuse me, not a Mac Mini.
01:24:41 ◼ ► But at some point they bring out a MacBook Air that has a USB-C to USB-A dongle that then has a different dongle that I think is for troubleshooting that then is plugged into my AirPods case.
01:25:14 ◼ ► So anyway, so the conclusion they came to was, oh, past Casey was not a jerk for the first time and apparently got AppleCare on this device.
01:25:30 ◼ ► And so I assumed what that meant was I would be walking away with, at the very least, a new right AirPod, or maybe I would get like a triple word score and get a whole new set of AirPods and a new USB-C case.
01:25:45 ◼ ► And then the conclusion was, no, we have to ship them away because I can't effectively perform diagnostics.
01:25:53 ◼ ► They're so broken that I cannot perform diagnostics, but yet I need to ship them off to some repair center so they can do more diagnostics.
01:26:09 ◼ ► I'm about to go full Karen or whatever the, what is it, Chad is the male equivalent, whatever.
01:26:34 ◼ ► And it's not going to be quick because it's going to be between three and five business days, I think, in order to get them back.
01:26:47 ◼ ► Let me tell you, because patience is not a virtue that you have a lot of, but I would say what you're paying for is not for your problem to go away and go away quickly.
01:26:59 ◼ ► Well, and that is true, but I still feel like a company that one of the most valuable companies in the world, if they can't even diagnose what's wrong with my stuff, shouldn't that be an indicator that the stuff is broken?
01:27:14 ◼ ► I feel like that pretty much indicates maybe it just needs to be like reset by by a thing that they don't have in house that they only have.
01:27:26 ◼ ► You wouldn't go in there and then walk out with a new item or how broken your thing was that it always take your broken thing and chip it somewhere.
01:27:32 ◼ ► And then at some point later, you would get something either your old thing back or a new thing back.
01:27:37 ◼ ► But the idea of instantaneous or cross ship or whatever is a fairly, well, not recent, but it is a in the age of Apple retail stores, recent innovation and has never been standard everywhere.
01:27:46 ◼ ► In fact, I think there is a fancier level of applicator depending on how you contact them or, you know, the cross shipping express thing.
01:27:54 ◼ ► Or if you're in a store, the manager's discretion, you can get a new one there and leave with it when they take your old one in and stuff like that.
01:28:00 ◼ ► But like, I think what you're experiencing is the average case, which is you don't always get the instantly a new one.
01:28:16 ◼ ► And my kids have destroyed many AirPods and I've gotten many warranty repairs and always they replace the part that they think is broken.
01:28:26 ◼ ► And to be clear, I would have been perfectly happy if they sent me away with a right AirPod and all my old stuff and got it to the point that I could at least repair them with my device.
01:28:40 ◼ ► You wouldn't have been over the moon happy because remember my story of my son going in?
01:28:43 ◼ ► I think it was four total times for a very similar problem because in each one of those times they sent him away with a new thing.
01:28:49 ◼ ► And each one of those times the new thing didn't quite work and he had to come back and go around and around.
01:28:53 ◼ ► So, you know, sometimes sending it away and having it get done for real for good in one trip is better than four individual trips where the person at the store makes a decision in the moment and says, I think it's probably just the right AirPod.
01:29:04 ◼ ► And then you go back and say, I think it's still the right AirPod and they replace it again.
01:29:15 ◼ ► I know I'm going to be eviscerated after this airs because everyone's going to say I'm being a big baby, which is arguably true.
01:29:33 ◼ ► No, not when there's an Apple store right there with a gazillion AirPods sitting in the store.
01:29:43 ◼ ► But it's like it's one of their least expensive products that they sell a gazillion of that break all the time.
01:29:51 ◼ ► It's not great, but at this point, I would rather have them fix it once in three to five business days than have to return to the store multiple times.
01:30:05 ◼ ► I mean, that used to be the way it was, was that you didn't get the, okay, we'll give you all a new one until you'd gone back three to five times or they had some metric or like most places have this.
01:30:15 ◼ ► And again, I feel like I'm coming across as saying, I want a brand new full package AirPods with the upgraded case and all that.
01:30:24 ◼ ► Well, yes, I would like that, but that's not what I expect by any stretch of the imagination.
01:30:29 ◼ ► I think it's perfectly reasonable if they send me back my, my, my old AirPods case, my old left AirPod in a repaired or replaced, right?
01:30:49 ◼ ► But I don't know, it's just, it's frustrating when I feel like I go, I do everything I can never to speak to Apple in this capacity anyway.
01:31:12 ◼ ► So I actually know what I'm doing because in this context, I kind of don't know what I'm doing.
01:31:21 ◼ ► And I'm frustrated that these AirPods are, I mean, don't make me say planned obsolescence, but it's hard not to sometimes, even though I do think that's BS.
01:31:31 ◼ ► I feel like, you know, the, the terms of Apple care, it used to be in years past that you could basically walk in and basically come out with an often refurbished, which is perfectly fair, but a replacement device.
01:31:45 ◼ ► I remember going to Apple care and saying, look, I have a reasonably bad scratch, uh, on my phone.
01:32:01 ◼ ► Hey, you know, I have this phone and I've had, I've got Apple care on it and I, it's got a handful of scratches on it.
01:32:17 ◼ ► And I didn't do that because I'm not that evil, but I really, really, really thought about it.
01:32:21 ◼ ► And it's just when the terms are getting that owner, onerous or nervous, I think I can say that onerous, uh, onerous.
01:32:33 ◼ ► Um, when the, when the terms are that onerous, in my personal opinion, then I, I, I can't help but wonder why am I doing this in the first place?
01:32:40 ◼ ► Well, I mean, you've got always got the option, uh, of, you know, the other option that will get you fast service in exchange for money is don't get Apple care.
01:32:51 ◼ ► Like again, what I think the point of Apple care, like any insurance is not paying the full cost out of pocket.
01:33:00 ◼ ► And if they do it in a manner of your liking, but if you don't like the time that they take to do it or the way the service does, you can buy yourself brand new AirPods real fast.
01:33:46 ◼ ► But if you know when the new products are coming out and you're close to it, you're like,
01:34:23 ◼ ► And I don't think I ever wrote down like the serial numbers of which one is mine versus
01:35:07 ◼ ► Well, hopefully after your three to five business days, what you will get back is a fully functional
01:35:30 ◼ ► You think you, if you have not had enough of us, okay, I know that's, that's how everybody
01:35:53 ◼ ► Looking back on some, some, what was going on with John, Gene, Andrea on Apple and AI in
01:37:19 ◼ ► Well, yeah, it's so hot in the summer, you just want to be in an air-conditioned theater.
01:37:22 ◼ ► Really, honestly, I don't see a lot of movies in the theater these days just because I pay for every streaming service in the entire universe and have a big fancy TV.
01:37:29 ◼ ► That's what I prefer to do, but I often get frustrated by how long I have to wait for movies to come from the theater to be available on streaming in any fashion.
01:37:44 ◼ ► I just watched Thunderbolts recently because it got some medium, middle-of-the-road reviews, and you could rent it for $25 or buy it for $29.
01:38:10 ◼ ► I was always going to watch it, and I could have easily waited for it to be available on streaming.
01:38:23 ◼ ► To give this movie the best chance of being the most enjoyable, it's the type of movie that I want to actually see in a dark theater on a really big screen with a giant sound system because it's that kind of movie.
01:38:34 ◼ ► It's like from the director of Top Gun Maverick, it's going to be, you know, big, loud, and fast, and flashy.
01:38:40 ◼ ► So I want to give this movie the best possible chance to wow me and for it to be enjoyable.
01:39:10 ◼ ► You know, actually, I know a lot about F1 cars because in the YouTube channels that I watch, inevitably, all my watching of supercars and hypercars inevitably leads you to F1 technology and F1 videos and stuff.
01:39:25 ◼ ► I have seen a lot of that stuff from that perspective, but never touching on, like, the sport competitive part of it.
01:39:51 ◼ ► And I had heard from people who do know F1 and like F1 that the movie is a reasonable representation to someone who doesn't follow the sport of, like, this is not entirely, like, oh, the sport is nothing like this movie.
01:40:04 ◼ ► If you watch this and you get some idea of what the sport is like, obviously, it's not, you know, a movie starring Brad Pitt or whatever.
01:40:18 ◼ ► Well, and so I went on a field trip this afternoon by myself and I went to the theater and I watched the F1 movie because there was no freaking way that you were going to talk about this movie.
01:40:29 ◼ ► And even though you kindly offered to make a no-spoiler review segment, which is what we're going to aim for, I didn't want there to be any risk of you slipping up.
01:40:38 ◼ ► Not because I think this movie really justifies, like, a full media blackout Todd Vaziri style, but just because I really wanted to go in cold.
01:41:07 ◼ ► The point of the movie, to have made it perfect would have been to make the movie worse, which is exactly what you would expect.
01:41:15 ◼ ► It was fine in the sense that it was not, it didn't take away from the movie, I didn't think.
01:41:33 ◼ ► Well, so the first thing I'm going to say about it is, after this show, I'm going to talk about the Apple product placement.
01:41:41 ◼ ► Which, you know, Apple likes a lot of media, they make a lot of TV shows, they make a lot of movies.
01:41:58 ◼ ► Because, at one point, they were showing, I think, the design department for Heroes F1 team, where they work on the car and the aerodynamics and stuff.
01:42:21 ◼ ► But, yeah, there was one or two conspicuous shots of, like, that's a lot of XDRs on screen.
01:42:32 ◼ ► What I also, I couldn't believe that Brad Pitt's choice of headphones, which was AirPods Max,
01:42:40 ◼ ► And he seemed to be, like, on the verge or maybe did actively get them wet a few times, like, underwater, which I didn't think.
01:42:57 ◼ ► As for the movie, I think I'm glad I saw it in the theater because it does, I think it did benefit.
01:43:03 ◼ ► It got, like, a 5% to 10% boost of just that movie experience because no matter how, my sound system is not that great enough.
01:43:09 ◼ ► But, like, this has got car engines and roaring things and just, you need to really be immersed in that.
01:43:16 ◼ ► What I would say of this movie is that it is, in my opinion, ever so slightly above average in almost everything.
01:43:29 ◼ ► But, overall, it is slightly above average, a slightly above average execution of a tried and true formula.
01:43:37 ◼ ► If you've seen any movies like this at all, you will not be shocked by what happens in this movie.
01:43:45 ◼ ► I am a staunch defender of, quote unquote, formula movies that execute really well on that formula.
01:43:56 ◼ ► Importantly, it doesn't do any huge, disastrously wrong things that would really drag it down for me.
01:44:04 ◼ ► Some people have, you know, referred to it, I think Merlin has said this, as, like, B-plus media.
01:44:14 ◼ ► As long as there's no big dips, if you're a little bit above average in everything you do, that's a good movie.
01:44:20 ◼ ► And so, if you have any interest at all in movies like this, not an F1, because I don't care about it.
01:44:26 ◼ ► But, like, if you have any interest in movies like this, and let's name some movies like this.
01:44:31 ◼ ► Even, like, something like Ford vs. Ferrari or your favorite Days of Thunder or Top Gun or Top Gun Maverick or The Karate Kid or any sports movie.
01:44:40 ◼ ► Like, if you like that kind of movie, this is a pretty good version of that kind of movie.
01:44:46 ◼ ► And if you don't know anything about F1, like, I don't, you will learn things about F1 from this movie.
01:44:51 ◼ ► Because the movie does, one of the things that I think is slightly below average is the movie does bend over backward to make the announcers say things that I assume the announcers would never say.
01:45:06 ◼ ► Like, I know this is someone who, you know, when I watch tennis, for example, they don't explain things like that.
01:45:13 ◼ ► And if you watch a lot of tennis, you will learn this stuff through osmosis, but you don't have time in a two-hour movie to learn this through osmosis.
01:45:37 ◼ ► Despite all the controversy about the ads or whatever, this is a thoroughly average to above-average execution of a tried-and-true formula.
01:45:50 ◼ ► So if you want to escape the heat and get into the air-conditioned, I recommend checking it out.
01:46:11 ◼ ► But if that kind of thing appeals to you, like the dazzle, the spectacle, and the formula, this will also appeal.
01:46:18 ◼ ► I see what you're going for, but I get so turned off by you comparing this to Top Gun Maverick.
01:46:24 ◼ ► Well, I compare it to the original Top Gun, which I think the original Top Gun is a better movie than this.
01:46:37 ◼ ► And I think one of the things they did above average is showing a bunch of cars going faster on a track, which sounds boring.
01:46:43 ◼ ► But with the application of modern technology, you can do that in a slightly different way than has been done in the past.
01:46:48 ◼ ► I'm not saying the way they did it is better than the way they did it in Days of Thunder.
01:47:36 ◼ ► Yeah, there were times, like a great example of this is DRS, which is drag reduction system.
01:47:40 ◼ ► And the way this works is if you're within one second of the car in front of you, in certain parts of the track, the rear wing of the F1 car, which is there for several reasons, but especially downforce to give the car better handling.
01:47:53 ◼ ► Well, that wing kind of acts like an air brake almost because it's horizontally behind the car and it's a bunch of airs hitting and it's slowing the car down.
01:48:04 ◼ ► So at certain times, if you are within one second of the car in front of you, then you can engage DRS, which is to say that wing will open up.
01:48:12 ◼ ► There's a little flap that opens up so the air will pass straight through the wing and you get like something like 10 or 20 miles an hour faster by doing that.
01:48:20 ◼ ► And when they explain DRS, they like super close up shots of the wing with the flap opening and you hear the announcer say DRS two or three times and then explicitly say drag reduction system.
01:48:33 ◼ ► It was very like, as you said, you know, oh, like as you would know, Bob, that's the drag reduction system.
01:48:40 ◼ ► You are right, but I thought as that goes, it was a not particularly cringe way of doing that.
01:48:48 ◼ ► I already knew about DRS because that is a thing that's often referenced in hypercars and they come with their own version of that because, of course, hypercars can do things that F1 cars cannot because of all those darn rules they have in F1.
01:48:58 ◼ ► But the other thing that I thought this movie executed exceedingly well on is it was trying to paint itself as a movie of this minute or maybe last year, if you will, insofar as this is current at Formula One in circa 2023 to 2023.
01:49:25 ◼ ► Like Gunter Steiner has a couple of very brief bit parts where he's the guy who basically leans back from the pit wall to look at the star trio of the – or maybe it's four of them.
01:49:51 ◼ ► But all of that being said, they had enough participation from actual Formula One and actual Formula One drivers and actual Formula One team principals and so on that it read as real.
01:50:05 ◼ ► But they were also smart enough not to go too deep into that because Formula One drivers, team principals, they're not actors.
01:50:15 ◼ ► It's like a baseball movie where they're playing the Yankees, but the team is like the – I was trying to make up a fake baseball team, but I'm afraid it would be like a Florida team.
01:50:25 ◼ ► Yeah, because if you do a make-up team, no one's going to get as mad at you as if you were like, oh, he's the driver for McLaren.
01:50:34 ◼ ► And so they did a really good job of giving enough nods to make it feel like it's real while not going completely out of control and having like extended scenes with these people who are clearly not actors.
01:50:54 ◼ ► There was the dude from Ferrari whose name is escaping me and the fake team's team principal.
01:51:01 ◼ ► And the other two guys on that couch, like they are real honest-to-goodness team principals.
01:51:30 ◼ ► The in-car scenes, to your point, the tech has gotten better since Ronin, since Days of Thunder,
01:51:44 ◼ ► And I think the director, was it Joe Kaczynski or something like that, got a little aggressive with like the 180 crash twists.
01:51:55 ◼ ► But you'll be like looking at the driver of the car, and then he'll like slam the camera 180 degrees the other way.
01:52:18 ◼ ► If anything, you're predisposed not to like it because whenever I watch tennis movies, I can't stand them because they screw it up so bad.
01:52:25 ◼ ► So, it's a testament to this movie's accomplishment that you weren't going like, oh, they got it all so wrong.
01:52:31 ◼ ► I think the biggest problem I had with this movie was how is Brad Pitt that astonishingly attractive at like 62 years old?
01:52:41 ◼ ► Speaking of Brad Pitt, there was a YouTube video that, of course, was chucked in my face because of everything that I'm doing.
01:52:48 ◼ ► Where Brad Pitt goes out in an actual F1 car on the course, and you get to see him actually driving it.
01:52:58 ◼ ► Although, I do enjoy watching the actor Brad Pitt try to drive a very expensive car very carefully.
01:53:05 ◼ ► I just see him every second he's out there, he's like, do not crash this multimillion-dollar car.
01:53:13 ◼ ► And I forgot to bring up, there was another bit of product placement that you didn't talk about.
01:53:18 ◼ ► In the very beginning of the film, it was, I think, when we meet the owner of the F1 team.
01:53:36 ◼ ► And I almost fell right the hell out of my chair, because that exact same pinball machine, in much worse shape, is in my house as we speak.
01:53:51 ◼ ► But I almost fell out of my chair, and I immediately grabbed my phone and took a picture and sent it to Aaron, because I was like, oh my god, you will not believe what just happened.
01:54:01 ◼ ► Which only matters to me, and I recognize that, but I just thought it was incredibly funny and incredibly cool.
01:54:10 ◼ ► I would like to talk spoilers again in the post-post show, but all told, I think this is an enjoyable movie.
01:54:16 ◼ ► If you will permit me, I think the summary of the plot, which we've kind of hinted at, is if you mash together, so skip like 20 seconds if you're not interested.
01:54:25 ◼ ► If you mash together Days of Thunder and Cars, the animated movie 3, and put them together, that's the plot.
01:54:32 ◼ ► Now, to you, that might sound terrible, but to me, that's great, because I love both those movies.
01:54:44 ◼ ► Yes, like my friend, Brian, who's kind of the reason I'm into F1, and he's been watching F1 since I've known him in the early 2000s.
01:54:52 ◼ ► I'm confident that he would hate every second of this movie, because he would be too particular about it.
01:54:58 ◼ ► But I went into it wanting it to be at least realistic enough, and otherwise I was going to let it wash over me.