00:03:42
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Prices are increased and the poor Apple TV took the brunt of it with 54% increase for the 64 gig one and a 67% increase for the 128 config that has Ethernet and thread networking.
00:04:01
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And when I mentioned it at first, I only mentioned an Ethernet and several readers said that the reason they bought it was specifically for the thread stuff.
00:04:11
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Because you don't really need storage.
00:05:26
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But I'm just feeling bad for people who are, like, just moving over the summer, you know, like, oh, I'll pick up a new Apple TV over the summer.
00:05:36
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And a lot of these products, I mean, with the HomePod Mini as well, like things that we've been waiting for for a while that have been sort of stalled by, you know, enhanced Siri delays.
00:05:47
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And now to find out that they're going to be significantly more expensive is, I mean, you know, we know why.
00:06:10
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But obviously, yeah, I mean, they weathered the price increases on SSDs and RAM for a lot longer than most of their competition, but weren't able to do it forever.
00:06:20
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So at least it's all going for a good cause, which is AI server farms.
00:06:24
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It's like, I think it's fine to be angry that the prices have jumped up like this, right?
00:06:32
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It is not the natural course of inflation for prices to just jump 20, 25, 30 percent, or in the case of Apple TV, 50 to 67 percent at once, right?
00:06:47
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That's sort of out of the ordinary, you know, so it's okay to be angry, right?
00:06:52
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And I think a rational direction for anger is at the irrational exuberance of the AI data center build out, which I think isn't, from my perspective, about being mad at AI in general, but at what's clearly a bubble to some extent.
00:07:11
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To me, it's only a question of how big is the bubble.
00:07:15
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Clearly, the spending is not commensurate with any kind of actual reasonable projection of revenue that it's going to earn.
00:07:23
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But the money to buy the data centers and the computers that go in them, which are more RAM hungry than any other computers anybody's buying for anything else.
00:07:34
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And I guess, to some extent, needs massive amounts of SSD storage, too.
00:07:39
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So if you're angry at the bubble, because the bubble has now had effects that have trickled all the way down to just buying a new MacBook Air for your kid who's going off to college in August or September,
00:07:54
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and you unfortunately didn't buy the MacBook Air yet, or MacBook Neo, right?
00:08:23
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Especially at the education pricing, right?
00:08:25
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At education pricing, the base model goes from $500 to $600, and that's a 20% increase.
00:08:30
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Yeah, and there were reports of the popularity of the Neo indicating that maybe they weren't going to be able to get all the parts,
00:08:39
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you know, because a lot of the chips were binned and stuff like that.
00:08:41
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They weren't necessarily going to be able to keep producing it at the low cost that they had announced it at simply because they were selling too many of them.
00:08:50
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Yeah, I actually think in hindsight, I think that's sort of misplaced, right?
00:08:54
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Because that speculation was all about the A-18 chip.
00:09:57
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I don't think the chip thing was ever going to lead to a price increase in the Neo.
00:10:00
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And I don't think it was going to, there were people saying, well, maybe they'll get rid of the low-end model and only sell the high-end model or something like that.
00:24:46
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It's almost a shame that they got rid of the Mac Pro because it would have been interesting to see how much that – the high-end configure that would have gone up.
00:24:53
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But this is – I mean, it's a weird – I mean, the swing in percentages, though, does seem strange.
00:25:14
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I think the only – I think the only explanation for the Apple TVs is that they priced them for this fall for new hardware.
00:25:23
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And that – again, I think it's a really interesting discussion that they must have had inside about what to do right now at the end of June when presumably the Apple TV is the earliest they're coming in September at the iPhone event.
00:25:39
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And I think in a lot – I think the year that these actual models came out, they came out in October, right?
00:25:44
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A lot of times Apple's fall schedule – they clearly always have a September event for the phone and the Apple Watches.
00:25:51
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And if there are new AirPods, they like to put the AirPods in that event, too.
00:25:55
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Sometimes they put other things in that event.
00:25:59
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There was – I think there was one time at the iPhone event where Oprah was at Apple Park because they were talking about Apple – the actual – the service Apple TV.
00:26:37
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They're not going to make an announcement.
00:26:38
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They're just going to say out of stock or they're going to – all the configurations will just suddenly have October delivery times.
00:26:45
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I mean I guess that's the way they would do it is you would put in an order now for a 64-gigabyte Apple TV and it would say estimated delivery October 1st or something like that.
00:27:49
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It seems like Apple TV is sort of to set top boxes what the Mac was to computing for most of the Mac's life, right?
00:28:00
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Like 5% market share but the 5% isn't just a random 5%.
00:28:05
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It's the 5% of people who really care and they sort of are religious about it and they try to convince their friends and neighbors to buy them too.
00:28:14
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And they really can't believe that the whole rest of the world is using the crap that they use.
00:29:59
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No, I am not cut out to sell people $250 four-year-old devices.
00:30:05
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I would have felt bad continuing to sell the Trashcan Mac Pro for $5,000 eight years after it came out without a spec increase or however many years it was.
00:30:18
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It's just – I would think, well, especially that last year when you know you're working on the new one, you know it's coming, and it's like somebody comes into the store and buys one.
00:37:00
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It's like, well, if they didn't increase the price at all, it would only add fuel to the fire that maybe they're just walking away from the whole platform and they're abandoning it, which has sort of been rumored.
00:37:15
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Apple didn't do a lot of interviews at WWDC earlier this month, but they did some.
00:37:19
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And there was one where somebody asked somebody, I forget who, about it.
00:37:24
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And they gave a diplomatic Apple-like answer, but more or less shot it down and said, no, we don't have anything in the future to announce, of course.
00:37:31
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But we're all in on this platform, and you could see it in all the whatever list of features they added to Vision OS 27.
00:37:57
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And I do think, you know, it doesn't make any sense, because what did they update the Vision Pro to, an M5 chip, right?
00:38:04
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It doesn't make any sense that if all the other M series products, the iPad Pro, all the various MacBooks, if they all went up about 20%, it doesn't really, although I guess when they're all, I don't know, maybe it does make sense that the M chip is only, or the RAM and everything is that low of a price out of the $3,500.
00:39:22
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So I really do think that the 6% increase is sort of, it's not about the margins and the component prices, but really is sort of a marketing move of saying, still alive.
00:40:03
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If you could jump into Airplane, one minute in, half an hour in, an hour in, you could jump in five minutes before the end, and it doesn't matter.
00:41:41
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I mean, it seems like you get into the point where some of the – there's – I don't know.
00:41:45
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Some of these data centers they're walking away from and are not getting done for various reasons, and maybe the demand doesn't pan out sooner rather than later.
00:42:19
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There is a possibility that as much as we're all right now bemoaning the early summer of 2026 as a crisis in RAM and SSD storage, there is a possibility that come Christmas will be like, remember the summer when things were good or they were better?
00:42:40
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You know, it is entirely possible that six months from now the situation will be worse, and I feel like that's – I don't know.
00:42:47
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I kind of felt like Apple's ambiguous statement was covering all possibilities in that regard.
00:42:54
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Presumably, though, hopefully, that this is really only a reference to the iPhone and Apple Watch, which did not get price increases, and I guess they're just waiting for the new products to do it.
00:43:06
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But then I guess it's curious why didn't they do that, if that's my theory of what they did with Apple TV, increase nows.
00:43:13
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Why didn't they do it with Apple or iPhone and Apple Watch?
00:43:19
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Maybe because they sell so many ungodly more of iPhones and Apple Watch that they're like, let's let people who are worried about prices buy these old ones now, right?
00:43:31
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You know, that they let them buy them now if they're worried about it and give them as much warning as possible and will take the hit.
00:43:39
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I mean, I think maybe in that case it's also an instance of where they – for like the pros, right, they probably have things locked in at the very least.
00:43:49
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Wouldn't you think that they have the prices for those contracts locked in through that cycle?
00:43:57
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And then – yeah, I mean – and you don't have to – like with the Vision Pro, you don't have to – I mean, unlike with the Vision Pro, I mean, like you don't have to worry about the perception that you're getting rid of the iPhone, obviously.
00:44:09
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And so just keep selling them at the prices that – basically without marking it up even further and taking the profit, you just keep selling them at those prices.
00:44:18
◼►
And then the rest of the lineup, though, like the base model, the 17, is further out.
00:44:25
◼►
It's not coming to – you know, the 18 is not coming to the spring, right?
00:44:28
◼►
That's supposedly, right, you know, and the rumor mill is very consistent on that regard.
00:44:35
◼►
What we're expecting is a new release strategy where the only new iPhones coming in September are the 18 Pro and the folding, quote-unquote, Ultra, and the regular, no-adjective iPhone 18 will move.
00:44:53
◼►
And the iPhone Air, second generation, which is still weird that it didn't get a number, is moving to the spring schedule when they've been releasing these e-phones.
00:45:04
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So they'll have, I guess, some kind of every five- or six-month release where the two high-end Premiere ones come out in September and then the rest of them come out in the spring.
00:45:18
◼►
The question is, will they increase the prices of the 17 and 17e and the iPhone Air in September even though they're year-old products?
00:45:28
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Or keep selling them until spring at the existing prices?
00:45:33
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That doesn't seem sustainable, but maybe?
00:45:38
◼►
I feel like, well, when the prices of the Pros go up, it might behoove them to raise the prices of the 17s simply because it makes the 17s look much more attractive in comparison.
00:45:50
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And I always fill out the chart with the pricing, and I think it's always, it's unsurprising to me because I do it every year, but it's like, oh, every $100 there's a new iPhone.
00:46:03
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There's a $600 iPhone, a $700 iPhone, an $800 iPhone.
00:46:07
◼►
If they only increase the prices of the 18 Pro and the folding one, which everybody is thinking is going to be $2,000 or higher, maybe now people are thinking $2,500.
00:46:19
◼►
That would create this gap between, if they don't raise the prices of the iPhone 17, that there'd be this gap between the 17 and the 18 Pro.
00:46:27
◼►
I mean, there could be, you know, all sorts of products are sold with a gap between the mid-tier and the high-tier, but that hasn't been Apple's strategy.
00:47:31
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Because there's an awful lot of people who are like, I could buy a pro, but I think the non-pro is a better value for me, and I kind of like it, and I like the camera's smaller.
00:47:40
◼►
Maybe they should have been doing that all along, honestly.
00:47:43
◼►
They sort of did, right, because the SEs and the Es all came out.
00:47:46
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I mean, so they were doing it with that, the very bottom of the lineup, but they weren't doing it a step up, and so they're fixing that mistake now, I guess.
00:47:56
◼►
And so these come out, and then you're like, ah, and then there's like this dopamine craving part of your brain that is like, hey, hey, it's September.
00:48:06
◼►
I think at the prices that they're going to be at, it's not going to be a question for me.
00:48:09
◼►
I'm just going to be like, no, I don't need that.
00:48:10
◼►
I don't know, but it's obviously, and it's just obviously going to be a major part of what people are talking about when they come out, right?
00:48:25
◼►
And it would have been anyway, even without the RAM and SSD crisis and this unprecedented industry situation, it would have been anyway with the folding phone costing $2,000 or more, which all of the other folding phones cost, but Apple would be the first ones to say, we're not like these other companies.
00:48:49
◼►
So it is commensurate with what all the other folding screens cost, and presumably Apple's is the nicest folding screen, but it's like, so even if this wasn't happening, whatever the starting price of the folding iPhone was going to be is what people would be talking about, right?
00:49:07
◼►
And some percentage of the day one mainstream news headlines are going to be Apple announced new iPhones, and one of them cost $2,000, right?
00:49:16
◼►
We can laugh, we can roll our eyes, but that is what people care about, right?
00:49:21
◼►
And it is eye-catching, and now whatever that number is, it's going to be 20% to 25% higher, probably.
00:49:29
◼►
And with the, you know, it's like, well, but they also announced iPhone 18 Pros, and they don't fold, they're the normal shape, and the price didn't go up at all, that would have been a better story than, and their prices went up a lot, too.
00:49:43
◼►
I don't know what they can do about it, though, and I don't think they're happy.
00:49:47
◼►
Ben Thompson has emphasized this and done the math on it, that if you hold for inflation, they've actually lowered the price of top-tier iPhones over in recent years.
00:49:59
◼►
It's actually, in terms of if you inflation adjust the dollars, iPhones, including iPhone Pros, have come down in price over the years, even though, famously, inflation has been a global phenomenon for the last five years.
00:50:15
◼►
That's true, and that has been great, but that's the sort of thing human psychology doesn't notice, right?
00:50:22
◼►
That price that you're used to has stayed the same, and inflation adjusted, it's actually a better value.
00:50:28
◼►
It's like, cognitively, even if you understand that sentence, you can say, oh, that is interesting, and I'm kind of happy about that.
00:50:34
◼►
It doesn't really hit you emotionally, though.
00:50:37
◼►
But when your new iPhone costs 25% more than the last one you paid for two years ago, that hits you in an emotional way, and the fact that you've saved some money on inflation adjusted dollars into five years before doesn't really assuage the burn, right?
00:51:20
◼►
Yeah, I don't think that that's a reason for the transition.
00:51:24
◼►
I don't think that the escalating number of global government diplomatic tasks that Apple CEO or somebody at Apple has to take care of, I do think it's higher than it ever was.
00:51:39
◼►
I don't think it's going down anytime soon.
00:51:41
◼►
I don't think that Tim Cook was like, I have so much to do globally that I kind of need to step aside as CEO and become executive chairman and take care of this.
00:51:50
◼►
But I do think it kind of contributed to the timing.
00:51:54
◼►
I might as well do it now because my plate's still going to be full.
00:52:42
◼►
They just have screens in the lenses that show a very bright monochrome green screen in front of the reality that you just see through the regular lenses.
00:52:54
◼►
And they have microphones in the arms of the glasses.
00:52:57
◼►
There are all sorts of features built in.
00:53:00
◼►
One of them is called teleprompting, where you can give it a script for like a presentation or a speech.
00:53:28
◼►
There is an AI assistant you can invoke.
00:53:31
◼►
You say, hey, even, and you can just talk to AI and ask normal questions that you'd ask to an AI chatbot.
00:53:38
◼►
Other features, there's one called Conversate, where you can turn on Conversate, and it will record a conversation or meeting that you are in.
00:54:07
◼►
You can use it outdoors in the middle of summer on a sunny day, and you can definitely still see it.
00:54:12
◼►
Now, one of the other products they have is the Even Clip.
00:54:16
◼►
Those are sunglass clips that you can wear over the glasses so you can turn them into sunglasses and then just unclip them to take them off indoors.
00:54:23
◼►
And they have a product called the Even R1 Ring.
00:54:27
◼►
This is a smart ring that does health tracking, sleep tracking, all that sort of stuff that other smart rings do.
00:54:33
◼►
But the other thing the R1 Ring does is it serves as sort of a remote control for the interface of the glasses.
00:54:39
◼►
Most, without the ring, what you do is you tap the side of the glasses to do things.
00:54:45
◼►
With the R1 Ring, you can just tap and scroll on the ring to move up and down and select and go back and stuff like that.
00:54:54
◼►
Really, really easy to figure out how to get around.
00:54:58
◼►
Simple interface, easy to navigate, really bright screen.
00:55:02
◼►
They have a new feature for developers.
00:55:03
◼►
If you use Claude Code or Codex, they have a new thing called Terminal so that you can connect to your AI coding agent from wherever you are and check on the progress right there in your glasses.
00:55:20
◼►
Go to EvenRealities.com and check out the Even G2 and see how everyday smart glasses keep helpful information in sight so that you can stay productive and hands-free throughout the day.
00:55:34
◼►
And for listeners of the talk show, you can use promo code Talkshow at EvenRealities.com to get 10% off the R1 Ring and or the Even Clip when you add them to your Even G2 glasses order.
00:55:49
◼►
Go to EvenRealities.com and remember that promo code Talkshow to save 10% off the R1 Ring or the Even Clip when you add them to your order.
00:55:59
◼►
Thanks to Even Realities for sponsoring the show.
00:56:03
◼►
One of the other little things, the thing that prompted your comment before the sponsor break there about Tim Cook and his global responsibilities or whatever, however Apple phrased it.
00:57:35
◼►
And the government is subsidizing them to a significant degree to make them competitive on a global stage.
00:57:44
◼►
And governments outside China, around the world, have sort of cast a stink eye on buying RAM components from them because it would disadvantage the non-subsidized actually trying to run a business where the revenue minus cost of goods equals profit runs the business.
00:58:08
◼►
And that if China, if two Chinese state-run companies grew to a dominant position in the RAM market worldwide, then China would have control over the RAM market.
00:58:21
◼►
And geopolitically, this is a bad idea for China to have control over an important market, which we've seen with things like the rare earth minerals of late, right?
00:58:32
◼►
That China has a geographic good fortune and government control has led them to a dominant position in these rare earth materials there of increasing importance to various devices being made around the world.
00:58:48
◼►
And apparently, I didn't remember this controversy or didn't even notice it in 2022, but Apple had apparently floated buying RAM from one of these companies in 2022 only for use in phones for the Chinese market that they would continue, that phones for the rest of the world would continue sourcing from the regular non-Chinese RAM manufacturers that Apple previously bought from.
00:59:14
◼►
And then for the phones in China, some or all of them would use RAM from these Chinese companies.
01:00:16
◼►
And he's also better him than somebody than the next guy.
01:00:19
◼►
The most qualified, most informed, most honest person in the Trump administration.
01:00:27
◼►
Both things can be true, but he's in a more influential position now than he was in 2022 as a senator from Florida, but also Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, wrote a letter just to say this would be a bad idea.
01:00:40
◼►
Their letter, I guess, used more words than that, but more or less is a bad idea.
01:00:45
◼►
Is the idea that it's a bad idea simply because we don't want China to control the market?
01:00:49
◼►
Or is it or is there some sort of implication that there is going to be spyware and RAM?
01:00:55
◼►
That they didn't say, and I don't – that's a great question, John, because I thought that too, and I'm glad you brought it up.
01:01:02
◼►
And I don't know, and I kind of Googled, and I didn't see anybody speculating about that, and I don't –
01:01:10
◼►
It seems harder – I mean, bring up the big hack, right?
01:01:13
◼►
I think the idea behind that wasn't there, like, an extra piece of equipment in those – wasn't there supposedly there was an extra piece of equipment that was doing some sort of spyware?
01:01:23
◼►
But it was on a whole – the idea of the big hack was that it was a whole – on a whole motherboard, there was a secret chip that would phone home.
01:01:34
◼►
It seems hard – I mean, I don't – I'm not nearly technical enough to make this assessment, but it seems hard with RAM to do something like that.
01:01:45
◼►
And I'm going from – and this is the thing where I do feel old – two system architecture courses I took getting my computer science degree in the mid-1990s.
01:02:20
◼►
Like if there was something funny in the RAM, it would have no way of communicating out, right?
01:02:26
◼►
It's – it really – I don't – I actually don't think it's possible.
01:02:30
◼►
I think it's really just about not giving them any kind of position because they're thumbs on the scale, because the government wants them to have a prominent position in the RAM market.
01:02:44
◼►
You know, you could see it now, right?
01:02:46
◼►
The previous foray of Apple, like, hey, how about we buy Chinese RAM for Chinese iPhones, was four years ago.
01:02:53
◼►
And here we are four years later and China thinking, hey, RAM is going to – is already important and is always going to be important and maybe will become more important, was correct, right?
01:03:07
◼►
There are certain businesses that are just like, oh, that's a good business to be in because nobody's ever going to get tired of that, right?
01:03:14
◼►
Like maybe you'll gain competitors and you'll have to compete.
01:03:18
◼►
But, like, you know, if you run a restaurant, people are always going to need to eat, right?
01:03:23
◼►
RAM, it's – nope, it's never going to fall out of fashion.
01:03:25
◼►
But now it's like people are eating more, right, with RAM.
01:03:58
◼►
I mean it seems like if the government could exert that kind of control and do that, they would be doing it already regardless of whether or not they are financially invested in the company.
01:04:10
◼►
Although I do think in hindsight, like if somebody could have foreseen – like the whole plot of the Apple in China book by – what's his name?
01:04:22
◼►
If somebody could have seen what Apple's partnership with Foxconn and, hey, how about we start building these devices in China and seen how it would go.
01:04:35
◼►
And the gist of Apple in China is that as much as making these iPhones and everything else in China allowed Apple to grow to the enormous size that it has and produce iPhones at the nearly unfathomable scale that they do.
01:04:52
◼►
Like it really is just unbelievable that they make – however many iPhones they sell a year, it's just this unfathomable number, right?
01:04:59
◼►
Remember when the tariffs came in a year ago and we were doing napkin math on – well, they're sending six 747s full of iPhones out of India ahead of the tariffs.
01:06:13
◼►
But it would be by buying more expensive – fewer people buying more expensive iPhones around the world, which might be exactly where we're back to with the price increases.
01:06:25
◼►
But I think if you could play that future out, I think national security hawks in the Senate and just national security apparatus would say this is a bad idea geopolitically because it's going to embolden China.
01:06:40
◼►
And that's sort of the main theme of the book, Apple and China, was that however much it benefited Apple, the partnership with Apple benefited China as a whole more than Apple.
01:06:50
◼►
And so I think that lesson has been learned and the idea that China is going to expand into RAM is something that they're trying to keep from happening in the first place.
01:07:01
◼►
The same reason dating back to the Biden administration that they've been trying to limit the sales of high-end NVIDIA hardware to China to try to keep them behind in AI.
01:07:17
◼►
And they obviously can't keep the hardware out of their hands but make it black market only.
01:07:21
◼►
And by making it black market only, it's more expensive and it's – they can't get as much of it as they could otherwise, like any black market good.
01:07:30
◼►
And I think that's how they're looking at the RAM market.
01:08:17
◼►
Full cabinets wearing shoes that don't fit.
01:08:19
◼►
Because not only does he think every man in the cabinet should be wearing the same pair of black, shiny, patent leather shoes, he also thinks – honest to God, if you're out there listening, Trump thinks that he has a gift like a carnival barker.
01:08:34
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Like, you go up and it's like, guess your age.
01:08:36
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Guess your age within two years or you win a prize.
01:08:38
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He thinks he can guess your shoe size.
01:09:40
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And when a sane man was president of the United States, then Kim Jong-un had the role of the madman, the crazy madman who's in charge of the most worrisome military.
01:09:53
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And when that title goes to somebody else, nobody pays attention.
01:09:58
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Didn't they have like a back and forth during this first administration though?
01:10:33
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I guess that it does raise the question of why aren't there more companies that make RAM?
01:10:39
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And it seems like the answer is this is one of those things where it's – you got to be – it's – you know, the only RAM worth buying is sort of cutting-edge RAM and it's really hard and the margins are often very narrow.
01:10:53
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And it's a market that goes up and down.
01:10:55
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The thing with the Micron CEO who was throwing some shade at Tim Cook, it was just three years ago.
01:11:02
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They had negative – they were losing money.
01:11:07
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Now, Micron, the American company that sells most of the – or I guess they're the biggest American RAM manufacturer, their last quarter they had 80% profit margins.
01:11:19
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And now he's riding high on the hog and throwing some shade at Apple for not throwing a bone to them when times were tough three years ago.
01:11:28
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But I guess it's super capital expensive to build these factories.
01:11:32
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You know, it's like why is TSMC the only company in the world that can make the leading-edge CPU manufacturing processes, right?
01:11:40
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There's one where it's all the way down to one company and the one company is in a geopolitical, not great part of the world, Taiwan.
01:14:29
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And then Disk Doubler was the insane one.
01:14:31
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Disk Doubler, I believe, because it was like – with RAM Doubler, if you didn't like it, you could just restart, take the extension out, and now you don't have RAM Doubler.
01:14:48
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I did because I was an idiot, a complete idiot with a 40 megabyte – I almost said gigabyte – 40 megabyte hard disk who was constantly at 39.8 megabytes consumed.
01:15:05
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And I had no way to back it up completely because if I had had a second 40 megabyte disk, I would have instantly filled it up with new stuff, not used it to back up the original.
01:15:18
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So I, in college, just through caution to the wind, installed Disk Doubler, and it worked.
01:17:26
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If you haven't done it, maybe the problem is you, and maybe you should consider the fact that you actually do need to build a new website or replace an old website,
01:17:37
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and that the way that you should do it is through Squarespace.
01:17:40
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It is an all-in-one platform for creating a website.
01:17:45
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You could do everything from registering domain names to picking a template for how your website should look to rejiggering the template to make it look exactly the way you want.
01:17:55
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They've got Blueprint AI is the name of their layout tool that uses AI, directing AI commands to redesign the website or create a new template that looks just the way you want.
01:18:08
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If you don't want to use the AI, you could just do it the old-fashioned way, drag and drop, WYSIWYG, right in the browser.
01:18:16
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When you log in, when you're the admin, the owner of a Squarespace site, you rejigger and design and change and configure and add components and features and pages to your website.
01:18:27
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In the browser, everything you see making it as the admin looks exactly like visitors will see when they come visit your website because it's all WYSIWYG right in a browser.
01:18:38
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The only difference is that you, the logged-in admin, have the ability to move stuff and change stuff, and the visitors just see it as a non-editable website.
01:18:48
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What you see is exactly what your visitors get.
01:18:52
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They've got all sorts of other built-in stuff, everything you can imagine.
01:18:55
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They take payments with all the payment stuff that you want, Apple Pay, the pay-in installment features from various services, credit cards.
01:19:05
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If you sell time or resources, if you are like a consultant or a trainer or something like that, you can do all of that through your Squarespace website, send invoices to your clients, and have your clients pay the invoices on your website through Squarespace payment stuff.
01:19:23
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None of that stuff has to come from a third party.
01:19:27
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If you sell stuff like T-shirts or stickers or anything like that, and you just sell little things, you could do all of that through Squarespace.
01:19:34
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You could just build an entire store, all of it right there, built into the same platform.
01:20:28
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I'm still running, you know, like I sort of implied, I'm still running Sequoia on this MacBook Air that I'm using right now, which is the device that I use most of the time.
01:20:40
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And we'll probably skip Tahoe completely to go to Golden Gate simply because I think it's easier on the eyes.
01:20:50
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At least, I mean, it's still, I mean, obviously it's still beta, but there's still things that it does that I don't, visually that I don't love.
01:20:56
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I don't understand why the scroll bars are so much darker.
01:20:59
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And there are still instances where they touch the edge of the window that drive me crazy.
01:21:05
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I'm not going to put it on my main Mac till it's out of beta.
01:25:23
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And then I got a text message from Trudy Miller at Apple PR after she listened to the episode and said, Lex, she said, I liked Lex, but his voicemails were very long.
01:25:39
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And I wrote back to her and said, you know, if you still have them, they would make for a good podcast.
01:27:11
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No, but at one point I just felt like, hey, this might be exciting to Lex that I'm obviously using Gnome and I've got a bunch of ideas and I'm sending them to him.
01:27:23
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And maybe he would like the idea that I'm using the app and have ideas.
01:27:27
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And he seemed to agree that these are good ideas.
01:27:29
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But then the amazing part is he wasn't saying like, OK, I'll look into that or I'll think about that.
01:27:35
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It was like two hours later, he's like, there's a beta that does it.
01:27:41
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And I have to admit in all and it is it is one of my favorite parts of where I am career wise and the life I've been able to make for myself is that when I was young, I thought, wouldn't it be great to know the developers of all of most of at least most of my favorite apps?
01:28:00
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And if I knew them, then I could I could convince them.
01:28:05
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And wouldn't it be great if I had an influential website where maybe maybe my requests would carry an unfair amount of weight and I could convince the people who make the apps that I use and love to implement features that come to my mind.
01:28:41
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I mean, I'm sure I have the floppy back here, but like the first time I got Photoshop, I just walked into the computer lab at school with a floppy disk, stuck it in the thing and dragged Photoshop onto the disk because you could do that back then and walked off with it.
01:28:55
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And now we know several people who are or have been working on Photoshop.
01:29:14
◼►
The copy protection, such that it was, was that when you registered the copy, if you bought, legit bought the fresh copy and then you launched it, it would ask for a serial number and a name.
01:29:27
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And I guess, and again, anything went back in those days, the app would write that information into its own resource fork somewhere.
01:29:37
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So that when you'd copy like a Drexel University licensed copy of Photoshop and then you'd launch it at home, if you went to about Photoshop, it would say licensed to Drexel University, whatever lab.
01:30:00
◼►
But honestly, it is, there is a weird, so it's not just that people like Lex and Adam are making really clever, cool apps and they are people who previously did not make clever, cool apps, but they're making cool apps and they're making, adding new features at, to me, at a crazy pace.
01:30:19
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Like, all these years, literally at this point, it seems crazy to say, but decades that I've known very talented developers who make software I use, I've never, I mean, when I worked at Barebone Software, I was in the office with Rich Siegel.
01:30:35
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I didn't get changes made as quickly as I do now, just by sending them to Lex on iMessage.
01:30:44
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And then all of a sudden, later in the same day, he's got a build that does it.
01:30:47
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It's like crazy, but it's a very cool app, Gnome.
01:30:51
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You know what my least favorite changes from Tahoe, and it is either exactly the same or almost exactly the same in Golden Gate, and I'm very sad that they didn't fix it, is I hate the way highlighted menus look.
01:31:06
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Like, file, edit, view, like when you click the file menu, the highlight over the word file, not the menu that drops down, but the highlight on the menu, I hate now that it's not like a rectangle with round corners, it's like a pill.
01:31:26
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I think that the menu should look like a tab, right?
01:31:30
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It should be, and it should be connected to the menu underneath.
01:31:33
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It's sort of a classic look to the menu.
01:31:37
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And that you could draw, and if you drew like a SF symbol of a menu from the menu bar dropping down,
01:31:45
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you would have a very strongly highlighted menu title, and then it has a tab at the upper left corner, and then the rectangular menu underneath.
01:31:55
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The Tahoe look for this, it just, every single time I click a menu in Tahoe or now Golden Gate.
01:32:09
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It looks like they're embarrassed, right?
01:32:11
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And I've always, you laugh, but I honestly think that that was sort of part of the wrong direction that Mac UI has gone for 10 years at Apple has been,
01:32:22
◼►
there's a contingent of designers or interface thinkers within Apple who didn't like the menu bar, right?
01:32:30
◼►
They're like, oh, we should make it hide automatically, or we should make it smaller, we should make it clear, we should de-emphasize it.
01:32:36
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Put more, do everything, nobody goes in a menu bar anyway.
01:32:40
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And it's like, well, nobody goes to the menu bar if you make it look visually less prominent, right?
01:32:44
◼►
Below these many years later, it is one of the, it is an idea that is literally, the basic concept is unchanged from 1984, like the original Mac.
01:32:56
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But it is a great way to organize a complete hierarchy of everything the app does.
01:33:03
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By having a reasonably limited number of menus that can fit in a menu bar, and you have to give them a title, it forces the developer to sort of organize them into, I don't know, what's the most menus an app can have reasonably?
01:33:20
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Maybe nine or 10, but for the most, most apps have five, six, seven menus.
01:33:24
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Some of them are standard, and everybody knows what to expect in the file and edit and probably a view menus.
01:33:32
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The window menu is pretty standard across all apps.
01:33:35
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You kind of know which stuff goes there.
01:33:37
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And so you end up with this consistency across all Mac apps for so many things.
01:33:49
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You go to view, customize toolbar, and then you can customize the toolbar in your Mac app.
01:33:55
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It's such a great organizing feature, and it seemed like Apple was de-emphasizing it.
01:34:00
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And I kind of get it for some users that a certain level of basic functionality should be in the main menu, but they lost the balance of, hey, everything could be a control in the windows, and you don't need to worry about the menus.
01:34:16
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And it's like, no, the menu is where an app can be rich and full and have a bunch of features that are more esoteric but important to some number of people.
01:35:29
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I will say that I know, and I still don't think Apple's documented it anywhere, but I did it since the last episode of this show.
01:35:36
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Last time I talked to Jason, I was running iOS 27 on a spare phone, but my main iPhone was still on iPhone or iOS 26.
01:35:47
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But I upgraded both to the other one, the main one to 27, because the Siri AI is so good, so useful, I don't care what other bugs there are.
01:35:58
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So starting with beta 2, I'm running it.
01:36:00
◼►
But I had done the thing where I upgraded it to the developer beta of iOS 26.6, because they said that if you do that, it'll do the indexing.
01:36:13
◼►
It'll do the pre-indexing, yeah, right.
01:36:54
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If you're waiting like a sane person for the real version of iOS 27 in September, 26.6 will surely be out any day now, right?
01:37:03
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Probably, I don't know, either by the end of this month or early in July.
01:37:06
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And you could just never put a beta on your phone.
01:37:10
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And by the time iOS 27 rolls out, you'll never, the indexing thing will be a problem that only those of us who installed developer betas in June ever had to worry about.
01:37:31
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Do you remember there was a Kickstarter project last year for a book called Go Computer Now, I think is the name of the book.
01:37:39
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But a guy named Ben Zotto wrote it, and it was about a computer company I'd never heard of before, the Sphere Computer Company from, like, the early days of the PC industry, like, 1980.
01:38:37
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But he sent me a coffee mug and a very nice little paper letter on paper thanking me for having linked to his Kickstarter and that when I linked to it, it goosed the sales significantly.
01:38:48
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And he sent me a nice little mug, and it was a delightful little gift to get in the mail.
01:40:51
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I wouldn't be surprised if I do get stupid and just install the beta of Golden Gate on my main, the M1 Max MacBook Pro I talked about earlier on the show, by the end of summer.
01:41:03
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Because I'm already running into situations where I want to ask questions of the new Siri AI, but I'm working.
01:41:11
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I'm on that computer, and that's still running Sequoia.
01:41:13
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And so I'm literally pulling my iPhone out of my pocket to do things.
01:41:19
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And I'm like, oh, I can't wait until I have this on my Mac.
01:41:22
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And then that part of my brain that installed disk doubler without any backup...