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590: Buy Your Car an iPhone

 

00:00:00   I have a ridiculous product category

00:00:03   that I would like to briefly review.

00:00:05   - This is gonna be interesting, carry on.

00:00:08   - Do you remember a few, maybe six months ago,

00:00:11   it was a while ago, I remember exactly what it was,

00:00:13   it was when the new iPhones came out.

00:00:15   Remember they ran a little warm,

00:00:17   and we were discussing briefly how,

00:00:19   isn't it annoying when you first get a new iPhone

00:00:22   and it has to re-index everything

00:00:23   as it's being all set up and everything,

00:00:25   and it's indexing all your photos,

00:00:26   and it gets really hot, and maybe slows down

00:00:29   and throttles its performance as a result.

00:00:31   And we jokingly discovered that Razer,

00:00:35   the gaming PC company, they make a magnetic clip-on,

00:00:40   a MagSafe mounting cooling fan

00:00:43   with a thermoelectric element, slash Peltier,

00:00:46   however you pronounce those, with one of those in it

00:00:49   to help cool phones while gaming.

00:00:52   - Are you about to pull a KC?

00:00:54   - What does that mean?

00:00:55   - Talk about something that we've talked about

00:00:56   in past episodes already.

00:00:58   - Oh, well fair, that is 100% pulling a KC.

00:01:00   - Let's see, let's sit back and watch.

00:01:02   - He just said what we spoke about in the past,

00:01:04   so he's clear, he's acknowledged it.

00:01:06   - Go ahead, and also.

00:01:07   - Well, I thought, I have to try this.

00:01:12   - Why, we slowed down, why?

00:01:13   Why do you need to cool your phone?

00:01:16   - About once a year, I need that,

00:01:18   because when I'm setting up a new iPhone,

00:01:21   it's really kind of terrible, so I thought,

00:01:22   you know what, what the heck, let me try it,

00:01:24   I can talk about it on this show.

00:01:26   I placed an order on Amazon, like, shortly after

00:01:28   we recorded that episode, it was back ordered immediately

00:01:31   and just has never arrived, like, it never will arrive

00:01:34   at this point, in the intervening times,

00:01:36   random Amazon sellers with those vowel combination names

00:01:40   that, you know, they last about six months

00:01:42   before they disappear and make new vowel combination names,

00:01:44   they have come up with entries in this product category.

00:01:47   And at the same time, I have been facing a problem,

00:01:50   as I am using my iPhone 15 Pro on the dashboard of my car,

00:01:55   like, in the dash mount on road trips,

00:01:57   as it's getting warmer, it's starting to become a problem

00:02:01   that my phone is really getting, like, quite hot in the car

00:02:05   while being used this way.

00:02:06   - Why don't you use CarPlay?

00:02:07   - Mm-hmm. - Mm, you should.

00:02:09   You definitely should use CarPlay.

00:02:10   - I'm gonna say that every time you bring this.

00:02:11   - You should.

00:02:12   So anyway, so I, and it's getting so hot that, you know,

00:02:14   like, the screen starts dimming and the battery

00:02:17   can't keep up with the charge and everything,

00:02:18   so I'm like, this is kind of annoying.

00:02:20   It's also probably not good for the phone,

00:02:22   for its battery life and et cetera,

00:02:23   and for its components to be, like, super hot for hours

00:02:26   when I'm doing, like, long road trips.

00:02:28   - You should buy your car on an iPhone.

00:02:30   Remember when you bought your car a watch?

00:02:31   (laughing)

00:02:33   Just to justify iPhone is just for the car.

00:02:35   (laughing)

00:02:36   - Anyway, so I ordered two product entrants

00:02:41   in this category.

00:02:41   One is just, like, basically a direct copy

00:02:45   of the Razer thing, so it's just a fan

00:02:48   with a thermoelectric plate in it

00:02:50   to chill below ambient temperature,

00:02:53   and it just has a USB-C input,

00:02:55   and it mounts via MagSafe, so it doesn't charge the phone.

00:02:59   I was a little wary, like, you know,

00:03:02   'cause the way thermoelectric plates work,

00:03:05   it's incredibly power consuming.

00:03:07   It's nothing like a heat pump, like an air conditioner,

00:03:09   where, like, you can get pretty cool temperatures

00:03:12   that are not that much energy.

00:03:13   No, like, those Peltier plates use a ton of power

00:03:17   to make a little bit of cooling,

00:03:18   and so I thought, how much could I possibly get

00:03:21   out of, like, a USB-powered fan for 30 bucks on Amazon?

00:03:25   Like, how cool could it possibly get?

00:03:27   Let me tell you, surprisingly cool.

00:03:30   It's cool to the touch immediately upon plugging it in,

00:03:33   and it actually cools the phone pretty well.

00:03:36   That being said, the one that just mounts to the back

00:03:38   and just like a standalone thing,

00:03:39   it's not really made to be used in a car.

00:03:42   What I wanted for the car was a MagSafe charging puck

00:03:46   on some kind of mount that could, like,

00:03:48   stick to the dash in some way

00:03:50   that also had cooling built in.

00:03:53   - Does this actually exist?

00:03:54   I'm assuming you're about to tell me it does.

00:03:56   - Of course it exists because of Amazon.

00:03:58   So, not only does it exist, there's like 25 of them,

00:04:01   all again from these weird, you know, no-name brands.

00:04:04   So, of course, I got two of them to try,

00:04:08   'cause they, like, I had to know what would fit my car.

00:04:10   There's not a lot of options that will,

00:04:12   that have, like, a stick-on mount.

00:04:13   Usually they require, like, the vent mounting,

00:04:15   which the placement of the vents in Rivian's,

00:04:18   it's like, it's only down low, so there's not really

00:04:21   anywhere to put something like that.

00:04:22   Anyway, so I tried one of these,

00:04:24   and I actually took my last road trip with it.

00:04:26   I went upstate about a week ago,

00:04:29   and it worked fantastically.

00:04:32   So, let me just set expectations accordingly.

00:04:35   That version of it that has, like,

00:04:37   charging and a cooler in it, the phone does not get cool.

00:04:42   It is not strong enough, it just can't keep up.

00:04:44   That's a huge thermal load.

00:04:45   It does not keep up, it does not keep the phone cool.

00:04:47   However, it does keep the phone a lot less warm,

00:04:51   and so it keeps it from overheating.

00:04:54   It keeps the screen from dimming,

00:04:55   it keeps it very slowly charging,

00:04:58   and so it actually does serve a pretty useful function here.

00:05:02   Like, in the summertime, when my phone was getting so hot

00:05:05   in, like, regular car rides, it was, like, hot to the touch,

00:05:08   it actually works.

00:05:09   So, this ridiculous thing in my car

00:05:12   that was from some no-name brand,

00:05:14   that has a thermoelectric plate and a cooling fan

00:05:17   behind my phone and MagSafe charges it, actually works,

00:05:21   and is totally worth the whatever 35 or 40 dollars it was.

00:05:25   So, I gotta say, if you have this problem,

00:05:29   check out this category of products.

00:05:30   You don't think it would work, it shouldn't work,

00:05:33   and yet it does work.

00:05:35   - Yeah, you already mentioned this,

00:05:36   like the Rivian Vans are down low or whatever,

00:05:37   but the regular car version of this, like in my car,

00:05:40   is where my MagSafe, my charging MagSafe magnetic mount

00:05:44   is clipped to an air vent.

00:05:46   - Just turn the AC on and it blows AC air

00:05:48   on the back of my phone the whole time I'm driving

00:05:50   and my phone gets cold, literally cold, so.

00:05:52   - Yeah, I mean, that is the better approach

00:05:54   if you have that option.

00:05:55   - I mean, it's not, I don't know if that's,

00:05:56   it's not intentional, I don't actually like it

00:05:58   that it's blowing air on it,

00:05:59   because in the winter it blows hot air,

00:06:00   but, you know, the fact is, my phone doesn't overheat.

00:06:04   - Can you put a link to this, certainly in the show notes,

00:06:07   can you share it with us so I can laugh

00:06:08   at how ridiculous this is?

00:06:09   - Oh yeah, it's bad, I mean, 'cause it's hideous,

00:06:12   I mean, here, let me show you, hold on.

00:06:13   - So, you said, like, the Rivian Vans,

00:06:15   like, you can't clip anything to them, they're just too,

00:06:16   they're too weird, like, weird electric car-y type vents

00:06:18   and they're down too low?

00:06:20   - They are weird electric car events,

00:06:21   but yeah, the bigger problem is that they're mounted down,

00:06:24   like, at the bottom of the dashboard,

00:06:25   it's actually, it's not a great place for them

00:06:26   even just to be vents, although Hopps loves them.

00:06:30   All right, so I just put a link in the chat.

00:06:33   (laughing)

00:06:33   - It's like a big tongue.

00:06:35   - It's like a gigantic tongue. - It's like a big tongue

00:06:37   licking an ice hockey puck.

00:06:39   - So I have that, I'm using that mount

00:06:43   with this second one, with this charging pad,

00:06:47   'cause this one was a little bit,

00:06:49   it had a little bit stronger cooling.

00:06:51   - I love that the artwork makes it look like

00:06:52   it's gonna make frost form on your phone,

00:06:54   which I think would not be good.

00:06:55   - No. (laughing)

00:06:57   - Truthfully, it's not as bad as I thought,

00:06:59   but it's not great.

00:07:01   - No, I mean, look, it's ugly, but you don't see it,

00:07:03   and one thing I was surprised by,

00:07:05   the fan really is not loud.

00:07:07   Like, you really don't hear the fan in a car.

00:07:10   - Cars are loud, like, it's gonna be drowned out

00:07:11   by the sound of the car. - Not his.

00:07:12   Yeah, electric cars aren't.

00:07:13   I was actually concerned about that.

00:07:15   - No, just like the wind noise and tire noise alone.

00:07:17   - Yeah, I mean, the tire noise, yeah, for sure.

00:07:19   Like, you do hear that, but I was very pleasantly surprised

00:07:23   that it actually is really not too loud.

00:07:26   Here, this and this one, if you just want a cooler,

00:07:30   not a charger, this is the other one

00:07:33   that actually cools it substantially better.

00:07:35   I think they're all kind of limited by how much power

00:07:36   they're going to draw from USB.

00:07:38   Like, I have one of those little USB power meter things.

00:07:40   The one, the lysin one, that one draws the most,

00:07:44   that's about 20 watts while charging a phone and cooling.

00:07:47   That seems to be the max.

00:07:48   Everyone else was around like 12 to 15 watts.

00:07:51   So, like, they could theoretically use USB power delivery

00:07:54   to have like even higher rates,

00:07:56   but for some reason they don't do that,

00:07:58   and I haven't looked into that further,

00:07:59   but like, I haven't found one that does for whatever reason.

00:08:01   But this, look, these are fine.

00:08:04   Like, they work fine.

00:08:06   It's a bit of a, and look, this is ridiculous.

00:08:09   You shouldn't need to do this.

00:08:10   Our phones shouldn't be overheating

00:08:12   when just operating in a car, but they do, and here we are.

00:08:16   - Well, I don't know if you can blame it on the phone.

00:08:19   I mean, I would blame it on the car maker

00:08:20   for making you use your phone in that way,

00:08:21   but like, because the car is like,

00:08:24   even when you're driving,

00:08:24   I know it's like air conditioned or whatever,

00:08:26   but it's like in direct sunlight, right?

00:08:28   So that's not a great-- - Pretty much.

00:08:30   - And it's like a little greenhouse.

00:08:31   It's a difficult situation.

00:08:33   - Yeah, and I'm using wireless charging,

00:08:34   which of course, like, generates some heat,

00:08:37   and I have a case around the phone,

00:08:39   which of course also basically insulates the heat

00:08:42   on the inside.

00:08:44   So there's a lot of factors working against it,

00:08:47   but it is kind of a ridiculous problem,

00:08:48   but a ridiculous problem deserves a ridiculous solution,

00:08:50   and I found one.

00:08:51   - All right, let's do some follow up.

00:08:55   Cywazam or something like that wrote,

00:08:58   with regard to the Snapdragon X10, whatever this is,

00:09:03   trillions of operations per second,

00:09:04   and that person wrote, "While 40 tops is the minimum spec

00:09:08   for something to be called a co-pilot plus PC,

00:09:10   all Snapdragon X Elite and plus chips

00:09:13   are actually rated at 45 trillion operations per second."

00:09:17   - I apologize for underselling the Snapdragon X, 45 tops.

00:09:21   - Excellent, I am glad to hear it.

00:09:24   Justin Long has come back around.

00:09:26   I don't know, I actually really liked him

00:09:28   when he was very popular like 15 years ago,

00:09:30   but he is the actor that you would know as the Mac

00:09:33   to the foil of John Hodgman's PC,

00:09:36   and he came back to promote Qualcomm-powered Windows PCs.

00:09:41   I don't even know what to make of this,

00:09:42   but The Verge writes, "Apple swarmer on the Mac

00:09:44   actor Justin Long defected to Intel a few years ago,

00:09:47   and now he's looking to switch

00:09:47   to a Qualcomm-powered Windows PC

00:09:49   during Qualcomm's Computex 2024 keynote today.

00:09:52   Long appeared in a brief 30-second skit

00:09:53   where he was bombarded by macOS notifications

00:09:55   and NAG screens causing him to start searching

00:09:57   for a Snapdragon-powered PC instead."

00:10:00   Cool.

00:10:00   - I'll put a link to Gruber's post about this,

00:10:03   which covers pretty much everything I wanted to say about it,

00:10:05   but yeah, the main thing that's really baffling is like,

00:10:08   okay, so you get the actor that was in an Apple ad campaign,

00:10:11   you try to ride in Apple's coattails to do a thing,

00:10:13   Intel has done it before,

00:10:14   apparently he's done this for Huawei as well, whatever.

00:10:18   But you have to have some motivation

00:10:20   for the person in the ad to be saying,

00:10:22   "I'm dissatisfied with Apple,

00:10:24   so I'm gonna get a CoPilot Plus PC," or whatever, right?

00:10:27   But the reason he's dissatisfied is he gets notifications,

00:10:32   like the email has arrived and stuff.

00:10:35   I mean, you can turn off notifications.

00:10:37   They should have asked an actual Mac user,

00:10:38   "What's annoying about macOS?"

00:10:40   We can tell you.

00:10:40   There are things you could put in the ad that are legit,

00:10:43   but what they had in the ad was like,

00:10:44   "Why does this make him want a new computer?"

00:10:46   It is just not a sensible ad,

00:10:49   and it shows real, just not...

00:10:52   Again, just ask anyone who has a Mac.

00:10:53   They'll tell you what's annoying about macOS.

00:10:55   For example, I think that people have done ads on this,

00:10:57   all the stupid permission things, right?

00:10:59   The pop-up, you know, we've been complaining about for ages

00:11:02   that Jason Stenell had a big post about

00:11:03   when he had to set up a new computer.

00:11:04   That's actually annoying.

00:11:06   Show those flying in his face and saying,

00:11:07   "Boy, I just tried to set up a new computer,

00:11:09   "and I had to give a million different permissions

00:11:10   "to a million different apps.

00:11:12   "I'm gonna get a Snapdragon X Co-Pilot Plus PC

00:11:15   "because then I won't have to deal with that."

00:11:16   I don't know if that's actually true,

00:11:17   but that would be a sensible ad

00:11:19   showing an actual pain point, but this failed to do that.

00:11:21   So anyway, I'm glad he's getting paid to do ads,

00:11:24   and it is really just a...

00:11:27   It's not, I don't know, embarrassing move

00:11:32   to be trying to play off of a very, now very old

00:11:37   Apple ad campaign rather than making your own ad campaign,

00:11:39   but you know, advertising is what it is.

00:11:42   - All right, so Windows Recall,

00:11:45   everyone seemed to be really worked up

00:11:47   about how this was gonna be a security nightmare,

00:11:48   and I'll actually admit that I assumed that, no,

00:11:53   they, Microsoft knows what they're doing.

00:11:55   This surely can't be as bad as everyone fears.

00:11:58   Well, it's as bad as everyone fears, if not worse.

00:12:01   Recall is part of the, Nith is reading from Verge,

00:12:03   "Recall is part of the new Co-Pilot Plus PCs

00:12:05   "that are debuting on June 18th,

00:12:06   "but experts who have tested the feature

00:12:08   "are already warning that Recall could be a quote-unquote

00:12:10   "disaster for cybersecurity."

00:12:12   Kevin Beaumont writes,

00:12:13   "Stealing everything you've ever typed or viewed

00:12:15   "on your own Windows PC is now possible

00:12:16   "with two lines of code."

00:12:18   Cool.

00:12:19   - Kevin's post has a big mock Q&A

00:12:22   about the way it's implemented.

00:12:23   So as we said in the last show,

00:12:25   or maybe it was the show before that,

00:12:27   the people who have not sort of mentally prepared

00:12:29   for the idea of a feature like this

00:12:31   by knowing about rewind or live streams or whatever,

00:12:35   it's just blowing their mind

00:12:36   that something's gonna be recording their screen

00:12:37   all the time and it seems really terrible

00:12:39   and they don't want it.

00:12:40   And now that people see the actual implementation,

00:12:43   yes, the implementation does have problems,

00:12:45   but a lot of the freaking out about it

00:12:47   is about sort of policy decisions.

00:12:50   So one of them is that it's on by default,

00:12:52   and apparently during the setup process for a new PC,

00:12:56   you can't opt out during the setup process.

00:12:59   You have to finish the setup process

00:13:00   and then go in settings and turn it off, right?

00:13:02   So you can turn it off, but it's on by default

00:13:04   and you have to hunt down the thing to do it,

00:13:05   which is mind boggling.

00:13:06   Everyone has, like all the enterprise admins

00:13:08   for Windows PC, enterprise IT people are already paranoid.

00:13:13   I'm sure they're slamming Microsoft saying,

00:13:15   "We need a way to turn this off by default

00:13:17   "because we don't want everything recorded on our computers

00:13:19   "'cause during legal discovery, during lawsuits,

00:13:22   "we don't wanna give a lot of information," all that stuff.

00:13:25   And then as you alluded to, Casey, there's the,

00:13:27   "Okay, but how is that actually implemented?"

00:13:29   Some aspects of it are unavoidable.

00:13:31   If you are recording everything that's on the screen

00:13:34   and those recordings are accessible to the logged in user,

00:13:36   then those recordings are accessible to the logged in user.

00:13:39   You know what I mean?

00:13:40   People want it to be recorded, but they're like,

00:13:42   "Yeah, but I don't want bad people to see it."

00:13:43   Well, guess what?

00:13:44   Bad people can gain access to your account as you,

00:13:47   and then if you can see it, they can see it.

00:13:49   So the mere existence of a treasure trove of recordings

00:13:52   of everything you've done is in itself a security problem

00:13:56   no matter how quote unquote secure it is.

00:13:58   There's no way you can make it so secure

00:14:00   that it can't be hacked because then the user

00:14:02   wouldn't be able to see it either.

00:14:04   Like for it to be useful, you have to be able to go back

00:14:07   in time and look at stuff.

00:14:08   If you take away that ability, you can make it real secure.

00:14:12   It's not a very useful feature, right?

00:14:13   So that I think is just, that's never gonna be fixed.

00:14:18   It's just people are just gonna have to live with it

00:14:20   and deal with it and it'll be fine.

00:14:21   But the second part is, okay, but you should at least

00:14:23   make it so that other people can't see it easily.

00:14:25   Like it should be encrypted on disk and stuff like that

00:14:27   and they didn't even do that.

00:14:28   It's like in a plain unencrypted SQLite database

00:14:31   that's accessible to, of course the logged in user,

00:14:35   apparently it's also accessible to any admin user

00:14:37   on the system.

00:14:37   It's just a plain text file.

00:14:38   Like they didn't even encrypt it at rest.

00:14:40   So implementation of this does not look great

00:14:43   and turning it on by default does not seem great.

00:14:45   And it's basically giving the Co-Pilot Plus PCs

00:14:47   kind of a marketing black eye before they have a chance

00:14:51   to impress people with all the good things about them.

00:14:53   You know what I mean?

00:14:54   Like this is not the fault of the Snapdragon X processor.

00:14:57   This is not the fault of the hardware.

00:14:59   It's the fault of Windows, including this feature

00:15:01   and turning it on by default

00:15:02   and apparently implementing it poorly.

00:15:03   So I don't know, Microsoft, they've got a lot of work.

00:15:06   But by the time you hear this episode,

00:15:08   presumably Microsoft will have issued an apology

00:15:09   and said they're not gonna have it on by default

00:15:11   and yada yada, but right now things don't look good.

00:15:13   - Yeah, I mean, I assume they will have it off by default

00:15:16   before it's released because there's way too many problems.

00:15:19   And we talked about all this when Rewind AI came out.

00:15:23   You know, whenever we talked about that like months ago.

00:15:25   And then again on our overtime a couple weeks ago.

00:15:27   You know, as you said, there's really no good way

00:15:31   to have this data be like, you know,

00:15:35   quote only accessible to good reasons

00:15:38   or good people or whatever.

00:15:39   I think the ultimately, as long as this data

00:15:43   is being collected somewhere on your computer

00:15:45   or on some service, like whatever it is,

00:15:47   like even if you have it all local, all encrypted,

00:15:50   it's still being collected.

00:15:52   And there will be ways to exploit that.

00:15:55   People will find security holes,

00:15:56   malware will try to access it,

00:15:58   some malware will succeed in accessing it.

00:16:01   There are also things like legal discovery risks

00:16:03   and things like that to, you know,

00:16:05   that will make a lot of companies not wanna do it.

00:16:06   - And just plain old social engineering,

00:16:07   because again, the user can access it.

00:16:09   So if you can convince the user to do something,

00:16:11   like that's most of hacking and malware

00:16:13   is based on tricking people into doing something, right?

00:16:16   And there's, again, there's no way to collect this

00:16:19   and have it be totally safe.

00:16:21   If the user has access to it, the user is the weakest link.

00:16:24   - Yeah, and there are so many practical and privacy concerns

00:16:29   and just legal concerns with this.

00:16:32   How are they getting around things like wiretapping laws?

00:16:35   There's so many problems with these kind of approaches.

00:16:39   I think it's interesting that these tools exist.

00:16:42   They make for fantastic demos

00:16:44   and some people will use them and will love them.

00:16:49   - It is so far from being appropriate to be on by default.

00:16:53   Like, we are nowhere, it is nowhere near

00:16:57   that universally good that it should be on by default.

00:17:00   This should be something that it's fine for companies

00:17:02   like Rewind to have products that do this.

00:17:05   It's interesting that Microsoft's doing it

00:17:06   at the OS level now.

00:17:07   It's wonderful to have it as an option

00:17:10   for those like power productivity users who know about it,

00:17:14   who know exactly what it's doing and who will opt into it.

00:17:17   It has to be only for them though.

00:17:19   It cannot be everyone opted in by default.

00:17:22   That is just irresponsible.

00:17:25   - Yeah, not good, Bob, but here we are.

00:17:28   AMD's next generation of AI laptop processors

00:17:31   have been announced.

00:17:32   Reading from The Verge, AMD announced at Computex 2024

00:17:35   that it's next generation of Ryzen laptop processors

00:17:38   for generative AI workloads.

00:17:40   The Ryzen AI 300 series.

00:17:42   It's a rebrand of its top tier Ryzen 9 chips.

00:17:44   The new Ryzen AI chips are built

00:17:45   on AMD's latest architectures for neural,

00:17:47   integrated graphics and general processing.

00:17:50   The first two processors in the series

00:17:51   are the Ryzen AI 9HX370, just rolls right off the tongue,

00:17:55   and the similarly eloquent Ryzen AI 9365.

00:17:59   Both have 50 trillion operations per second on their NPUs,

00:18:03   but the HX variant is the higher end of the two.

00:18:06   You know that because it says HX.

00:18:08   - So we mentioned last episode

00:18:10   or whenever we talked about the Copilot Plus PCs

00:18:11   that AMD and Intel also have processors

00:18:15   that they're gonna be rolling out

00:18:16   that are going to qualify as Copilot Plus PCs.

00:18:18   It's not just an ARM thing, so they're behind,

00:18:21   but they're catching up.

00:18:22   And look, there's AI right in the processor name.

00:18:24   I'm sure they'll never regret that branding

00:18:26   and it won't look dated when we look back on it.

00:18:28   (laughing)

00:18:29   But 50 tops, hey, better than 45, right?

00:18:31   So good job, AMD.

00:18:32   - Hooray.

00:18:33   All right, Intel has also detailed its new lunar lake CPUs

00:18:38   that will go up against the aforementioned AMD,

00:18:40   Qualcomm and Apple, reading this time from Ars Technica,

00:18:42   "Lunar Lake will be Intel's first processor

00:18:44   "with a neural processing unit or NPU

00:18:46   "that meets Microsoft's Copilot Plus PC requirements.

00:18:49   "Intel rates lunar lakes NPU raw performance at 48 tops.

00:18:52   "Lunar Lake has two functional tiles.

00:18:55   "The compute tile combines all of the processors,

00:18:57   "performance and efficiency cores, the GPU, the NPU,

00:19:00   "the display outputs, and the media encoding

00:19:02   "and decoding engine.

00:19:03   "And the platform controller tile handles wired

00:19:06   "and wireless connectivity, including PCIe

00:19:08   "and USB, Thunderbolt 4, and Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

00:19:12   "Another big packaging change is that Intel

00:19:13   "is integrating RAM into the CPU package."

00:19:15   Well, just like Apple.

00:19:16   - Yeah, so does this sound familiar?

00:19:18   This is, you know, Apple sort of led the charge here

00:19:21   in the mass market, in the market for mass market PCs, right?

00:19:25   They made their system on a chip,

00:19:26   it's got the RAM in the same package,

00:19:28   it's got the whole thing in a giant SOC.

00:19:30   Here's Intel finally catching up with that philosophy.

00:19:33   I think the AMD one is similar with the chiplet type thing,

00:19:36   but this is, I really feel like this is Apple leading.

00:19:41   And people are gonna say, well, Apple isn't the first one

00:19:42   to do that, lots of people have done it before,

00:19:43   so on and so forth.

00:19:44   But Apple showed that it can perform very well

00:19:47   in personal computers that they sell millions of

00:19:50   to regular people.

00:19:51   Put it all on one chip, put the GPU on there,

00:19:54   put the neuro-processing, the media encoder engine,

00:19:56   everything, and so here's Intel, basically many years later

00:20:00   saying, let's do that.

00:20:01   Now they have things separated,

00:20:03   I think we've talked about this before,

00:20:03   I think they're using like different processes

00:20:05   for different parts of the chip.

00:20:06   I think the connectivity thing is not built

00:20:10   on the same three nanometer processor,

00:20:12   whatever I think they might be.

00:20:13   I forget what the details are,

00:20:14   if they're using TSMC to fab this or whatever,

00:20:16   but so they're taking a slightly different approach to Apple

00:20:18   because Apple can afford to just put it on all one thing,

00:20:20   which has some efficiency benefits,

00:20:23   but of course it is also more costly.

00:20:25   But it's really kind of weird to see the PC world

00:20:29   essentially following Apple's lead and deciding,

00:20:32   you know what, that thing Apple decided to do with the M1,

00:20:35   we should make all our PCs like that too.

00:20:38   Snapdragon, AMD, Intel,

00:20:41   all seem to be moving in that direction,

00:20:43   at least for like the low end and medium end

00:20:46   laptop type things.

00:20:47   When it comes to big desktop PC and gaming PCs,

00:20:50   they still have just giant discrete GPUs

00:20:52   that use a ton of power and giant chips that aren't SOCs.

00:20:56   So in that respect,

00:20:57   they're not following Apple down that path,

00:20:59   but boy, even if I predicted that,

00:21:03   you know, when the M1 came out,

00:21:04   by the time Apple has the M4,

00:21:06   Intel, AMD and the ARM things will be following.

00:21:09   I feel like this is unexpected.

00:21:10   I would have been more likely to think,

00:21:13   oh, maybe the whole PC world will go ARM

00:21:15   as discussed in past episode.

00:21:18   Doesn't look like they're all going ARM,

00:21:20   especially since the Co-Pilot Plus PC thing

00:21:22   isn't firing off like gangbusters,

00:21:24   but I'm still holding out hope.

00:21:25   And anyway, in the meantime,

00:21:26   Intel and AMD are in the game too.

00:21:30   - Speaking of Apple and M chips,

00:21:32   Apple says the M2 iPad Air,

00:21:35   no, it doesn't have 10 GPU cores.

00:21:37   We actually meant nine.

00:21:40   Cool, cool, we're cool, right?

00:21:42   Reading from MacRumors,

00:21:43   Apple has seemingly updated its tech specs webpage

00:21:45   for the latest M2 iPad Air models

00:21:47   to indicate the M2 chip has a nine core GPU

00:21:49   rather than 10 cores as previously stated.

00:21:52   The change was first reported by a nine to five Mac

00:21:53   based on available web snapshots.

00:21:55   The update to Apple's US website

00:21:56   was made within the last 10 days.

00:21:58   This was written two days ago as we record.

00:22:00   However, the equivalent webpage

00:22:02   on many of Apple's regional stores

00:22:04   still lists the M2 iPad Air as having a 10 core GPU.

00:22:07   Eventually a statement was provided to nine to five Mac

00:22:10   and Apple said that the details it shared

00:22:13   with the iPad Air's performance

00:22:15   were always based on a nine core GPU.

00:22:17   So Apple said, and I'm quoting,

00:22:18   "We are updating apple.com to correct the core count

00:22:20   for the M2 iPad Air.

00:22:21   All the performance claims for the M2 iPad Air are accurate

00:22:24   and based on a nine core GPU."

00:22:26   Whoopsie-dipsies.

00:22:27   - What a weird flub.

00:22:28   Like, I mean, it doesn't even seem like

00:22:30   it's a last minute decision.

00:22:32   This is something that had to have been decided long ago,

00:22:34   but like maybe there was a miscommunication.

00:22:36   Like they decided to go with the nine core

00:22:37   instead of the 10 core to save money on the iPad Air

00:22:39   and just the web team didn't hear about it

00:22:42   even though that decision was made four months ago.

00:22:44   Like, it's not like they started manufacturing the iPad Air

00:22:46   on the day of the announcement or something.

00:22:48   Very strange.

00:22:49   Not a big deal for the iPad Air.

00:22:50   That's fine, but I don't know what's going on over there.

00:22:53   - We are brought to you this episode by Squarespace,

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00:24:55   (upbeat music)

00:24:58   Let's talk about LLMs and how they can learn.

00:25:02   Adeiko writes, "There's some quote unquote new tech

00:25:05   "that aims to enable LLMs to learn in context,

00:25:08   "in production, avoiding limitations of relying solely

00:25:10   "on RAG or retrieval augmented generation.

00:25:14   "While promising this approach

00:25:15   "is significantly more expensive,

00:25:16   "here's a paper explaining,"

00:25:17   and we'll put it in the show notes,

00:25:18   "the methodology from earlier this year

00:25:19   "and a video discussing the current limitations

00:25:21   "you mentioned on the episode

00:25:22   "and a potential solution that is clearly explained."

00:25:25   So we'll put all three of these links in the show notes.

00:25:27   John, care to summarize and/or dissect for us?

00:25:30   - Yeah, so there's one video that says,

00:25:31   "What is RAG?

00:25:32   "What is retrieval augmented generation?"

00:25:34   And my summary of it would be,

00:25:37   you take what the person typed into their chat bot

00:25:39   and you stick a bunch of text in front of it.

00:25:42   And then you send that to the chat bot

00:25:44   and picking the text you stick in front of it,

00:25:47   I mean, they're not actually doing this,

00:25:49   but you can imagine if they ask some question about cars,

00:25:52   you would do a Google search based on what they asked

00:25:55   and take the results of that Google search

00:25:56   and stick it to the front of their text

00:25:58   and then take that whole wad of text

00:26:00   and throw it through the LLM, right?

00:26:02   It's taking more than what you said,

00:26:04   but trying to augment it with some context.

00:26:06   Okay, LLM, maybe you weren't trained

00:26:08   on any data about cars,

00:26:10   but I'm gonna pull the latest up-to-date information

00:26:12   about the car they mentioned in their prompt,

00:26:14   and I'm gonna put that in front of their prompt,

00:26:16   and then I'm gonna shove all that text, their question,

00:26:18   plus all the text I grabbed about the latest cars,

00:26:20   and I'm gonna chuck that into the LLM,

00:26:21   because the LLMs are like,

00:26:22   oh, I don't know anything after 2021, right?

00:26:25   Like the old versions of chat DPT would say that

00:26:27   because they were trained on older data.

00:26:29   Well, what if someone's asking about something

00:26:30   that's more recent that the LLM could not have been trained

00:26:32   on or maybe just wasn't trained on

00:26:33   because it's really narrow interest?

00:26:36   That's what RAG is, right?

00:26:37   But of course that has lots of limitations.

00:26:39   I will put the second video says,

00:26:41   what are the limitations of RAG?

00:26:42   And you learn all about that.

00:26:43   And then the final thing is continual learning

00:26:45   for large language models, the paper,

00:26:48   the scientific paper that we'll link,

00:26:50   and this is the thing from the abstract,

00:26:52   it says large language models are not amenable

00:26:53   to frequent retraining due to high training costs

00:26:56   arising from their massive scale.

00:26:57   However, updates are necessary to endow LLMs

00:26:59   with new skills and keep them up to date

00:27:01   with rapidly evolving human knowledge.

00:27:02   This paper surveys recent work

00:27:04   on continual learning for LLMs, right?

00:27:06   So the idea is, we said before,

00:27:07   when you throw things through an LLM,

00:27:09   the weights, the little numbers inside the LLM

00:27:12   don't change, right?

00:27:13   They take input, they produce output,

00:27:14   but the inside of that LLM never changes.

00:27:16   So you can't teach it anything.

00:27:17   All you can do is make your prompt bigger and bigger

00:27:19   and hope that the information in your prompt

00:27:22   influences the answer.

00:27:23   And it does influence the answer,

00:27:24   but not as much as training the LLM

00:27:26   on a whole bunch of that information, you know?

00:27:28   Anyway, so that's RAG.

00:27:30   - Right, so then Steven Tierney writes

00:27:33   that Sundar Pichai's infinite context window claim

00:27:36   from Google I/O seems to stem from this paper,

00:27:39   which is entitled Leave No Context Behind,

00:27:41   Efficient Infinite Context Transformers

00:27:42   with Infinite Attention.

00:27:44   This work introduces an efficient method

00:27:47   to scale transformer-based large language models

00:27:49   to infinitely long inputs with bounded memory and computation

00:27:52   A key component in our proposed approach

00:27:54   is a new attention technique

00:27:56   that incorporates a compressive memory

00:27:58   into the vanilla attention mechanism.

00:28:00   The attention mechanism in Transformers

00:28:01   exhibits quadratic complexity

00:28:03   in both memory footprint and computation time.

00:28:05   Compressive memory systems promise to be more scalable

00:28:07   and efficient for extremely long sequences.

00:28:10   Instead of using an array

00:28:11   that grows with the input sequence length,

00:28:13   a compressive memory primarily maintains

00:28:15   a fixed number of parameters to store and recall information

00:28:17   with a bounded storage and computation cost.

00:28:20   In the compressive memory,

00:28:21   new information is added to the memory

00:28:23   by changing its parameters with an objective

00:28:24   that this information can be recovered back later on.

00:28:26   John, translate that for me, please.

00:28:28   - So the scaling thing for people

00:28:30   who ever took computer science class with big O notation

00:28:32   is like how does this algorithm scale

00:28:34   with the size of the input?

00:28:35   For example, linear scaling would be,

00:28:37   if you asked me to process 20 of these things,

00:28:39   I'd take twice as long as if you asked me to process 10.

00:28:42   Right, that's linear scaling.

00:28:43   You can have other kinds of scaling

00:28:45   where it scales to the square of the input

00:28:47   and that's worse, right?

00:28:49   And quadratic, that's what they're getting at there.

00:28:53   The point is if you make longer and longer inputs

00:28:55   to the LLM, it just, the time goes like a hockey stick graph

00:29:00   it gets really, really bad.

00:29:01   It doesn't even scale linearly.

00:29:02   And even linear would be bad

00:29:03   because Sundar Pichai was saying,

00:29:06   you're gonna have infinite context.

00:29:07   We have a limitation now of like 2 million tokens

00:29:10   and that's pretty good.

00:29:10   You can put a large wad of text through our LLM.

00:29:13   Pretty big, right?

00:29:14   But you can't, like I was mentioning,

00:29:16   the infinite context opened the door to the idea of like,

00:29:18   can you actually teach an LLM?

00:29:20   Well, if your context is infinite,

00:29:22   you can just keep typing stuff until the LLM gets it.

00:29:24   No LLM, let me tell you more about this thing.

00:29:27   And let me tell you more.

00:29:28   Like essentially, you're not training it,

00:29:29   you're not changing the weights,

00:29:30   but it's like anytime I type anything,

00:29:33   the last billion characters I've written to it

00:29:35   over the past five years get sent through the LLM

00:29:37   plus the question I just asked stuck at the end.

00:29:40   And that's, as you can imagine, incredibly inefficient

00:29:42   because of the way it scales.

00:29:43   So this infinite context thing is like,

00:29:45   well, we're not gonna do that.

00:29:46   Instead, we're gonna use this thing where we kind of like,

00:29:48   we try to do with a fixed amount of memory and computation.

00:29:51   I don't understand how they're doing it,

00:29:53   but it's like, I feel like they have some sort of block

00:29:55   that the input goes into

00:29:56   and then it modifies the values in that block

00:30:00   and it just keeps doing that over and over again.

00:30:01   And finally, it gets the final block

00:30:02   and sends that through the LLM

00:30:04   after it's been modified by all the input.

00:30:06   But it's much less compelling.

00:30:08   Like many people who wrote in about this is like,

00:30:09   yeah, it's not really infinite context.

00:30:11   It's more like taking an infinite amount of input

00:30:14   and squishing it down to a small finite size

00:30:16   and sending that through the LLM

00:30:17   and hoping you've preserved enough information

00:30:20   to get a useful answer out of it.

00:30:22   And by the way, the other thing,

00:30:23   the previous link about the continual learning

00:30:27   is that some people are looking into the idea

00:30:29   of what if we did change the weights

00:30:31   when you sent a question or something through?

00:30:33   If you talk to an LLM and you try to tell it something,

00:30:36   can we retrain based on what you put in

00:30:39   and change the weights of the model?

00:30:40   And that's an area of research or whatever.

00:30:42   And as I mentioned, we talked about this earlier,

00:30:45   that opens the door for people to screw up the LLMs

00:30:48   and make them terrible.

00:30:49   You could tell it a whole bunch of bogus stuff

00:30:51   and now your LLM just gets dumber and worse

00:30:53   and tells more lies.

00:30:55   It's like children.

00:30:56   You can teach them whatever you want.

00:30:58   You hope you teach them good things

00:30:59   and teach them how to read and write

00:31:01   and do math correctly and all

00:31:04   and be a nice polite person or whatever.

00:31:06   And what you will get out of all that effort

00:31:08   is hopefully a good adult.

00:31:11   But if you are terrible to them and do terrible things

00:31:13   and tell them lies, the results will be worse.

00:31:17   So the ability of, as you can imagine,

00:31:20   if you allowed anyone on the internet

00:31:22   to type anything they want

00:31:23   that would actually change your LLM,

00:31:26   that would be bad instantly.

00:31:27   We already saw that with the non-trainable LLMs.

00:31:31   Remember when Microsoft put their chatbot up

00:31:32   and it was spewing Nazi stuff?

00:31:34   That's just because it's trained on the internet

00:31:36   and it's filled with all sorts of terrible things.

00:31:37   So they're trying to tamp that down.

00:31:38   But this would be like, no, it will be retrained

00:31:41   based on the things you tell it.

00:31:43   Nightmare fuel.

00:31:44   But of course, if you had your own independent LLM

00:31:46   and you were sensible, then you could mess up yours

00:31:49   and other people would have their own

00:31:50   and they could mess up theirs.

00:31:51   And it's an interesting idea.

00:31:53   But the infinite contact window was like,

00:31:54   no, the LLM doesn't change until we release a new version.

00:31:57   The weights are unchangeable,

00:31:59   but we'll allow you to type an infinite amount

00:32:01   of information in your prompt

00:32:02   and maybe that'll make it do something sensible.

00:32:05   None of these approaches seem super great to me,

00:32:08   but I'm glad people are trying to figure out

00:32:10   how to get around the current limitations

00:32:12   because the current limitations are crippling

00:32:15   for some use cases.

00:32:15   Like they just basically make it impossible

00:32:18   to do certain things reliably.

00:32:20   It doesn't mean they're not useful.

00:32:21   They're useful for other things,

00:32:22   but certain use cases, it becomes completely useless.

00:32:25   So I will look forward to this research advancing,

00:32:28   but when it's appearing in scientific papers and stuff,

00:32:31   it makes me think it's many years

00:32:32   from being practically implemented, but we'll see.

00:32:35   - All right, as we sit here,

00:32:37   it is the evening of Wednesday the 5th.

00:32:41   And in just a few short days,

00:32:43   we will all be flying west to these greater San Jose area

00:32:47   in order to go to WWDC,

00:32:50   Apple's annual worldwide developer conference.

00:32:52   As we mentioned last episode,

00:32:53   all three of us will be there

00:32:54   barring any plane catastrophes.

00:32:56   And I know all three of us are super excited.

00:32:58   - What do you have to say?

00:32:59   (laughing)

00:33:00   - You know what?

00:33:01   You never know what'll happen.

00:33:02   So I just mean like a delay for the record.

00:33:05   I didn't mean--

00:33:06   - That's not what it sounded like.

00:33:07   - Please, please.

00:33:07   - Sorry.

00:33:08   It's not getting any better.

00:33:09   Don't worry, we'll fix it in post.

00:33:11   So yeah, WWDC is coming up.

00:33:13   So we should probably talk about what to expect.

00:33:16   And honestly, I'm very surprised,

00:33:20   well maybe not surprised,

00:33:20   but impressed with the lack of like concrete leaks.

00:33:23   And let me go through a few things here,

00:33:25   unless one of you has an opening statement.

00:33:26   Let me go through a few things

00:33:27   that we haven't really talked about

00:33:28   that we can use as jumping off points.

00:33:30   But by and large, I feel like it's pretty,

00:33:34   pretty well under lock and key

00:33:35   what we're gonna see on Monday.

00:33:37   - Why do you think that?

00:33:38   It's just because the things we've talked about

00:33:39   have been rumored.

00:33:40   I believe most of the things will come to pass,

00:33:42   and I think that's what they're gonna show.

00:33:44   But we'll say, we'll go through the items we have here.

00:33:45   We've talked about a lot of things on past episodes

00:33:48   that have been rumored for WWDC,

00:33:50   and I don't think many of them have been debunked.

00:33:52   They're just sitting out there waiting for us,

00:33:54   waiting to see if they're true or not.

00:33:56   - Yeah, so we'll start.

00:33:58   Mark Ermin has said, "Read my lips, no new hardware."

00:34:01   And so there's apparently not gonna be any hardware

00:34:04   this year, which I don't think is particularly surprising,

00:34:06   but Mark has stated it is definitely not happening.

00:34:09   - Yeah, that sometimes happens.

00:34:10   We have the no hardware WWDCs.

00:34:12   Sometimes Apple itself kind of leaks it

00:34:13   to control expectations.

00:34:15   In this case, I don't think there were any

00:34:17   particular expectations that Apple needed to leak

00:34:19   to tamp down, other than my unrealistic expectations

00:34:23   about the Mac Pro and the Mac Studio,

00:34:24   but there's cold water in that.

00:34:26   - My expectations about Siri not sucking.

00:34:29   - Well, yeah, but no hardware.

00:34:30   No hardware, WWDCs.

00:34:31   And we just had a bunch of hardware.

00:34:34   The only hardware that Apple should be updating right now

00:34:36   are the ones they apparently can't update

00:34:38   because the chips aren't ready,

00:34:39   and that would be the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro.

00:34:42   I mean, he was pretty definitive,

00:34:44   and when he comes out this close to WWDC

00:34:46   and says no hardware, I just have to accept

00:34:47   there's gonna be no hardware.

00:34:48   So I'm sad about it, but perhaps not surprising.

00:34:51   - You know, let me jump in and go a little off script here.

00:34:54   Do you think, Jon, that this is the year,

00:34:57   that the forthcoming macOS release,

00:34:59   whatever it may be called,

00:35:01   do you think that's the year that they start

00:35:03   really hammering down, or taking away stuff for Intel?

00:35:07   'Cause you weren't missing out on much

00:35:09   on your ancient-ass Mac Pro, right?

00:35:11   - Performance.

00:35:12   (laughing)

00:35:13   - Well done, Marco.

00:35:14   - Yeah, but didn't we talk about this?

00:35:16   Like what year we thought the Mac Pro should stop?

00:35:18   I forget what I predicted,

00:35:19   but whatever I predicted back then, I stick by,

00:35:22   'cause I think that was probably a reasonable prediction.

00:35:25   Maybe this year, I don't know.

00:35:26   I feel like it's a little bit early, but you know.

00:35:28   We'll see.

00:35:29   Like, half the reason I think it's not gonna come this year

00:35:33   is because that would require extra work by Apple

00:35:36   to deal with that, and they're like, "Ah, macOS.

00:35:38   "We really don't put that much effort in.

00:35:39   "Let's do it next year."

00:35:40   (laughing)

00:35:41   - Fair enough.

00:35:42   All right, so speaking of macOS and also iOS,

00:35:45   allegedly, according to Mark Gurman,

00:35:47   "The Settings app is getting revamped

00:35:49   "with a cleaner interface, better organization,

00:35:51   "and much improved search."

00:35:52   And that's both iOS and macOS.

00:35:53   Like I said, I'll believe it when I see it,

00:35:56   insofar as I don't doubt that they've touched

00:36:00   and maybe rejiggered some stuff in Settings,

00:36:03   but I don't know.

00:36:04   I am not as offended by Settings as most people,

00:36:07   but I can absolutely tell you it is a mess.

00:36:09   And although I haven't looked at it in a little while,

00:36:11   I feel like they've kind of given a hint about this

00:36:14   on the Vision Pro, because the Vision Pro settings

00:36:15   are vastly different than any other platform.

00:36:18   And to my recollection,

00:36:20   they do make a modicum of sense in there.

00:36:23   So maybe we'll see that getting cribbed

00:36:25   and put into iOS and macOS.

00:36:27   But one way or another, we're gonna get something different.

00:36:29   - Yeah, this rumor doesn't have enough detail

00:36:31   to be that interesting, either because it's just a vague

00:36:34   rumor and they don't have details,

00:36:35   or because the person conveying this rumor

00:36:37   doesn't understand what's wrong with Settings.

00:36:40   - Right.

00:36:41   - They just say, "I was revamped to get a cleaner interface."

00:36:43   I don't think the complaints were that the interface

00:36:44   was not clean.

00:36:46   - I mean, I don't feel clean using it.

00:36:48   (laughing)

00:36:49   - Jason had a good article of like,

00:36:50   "Look, you can use hierarchy to arrange information

00:36:53   "visually and conceptually, and that can make things

00:36:56   "easier to find."

00:36:58   And we don't wanna re-litigate everything

00:37:00   that's wrong with Settings, but there's no concrete things

00:37:02   about what are they fixing.

00:37:03   They're like, "Ah, well they're just rearranging stuff.

00:37:04   "Some things, they're putting things in different places,

00:37:06   "and the search will be better."

00:37:08   Those are all good, improvements are welcome,

00:37:10   but I haven't seen anyone say,

00:37:13   "They're totally overhauling it,

00:37:15   "and it's gonna be good now."

00:37:16   It's just, it's like minor improvements.

00:37:19   And I guess if you do minor improvements many years

00:37:21   repeatedly, you'll get better and better, and it'll be fine.

00:37:23   But I'm still not jazzed about the Settings app.

00:37:27   I mean, it's still full of bugs even.

00:37:29   Like, setting aside the design, which is I think still poor,

00:37:34   I don't really necessarily need them to massively revamp

00:37:38   the design if it's still gonna be this buggy.

00:37:40   Like, I'd rather, if they only do one thing to improve it,

00:37:43   I'd rather they make the current design

00:37:44   actually work correctly.

00:37:46   But that being said, a new design would also be welcome.

00:37:49   But I'm hoping whatever this rumor is,

00:37:51   I'm hoping that what they're really saying is,

00:37:54   it's been worked on a lot, and maybe that will include

00:37:56   some bug fixes also.

00:37:57   But it still feels like a broken web app version

00:38:02   of something that's trying to imitate an iOS settings screen.

00:38:06   Like, it does not feel like anything that would ever

00:38:09   have come from Apple if you would have shown people,

00:38:11   like, you know, even five or 10 years ago, like,

00:38:13   "Hey, this is current Apple software in the year 2024."

00:38:17   They would look at it and be like, "Are you serious?"

00:38:19   - Yeah, when we're talking about Mac OS settings,

00:38:21   but this rumor's actually primarily about iOS settings,

00:38:24   which, you know, we all are familiar with,

00:38:26   and doesn't need as much attention as Mac OS settings,

00:38:28   but I think they're rearranging stuff,

00:38:31   splitting out some things that were previously combined.

00:38:33   iOS settings, the search has always,

00:38:35   has had many years of work in it,

00:38:36   so that's how a lot of us navigate settings,

00:38:38   'cause you can't remember exactly where something is.

00:38:40   But, you know, in all cases, I feel like, you know,

00:38:44   the general philosophy of settings in both Mac OS

00:38:46   or iOS is being maintained to be the same.

00:38:49   They're just like, "Maybe we could arrange things better."

00:38:51   And I think on iOS, the design is reasonable.

00:38:54   On Mac OS, they should have better information,

00:38:57   organization, and hierarchy,

00:38:59   given the larger size of the screens

00:39:01   and the more sophisticated input methods.

00:39:02   And as for the bugs, we've said this before,

00:39:04   when settings was first redesigned,

00:39:05   how much of it is the settings app?

00:39:06   How much of it is Swift UI bugs, you know?

00:39:09   I mean, I know it's all the same company,

00:39:10   and they can complain directly to the Swift UI people,

00:39:12   but when stuff like text fields, like,

00:39:14   don't stay editable or lose focus

00:39:16   when you're in the middle of typing,

00:39:18   I worry, wonder about that.

00:39:19   And sometimes they're using, like,

00:39:20   quote-unquote standard controls

00:39:21   that I think are bad standard controls.

00:39:23   The settings team didn't define those controls.

00:39:25   They're using the standard controls

00:39:26   as part of this form thing in Swift UI,

00:39:29   and I think those controls are bad.

00:39:31   I think they look bad.

00:39:32   I think they don't work well,

00:39:33   but the settings team didn't make those, right?

00:39:36   They're just, you know, using the OS-level controls.

00:39:39   So to the extent that they're buggy,

00:39:40   I think a lot of it is probably on the frameworks teams,

00:39:43   and to the extent that those controls are bad,

00:39:45   that's all on the frameworks team.

00:39:46   Like, one of the things that drives me up a wall,

00:39:49   and I just can't believe, this is not,

00:39:51   I guess it's in settings,

00:39:52   one of the passwords pane in settings,

00:39:53   when you edit, like, a password,

00:39:56   and it makes you edit text in, like, a right-aligned thing.

00:39:59   I feel like I'm writing in a right-to-left language,

00:40:01   or a left-to-whatever,

00:40:02   whatever the opposite of the way English is.

00:40:05   - Right-to-left.

00:40:06   - Have you done this and seen it?

00:40:07   It breaks my brain, how, like, backspacing

00:40:10   and forward-spacing and moving text goes.

00:40:13   You're editing right-aligned text for, like, the password.

00:40:17   I don't want any surprises or unexpected behaviors

00:40:20   when I'm editing the text of a password in plain text, right?

00:40:24   Just, that's not a good way to let me edit information.

00:40:29   It's name-value pairs, username, password, website.

00:40:33   Don't make it right-aligned in a text field

00:40:35   that has no borders,

00:40:36   it's the same color as the background,

00:40:37   that just behaves in bizarre ways.

00:40:40   That's the stuff that really needs to be fixed,

00:40:42   and the settings team,

00:40:43   well, maybe for the right-aligned thing,

00:40:44   they have control over that,

00:40:45   but I'm not sure how much control

00:40:46   the settings team has over that, so.

00:40:48   - Well, but, I mean, this is maybe not their fault,

00:40:52   but it is their problem, you know?

00:40:54   Yes, they were building this app on what seems

00:40:57   to have been definitely a shaky design concept

00:41:01   of let's just make it look like iOS,

00:41:03   and that didn't go so well,

00:41:05   building it on top of SwiftUI for Mac,

00:41:07   which is not the greatest platform for SwiftUI

00:41:11   to date so far, but at the same time,

00:41:14   nobody was forcing them to do this.

00:41:15   Nobody was, or at least, you know, the SwiftUI team

00:41:18   doesn't run the company,

00:41:19   so the SwiftUI team was not forcing the rest of the company

00:41:21   to say, "Hey, you better rewrite all your stuff

00:41:23   "in SwiftUI right now."

00:41:24   And even if they were, that's not our problem

00:41:28   as the customers, like, this is a self-created problem

00:41:31   internally to Apple, so what we see,

00:41:35   we don't care what it's written in,

00:41:37   we don't care what team dynamics there were,

00:41:40   or what they wanted to do on a technical level

00:41:41   to make it more idealistic,

00:41:43   all we see is the Settings app is really weird and sucks now.

00:41:47   And granted, it was not in perfect shape before,

00:41:50   but it's bad now, and it looks like they did

00:41:54   a whole bunch of work and came out with something

00:41:56   that was just still very bad, just in new and different ways.

00:42:00   You know, the example you gave with the typing

00:42:02   in a write-a-line text field,

00:42:04   so much of what I see in the Settings app

00:42:07   feels like no one has ever used it.

00:42:09   Like, I feel like I'm trying out some code

00:42:13   that I just wrote for the first time,

00:42:15   and I'm running it in the simulator,

00:42:16   and I'm trying it out, and I'm like,

00:42:17   "Oh, this doesn't work.

00:42:19   "Okay, back to the drawing board."

00:42:20   But they shipped it that way.

00:42:22   Like, it just seems like it's like a design concept

00:42:26   that they showed in a meeting one day,

00:42:28   and someone hit the wrong button and shipped it.

00:42:30   - Yeah. - Yeah.

00:42:31   And the thing is, the reason I think

00:42:34   they're sticking with design, it did solve

00:42:36   a bunch of the problems they had

00:42:37   with the old fixed layout.

00:42:38   Like, if the old fixed layout just wasn't scalable,

00:42:40   you couldn't add more stuff easily,

00:42:42   everything was sort of hand-laid out,

00:42:43   and it was hand-laid out over a decade and a half

00:42:46   by different people, so you could sort of see

00:42:48   the different, one preference pane was different

00:42:50   than another was different than another,

00:42:51   based on when it was made and who made it

00:42:53   and what they decided to do and what mood they were in.

00:42:55   And this is uniform and scalable

00:42:56   and scrollable and extensible,

00:42:58   but the building blocks that they used to achieve that,

00:43:01   they're bad building blocks, right?

00:43:03   The individual controls, the way it scales,

00:43:06   the way it looks, the way it works, that's all bad.

00:43:08   So they did solve their problem.

00:43:10   And hey, now we have a scalable solution for settings

00:43:12   in Mac OS, but they've brought on themselves,

00:43:15   to your point, Marco, many new problems

00:43:17   by using these new controls that either weren't ready

00:43:20   or buggy or just bad ideas, and that is a shame.

00:43:23   So we'll see.

00:43:24   Again, I welcome any kind of improvement,

00:43:25   but there is no rumor that it's a complete overhaul

00:43:28   that adds information hierarchy and visual hierarchy

00:43:31   and restores some of the hand-laid out things

00:43:34   for the most common controls,

00:43:35   'cause that's what they should really do.

00:43:36   Like, the old hand-laid out one, like the good ones,

00:43:39   the nice preference panes that were hand-laid out

00:43:41   and beautiful, they were nice and easy to use,

00:43:43   and you could remember what they look like,

00:43:44   and you could remember where controls were spatially,

00:43:46   and it was like being in a place in a room

00:43:48   with furniture arranged and all my wonderful things

00:43:50   that I love, but it was just nice, right?

00:43:52   And you can't do that for every single one.

00:43:53   So you do need a scalable solution for more settings, right?

00:43:56   You gotta have that, and they should have a better system.

00:43:58   But for the most commonly used screen,

00:44:00   like the five most commonly used settings screens,

00:44:03   and I'm sure Apple knows what those are, hand-lay 'em out.

00:44:06   Bring in an actual good UI designer

00:44:08   who remembers what Mac user interfaces are supposed to look like.

00:44:10   Hell, bring someone who's ever used a web form,

00:44:13   because I can't remember any time I was asked

00:44:15   to update my passport on a web page,

00:44:18   and the text field was right aligned in English.

00:44:21   Doesn't make any sense.

00:44:22   Who thought of that?

00:44:23   Or the labels were massively far away from the values.

00:44:26   Just disappointing.

00:44:28   - It's an adventure in there, but we'll see what happens.

00:44:33   VisionOS 2.0.

00:44:36   There haven't been very many rumors about this.

00:44:38   Somebody pointed out, I don't have the toot in front of me,

00:44:41   but somebody pointed out that, hey,

00:44:43   VisionOS shipped in the middle

00:44:45   of the software life cycle for Apple.

00:44:48   And so it would not be surprising if VisionOS 2.0

00:44:51   is really just getting all the low-hanging,

00:44:52   or some of the low-hanging fruit that didn't ship for 1.0.

00:44:55   But one of the things that's been rumored, maybe,

00:44:57   is that some, or perhaps even all, of Apple's iPad apps

00:45:01   that are running in compatibility mode on the Vision Pro,

00:45:03   perhaps those will become real, honest-to-goodness

00:45:06   Vision Pro apps, so things like home,

00:45:08   calendar, podcast pages, et cetera.

00:45:11   Which I think is possible, although it would not surprise me

00:45:14   if that was issued in favor of doing something more

00:45:18   whiz-bang, but we'll see.

00:45:20   Maybe we would be able to rearrange the home screen.

00:45:22   That'd be cool.

00:45:23   - Yeah, so if these apps, if the things that shipped

00:45:26   as iPad apps are native, it makes me think

00:45:28   that they were already being developed,

00:45:30   they just weren't ready for launch, right?

00:45:32   'Cause I don't feel like they would launch the Vision Pro,

00:45:35   and then say, okay, now all those things

00:45:37   we had to ship as iPad apps, let's get teams

00:45:39   on those to make them.

00:45:41   Seems like they would have to be in progress already

00:45:42   and just didn't make the deadline.

00:45:43   But either way, this is embarrassing

00:45:44   when you launch a new platform,

00:45:46   and a whole bunch of your really important apps

00:45:49   are the iPad versions.

00:45:51   But Apple has done that in the past, like with the iPad,

00:45:55   not getting versions of Apple's own Pro apps

00:45:58   for years and years and years.

00:46:00   Sometimes it takes Apple a really long time

00:46:02   to get around to doing stuff.

00:46:03   And what was the iPad OS rumor

00:46:05   that's gonna get a calculator now?

00:46:06   It's just they just never got around to it, right?

00:46:08   And so, I mean, if they do this, at least it shows,

00:46:10   if they have, if they're all,

00:46:12   if all the iPad apps are now native,

00:46:14   I think that does show some level of commitment

00:46:16   that they realized it was embarrassing not to have that,

00:46:18   and it was just a timing thing,

00:46:19   and now they're fixing that.

00:46:21   But I agree with you, Casey,

00:46:22   that I don't expect Vision OS 2.0 to be massively different.

00:46:26   There's just so many obvious things they need to fix

00:46:30   and enhance, fix bugs, add minor features.

00:46:32   I don't even expect them to have

00:46:34   a big home screen rearranging thing.

00:46:35   If they do, it'll be very rudimentary,

00:46:37   'cause this is really just kind of like the,

00:46:39   you know, make it what we wish 1.0 could have been

00:46:42   if we had an extra, you know, six months.

00:46:45   - Yeah, 'cause that's really all it's been.

00:46:46   Like, you know, you think about every year,

00:46:49   you think about these platforms

00:46:50   going up by one whole version number,

00:46:51   and there being a certain kind of minimum amount

00:46:53   of improvement, but keep in mind,

00:46:55   like, Vision Pro was a half-year release.

00:46:58   And so it really hasn't been that long since 1.0.

00:47:01   And from all we've heard, it seems like software

00:47:05   was the, like, gating factor of when it could be released,

00:47:08   not hardware, so like, it's not like they have

00:47:10   a bunch of software work saved up for years,

00:47:12   you know, waiting to be released.

00:47:13   It's like, no, you know, what we got so far,

00:47:15   like, that's what they have so far.

00:47:17   And so I'm not expecting a lot of movement

00:47:20   on the Vision Pro software side yet.

00:47:22   It's just, it's too soon.

00:47:23   And that being said, like, keep in mind, too,

00:47:26   this is a very, like, distant forward-looking platform

00:47:30   for them, this is not gonna be a big seller

00:47:32   for a long time, if ever.

00:47:34   And so I think the level of improvement to expect

00:47:39   for Vision OS releases, even going forward,

00:47:41   even when they have full years to do it,

00:47:43   I'm expecting something more like WatchOS releases,

00:47:48   or tvOS releases, like, not, I'm not expecting, like,

00:47:51   major new changes and major new features

00:47:54   to be coming out every single year.

00:47:55   I think it's gonna be a slower update pace.

00:47:57   Like, I think this is a very long game

00:48:00   they're playing with Vision Pro.

00:48:01   I think, honestly, I would love to see them

00:48:03   step on the gas a lot harder,

00:48:04   but what we're seeing so far shows a different strategy,

00:48:07   but regardless, I don't expect a lot of movement

00:48:11   on this platform every single year.

00:48:13   I think it's gonna be a very slow burn.

00:48:16   - You did get that immersive environment

00:48:17   for working in Xcode, with the wavy neon lines and stuff.

00:48:21   - Oh, yeah, from the developer app.

00:48:23   - I mean, that's cool.

00:48:24   I guess I actually haven't tried this out yet,

00:48:25   but that's a thing, which is neat.

00:48:29   But yeah, I don't know, I would love to see,

00:48:32   even before I see a lot of software motion on VisionOS,

00:48:36   I really would prefer to just see content

00:48:39   more than anything else.

00:48:40   Like, that's what I feel like I want,

00:48:42   and we're just not getting it right now,

00:48:44   which is too bad, but, you know, it is what it is.

00:48:47   I will say, though, I was briefly using Vision Pro

00:48:49   using the Mac virtual display mode

00:48:53   with the developer strap on with a high-speed USB cable

00:48:57   plugged into my Mac, and I do really like that.

00:49:00   I mean, I was at home, so I only needed it

00:49:02   for a minute or two because I was working on something,

00:49:04   but it is pretty cool when it works,

00:49:08   particularly when it's done via a cable,

00:49:11   because then latency is much, much lower,

00:49:14   and I feel like the crispness of the display

00:49:17   is also considerably better, which I enjoy.

00:49:20   But yeah, I mean, I just want content.

00:49:22   Give me more content, 'cause I'm not using this thing

00:49:24   for work a whole heck of a lot.

00:49:25   I'm not sure anyone really is,

00:49:26   so I would really just love more content.

00:49:30   - Yeah, and that would also, I think,

00:49:32   significantly drive sales, too.

00:49:33   Like, that's what we need first, 'cause you're right.

00:49:35   Like, it's gonna be a long time

00:49:37   before there's meaningful software on here, if ever.

00:49:42   So, again, like Apple TV, like this,

00:49:44   when we had gone to the thing in November

00:49:50   that we can't talk about, the one thing I was dying

00:49:53   to talk about in the intervening months

00:49:54   between that and release was it was very obvious to me,

00:49:57   even from some past time, it was very obvious to me

00:50:02   that this feels like computing on a virtual Apple TV

00:50:06   with an infinitely sized screen.

00:50:08   And it does kind of physically feel like

00:50:11   you are kind of manipulating these giant apps

00:50:14   in your giant space with these kind of indirect mechanisms

00:50:18   of your eyes and pinching and flinging things around

00:50:21   and stuff like that.

00:50:22   And it kind of, like, it felt a lot like computing

00:50:27   on an Apple TV, but just in a much bigger way.

00:50:29   And obviously, better in some ways, worse in others.

00:50:31   But for the most part, it felt like it was closer to that

00:50:36   than using a laptop or an iPad or something like that.

00:50:38   And so, I think what I would expect here is,

00:50:42   I think it's gonna end up being a lot like the Apple TV

00:50:44   as an app platform, which is most apps will not find

00:50:48   much reason to be there, and most users won't want

00:50:51   to use most apps there, but with the right content

00:50:55   and with the right specialized apps,

00:50:57   this could be something people use frequently.

00:50:59   It just needs that content to be there.

00:51:01   Like, I never even think about making an Apple TV app,

00:51:04   but I use my Apple TV almost every day.

00:51:06   What do I use on my Apple TV?

00:51:08   Like, four apps.

00:51:09   But I use them almost every day.

00:51:11   So, the Vision Pro, I think, could be there.

00:51:13   I think it could reach that point where people are using it

00:51:16   for mostly content consumption and maybe occasional

00:51:21   specialized uses or very narrow productivity uses

00:51:25   for certain people.

00:51:26   I see that being possible, but I think to get there,

00:51:29   first, we need the install base to grow,

00:51:31   and the only thing that's really gonna meaningfully grow,

00:51:32   and I think at this point, is content.

00:51:34   So, that's what I'm really watching for,

00:51:36   is where are the content deals,

00:51:39   where's the content coming from,

00:51:41   like how much can there be, how quickly.

00:51:44   That's what will actually move these things.

00:51:45   And then we can talk about computing possibilities

00:51:47   down the road.

00:51:48   - Yeah.

00:51:49   But I tell you what, if you are traveling

00:51:51   and want a huge ass screen that doesn't take

00:51:55   a whole lot of space, it is without peer.

00:51:58   So, there are some uses, as few and far between

00:52:01   as they may be.

00:52:02   Open AI.

00:52:04   According to Mark Gurman, Apple picked Open AI

00:52:07   as its inaugural AI partner for a few reasons.

00:52:09   It got better business terms than Google was offering,

00:52:11   and Apple believes that Open AI's technology

00:52:12   is the best available on the market.

00:52:13   Apple is expected to offer its new AI features

00:52:16   as an opt-in service, according to people familiar

00:52:18   with the matter.

00:52:19   So, yeah, I think everyone's expecting the AI dust

00:52:23   to be sprinkled all over the place.

00:52:25   It's yet to be seen if somebody in the C-suite

00:52:28   got a burr up their butt to put AI on everything,

00:52:31   or if Apple will take what I hope,

00:52:34   if Apple does what I hope they'll do,

00:52:36   which is take a more mature approach and ask,

00:52:38   where are we actually helping?

00:52:41   Let's not do this just because we can.

00:52:43   Let's do it because we should.

00:52:44   And honestly, I think that there's far fewer places

00:52:48   that AI should be used than where AI can be used,

00:52:52   and we'll see what happens.

00:52:53   But I'm hopeful they're gonna be mature about it.

00:52:56   - I was looking at this Gurman article.

00:52:57   I'm doing the search for, like, the Bloomberg style guide

00:52:59   says when you're attributing anonymous sources,

00:53:02   you have to say, "The people said," right?

00:53:05   So, you just search for the people, that string,

00:53:08   'cause that'll find you the tidbits

00:53:09   that he's saying are sourced.

00:53:10   My sources say this.

00:53:12   And everything you read there was one of those,

00:53:13   the people said things.

00:53:14   So, I removed that text from some of the snippets

00:53:18   'cause it's awkward.

00:53:19   Anyway, the reasons for picking,

00:53:22   it was they were talking to Google and other partners

00:53:23   or whatever, that Apple thinks that they're the best,

00:53:25   that they're the market leader,

00:53:27   and that they gave better business terms to Google,

00:53:29   which kinda makes sense 'cause OpenAI's younger and hungrier,

00:53:32   you know what I mean?

00:53:33   And the OpenAI thing is interesting

00:53:36   because everything you said about the AI features, right,

00:53:40   we assume that there'll be a bunch of those,

00:53:41   like, "Oh, you can now do a useful thing,"

00:53:43   and, "Yeah, we'll say it's AI," or whatever.

00:53:45   It's the same stuff we used to say that was ML, right?

00:53:47   But the chatbot style, "Hey, you talk to an LLM

00:53:52   as if it's a little person back and forth,"

00:53:55   all the OpenAI rumors are like,

00:53:58   that's what OpenAI would be providing

00:54:00   because Apple has an internal one that they're working on.

00:54:02   They have their own kind of LLM chatbot named Ajax

00:54:04   or whatever, but it's not ready,

00:54:05   and OpenAI's things are better,

00:54:07   so let's do a deal with them.

00:54:10   But I still, the fact that it would be opt-in,

00:54:13   like, what does that mean?

00:54:14   Does that mean that when you're setting up your computer

00:54:16   and says, "Oh, and by the way,

00:54:17   "we have a partnership in OpenAI.

00:54:19   "Do you want to enable feature that puts an icon

00:54:21   "in your menu bar that you can click on

00:54:22   "that props up a text box,

00:54:24   "and now you're talking to chat GPT or something?"

00:54:26   Like, what is opting into this?

00:54:27   How does a chatbot fit into the OS?

00:54:30   We can see how all the other stuff fits in,

00:54:31   and like I said last week,

00:54:33   the rumors that come down from on high

00:54:35   that's telling every single team,

00:54:36   "Find a place to put AI into your product,"

00:54:38   that's bad, and that's kind of the worst of corporate,

00:54:42   like, "Oh, it's a buzzword.

00:54:43   "Let's just find a place to shoehorn this into our product."

00:54:45   But to some degree, I trust the product teams

00:54:48   to think, "What can we do with AI that is useful

00:54:50   "in the Notes app, in Pages, in the Finder?"

00:54:53   Like, I don't think any of them are gonna be like,

00:54:56   "I know how we can use AI in our app.

00:54:58   "Let's put a text box up,

00:55:00   "and they'll send the message to chat GPT."

00:55:01   Like, they'll think of something better, right?

00:55:03   It's bad that they're asking all the teams to do that,

00:55:05   because maybe it doesn't make sense

00:55:06   to some teams to add AI features,

00:55:07   but the mandate, we keep seeing this rumor

00:55:09   that the mandate came down from on high.

00:55:11   Every team, you better find some way to add AI,

00:55:13   because this is the AI year, right?

00:55:15   But that is entirely separate from this OpenAI deal,

00:55:17   which is like, "Oh, you can opt in somehow in Mac OS

00:55:21   "or in iOS to, like, on iOS,

00:55:24   "to just install the chat GPT app?"

00:55:25   Like, what does this mean?

00:55:26   This is the thing that I'm looking for the most

00:55:29   in this presentation, that they're gonna be on stage,

00:55:31   they're gonna say, "We've partnered with OpenAI,"

00:55:32   or maybe they won't say that, and somehow,

00:55:35   some way, they're going to say,

00:55:37   "In our operating systems that we're shipping,

00:55:39   "there's a way for you to start talking to chat GPT

00:55:41   "and having a little conversation

00:55:43   "in a little window somewhere."

00:55:44   I don't even think that's that useful a feature.

00:55:46   There's already a chat GPT app.

00:55:48   There's a Mac one with Swift UI, there's a native iOS one,

00:55:51   you can use it on the web, like, what is this?

00:55:53   I don't get it, and this is the thing that's baffling me,

00:55:56   because, as we said, I think this is the highest potential

00:55:58   for badness, because it is such a non-Apple,

00:56:05   non-controlled, non-careful, just like,

00:56:07   "Wild West, talk to chat GPT, good luck, it's not our thing."

00:56:10   How is that a selling point?

00:56:12   How are you going to promote that as a new feature

00:56:16   of your operating systems?

00:56:17   If a non-hardware WWDC, I don't think there's probably

00:56:20   gonna be a developer story, unless Apple's gonna pay

00:56:23   for your API tokens, and now you can write an iOS

00:56:26   or a Mac app and use their framework

00:56:27   and get free access to chat GPT,

00:56:29   because Apple did some multi-million dollar deal

00:56:31   with them or something.

00:56:32   This baffles me, that's why I added this thing

00:56:34   of the whole opt-in, like, what does that mean?

00:56:36   What are we opting into?

00:56:37   What are you providing?

00:56:38   I have red flags all over this.

00:56:41   (laughing)

00:56:44   - Yeah, I don't know, I'm so turned off

00:56:49   by Sam Altman and OpenAI.

00:56:52   I don't know, it's funny, the dude who we all snickered

00:56:54   about wearing the two popped collar polo shirts,

00:56:58   wasn't that WWDC, like, forever and a day ago?

00:57:00   - A long time ago, yeah.

00:57:01   - Yeah, and we all laughed and had a good,

00:57:04   you know, laugh at his expense, and, you know,

00:57:06   oh, look at this Silicon Valley bro

00:57:08   just being the world's bro-iest bro.

00:57:11   And fast forward five, 10 years, and it seems like,

00:57:14   same as it ever was, nothing's ever really changed,

00:57:16   like, it's, you know, move fast, break things,

00:57:18   and have no consequences, and, I don't know,

00:57:21   like, again, we'll see what happens,

00:57:23   like, I am cautiously optimistic, and again,

00:57:25   I like to think of Apple as generally one of the more mature

00:57:30   and adult organizations in the Valley.

00:57:33   I'm sure there's exceptions, I'm sure that's not always true,

00:57:35   but broadly I think that to be the case,

00:57:38   and I don't know, I feel, I hope,

00:57:40   and I so desperately want Apple to be deliberate,

00:57:45   be considered, be mature, and not just put the AI at dust

00:57:50   on everything they see, but, hey, we'll see.

00:57:54   - I mean, like, I don't, I find Chat TV useful.

00:57:57   I use, it's in my rotation of things that I do.

00:58:00   I do all the chat bots, I do Google searches,

00:58:02   like, I get useful things out of it.

00:58:05   There is use to be had there, but I'm doing that already.

00:58:08   Like, I don't need Apple to add any features to macOS

00:58:10   for me to do this.

00:58:11   I can have a free account on OpenAI, I can have a paid one,

00:58:14   I can use Google Gemini, I can do it on iOS,

00:58:16   I can do it on a Mac, like, all of that is already there.

00:58:19   I don't think I need any kind of OS integration

00:58:22   to make that experience better.

00:58:23   I can open a webpage, I can have, you know,

00:58:25   let's me, it's already open in a tab somewhere.

00:58:27   (laughing)

00:58:29   Like, you know, maybe it's not on my phone or whatever,

00:58:32   like, I guess they could use voice thing,

00:58:34   like, it integrates with Siri and you talk to Siri

00:58:36   and it sends it out.

00:58:37   Like, I'm not saying there's no room

00:58:38   for OS integration, there is, but I just,

00:58:40   this just seems such an uneasy partnership,

00:58:42   but also because, you know, like, the sources in this

00:58:44   essentially seem to indicate, some of the sources

00:58:47   are not inside the Apple,

00:58:48   sometimes they're ex-Apple people or whatever,

00:58:49   like, this is a stopgap.

00:58:51   Apple doesn't have anything Chat HTTP caliber.

00:58:53   They don't have anything Google Gemini caliber.

00:58:55   They want to have something like that,

00:58:57   they wanna have a story for that for W3C,

00:58:58   therefore they have to partner,

00:58:59   we talked about this before, but they are working on stuff.

00:59:02   Apple does have its own internal LLM.

00:59:04   It does have its own internal chat bot

00:59:05   that its own employees have been using.

00:59:08   It's just not up to snuff yet, which makes sense,

00:59:10   'cause they got a late start, right?

00:59:11   But they're doing research in that area,

00:59:13   so presumably, if this turns out to be useful,

00:59:15   Apple would wanna pull a Google Maps here and say,

00:59:19   yeah, we'll partner with this other company

00:59:21   because they're the market leader,

00:59:22   but eventually we'll roll out our own thing

00:59:24   and eventually our own thing will be,

00:59:26   if not better than good enough, right?

00:59:28   And hopefully they'll do it better

00:59:29   than they did with Maps rollout,

00:59:30   but we'll see how it goes.

00:59:32   But still, this is what I'm looking at the most,

00:59:37   what's the pitch here?

00:59:37   How is it integrated?

00:59:38   How is this presented?

00:59:40   If it's opt-in, what does that look like?

00:59:44   It's so weird to sort of,

00:59:45   if this ends up being a tentpole feature

00:59:46   and not just an off to the side,

00:59:47   'cause I can imagine just being like,

00:59:48   oh, and by the way, we partner with them and blah, blah,

00:59:50   and that's all they say about it, it's quick, right?

00:59:52   But if this is a tentpole feature,

00:59:54   usually tentpole features aren't like,

00:59:56   and we're so confident in it that it's not on by default,

00:59:58   it's kind of like the Windows recall thing, right?

01:00:01   That's a sign of something like,

01:00:03   we think it might be okay, but there is some danger here,

01:00:06   so if you just hit okay, okay, okay during setup,

01:00:10   whatever we're doing, you won't be exposed to, right?

01:00:14   But if you opt into it somehow,

01:00:16   then again, when you talk to Siri,

01:00:19   and it can't figure out the answer,

01:00:20   instead of telling you to check the web,

01:00:21   it'll ask chat GPT or something.

01:00:23   - Yeah, yeah, I don't know.

01:00:26   We'll see what happens.

01:00:28   I mean, that's all the items that we had in the show notes.

01:00:31   I just, I really don't know what to expect,

01:00:33   and I am so very, very interested

01:00:35   to see what the AI story is.

01:00:37   It seems that Apple's previous dedication to ML,

01:00:41   or machine learning, as we've talked about,

01:00:42   many other shows and blogs have talked about,

01:00:45   you know, they finally embraced AI as a term.

01:00:48   And so we'll see what happens.

01:00:50   I think it's tough because, you know,

01:00:52   Apple is a publicly held company,

01:00:54   and publicly traded company, and you know,

01:00:56   I think investors and, you know,

01:00:58   rank and file shareholders are gonna expect them

01:01:00   to have that AI dust sprinkled everywhere,

01:01:04   you know, like a graffiti cannon of,

01:01:06   or not graffiti, a glitter cannon of AI dust

01:01:09   just shooting all over, you know, everything WWDC touches.

01:01:12   But I don't know that that's appropriate or reasonable,

01:01:15   so we'll see what happens.

01:01:17   And I'm just curious to see, you know,

01:01:19   now that we've got a whole new platform,

01:01:20   I'm so excited to see what VisionOS 2 is.

01:01:24   If history tells us anything, it will be disappointing.

01:01:26   - Do you think VisionOS will have AI dust sprinkled on it?

01:01:29   - Oh no. - At all?

01:01:31   Anywhere?

01:01:31   - I'd be surprised if iPadOS even has it.

01:01:34   Like, keep in mind, like, you know, again,

01:01:35   we're still dealing with Apple's kind of hierarchy

01:01:38   of platform importance.

01:01:39   iOS is gonna get all the cool stuff first.

01:01:41   I would be surprised if we see it anywhere else.

01:01:45   I think it's gonna be iOS certainly, you know, first,

01:01:49   and then maybe they'll put some of the basics

01:01:52   into iPad and Mac.

01:01:54   - Well, the cross-platform stuff will get it.

01:01:56   Like, the whole, like, removing people

01:01:57   from the background of photos,

01:01:58   that's just gonna be everywhere,

01:01:59   because it's a common framework, you know what I mean?

01:02:01   - Yes, of course, yeah.

01:02:02   But like, you know, in terms of like,

01:02:04   features like specific to, say, like,

01:02:07   the Vision Pro or the watch, or like,

01:02:09   I would be surprised to see anything like that this soon.

01:02:13   - And speaking of like, sprinkling AI sparkles everywhere

01:02:16   and everyone expects it to do it,

01:02:17   at this point though, and this is what everyone expects,

01:02:20   but at this point, it's true that the only way

01:02:22   for Apple to really make news is to do something different

01:02:27   than everyone else does.

01:02:28   I mean, they can make news by saying

01:02:29   we're not doing any AI stuff, and that would be news,

01:02:31   but that's obviously not what they're doing, right?

01:02:32   But they're not gonna do what every other company did,

01:02:34   which is like, AI everywhere,

01:02:35   sprinkle, sprinkle, sprinkle, sprinkle, like, you know,

01:02:37   because that'll just be like, everyone else did that.

01:02:39   Like, throwing spaghetti against the wall, right?

01:02:41   Like Windows did.

01:02:42   Anything we could think of, we're just gonna do.

01:02:44   The only way Apple could actually make news

01:02:46   is by saying, we're doing AI, but we're doing it

01:02:49   the Apple way, where everything is useful,

01:02:51   and blah, blah, blah, like, they have to present it that way.

01:02:52   That is a marketing decision.

01:02:54   We already know they're already doing that.

01:02:55   We talked about that last week.

01:02:56   There's tons of features that I used to call ML

01:02:58   that are just features of our phone, right?

01:03:00   If they do that this year and they present it as,

01:03:03   we're not doing AI like everyone else,

01:03:04   we're not throwing spaghetti against the wall,

01:03:06   we don't have a thing where you draw a picture

01:03:07   and AI draws along with you,

01:03:08   because we didn't think that was that useful yet.

01:03:10   So we didn't put it in, right?

01:03:12   That's the story, that's the Apple story.

01:03:13   And the news would be, Apple, WWDC,

01:03:16   rolls out a bunch of AI features,

01:03:17   but unlike other people's AI features,

01:03:18   they only introduce the ones that are useful,

01:03:21   and also a changing thing.

01:03:22   Right, because that's the wild card,

01:03:24   but I don't understand that, right?

01:03:25   That is the way to make news.

01:03:27   Otherwise, the story will be,

01:03:28   Apple catches up with everyone else

01:03:29   and does what everyone else has already done,

01:03:31   which is, I guess, better than the bad story,

01:03:33   which is Apple doesn't do any AI stuff

01:03:35   and they're doomed, right?

01:03:36   - Well, I mean, I think that's the most likely.

01:03:38   I think by far the most likely reaction

01:03:40   by the overall press and business and Wall Street communities

01:03:44   is gonna be they didn't do enough.

01:03:46   Now, as actual Apple users, for me,

01:03:51   like what you were saying earlier,

01:03:52   I would rather they do things that are useful to me.

01:03:55   I don't need them to do the most stupid things that they are,

01:03:59   'cause other companies will gladly do

01:04:01   the most stupid things that they are.

01:04:02   Apple doesn't need to do that.

01:04:04   They are, as you were saying,

01:04:05   they are the more grown-up company.

01:04:07   I don't think that is their style

01:04:10   to be the spaghetti against the wall, cutting edge,

01:04:13   let's do a bunch of stupid stuff.

01:04:15   That's not Apple's style.

01:04:15   Apple is very conservative in that kind of approach.

01:04:18   And to some degree, that's kind of just in their DNA.

01:04:22   To another degree, they need to be,

01:04:23   because they have much more scrutiny on them

01:04:25   and their moves have, they make bigger waves.

01:04:29   - And their brand, not that they're Disney,

01:04:31   but their brand is very kind of like,

01:04:33   let's not be hasty and do the radical stuff

01:04:37   just because everyone else is doing it, right?

01:04:39   And I honestly think if they market this well,

01:04:41   the story won't be Apple didn't do enough.

01:04:42   The story will be what Apple wanted to be,

01:04:44   is that Apple took a more considered approach.

01:04:46   Everyone else has just been like,

01:04:47   "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah."

01:04:49   And Apple made all their features useful.

01:04:53   Here are the things that it does.

01:04:55   It only does things that are provably useful, right?

01:04:58   Like they did last year and the year before

01:04:59   and the year before, like, oh, OS wide, you can OCR text.

01:05:03   Like that's an AI feature, but it's useful.

01:05:06   Like, and it's not, if that is the story Apple presents,

01:05:09   I think most of the stories from outlets

01:05:11   that don't have it in for Apple will be,

01:05:13   Apple decides to take a different approach to AI.

01:05:15   Unlike its competitors, Apple says that it's only rolling out

01:05:18   features that are provably useful.

01:05:19   And I'm not gonna use that term

01:05:20   because that's not a good marketing term,

01:05:21   but you know, some marketing person will come up with

01:05:23   a two or three word phrase that distinguishes

01:05:25   Apple's approach to AI, which again,

01:05:27   is gonna be no different than what they did last year.

01:05:30   The only difference is the magic of marketing, right?

01:05:32   And I, you know, you're right that there will be

01:05:33   some stories like Apple's not doing enough.

01:05:35   They're falling behind.

01:05:36   Microsoft has 40 LLMs running in the background

01:05:39   and Windows 11, right?

01:05:40   But I feel like the whole Windows co-pilot PC thing

01:05:43   is just so wrapped up in the recall disaster

01:05:46   that no one is even talking about the draw along

01:05:49   or whatever, or the OS wide like translation,

01:05:51   which I think actually is useful.

01:05:53   So the door is open for Apple to do something smart here.

01:05:56   And again, the wildcard is what the hell is OpenAI?

01:05:59   Because OpenAI is not that.

01:06:00   OpenAI and ChatGPT, that is not,

01:06:03   we only do the things that we are sure are useful and safe.

01:06:06   Because, you know, for all the uses that ChatGPT has,

01:06:10   it's not conservative.

01:06:12   (laughing)

01:06:13   Basically the floodgates.

01:06:14   It's like type anything you want, hope it works,

01:06:16   fingers crossed.

01:06:17   (laughing)

01:06:19   - Yeah, like that, I would be very happy with,

01:06:22   take most of the basics that we already know

01:06:25   that quote AI stuff can do,

01:06:27   even take a lot of the stuff the phones already do

01:06:29   and just make it better, make it more reliable,

01:06:31   but give it better results.

01:06:32   As we were saying last episode,

01:06:33   like basic dictation, speech-to-text kind of APIs,

01:06:38   I believe, is it all Android phones

01:06:41   or just the Pixel phones that have supported

01:06:44   system-wide closed captioning?

01:06:45   You can just have constant transcription showing on screen

01:06:48   of whatever audio is playing on the phone.

01:06:51   - Likely added to Windows.

01:06:52   - Right, like why haven't iPhones been able to do that yet?

01:06:55   Like that's such low-hanging fruit for Apple.

01:06:58   That should be a feature, of course it should be a feature.

01:07:01   And that's, again, things like removing people

01:07:03   from photos that shouldn't be there.

01:07:05   Like that kind of stuff,

01:07:06   these are not cutting-edge new ideas.

01:07:10   These are features that the rest of the industry has done.

01:07:12   And yes, Apple will be playing quote catch-up,

01:07:14   but that's fine as long as they do a good job of it.

01:07:17   The reason why some of these features stand out to us

01:07:20   as things Apple should do is because they are good ideas.

01:07:24   We are not saying Apple should do everything

01:07:25   everyone else has done.

01:07:26   Most of the other things people have done with quote AI

01:07:29   are weird and useless and creepy or something.

01:07:33   But there are a few really cool killer features

01:07:36   that it would be nice if Apple had good versions of.

01:07:38   And then beyond that, what we've already talked about.

01:07:40   Things like, obviously the big one is make Siri better.

01:07:43   Like that is the big one.

01:07:45   Please, for the love of God, make Siri better.

01:07:48   - Make Siri, this is interesting, make Siri better,

01:07:51   but don't turn Siri into chat GPT.

01:07:53   There's a fine line there because you want Siri to be better.

01:07:56   It's like all the things that Siri's supposed to do now,

01:07:58   imagine if it did them reliably

01:08:00   and with lots of flexibility and sophistication,

01:08:02   and maybe you could do one or two new things.

01:08:04   But that is very different than, hey, guess what?

01:08:06   Now you can just ask Siri anything and it will do something.

01:08:08   That's not what we want, right?

01:08:10   Because that is the throwing spaghetti against the wall

01:08:12   because you can get yourself into trouble real fast

01:08:14   with just, especially since Siri has essentially control

01:08:17   over your phone and when it gets it wrong,

01:08:19   there are consequences, bad consequences.

01:08:22   So that is something, I mean, there's no rumor

01:08:24   that like, you know, the Siri suddenly

01:08:26   could become chat GPT, right?

01:08:27   Apple needs to, it's kind of like what you were just saying,

01:08:30   things that the phone already does

01:08:31   just make it do them better,

01:08:32   but that is different than Siri is now

01:08:35   an all-knowing wizard that you can ask anything

01:08:37   and cross your fingers.

01:08:39   - Yeah, like I don't need Siri to become a chat bot.

01:08:44   I don't need Siri to generate images

01:08:47   that don't exist already for me.

01:08:48   Many of the things that we think of as modern AI apps,

01:08:53   I don't need Siri to do those things.

01:08:55   What we need Siri to do is what the promise of Siri

01:08:59   has always been promising and it has just never

01:09:02   reliably delivered on that promise.

01:09:04   That's what we want to do.

01:09:05   And I think, you know, looking at modern AI techniques

01:09:08   and models and things like that,

01:09:10   I think this gives them the ability to tackle

01:09:13   what really is a pretty old set of problems

01:09:16   in a new way that should theoretically

01:09:18   be substantially better.

01:09:19   So that's what I'm mostly looking for.

01:09:21   And everything else that we've talked about,

01:09:23   like being able to control apps without configuration

01:09:26   and stuff like that, that's all gonna be great

01:09:28   down the road whenever that comes together.

01:09:30   I don't even need that right now.

01:09:32   I just want Siri to work.

01:09:34   That'd be great.

01:09:35   And maybe give me a good captioning model

01:09:37   on the phone that I can use.

01:09:38   And otherwise, I think that could be enough for us.

01:09:42   It's not gonna be enough for the press,

01:09:43   it's not gonna be enough for the analysts,

01:09:45   it's not gonna be enough for Wall Street,

01:09:47   but I think that would be enough

01:09:48   for Apple's actual customers.

01:09:50   - I have an addendum to an earlier statement

01:09:52   that I meant to correct myself immediately

01:09:53   and then the time passed and I couldn't.

01:09:55   But talk about when they're dropping Intel support,

01:09:57   I forgot about all the AI stuff.

01:09:59   The whole requirement to have an NPU,

01:10:01   like that's why rewind doesn't work on my computer,

01:10:04   that may push the schedule forward.

01:10:07   I mean, that wasn't really a glimmer in anyone's eye

01:10:09   when back when we were talking about this years ago.

01:10:12   But now the whole like, you know,

01:10:14   the Co-Pilot Plus PCs requiring a 40 tops NPU,

01:10:16   blah, blah, blah.

01:10:18   You know, my CPU doesn't have an NPU in there, right?

01:10:21   And so every single one of these quote unquote AI,

01:10:23   if they bother to add quote unquote AI features,

01:10:27   yeah, they could just make them not work on Intel,

01:10:28   but they could all just not make Mac OS,

01:10:30   also just not make Mac OS work on Intel.

01:10:32   So I feel like that nudges the possibility

01:10:34   that this is the year my Mac isn't supported,

01:10:35   nudges it a little bit.

01:10:37   I don't think it makes it a slam dunk,

01:10:38   I'm thinking the sure thing,

01:10:39   I still think I'll probably be supported

01:10:41   and just won't have features visible,

01:10:42   but the LLM stuff is a problem for me.

01:10:46   - Can you reprogram the Afterburner card to be an NPU?

01:10:51   - It would still be so bad, right?

01:10:53   That is not, they're not spending any time

01:10:55   optimizing any of this stuff.

01:10:57   It's like, well, it runs in the neural engine

01:10:58   and also someone did an implementation

01:11:00   for like the SIMD instructions and the Xeon.

01:11:02   Nope, not happening.

01:11:04   - Yeah, it's not, sorry.

01:11:05   You're out of luck on that one.

01:11:06   - Yeah, so it's really just, I mean,

01:11:08   like I said, what Mac has going for it is like,

01:11:10   yeah, Apple probably doesn't care that much.

01:11:12   Oh, sorry, Intel Mac users,

01:11:13   you don't get these new features, right?

01:11:15   Just be glad Mac OS still,

01:11:16   we still ship it for your CPU.

01:11:21   And that, I feel like that has a likelihood

01:11:23   because Apple's like, yeah, it's just Mac,

01:11:25   it'll be fine, right?

01:11:26   But if they really, it was the old Apple

01:11:29   where it's like everyone on the same page,

01:11:30   they'd be like, no, we're cutting them off this year

01:11:32   'cause we got so many of the AI features

01:11:33   and they all require the neural processor

01:11:35   and Intel doesn't have that, so tough luck.

01:11:37   We'll see, like I, the worst case scenario for me,

01:11:41   it's like, I was gonna ask you too

01:11:43   what you're most looking forward to WWDC,

01:11:45   but the thing I'm fearing the most

01:11:47   is that I won't be able to run this version of Mac OS

01:11:51   or the feature that I want in Mac OS

01:11:54   doesn't run on my thing.

01:11:55   So for example, the photos features

01:11:57   that use quote unquote AI to do cool photos stuff.

01:12:00   Granted, there's ways I can use other AI tools

01:12:02   to edit my photos, I don't need this to be built in,

01:12:05   but if I can't even access those features,

01:12:08   like if the person removal thing

01:12:10   is built into the photos app,

01:12:11   like this is great, saves me a lot of time,

01:12:12   it's right built in, I don't have to edit it

01:12:14   in an external editor, don't have to go to a webpage.

01:12:16   Oh, but not on Intel, that's a big fear for me

01:12:18   because even though I would still,

01:12:20   it's like, look, Mac OS still supports your system,

01:12:22   no problem, I'd be like, oh, but I really wanna use

01:12:25   the new AI powered photo editing features on my Mac

01:12:28   and now I'm sitting at my wife's computer

01:12:29   to do photo editing and she's complaining

01:12:31   that I'm hogging her computer and that hastens the timeline

01:12:35   for me getting a new Mac, but. (laughs)

01:12:38   Yeah, which Apple hasn't shipped yet,

01:12:39   like an M4 based Mac Studio or something,

01:12:41   but anyway, that's, I wanna throw it,

01:12:43   anyway, so what things are you most looking forward to?

01:12:45   Mark, you already said Siri, but is there anything else,

01:12:47   like speaking of developer stuff,

01:12:48   like developer tools, Xcode, Swift,

01:12:50   like what big thing are you looking forward to at WWDC,

01:12:54   assuming there's no hardware?

01:12:56   - So, I mean, for me, I really wanna see,

01:12:59   kind of what I was talking about last episode,

01:13:01   I want there to be good models that developers can use

01:13:06   on the phone for free with no limits,

01:13:08   like that's what I really want,

01:13:09   give us built in AI SDKs that we can just use

01:13:14   the same way we can use almost every other API on the phone.

01:13:18   Like that would be game changing in so many ways,

01:13:21   and so that's the big thing I want in terms of capability.

01:13:24   Now, in smaller ways, like, you know,

01:13:26   there's other like developer tool type stuff,

01:13:29   Xcode has had a lot of bugs for me

01:13:32   this past couple of years, a lot of like issues

01:13:35   that don't clear, that I've actually cleared,

01:13:38   a lot of having to do clean builds

01:13:42   just to clear weird compiler bugs.

01:13:44   My rewrite of Overcast, I use a couple of packages

01:13:48   that I do locally, and every time I change anything

01:13:51   in the package, I have to go like resolve package caches,

01:13:54   because otherwise it just won't pick up the change.

01:13:56   Like there's all sorts of weird,

01:13:58   just straight up bugs in Xcode,

01:14:00   or at least things that's like behaviors

01:14:02   that sure seem like bugs, that I would,

01:14:04   I think Xcode really could use some help in that area.

01:14:07   I don't think they're going to be working on that,

01:14:10   I suspect that--

01:14:12   - I think they are working on that,

01:14:12   it is a question of whether they'll fix more bugs

01:14:15   than they introduce them.

01:14:16   - Yeah, like, 'cause I'm sure that, you know,

01:14:18   whatever they're doing like with AI stuff,

01:14:21   I'm sure there's obviously been massive demand

01:14:22   for integration into Xcode of some kind of AI-based tooling,

01:14:27   whether it's like an AI-based autocomplete,

01:14:29   like the old version of what Microsoft called Copilot,

01:14:32   or you know, other stuff like,

01:14:34   there's obviously a lot of demand for that in recent years.

01:14:36   - And there's rumors for it, we haven't mentioned it

01:14:38   in the past, but yeah, like basically like,

01:14:39   oh, Xcode will help you write your code for you using AI,

01:14:41   I'm assuming that's gonna be there.

01:14:42   - Like, can Xcode write around its own bugs using AI maybe?

01:14:45   Like, can it automatically like clear the issues for me

01:14:48   so I don't have to do it?

01:14:49   - When Xcode makes SwiftUI view,

01:14:51   the preview also won't work.

01:14:53   - Right, exactly, like, there's a lot in Xcode,

01:14:56   a lot of the basics that I think could use some attention,

01:14:59   but otherwise, like, in terms of the actual, like,

01:15:02   you know, the APIs and the language,

01:15:05   this is gonna be a big year for Swift concurrency safety.

01:15:10   This is the year of like, sendable really getting its moment

01:15:13   'cause I presume they're gonna introduce Swift 6,

01:15:16   and that brings with it a whole bunch

01:15:17   of stricken currency checks,

01:15:19   and theoretically, some language enhancements

01:15:23   that make complying with stricken currency easier.

01:15:28   Like, right now, as I've been writing the Overcast Rewrite,

01:15:31   and as I wrote Blackbird, I have tried to make them comply

01:15:36   with the stricken currency checks as they've existed

01:15:38   in the pre-6 Swift languages.

01:15:40   So like, you've been able to opt in to these warnings

01:15:44   that will tell you like, hey, this thing

01:15:45   that you're doing over here with this like mutable state

01:15:47   in this object, this will be an error in Swift 6.

01:15:50   So there are, I've been trying to comply

01:15:55   with the requirements, you know, before it's even out,

01:15:59   and it's pretty hard, and there are certain things

01:16:01   where like, this object here clearly is not being

01:16:05   a mutable state, and it's like losing its state right here

01:16:08   before this is even returning from its init or whatever,

01:16:10   like, there's all sorts of things like that,

01:16:12   and there have been various proposals in Swift Evolution

01:16:16   to like, make some of that stuff automatic,

01:16:18   and like, detect it so you don't have to like,

01:16:21   jump through hoops to go around it.

01:16:23   I haven't followed in detail of like,

01:16:25   whether those things are actually in Swift 6,

01:16:28   or you know, whether they will be.

01:16:29   - A bunch of them are.

01:16:30   - Yeah, I'm sure a bunch of them,

01:16:31   and so, what I wanna know is like, right now,

01:16:34   all the stuff that will be an error

01:16:36   in Swift 6 Concurrency Checking Mode,

01:16:39   a lot of that's pretty hard to work around,

01:16:40   and so what I wanna see is, have they made it easier

01:16:44   to work with for the actual release of Swift 6,

01:16:47   'cause that's what most of these proposals were aiming to do.

01:16:51   So let's see, that's what I wanna know is like,

01:16:53   as we go into this new era of Swift Concurrency

01:16:55   and Swift, you know, strictness,

01:16:57   how easy is it to do the right thing?

01:17:01   I've seen a lot of languages over time

01:17:04   that make it hard to do the right thing.

01:17:05   So far, Swift has been pretty good about it,

01:17:08   so let's see, and then beyond that,

01:17:12   as you know, I've been writing this whole rewrite

01:17:14   using Swift UI, and using Swift async modern concurrency,

01:17:19   wherever possible, and there are still a lot of system APIs

01:17:24   that do not play well with Swift Concurrency.

01:17:28   I'm still having to write callbacks here and there,

01:17:31   I'm still having to shell out to task

01:17:35   to do something in a function,

01:17:37   there are still areas in the system frameworks

01:17:41   that have not been updated yet for Swift Concurrency.

01:17:44   I would love to just see more of that, please.

01:17:46   Give me as much more as you can,

01:17:48   whatever you've gotten done this year,

01:17:50   every year it gets better, so I just wanna see,

01:17:52   make all, have everyone work on the frameworks

01:17:55   throughout the year as they have time,

01:17:57   and here and there, I get updates

01:17:59   that make things easier for me as a Swift async programmer.

01:18:03   So that kind of stuff is mostly what I'm looking forward to,

01:18:06   most of the boring tooling and API stuff,

01:18:10   but that's what actually improves our lives

01:18:12   as developers day to day in the following year.

01:18:16   It's not like this one new hotness that we must use,

01:18:19   it's like some cool new API or something,

01:18:21   no, usually it's just a bunch of small life improvements

01:18:25   that they made to the rest of the system

01:18:26   and the rest of the tooling and the rest of the APIs,

01:18:28   that's what I'm looking forward to mostly.

01:18:29   But also, yeah, give me some of that

01:18:31   cool transcription model, please, thank you.

01:18:33   (laughing)

01:18:35   - You know, I'm glad you brought up Swift stuff,

01:18:37   because that, sitting here today,

01:18:40   that's what I think I'm most excited for,

01:18:42   is what is the new hotness within Swift?

01:18:45   And Swift can get on my nerves from time to time,

01:18:47   but by and large, 10 years on,

01:18:50   'cause the announcement was 10 years and a few days ago,

01:18:53   10 years on, it is a really, really great language.

01:18:56   It is not without problems, it's not without faults,

01:18:58   but it is a really great language.

01:19:00   And I do think it is mostly moving in a positive direction.

01:19:05   And I feel like now that there's big and exciting things

01:19:08   happening, like Swift concurrency,

01:19:10   I feel like a lot of the, what is the term or phrase,

01:19:13   like bike shedding, is that what I'm looking for,

01:19:14   that was going on in the Swift 2.3.4 era,

01:19:19   where we were worrying about really, really useless

01:19:23   and dumb arguments that were happening all the time.

01:19:25   And I don't know, Jon, you're more plugged in, a coincidence.

01:19:27   - I didn't know we were useless and dumb, but yes,

01:19:29   there was some sort of, you do have to hash that stuff out,

01:19:32   and it is important to get it right.

01:19:33   So it might've seemed like a lot of kind of like,

01:19:35   well, who cares what that keyword is called?

01:19:37   It's not that important, just do stuff.

01:19:39   That actually is kind of important,

01:19:40   'cause you get stuck with that stuff.

01:19:41   So I don't have many complaints about the process, but.

01:19:44   - But either way, spending a whole bunch of time bickering

01:19:47   about whether pre and post increment,

01:19:49   the plus plus operator should or should not be

01:19:51   in the language, like, whatever, y'all, just move on.

01:19:53   But anyways.

01:19:54   - That being said, you guys really messed up substrings.

01:19:57   - Oh, substrings are such a pain.

01:19:58   - Well, you know, because there's some lousy things,

01:20:02   but the thing is, if they come up with better ones,

01:20:05   you can just abandon the lousy ones and never use them.

01:20:07   You know what I mean?

01:20:08   Like, they've not painted themselves into a corner,

01:20:11   which is really what you want to avoid with language design.

01:20:13   - Yeah, everything they've done with like, substrings

01:20:15   and various like array index stuff, oh my God.

01:20:19   Like, I still, every time I have to manipulate an index

01:20:23   or a string or something, I have to like look up code

01:20:24   examples, like, I cannot figure out how the heck do I do this?

01:20:27   I just want--

01:20:28   - Substrings are not strings.

01:20:29   - Oh.

01:20:30   - Yep, it drives me nuts.

01:20:31   - I mean, it makes sense if you know why they're doing it

01:20:33   for like, for implementation efficiency, but it's like,

01:20:35   I don't want to have to see that.

01:20:36   But just pretend it's not like that.

01:20:38   - Yeah, right, exactly.

01:20:39   But we're getting off on a tangent.

01:20:40   So a lot of that bike, us, new way,

01:20:44   a lot of that bike shedding and yak shaving and whatever

01:20:46   the turn of phrase you want to use is, I feel like that used

01:20:48   to bubble up into my world in so far as like,

01:20:51   I don't pay attention to Swift evolution,

01:20:52   even though maybe I should.

01:20:54   But a lot of that navel gazing was bubbling out

01:20:58   into my world, and I haven't seen much of that recently

01:21:00   in at least a couple of years, which I think is a good thing

01:21:03   because that means whatever's happening,

01:21:05   instead of people going, ah,

01:21:06   look at this ridiculous argument, you know,

01:21:08   instead, legitimate arguments are happening, good ones.

01:21:11   And so I'm excited to see what Swift 6 brings.

01:21:14   I am petrified.

01:21:15   I cannot begin to tell you how scared I am

01:21:19   of turning on the warnings for Swift, you know,

01:21:21   for strict concurrency checks, because I'm sure

01:21:23   it's going to be a mess.

01:21:24   I'm not knowingly doing anything wrong,

01:21:26   but I bet you I'm doing a lot wrong.

01:21:27   - You gotta try it, you gotta see.

01:21:28   - It's not necessarily wrong, it's just like,

01:21:31   I mean, I've made several runs of this,

01:21:33   and I'm sure we'll talk about it more after WWDC

01:21:35   and following episodes, but like,

01:21:37   in the absence of Swift concurrency, before it existed,

01:21:40   we all did our own things using the technologies

01:21:43   that Apple did offer at the time.

01:21:44   Grand Central Dispatch, you know, callbacks, Async/Await,

01:21:47   like that's all kind of like, it's not quite, you know,

01:21:50   precursors to the big strict concurrency checks, right?

01:21:54   So if you have an application that's already written,

01:21:57   it's like, okay, but I already did a thing

01:22:01   to deal with concurrency, maybe it's not as good,

01:22:03   but then Swift, you turn on the strict concurrency checks,

01:22:05   and it's like, everything you're doing

01:22:06   is a violation of strict concurrency.

01:22:07   Yeah, this is what I had to do before you existed

01:22:11   to do things concurrently, and so it's like,

01:22:14   yeah, that approach, you should use a different approach

01:22:16   to do that, our approach is safer,

01:22:17   but you end up having to like rethink stuff.

01:22:19   It's not like, I'll just add an annotation here

01:22:21   and it'll fix it, it's like, I mean, this sounds dumb,

01:22:24   but like, the Swift concurrency strict checking thing

01:22:29   wants you to use Swift concurrency features, right?

01:22:32   It doesn't want you to use Grand Central Dispatch and queues,

01:22:36   right, you can, you can like satisfy it,

01:22:39   but it's like, if you just use these, our features,

01:22:42   like use strict concurrency, use what we want you to use,

01:22:44   use actors, right, that's why they exist,

01:22:47   and it's like, but I already did it a different way,

01:22:49   and it's like, well, you're gonna have real problems

01:22:51   trying to make the compiler satisfied about that,

01:22:54   so I'm sure there will be much discussion about that.

01:22:56   I mean, the good thing about Swift,

01:22:58   the Swift illusion process, it happens in public,

01:23:00   Swift is open source, it's like, there should be no,

01:23:02   for the most part, there should be no secrets revealed

01:23:04   to Apple about the Swift language, right,

01:23:07   about what they're doing with it, that'll be revealed,

01:23:09   like, 'cause you know, if you looked at like

01:23:10   all the Swift language things, and it was like,

01:23:11   and then Swift UI appeared,

01:23:12   Swift UI wasn't developed in public, but Swift was, right?

01:23:16   So, you know, we'll see what kind of surprises

01:23:18   Apple has for us, but the Swift features they're adding,

01:23:20   they know the pain people have trying to, you know,

01:23:24   comply with Swift concurrency,

01:23:25   and they're trying to make it easier,

01:23:26   but fundamentally, I think the problem they have

01:23:28   is that they want people to use actors and Swift concurrency

01:23:32   as a way to manage concurrent processes,

01:23:35   and that supersedes and replaces a bunch of things

01:23:37   that people had used in the past,

01:23:39   and figuring out how to do that

01:23:43   without like changing your approach to concurrency,

01:23:45   like Casey, I know you love to use the,

01:23:47   what is it, the publisher thing with the source and syncs

01:23:50   and the events, what is that called?

01:23:51   - Which I don't, it's combined.

01:23:52   I don't use that much of it in Call Sheet.

01:23:55   I do use some, but compared to just a couple of years ago,

01:23:58   I use very, very little, and I only use it

01:24:01   in a handful of places where it makes the most sense.

01:24:03   Generally speaking, the concurrency and stuff

01:24:05   that I'm doing is async/await,

01:24:07   which is good insofar as it's new,

01:24:10   but it's bad insofar as I'm probably doing

01:24:12   a rudimentary version.

01:24:13   - Your stuff is not sendable, I'm sure.

01:24:16   - Well, yeah, for the most part.

01:24:17   - Nor should you make it sendable.

01:24:19   - I mean, I can tell you that I use a lot of combine

01:24:23   and async/await in the rewrite.

01:24:25   There's places for both of it,

01:24:27   and I think they actually play somewhat nicely

01:24:32   with each other if you don't do

01:24:33   two ridiculous things with them,

01:24:35   but those things do solve different problems.

01:24:38   - Yeah, and the solution is not like,

01:24:40   oh, I'm gonna take all my data,

01:24:41   and I'm gonna make everything sendable,

01:24:43   because that's not how to fix this problem.

01:24:46   You can't, you have to have mutable state somewhere.

01:24:49   It should be protected by actors,

01:24:50   but very often you're sending OS objects back and forth,

01:24:53   and those aren't sendable,

01:24:55   and you don't have a way to change that,

01:24:56   because you don't define that class,

01:24:58   nor can you make it sendable or lie about it being sendable.

01:25:01   Anyway, I'm sure we're going off on a big tangent here,

01:25:04   'cause we're developers and we've all struggled with this,

01:25:06   but I think the way Apple presents this story is interesting

01:25:09   down to the idea of the warning Marco mentioned.

01:25:14   This will be an error in Swift 6.

01:25:16   Does that mean you can't use Swift 6

01:25:18   unless you have strict concurrency compliance,

01:25:20   or is there a mode in the Swift 6 compiler

01:25:23   that lets you run Swift 5 code,

01:25:25   and do you lose out on any features in Swift 6

01:25:27   if you decide that,

01:25:28   like that's a story that Apple will tell,

01:25:30   and has been telling in the open,

01:25:32   but they'll see how marketing presents that.

01:25:35   Like, Swift concurrency, it's great,

01:25:36   but if you're not ready for it, don't worry,

01:25:38   you can still use Swift 6,

01:25:39   you just won't turn on the strict concurrency thing,

01:25:42   kind of like it is in Swift 5 now.

01:25:43   - Yeah, and I think that's the case.

01:25:45   I could swear, and I'm probably getting

01:25:47   the details wrong here,

01:25:48   especially 'cause, well, my memory is,

01:25:51   John makes fun of me justifiably, is very bad,

01:25:53   but I could swear that Ben Cohen,

01:25:54   or someone on the Swift team, has publicly stated,

01:25:57   hey, Swift 6, it's going to be opt-in

01:26:01   for the concurrency checks,

01:26:03   and you still will be able to do the rest,

01:26:04   this is what you just said, John,

01:26:05   you'll still be able to do the rest of the Swift 6 hotness

01:26:09   without buying, or going all in

01:26:12   on the strict concurrency checks.

01:26:13   - Yeah, 'cause you can just download

01:26:14   the Swift 6 compiler right now, and try it,

01:26:16   and you can see how these features work, or whatever,

01:26:17   but doing it in open source,

01:26:19   and having the developers talk about it,

01:26:21   is kind of separate from how Apple will present it,

01:26:24   how Apple marketing will present this

01:26:26   when it shows the new version of Xcode,

01:26:28   you know what I mean?

01:26:29   Like, how it manifests in Xcode,

01:26:31   what the defaults are for a new project in Xcode,

01:26:33   these are things that aren't actually strictly related

01:26:36   to the Swift open source project,

01:26:38   but have huge effects on how this change is perceived

01:26:41   by the people who are not following Swift evolution,

01:26:43   which is most developers, right?

01:26:45   Kind of like when they do new project,

01:26:46   does it default to Swift UI,

01:26:48   that is kind of like an important political thing,

01:26:49   does it default to strict concurrency,

01:26:51   does it default to adding tests, Marco?

01:26:53   The defaults matter in Xcode, and policy changes like that,

01:26:59   so that is, for developers,

01:27:02   I mean, it is a developer conference,

01:27:03   it's more esoteric,

01:27:04   and you're not gonna see big news stories about it,

01:27:06   but the Swift 6 story is going to be interesting,

01:27:10   and like you said, to most people,

01:27:12   it's entirely new to them.

01:27:14   It's public information,

01:27:15   they could have been looking at it all since last year,

01:27:17   but most people, that's not their hobby,

01:27:19   to keep up with language evolution,

01:27:21   they just wait until a bit of a receive,

01:27:22   and see what Apple has to offer them,

01:27:23   even though you could go download it right now and try it.

01:27:26   - Exactly, and so for me,

01:27:28   that's what I think I'm most interested in right now,

01:27:31   of course, I think I'm interested in when the iOS changes,

01:27:35   and oh yeah, iPad OS is still an operating system

01:27:38   in our lineup.

01:27:39   I'm very curious to see what the,

01:27:41   we'll get a second data point for VisionOS,

01:27:44   so we can start to draw a line between the two data points,

01:27:47   but more than anything else,

01:27:49   I'm very curious what my development life will look like

01:27:53   for the next year plus,

01:27:55   and I think some of that will probably be

01:27:57   me ripping all my hair out,

01:27:58   trying to get this concurrency stuff working properly,

01:28:01   but I think some of it should be fun and exciting,

01:28:03   and as much as I will, in one breath,

01:28:06   whine about SwiftUI,

01:28:08   and tell you that it's, it neuters me here and there,

01:28:11   and there's nothing you can do to put a search bar anywhere,

01:28:13   but in a navigation bar,

01:28:15   and things of that nature that,

01:28:16   it makes it very, very stodgy,

01:28:18   and difficult, and unwavering,

01:28:20   but I'll also tell you that it's just such a joy

01:28:23   to work with, and so, so much nicer,

01:28:26   and so much faster than UIKit,

01:28:29   and so I'd love to see what new SwiftUI stuff is happening.

01:28:32   It certainly seems like Apple internally

01:28:34   is spending more and more time,

01:28:35   and putting more and more energy

01:28:36   into consuming SwiftUI,

01:28:38   which makes me think they're doing the same for,

01:28:41   within SwiftUI itself,

01:28:43   the best way for Apple to make a good API for developers

01:28:47   is for them to dog food it,

01:28:48   and they seem to be doing that more and more,

01:28:50   so I'm excited for that.

01:28:51   I don't know, I'm really excited,

01:28:53   leaving aside the fact that, you know,

01:28:54   I'm gonna see you too,

01:28:55   leaving aside that I'm gonna be there,

01:28:56   that I'm gonna be at Apple Park,

01:28:59   all of that is, of course, incredibly exciting,

01:29:00   we covered that last week,

01:29:01   but I'm just really excited to see what's coming,

01:29:04   'cause there's so little that has leaked out,

01:29:06   like we said, that,

01:29:07   and what's leaked out is more of a,

01:29:09   oh, there's AI dust a-coming,

01:29:11   you know, there's a dust storm a-brewin',

01:29:12   and that's about it, so.

01:29:13   - I still think the leaks have covered a lot.

01:29:17   I don't expect to see tons of stuff that wasn't leaked.

01:29:19   It's just that the stuff that's leaked is,

01:29:21   I don't know, obvious, or like, not shocking,

01:29:24   you know what I mean?

01:29:25   - It's also a bit vague, like, particularly around the AI stuff.

01:29:27   - Yeah, yeah, I mean, it is vague,

01:29:29   but like, you know, we won't get the details,

01:29:30   but I don't think, well, we'll see.

01:29:33   Will there be something that was like,

01:29:34   totally not rumored that is shocking?

01:29:35   I think it'll just be in the details of how things work.

01:29:39   And by the way, speaking of testing,

01:29:41   I forget, I think there's a bunch of open source projects

01:29:43   that do this, and I kind of hope Apple adopts one of them,

01:29:45   or takes one under its wing or makes it official,

01:29:47   but the XCTest framework,

01:29:48   which Casey may be familiar with,

01:29:50   it's not great.

01:29:52   It's kind of stodgy and old,

01:29:54   and if you've ever used, - It's passable.

01:29:55   - If you've used a modern testing framework

01:29:57   in a language like Node or whatever,

01:29:58   you kind of, or even, I mean,

01:30:00   obviously all my testing experience comes from Perl,

01:30:02   the great-great-great-grandfather

01:30:03   of good testing and programming languages.

01:30:06   Just the fundamental stuff that you expect

01:30:09   from a test framework either doesn't exist

01:30:12   or is very awkward in XCTest, 'cause it's old.

01:30:15   And so what does the Swift UI for testing look like?

01:30:18   And there are a bunch of open source projects

01:30:19   that try to do this, like make a sort of Swiftie type API

01:30:23   that looks kind of like the popular testing packages

01:30:27   for Node or, you know, like just a nicer testing framework.

01:30:32   I would love Apple to bless one of those and adopt it

01:30:36   or to come out with its own.

01:30:37   I mean, this kind of falls into the category

01:30:38   of a MarkerWiz thing, it's like,

01:30:39   hey, we've got a bunch of old APIs.

01:30:41   Some of them aren't really Swiftie, right?

01:30:43   They don't match the language well.

01:30:45   They don't take advantage of the features.

01:30:46   They look kind of old.

01:30:47   They're kind of awkward to use.

01:30:48   We know better ways to do things now.

01:30:50   Test framework is one of those things.

01:30:52   I think that would be a big quality

01:30:53   of life improvement for people.

01:30:54   Of course, they have to keep supporting the old one

01:30:56   basically forever because people use it

01:30:58   and make huge test suites, but a Swiftie testing,

01:31:01   again, there's been no rumors about that.

01:31:02   I've just been looking at a lot of the open source ones.

01:31:04   I'm like, these are all good ideas.

01:31:06   Pick one, Apple, and do it or, you know.

01:31:08   - I miss fluent assertions is one that I used

01:31:11   in my .NET days and so, you know,

01:31:13   I'm looking at the about page trying to remind myself

01:31:15   how it works and basically, you know,

01:31:16   say you have a string that's an account number

01:31:18   is the example they use and the code you write

01:31:21   is account number should be, you know,

01:31:25   one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

01:31:26   And so it's written almost like plain English

01:31:29   and it's not too dissimilar from--

01:31:31   - Are there dots between every word?

01:31:33   - Yeah, yeah, account number dot should,

01:31:34   paren, paren, dot, be, paren.

01:31:36   - Ugh, that's a little bit, that's a very popular trend.

01:31:40   - I know, it's awful.

01:31:42   It's code that looks great on slides and examples

01:31:44   and it's totally unwritable.

01:31:46   - Well, so it's not terrible and that is a common thing,

01:31:49   but really what you're looking for is the convenience

01:31:51   of being able to essentially, you know,

01:31:53   to just give one example and I know XCTest

01:31:55   has ways of doing this, but it's awkward and weird.

01:31:58   You have a bunch of nested data structures and objects

01:32:00   and you wanna diff them, right?

01:32:02   I don't wanna have to do that manually.

01:32:04   I just want it to be able to use Reflection to traverse them

01:32:06   and to give me like a really cool looking diff

01:32:08   of where they differ, you know what I mean, right?

01:32:10   As opposed to comparing properties manually one at a time

01:32:14   at each level and having messages to,

01:32:16   so you know which part differed or whatever.

01:32:17   Every modern testing framework has a way to say,

01:32:21   there's this thing like that thing

01:32:22   and they're both kind of deeply nested structures

01:32:24   and the good ones say, oh, and by the way,

01:32:26   I don't care about these differences

01:32:28   and ignore these properties

01:32:29   and I don't care about white space.

01:32:30   And like, it's all just convenient.

01:32:32   It's like, oh, that's just convenience method.

01:32:33   You can do that all yourself.

01:32:34   Yeah, you can.

01:32:35   It's just annoying as hell, right?

01:32:36   So it's not so much the whole,

01:32:38   it looks like English, this should be that

01:32:39   and has this and does this and whatever.

01:32:41   I just want like, especially in a language like Swift,

01:32:44   it's so, you know, really on board with static checking

01:32:48   and so you really just can't,

01:32:50   ah, just chuck these two things over the fence.

01:32:51   They look like they're the same.

01:32:52   It's like Swift's like, whoa, whoa,

01:32:53   these are totally different classes.

01:32:55   I can't compare these two things.

01:32:56   What are you talking about?

01:32:57   I don't have those kind of Reflection.

01:32:59   It's like, you really need convenient support

01:33:02   from the framework to satisfy the Swift compiler

01:33:06   to allow you to just say, is this thing like that?

01:33:08   Expect this thing to be like that.

01:33:09   That's gonna be like this, you know.

01:33:11   It's, that stuff is tedious in testing.

01:33:15   It makes people not wanna write tests.

01:33:17   - Like Marco.

01:33:18   - Well, that's not why.

01:33:19   - Sick man.

01:33:20   - If he did write tests, he'd say, boy,

01:33:21   it sure is tedious comparing these deeply nested object

01:33:24   trees to each other.

01:33:26   And then, you know, and if you get lazy,

01:33:28   when the test fails, you're like, why did it fail?

01:33:31   What was the problem?

01:33:32   And you gotta basically gotta step through it

01:33:32   in the debugger because there's no like, you know,

01:33:34   the automatic diffing of object trees

01:33:36   to tell you exactly where it failed.

01:33:38   - Anything else you're looking forward to, John?

01:33:40   - I am kind of, I mean, I mentioned the photos feature

01:33:42   'cause that's what I'm thinking about a lot.

01:33:43   Like again, when I edit photos, I have many tools.

01:33:47   I've purchased many other external editors.

01:33:49   I have Photoshop, I have Photomator, Pixelmator.

01:33:52   I have raw power.

01:33:54   I have access to web tools or whatever,

01:33:56   but there's something to be said for having stuff built in.

01:33:59   And Photos does have stuff built in, but it's so outdated.

01:34:02   And I like the quote unquote healing brush

01:34:04   in the Apple Photos app is just barbaric compared

01:34:08   to what the good apps can do.

01:34:10   But I don't always want to edit an external editor.

01:34:12   I certainly don't want to export an edit on the web

01:34:14   and bring it back or whatever.

01:34:15   So to the extent that Apple can catch up

01:34:18   and add those features to Photos itself,

01:34:19   and I can actually run them on my Intel Mac,

01:34:21   that will have be a big quality of life change for me.

01:34:25   I will really appreciate that, not this year,

01:34:27   but next year for my Long Island Beach vacation pictures.

01:34:30   I want it to be in the Photos app.

01:34:32   I want the Photos app to get better.

01:34:34   This is not the year, it seems like.

01:34:36   If there's something about Apple's platforms

01:34:38   that you want it to get better

01:34:39   that doesn't have to do with AI, this is not the year.

01:34:41   All the bugs that report in the Finder,

01:34:43   all those things that are annoying you,

01:34:45   the apps that you feel like are neglected

01:34:47   and haven't had any attention paid to them,

01:34:49   this is not the year they're gonna fix that.

01:34:51   You know, usually it's never the year

01:34:52   that they're gonna fix that,

01:34:53   but definitely not this year.

01:34:54   What they're gonna do,

01:34:55   those teams spent time adding AI features or whatever,

01:34:57   and so I will appreciate those when I have them,

01:34:59   but like, you know, we're all still hoping for that year

01:35:01   when the bug that's been in your favorite operating system

01:35:04   for 10 years finally gets fixed,

01:35:06   but it just does not seem like this is the year for that.

01:35:09   And it wasn't last year, and it wasn't the year before that,

01:35:11   and it wasn't the year before that,

01:35:12   and it wasn't the year before that,

01:35:13   and it's a big systemic problem

01:35:15   that we've discussed in the show,

01:35:15   but definitely not this year

01:35:17   because everyone's been off doing AI stuff.

01:35:19   So that's kind of a shame, but yeah.

01:35:21   If I had a wish list, it would be like,

01:35:22   oh, they fixed all my longstanding bugs.

01:35:24   That's not gonna happen.

01:35:25   I'm looking forward to the photos editing features.

01:35:27   I am kind of looking forward to the better Siri.

01:35:31   Like, I rarely use Siri,

01:35:34   but the things I use it for, I find useful.

01:35:38   The, you know, remind me to do whatever,

01:35:40   use that all the time, almost daily, right?

01:35:42   Because I know how to do it.

01:35:44   I know the syntax it wants.

01:35:46   I know how it works for the most part.

01:35:48   It could be better, but it just shows the utility.

01:35:51   If you can give me something that I can,

01:35:52   that works enough for me to use it,

01:35:55   it has a big effect on my life.

01:35:56   So if they just take something that Siri

01:35:58   has supposedly been able to do for 10 years

01:36:01   and they make it good enough for me to wanna use it,

01:36:03   that could potentially have a big impact.

01:36:05   So I'm kind of looking forward to that as well.

01:36:07   And I was looking forward to hardware,

01:36:09   but that doesn't seem like it's gonna happen, so.

01:36:11   Yeah, and the Swift stick stuff, like I said,

01:36:13   I'm mostly looking forward to how Apple presents the stuff

01:36:16   that I've already been reading about in Swift Evolution

01:36:18   for an entire year.

01:36:19   Like, what is the pitch?

01:36:20   What is the, what are the ergonomics of it?

01:36:23   How does it manifest in Xcode?

01:36:25   How do they present it to the world?

01:36:27   Because there is a potential for pushback, let's say, right?

01:36:32   You know, for everyone who has tried it,

01:36:34   it's an obscure flag that you have to know about.

01:36:36   Like, oh, strict concurrency, all caps, blah, blah, blah,

01:36:38   equals whatever in your build.

01:36:39   Like, it's not obvious how to do it in the existing Xcode,

01:36:43   but the people who try it, they're like,

01:36:44   oh, 50,000 warnings.

01:36:46   I'm like, wow, I reduced that to 100

01:36:48   after just changing two lines of code.

01:36:50   And then they spend a week trying to get that 100 down to 10.

01:36:52   And then they spend a month trying to get that 10 down

01:36:54   to zero, right?

01:36:55   Depending on how much of their app

01:36:57   they're willing to rewrite.

01:36:58   That's a tough story to pitch to people.

01:37:01   And I'm, you know, setting aside the technology

01:37:04   and the actual features, how do you present that

01:37:07   to a room full of developers and make them excited about

01:37:09   and not dreading it?

01:37:11   Like, you know what I mean?

01:37:13   And that is going to be a challenge this year, I think.

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01:39:16   (upbeat music)

01:39:20   All right, let's do at least a little bit of Ask ATP.

01:39:22   It's been a little while since we've done it.

01:39:23   And let's start with James who writes,

01:39:25   "Any chance that the now expected late 2024

01:39:27   M4 MacBook Pro gets upgraded to Thunderbolt 5?"

01:39:31   And my question to James is, why do we care?

01:39:34   Not to say that we shouldn't.

01:39:35   I'm not saying that the question is unreasonable,

01:39:37   but I genuinely don't even know

01:39:39   what Thunderbolt 5 brings.

01:39:41   So, Jon.

01:39:43   - Faster speed.

01:39:44   That's what we talked about on the show in the past.

01:39:46   Unlike Thunderbolt 3 to 4,

01:39:48   which didn't increase the speed at all,

01:39:49   Thunderbolt 5 does.

01:39:51   You know, is there a chance?

01:39:52   Yes, there is a chance.

01:39:55   I think there is.

01:39:56   I don't know enough about the M4 and the iPad

01:39:57   if anyone has examined it

01:39:58   and see if there's any vestiges of Thunderbolt 5

01:40:01   or whatever, but you know, there's always a chance.

01:40:04   There's not a good chance.

01:40:06   Apple has not really been known for being on the,

01:40:09   we talked about this when we were talking

01:40:10   about the Co-Pilot Plus PCs

01:40:11   and how they just all had the latest versions

01:40:12   of every standard, latest version of Bluetooth,

01:40:14   latest version of Wi-Fi,

01:40:15   like latest version of Thunderbolt, right?

01:40:17   Apple doesn't really do that.

01:40:19   When they do, it's notable.

01:40:21   Apple's current line of stuff have one back

01:40:24   from the latest version of most of this stuff.

01:40:26   That's just the way Apple tends to roll.

01:40:27   So I don't think it's highly likely,

01:40:30   but absolutely it is possible to keep up a lot

01:40:32   for those M4 MacBook Pros with Thunderbolt 5.

01:40:35   - David Martin writes,

01:40:36   "Do you think Apple will finally ship 16 gigs of RAM

01:40:38   "in the MacBook Air when the M4 gets put into it?"

01:40:41   I don't, but I hope.

01:40:43   - I mean, you can hope.

01:40:45   Now's the time you can have this hope.

01:40:46   I don't think so.

01:40:47   Just, they should.

01:40:50   They 100% should, but I don't think so.

01:40:52   I mean, do they even,

01:40:53   is the MacBook Pro start at 16?

01:40:55   I forget.

01:40:56   - I think the Pros do.

01:40:58   - Even the low-end one that's like barely a Pro?

01:41:01   - I don't know.

01:41:02   It wouldn't surprise me either way.

01:41:03   I mean, they're gonna keep shipping.

01:41:04   For the MacBook Air, that is a computer

01:41:07   that is extremely important for it to hit a price point

01:41:10   for its sales.

01:41:12   And Apple will not sacrifice its margins.

01:41:14   So they're gonna get their, you know, whatever 38%,

01:41:17   whatever their margin is,

01:41:17   like they're gonna get their margin somewhere.

01:41:19   And so they, you know,

01:41:21   if they make more money on average

01:41:23   by skimping on the RAM on that base model,

01:41:26   they're gonna keep doing that.

01:41:27   They're gonna keep doing it as long as they possibly can.

01:41:30   - See, on the MacBook Air though,

01:41:32   I think that is, I mean,

01:41:34   of all the computers Apple sells,

01:41:36   I feel like the MacBook Air is probably the least likely

01:41:40   to have its specs bumped,

01:41:42   because people just want the cheapest laptop they can get.

01:41:46   And so like, on the MacBook Pros,

01:41:48   like what percentage of MacBook Pros

01:41:49   are purchased with the base RAM

01:41:50   versus the percentage of MacBook Airs?

01:41:52   The MacBook Air has gotta be so much bigger

01:41:54   than the MacBook Pros.

01:41:55   - I don't know, 'cause in both cases,

01:41:57   huge amounts of them are purchased by businesses

01:41:59   and schools and stuff like that.

01:42:00   So like, and I think usually when you're talking

01:42:03   about those big bulk buys,

01:42:05   it's very, very frequently, it is either the base model

01:42:09   or like the next stocked up config

01:42:11   that is normally stocked, like not a custom build.

01:42:14   So, but there's tons of base model sales sold in any case.

01:42:17   So I bet it is a pretty high ratio

01:42:20   for both the Air and the Pro,

01:42:22   although I think you're right,

01:42:23   it probably is higher for the Air.

01:42:25   - Well anyway, like they can't stay at eight forever,

01:42:28   just like they couldn't stay at four forever.

01:42:30   Do they have to double?

01:42:31   Do they have to go from eight to 16?

01:42:33   I mean, the iPads apparently come with 12,

01:42:36   they're only using eight of it.

01:42:37   Like you can go up, you don't have to double it every time.

01:42:40   Like it'd be nice, they'll be catching up,

01:42:42   I think it would be a good idea,

01:42:43   but like 16 seems too generous for their lowest end laptop.

01:42:47   - It's not.

01:42:48   - The M4 version of their lowest end laptop.

01:42:49   - It's 2024. - But they're absolutely sure

01:42:50   because the 16 versus the eight costs them

01:42:53   like five extra bucks.

01:42:55   The only way it would hurt the margins

01:42:56   is why Marco was mentioning it,

01:42:57   is it will stop people from buying the more expensive model

01:43:00   where they charge you a bazillion dollars for that RAM.

01:43:02   That's how it hurts margins.

01:43:03   Not because like, oh, that's not hurting margins,

01:43:05   that extra RAM costs them nothing.

01:43:07   That's true, but it stops you from buying

01:43:09   the one where they overcharge for the RAM upgrade.

01:43:11   And that is the problem that Apple's trying to avoid.

01:43:14   But yeah, they need to bump their RAM.

01:43:16   If they're gonna do this thing where they just

01:43:18   only will only ever double it

01:43:20   and will wait until it is incredibly embarrassing

01:43:22   before they do the doubling,

01:43:24   that's not a good dynamic and I hope they should fix it.

01:43:26   But yeah.

01:43:29   - Yeah, I think they will upgrade the MacBook Air RAM

01:43:32   once the whatever type of RAM chip the MacBook Air uses

01:43:37   is no longer available in eight gig chips.

01:43:40   That's when they will finally update it.

01:43:41   - I mean, like if it was in the iPad,

01:43:43   maybe those ones aren't available.

01:43:46   I don't think they're ever not gonna be available,

01:43:48   but it's just, when is the,

01:43:51   someone had a similar question,

01:43:52   I think I cut it out of this.

01:43:54   Like which do you think will happen first?

01:43:55   The MacBook Air gets 16 gigs of RAM

01:43:57   or some other highly unlikely thing

01:43:59   and it was like, you know, rock and a hard place.

01:44:01   Two things that Apple just does not wanna do,

01:44:03   but you know, they can't hold the line on RAM forever.

01:44:05   They will have to bump it eventually.

01:44:07   It's just maybe not this year.

01:44:10   - Winnie Lewis writes,

01:44:11   "Could Apple's reluctance to put cellular on the Mac

01:44:13   be due to their failure to produce an in-house modem?

01:44:15   Considering Apple's reluctant dependence on Qualcomm

01:44:18   and the exorbitant rates Qualcomm charges,

01:44:20   I can understand why Apple's holding off

01:44:21   on adding cellular to high priced devices like the Mac.

01:44:24   This argument is undercut somewhat with the iPad Pro

01:44:26   costing the same as a MacBook Air,

01:44:27   but MacBook Pros can still greatly increase in price

01:44:30   over an iPad Pro.

01:44:31   And if customers have waited this long,

01:44:32   what's the harm in making them wait longer?"

01:44:34   Yeah, that's fair.

01:44:35   I feel like we've talked about this

01:44:36   a couple of times in the past.

01:44:37   - Well, yeah, we need to debunk this again,

01:44:39   because we've mentioned this years ago

01:44:41   and then we corrected ourselves

01:44:42   and some people are still going with the outdated information

01:44:45   the idea that Qualcomm charges you a percentage

01:44:47   of the purchase price of the product

01:44:48   and because Macs can be so much more expensive

01:44:51   that Apple would be charged a ton more.

01:44:53   That's not how it works

01:44:54   based on our most recent looking into this.

01:44:57   Like there is a cap and Apple's already at the cap.

01:44:59   Like Qualcomm, whatever, they'll charge you a percentage

01:45:02   up to whatever the amount is.

01:45:04   And basically every Mac is already at that maximum cap.

01:45:07   So Apple is not avoiding cellular and Macs

01:45:10   because it would be too expensive

01:45:13   relative to putting cellular in iPads and other devices.

01:45:16   They could be doing it for,

01:45:17   whatever their reasons are, that's not it.

01:45:19   Like it's like, "Oh, they can't do it

01:45:20   because you can buy a $5,000 Mac

01:45:21   and then a Qualcomm will get $500 of that."

01:45:23   That's not how it works.

01:45:25   At least, you know, it used to be

01:45:27   and then we were corrected

01:45:29   and then we aired the correction

01:45:31   and I think it is still the case

01:45:32   that there is a monetary cap for this.

01:45:35   - Every possible argument people put up

01:45:37   for why cellular maybe is being held back from the laptops

01:45:41   for some kind of weird business reason,

01:45:43   it's in every iPad.

01:45:45   Like it's even, okay, it's in the $350 base model.

01:45:49   Like you have to pay a little more for the cellular,

01:45:51   but like it's been available on every iPad ever since 2010.

01:45:57   So every iPad model has had cellular as an option

01:46:00   that has cost between usually $130 and $200 extra

01:46:04   and it is great, it just works.

01:46:06   Like, and the only thing I can think of

01:46:09   is like in some various forms of their deals with carriers

01:46:14   or their pricing with Qualcomm,

01:46:17   I'm sure there are differences

01:46:19   in like how the devices are categorized.

01:46:22   Like I'm sure they have different agreements

01:46:24   and different rates for,

01:46:25   if somebody's considered a phone or a wearable

01:46:28   or a tablet or a PC.

01:46:30   Like I'm sure those are like different categories

01:46:32   for some kind of licensing deals or whatever,

01:46:34   but again like cellular laptops have existed

01:46:37   in the PC world for a very long time now.

01:46:40   So obviously this is not something that's that difficult

01:46:43   to navigate with the carriers and the royalty holders

01:46:46   like Qualcomm and things like that.

01:46:47   Like this isn't a difficult problem

01:46:50   and this isn't a problem that no one has solved.

01:46:53   This is just, this is a choice that they've made

01:46:56   that they just don't care.

01:46:58   And I'm sure if an Apple person was here,

01:47:00   I'm sure we'd get a wonderful PR answer of like,

01:47:03   you know, how important it is to serve our customers

01:47:05   and they, you know, what we show, blah, blah, blah.

01:47:07   But like, look, actions speak louder than words.

01:47:10   Apple does not care about cellular on the Mac.

01:47:12   They have not prioritized it.

01:47:13   They seem to have no path to get there from where,

01:47:16   like they seem to be in no rush to do it

01:47:19   and we are so far past the point where like,

01:47:23   it can't be just like, oh, they're working on it,

01:47:25   but it's not done yet.

01:47:25   No, we're so far past that point.

01:47:27   They don't care.

01:47:28   - I mean, iPad Pro being so expensive,

01:47:31   you can make an iPad Pro more expensive than a Mac

01:47:33   pretty easily by configuring it.

01:47:35   It's the same, you know, they're using the same SoCs,

01:47:38   all Apple Silicon, like every excuse has fallen away.

01:47:41   Winnie's question here is though,

01:47:42   is actually vaguely plausible is that Apple has been planning

01:47:46   to bring cellular to the Mac just as soon as they're done

01:47:48   with their in-house modems.

01:47:49   And unfortunately they pinned that feature

01:47:52   to the timeline of a product that is terminally behind.

01:47:56   Apple's been trying to,

01:47:57   they bought the modem business from Intel

01:47:59   and they've been trying to make cell modems

01:48:00   and they wanted this for their phones, obviously,

01:48:02   but like maybe they said,

01:48:04   we're not even thinking about cellular in the Mac

01:48:06   until we get our modem stuff

01:48:07   and the modem stuff should be ready by 2022, right guys?

01:48:10   And you know, it hasn't worked out.

01:48:11   - Even that theory, like why?

01:48:13   It's literally been in every single iPad.

01:48:15   - That's totally an Apple thing to do though.

01:48:17   It's totally an Apple thing to do.

01:48:18   - But why?

01:48:19   How different is the hardware in a MacBook Air

01:48:21   versus the hardware in an iPad?

01:48:22   - I know, well, this is definitely a business thing.

01:48:25   If you worked in a big company, someone will say,

01:48:28   "We're gonna do this.

01:48:29   It's been a long standing thing that people want

01:48:30   and we're gonna tie it to this other thing."

01:48:31   And then the other thing gets delayed

01:48:32   and then the people will say,

01:48:33   can we just untie these two things now and just do,

01:48:36   you know, like you said, just do what we do in the iPads?

01:48:38   Can we just stick to Qualcomm thing?

01:48:40   And there's just a tremendous institutional

01:48:43   sort of resistance to untying two things

01:48:45   that have been tied to each other,

01:48:47   especially when it comes to a product line

01:48:48   that is not the top priority.

01:48:50   Like if you tie something on the phone and it turns out,

01:48:52   oh, you know, now one thing is delaying another,

01:48:54   untying that is easier because the phone is so important.

01:48:56   But on the Mac, I'm sure it's like,

01:48:58   no, we've already started down this path.

01:49:00   We're working on the modems.

01:49:01   Let's just wait until they're done.

01:49:02   I think they're gonna be done this year and they're not done.

01:49:04   And then the next year you have the same conversation

01:49:05   and with the same result.

01:49:07   That is plausible.

01:49:08   It is a common dysfunction of businesses,

01:49:11   but you know, us out here as customers,

01:49:12   like we don't care what the reason is.

01:49:14   We just want it and, you know,

01:49:16   I think Apple's answer would be like,

01:49:17   well, you may want that,

01:49:18   but you're in the minority, so tough luck.

01:49:20   Eh, it is what it is.

01:49:21   - But how many iPad owners choose it?

01:49:24   How many Apple Watch owners choose it?

01:49:25   - Well, we feel like iPad owners prioritize it differently.

01:49:28   Well, when we survey Mac users,

01:49:30   a very small percentage seem to want it

01:49:31   and our tethering solution is so amazing

01:49:33   and blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:49:34   That's what they would say.

01:49:35   Not that there's any reason that they're not doing it,

01:49:37   but that it's like, well, we have to prioritize it

01:49:39   even though you super duper want it,

01:49:41   not everybody is like you.

01:49:42   I think that's what they'd say.

01:49:42   - And again, if tethering is the answer,

01:49:45   why do iPads have it?

01:49:46   Why does every iPad forever have it?

01:49:49   - And why is tethering so bad?

01:49:51   - You know that too, yeah.

01:49:52   But that's the thing, no argument against it

01:49:55   holds any water once you say,

01:49:56   well, then why is it available

01:49:58   in every single iPad they ever made?

01:50:00   It just makes no sense when you consider that.

01:50:03   Like, why, like, I just, oh God.

01:50:06   As much as, I'm kinda glad that the iPad mania

01:50:09   is passing now from the iPad Pro take,

01:50:11   'cause like, I just, I'm so annoyed at the thought,

01:50:14   like, how amazing would it be

01:50:17   if the MacBook Air was released

01:50:20   with an OLED screen and cellular?

01:50:23   We would be flipping our minds.

01:50:25   - OLED screen, whoa, whoa, whoa.

01:50:27   That is a pro product, Marco.

01:50:29   People with iPad Airs cannot hand a hat

01:50:31   faster than 60 hertz refresh,

01:50:33   'cause that is also a pro product.

01:50:34   And they cannot handle OLED screens,

01:50:35   don't even talk about that for at least five more years.

01:50:38   - Like, why is it, I'm just, I shouldn't get all mad.

01:50:42   Why does the iPad Pro, in even an 11-inch form factor,

01:50:47   have an M4, a great OLED screen,

01:50:52   cellular in a really small package

01:50:55   that costs around a little over 1,000 bucks

01:50:57   if you put the keyboard on it and stuff,

01:50:59   and the MacBook Air, with most of those same cuts

01:51:03   at about the same price, is not only does it not

01:51:07   have those features at those price,

01:51:09   but those features are not attainable

01:51:10   at any price on that product.

01:51:13   Why?

01:51:15   (groans)

01:51:16   - It's so frustrating.

01:51:18   - I mean, part of that is that the iPad you were describing

01:51:20   is the most expensive iPad, and the laptop

01:51:23   you were describing is the least expensive.

01:51:25   And Apple wants to segment its product line, but yeah.

01:51:27   I mean, you can't even get the--

01:51:28   - But the same people are looking at both

01:51:29   of those product segments. - I know, you can't even

01:51:31   get the OLEDs on the MacBook Pro,

01:51:32   so it really hurts that argument for now,

01:51:33   but we'll see how it goes, but yeah.

01:51:35   - I mean, look, the OLED's brand new.

01:51:36   Like, I understand that that's gonna be a process

01:51:38   of bringing it to everything slowly, sure.

01:51:41   Cellular is not.

01:51:42   It's so not new.

01:51:45   I was using a cellular modem to tether my laptop in 2006.

01:51:50   This is not new!

01:51:52   - No, I hear you and I agree, but if we continue this

01:51:56   any further, it will turn this entire show

01:51:58   into a Marco and Casey whine about cellular max power hour.

01:52:01   So I feel like at this point, we should probably call it,

01:52:06   even though I would like to agree

01:52:07   with all your grumbling and whining,

01:52:10   because I am right there with you.

01:52:12   - You're just making so many people write in

01:52:13   to say how little they care about cellular on their Macs,

01:52:16   and it's a useless feature,

01:52:16   and Apple should never edit.

01:52:18   - Please don't.

01:52:19   - And if it's so useless, why isn't everybody up there?

01:52:21   Thank you so much to our sponsors this episode,

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01:52:31   Members get an exclusive after show topic every week

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01:54:05   - All right, so we're gonna do

01:54:09   a little post-show neutral today.

01:54:12   And we're gonna talk about our member special.

01:54:15   This is the most recent member special

01:54:17   as we are recording right now,

01:54:18   which was talking about cars and car-related things.

01:54:22   And so, Jon, I guess you would like to revise your statement

01:54:25   with regard to buying cars for your kid?

01:54:28   - I just have updates.

01:54:29   Like I threw at the end of our discussion,

01:54:31   the discussion was like, if you had to buy a new car now,

01:54:33   what would you buy?

01:54:33   And we had all the sorts of conditions and caveats

01:54:35   and whatever, and we got increasingly ridiculous.

01:54:37   At the very end, I said, what about buying a car for a kid?

01:54:40   Which, you know, neither one of your children

01:54:43   are driving age, but mine are,

01:54:44   so I'm like, maybe this will come up.

01:54:45   Anyway, and we talked about it,

01:54:49   and it's a difficult problem and yada, yada,

01:54:51   but the problem has continued to exist in my household.

01:54:54   We have four licensed drivers and two cars.

01:54:57   That is a difficult situation,

01:54:59   and it's made more difficult by me

01:55:01   because I don't want my children to drive my car.

01:55:05   So now we have four licensed drivers

01:55:08   and two of them can only drive one of the cars.

01:55:11   So it's kind of like the whole, you know,

01:55:13   bringing the goat and the chickens

01:55:15   and the wolf across the river or whatever,

01:55:16   of like, okay, well, if this person wants the car

01:55:18   on this day, then I will let my wife use my car.

01:55:21   So that means she'd have to take my car

01:55:23   when she goes to work, so her car is here

01:55:25   for the kids to use, and then it's just,

01:55:28   it's a pain, right?

01:55:29   And we're talking about it on the show,

01:55:30   is if you had to buy a car for your kid, what would you buy?

01:55:33   And I'm, because I'm faced with that problem.

01:55:35   We were considering trying to get a kid car,

01:55:38   not a car for a kid.

01:55:39   They could buy their own car eventually,

01:55:41   and maybe one of these cars eventually will be given to/sold

01:55:44   to the kid when they graduate college

01:55:45   and move out of the house,

01:55:47   but we just wanted to have a car that the kids can drive

01:55:50   that like, if they bang it up or hit a curb

01:55:52   or get into a fender bender, we don't care about it,

01:55:55   and they're not driving our cars,

01:55:56   and we don't have to do this car shuffle thing.

01:55:59   And I've been working on this problem

01:56:02   since we recorded that member special.

01:56:04   And as, again, as you can imagine,

01:56:07   I make it so much more difficult for myself

01:56:08   because of what I want out of this.

01:56:11   So here's the difficulty.

01:56:12   - Okay, let me guess.

01:56:14   The end of this discussion is you have bought or will buy

01:56:18   either an Accord, which is my guess, or a Civic,

01:56:21   because I cannot fathom you owning

01:56:23   any other car manufacturer's product other than Honda.

01:56:26   - So here's, I'm looking for cars and getting frustrated.

01:56:29   Here's the frustration.

01:56:30   First one, let me find a crap box.

01:56:33   Although I'm trying to use the kind word for that, right?

01:56:35   Let's find a kid car, like it's like a $2,000 thing.

01:56:38   Like it's junky, you don't care, you know what I mean?

01:56:41   - Like the old Volvo box.

01:56:42   - Yeah, and I was even looking at old Volvos.

01:56:44   I was like, can I find a Volvo or whatever?

01:56:46   And I was looking at like the safety ratings and stuff.

01:56:49   Not that Volvos aren't safe, they are,

01:56:51   but like the safety rating information available to us

01:56:54   is not granular enough for me to distinguish

01:56:57   how much better a Volvo is than like some other car

01:57:01   of similar vintage, you know what I mean?

01:57:03   Like, 'cause everyone games the system,

01:57:04   like they all want to get the five star crash rating

01:57:06   or whatever, and so two five star cars,

01:57:09   they're not the same, they both got five stars,

01:57:11   but one of them is probably better than the other,

01:57:12   but how much better and how can I tell?

01:57:14   But anyway, I'm looking for crap boxes.

01:57:18   And there's a lot of them available, but they're crappy.

01:57:22   - Hence the name. - Right.

01:57:24   I mean, they have like 200,000 miles in them.

01:57:27   They're filled with rust 'cause it's New England, right?

01:57:29   Like any car that you can buy

01:57:31   for a very small amount of money,

01:57:32   it has huge amount of miles,

01:57:34   this is gonna be rusted out,

01:57:35   it's gonna have so many mechanical problems,

01:57:36   I don't want to leave my kids stranded.

01:57:38   I do want it to be safe, but any car that's like $2,000

01:57:41   is gonna be old and older cars are less safe,

01:57:43   they have less safety equipment,

01:57:45   they're safe in crash testing, you know what I mean?

01:57:47   And it's like, do I want my kid to be in an unreliable car

01:57:52   that's gonna cost me like $1,000 in repairs

01:57:55   once I bring it home and realize that the engine is dead

01:57:58   or it needs a new water pump

01:57:59   or all the brakes are shot or whatever?

01:58:01   - Did you get yourself a new car?

01:58:03   - That's exactly what I was wondering.

01:58:04   Are we pulling a Marco and buying ourselves a new car?

01:58:07   - Well, we're just talking about the crap boxes now, right?

01:58:10   It's like-- - Oh my God, he did.

01:58:11   - You're always hoping to find the car

01:58:13   that was just driven to church on Sunday every day

01:58:16   and kept in an air-conditioned garage

01:58:18   and it has a small number of miles on it,

01:58:21   but that just doesn't exist.

01:58:23   And then, so I'm looking for used cars like that.

01:58:25   And then I go up, okay,

01:58:26   well, what if I say it's not a crap box?

01:58:28   What if I look for a decent used car?

01:58:30   Then what happens with my philosophy is like,

01:58:32   I go right from crap box on Craigslist or whatever, right?

01:58:35   I go from that, I immediately go to a whatsoever,

01:58:37   I don't want a crap box,

01:58:39   I don't wanna worry that this car is unreliable.

01:58:41   I want a car that doesn't have a lot of miles,

01:58:44   that's probably pretty reliable,

01:58:46   and you get into the whole land of certified,

01:58:48   pre-owned with warranty from dealer type things.

01:58:52   And guess what?

01:58:52   Those cars cost as much as a new car.

01:58:54   (laughing)

01:58:56   I was like, what the hell?

01:58:57   And you're gonna say, is there nothing in between?

01:58:59   Yeah, there are things in between,

01:59:00   but I don't want much in between.

01:59:02   I either want a crap box that costs me nothing

01:59:04   or a very reliable car.

01:59:05   And guess what?

01:59:06   If you want a very reliable car with not a lot of miles,

01:59:08   it's basically the price of a new car.

01:59:09   - Now wait, hold on.

01:59:10   I don't really disagree with anything you've said,

01:59:13   although I have not gone car shopping in six years now, but--

01:59:16   - You're always going car shopping, come on.

01:59:17   - Well, eh, yes and no.

01:59:19   But anyways, I haven't done serious car shopping.

01:59:22   I've done no more than kick some tires.

01:59:24   But anyways, first of all,

01:59:26   and I'll just leave this be

01:59:27   because we'll get on a huge tangent,

01:59:29   but you should be buying a lightly used electric car

01:59:32   for your kids because it doesn't have a lot of--

01:59:34   - A lightly used electric car.

01:59:36   - Yes. - Please point me to those.

01:59:37   - Yeah, get like a Leaf or something,

01:59:39   or even like an old Model 3 at this point.

01:59:41   There's so many out there now.

01:59:44   - So I'm not gonna buy a Tesla,

01:59:45   so we can just take that off the table right away.

01:59:48   And a Nissan Leaf, I did look at them,

01:59:50   but they don't have like conditioned batteries,

01:59:52   so all their batteries, and again in New England,

01:59:54   are so hosed, it's not even funny,

01:59:56   like the used ones, you know what I mean?

01:59:57   Because they don't even do like--

01:59:58   - Well, it's your own fault

01:59:59   for living somewhere with weather.

02:00:01   I mean, what do you expect?

02:00:02   - And a Nissan Leaf, it's not an unsafe car,

02:00:04   but I just, I'm not sure.

02:00:06   - There are options other than that.

02:00:07   - And the thing is, even a lightly used electric car,

02:00:10   they're expensive.

02:00:11   They're not, you can't buy,

02:00:13   there's no such thing as a crap box version of that,

02:00:15   and then all of a sudden,

02:00:16   you're getting into new car territory prices, right?

02:00:18   It's like, oh, buy lightly used Nissan Leaf for $22,000.

02:00:21   That's new car territory.

02:00:23   - Okay, that's fair.

02:00:24   Okay, so the other thing I was gonna say is,

02:00:25   there is an in-between that I'm sure

02:00:27   you will thumb your nose at for some reason or another,

02:00:29   and maybe it's that you just don't have these where you are,

02:00:31   but it's local hero CarMax,

02:00:34   which I think I've mentioned many times.

02:00:35   - This has been a long time on their website.

02:00:37   - It's headquartered here in Richmond,

02:00:38   and they, to the best of my recollection,

02:00:43   not only do they typically sell decent used cars,

02:00:47   and it's always a crap shoot.

02:00:48   I'm not saying they're guaranteed to be perfect,

02:00:49   but they're usually pretty decent,

02:00:50   but A, they do have a one-week return policy

02:00:52   on freaking automobiles, which is pretty cool,

02:00:55   but secondly, you can choose to buy

02:00:58   into their extended warranty,

02:00:59   and so you can basically create your own CPO situation.

02:01:03   Granted, it does cost extra money.

02:01:05   It's not free, but you can basically

02:01:06   create your own CPO situation

02:01:08   by giving them some money upfront,

02:01:09   and then they will do a bumper-to-bumper warranty

02:01:12   on this used car, which might be the best

02:01:14   of both worlds for you, although I suspect

02:01:16   that they're probably still more expensive

02:01:18   than you would wanna spend.

02:01:19   - Yeah, I spend a lot of time on CarMax,

02:01:21   AutoTrader, AutoTempest, Cars and Bids even,

02:01:24   where I've had saved searches for months

02:01:26   on Cars and Bids just out of my own curiosity.

02:01:29   Cars and Bids is more of an enthusiast site,

02:01:31   and I have saved searches for the last stick shift accord

02:01:35   or whatever. - Of course.

02:01:36   - Actually, to go back a step, I'm embarrassed.

02:01:39   I forgot about this because my parents have one.

02:01:41   D-Temp from the chat brings up,

02:01:43   why not a used Chevy Bolt?

02:01:44   They weren't that expensive new.

02:01:45   They can't be but so expensive used.

02:01:47   - The used EV things, like, a lot of things

02:01:50   keep me away from the used EVs.

02:01:52   You can't get them cheap.

02:01:54   They have old, cruddy batteries.

02:01:55   The NCAS thing is out there too,

02:01:58   and it's like, do I wanna buy an electric car

02:02:00   with a connector I know is not gonna be

02:02:01   the connector I want it to have

02:02:02   and wire my house up for that kind of, like,

02:02:05   oh, it's so easy. (laughs)

02:02:07   - Identity adapters aren't that big,

02:02:08   but it's like, the main thing is,

02:02:11   there's no electric cars that I like,

02:02:13   like at this point, that I can afford, right?

02:02:14   There's no-- - But it's not for you.

02:02:15   It's for your kids, and Chevy Bolt is the answer.

02:02:17   - But that's the thing.

02:02:18   It's not, it's a kid car, but it's not for the kid.

02:02:21   It's like-- - What?

02:02:23   What?

02:02:24   - The title is going to be in our name.

02:02:26   It's not gonna be the child's car.

02:02:27   - That doesn't matter.

02:02:28   Who's driving this?

02:02:30   - I know that the one's driving it,

02:02:31   but the thing is, if I'm gonna spend, like,

02:02:33   five digits, five digits, 10,000 to 20,000,

02:02:37   whatever dollars in a thing,

02:02:38   I want it to be a car that I like.

02:02:39   Maybe that's just a me thing.

02:02:40   I don't know, it's not for you,

02:02:41   it's just, you know, it's a kid car.

02:02:43   I can't buy a car I don't like.

02:02:45   - On the plus side, now I understand

02:02:47   why you give me so much shit about Aaron's,

02:02:49   about me driving an automatic,

02:02:51   even though I drive Aaron's car maybe 100 miles a year,

02:02:53   but now I get it.

02:02:54   Aaron's car is Aaron's car.

02:02:56   Yes, it is our car, legally speaking,

02:02:59   but I almost never drive that thing.

02:03:00   It's her car.

02:03:01   If she wanted something that I really disagreed with,

02:03:05   I would have a conversation with her about it,

02:03:07   but that's what she would get.

02:03:07   - But she's your wife, not your child.

02:03:09   - Well, even still, like, that's,

02:03:11   I don't understand why you're hanging your hat so much

02:03:13   on it needs to be something John approved.

02:03:15   Like, who freaking cares?

02:03:17   As long as it's not an absolute disaster,

02:03:19   it's not for you.

02:03:20   - It has to be me approved.

02:03:21   It has to be me approved.

02:03:22   - Oh, you are--

02:03:23   - There's no electric cars that I like.

02:03:24   They're very expensive.

02:03:25   I'm worried about the battery life or the battery health.

02:03:27   There's not a lot of good, cheap ones.

02:03:29   - Well, half the Bolt batteries

02:03:30   have been replaced under warranty.

02:03:32   Like, most of them have.

02:03:33   You really are doing yourself a disservice.

02:03:35   - The Bolt is probably the best contender in that category,

02:03:39   'cause like I said, the Leaf doesn't have

02:03:39   the conditioned batteries.

02:03:40   The Bolt did have that battery problem,

02:03:42   and they've been replaced.

02:03:43   They are still kind of expensive,

02:03:46   but that is actually a good possibility.

02:03:49   But there's a lot of unknowns there

02:03:53   with having it be our first electric car

02:03:55   and having it be for the kids and everything like that.

02:03:57   So anyway.

02:03:58   - You're coming up with excuses, darling,

02:03:59   but whatever you have to do.

02:04:01   - It's like I said, it's not the shape of the market

02:04:03   that's forcing these two polar things.

02:04:04   It's my desires that are forcing them,

02:04:07   that it either has to be a crap box or a reliable car,

02:04:09   and the crap boxes are too crappy,

02:04:10   and the reliable ones are too expensive,

02:04:12   and the EVs are too expensive, or I don't like them,

02:04:14   or I think it's not the right time to be an EV,

02:04:16   especially for kids, right?

02:04:18   So that got me into that situation, and you know.

02:04:21   - I feel like there are options

02:04:24   that will solve this problem, which you are,

02:04:26   it is well within your right to say I don't care,

02:04:29   and they're not for me,

02:04:30   but I do think there are options out there for you

02:04:33   that would work, but carry on.

02:04:34   What car did you buy yourself?

02:04:36   - Yeah, well, so that's the,

02:04:38   it's not me that's the problem here.

02:04:40   It's one of my wife's. - Oh, it's not you?

02:04:41   - I assure you it's you.

02:04:42   - It is 100% you, John.

02:04:44   - With respect to getting the car,

02:04:46   once my wife got wind of the idea

02:04:48   that I was looking for a third car for the kids to drive,

02:04:52   you know what happened.

02:04:52   She's the Marco in this situation.

02:04:55   She's like, "Oh, you're looking at cars?"

02:04:56   - Does she want a new car?

02:04:57   - No, no, no, no.

02:04:59   You know, my car is kind of old.

02:05:01   - She is right, isn't it?

02:05:02   No, no, no, hers is newer than yours.

02:05:04   - Hers is the new one, it's the 2017.

02:05:05   It's not that old. - Right, okay, okay.

02:05:06   - But she gets the seven year itch.

02:05:09   Literally, the seven year itch.

02:05:11   - Better here than other places, John.

02:05:13   - I'm not looking for a car for you.

02:05:15   You already have a car.

02:05:16   I'm trying to get the kids out of your car

02:05:18   so they won't wreck it and giving them a car.

02:05:20   And she's like, "Why not just let them continue to wreck it

02:05:23   "and get her a new one?"

02:05:24   But you're looking at cars, I like cars.

02:05:26   (laughing)

02:05:27   - Oh gosh.

02:05:28   - Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

02:05:29   Hold it, before you say anything, I'm going to wager,

02:05:33   I don't know how this is gonna turn out, I really don't,

02:05:34   but I'm going to wager that Tina has decided

02:05:38   she would like something new and thus will want something

02:05:42   that only has two pedals, not necessarily

02:05:45   because she prefers that, but because there's no other choice

02:05:47   at this point, and now you have a marital issue

02:05:50   as to whether or not Tina will have a two pedal car.

02:05:52   That's what I'm gonna guess.

02:05:53   - I'll go even further.

02:05:54   I'm gonna say Tina wants an EV.

02:05:55   - Well, you don't know her driving taste, apparently.

02:05:58   - That's the thing I forgot to mention before,

02:05:59   is that all our cars are stick shift,

02:06:01   my kids both learned on stick shift.

02:06:03   They're not stick shift enthusiasts.

02:06:05   My daughter in particular had real hatred for stick shift,

02:06:07   and she's like, "When are you gonna get a good car?"

02:06:09   She just doesn't--

02:06:10   - Oh, that hurts me deep down inside.

02:06:11   - Yeah, well, other kids, whatever, that's their taste.

02:06:14   All my friends have good cars,

02:06:15   but just two pedals in them or whatever.

02:06:16   She's come around a little bit on it

02:06:17   since getting more comfortable with it,

02:06:19   but my son, he can drive stick fine,

02:06:21   but he's also just not into it.

02:06:22   They're not into it at the very least.

02:06:23   So the whole idea with the kid car

02:06:25   is we would get an automatic.

02:06:26   The kid car would be automatic, right?

02:06:28   Because they both don't like it,

02:06:30   and the whole point is that they would drive it

02:06:33   and whatever, right?

02:06:34   'Cause if they're not enthusiasts,

02:06:37   stick shifts will have no place in their future life.

02:06:39   You know what I mean?

02:06:40   It's just, this is what we had,

02:06:41   they had to learn on it, whatever.

02:06:43   But, you know, anyway.

02:06:45   - See, but my recollection of Tina, of her preferences,

02:06:48   was that she actually legitimately

02:06:50   does prefer three-pedal cars,

02:06:51   but I feel like she's more willing to give on that issue

02:06:56   than you and probably I are.

02:06:59   - Well, when she started saying,

02:07:01   you're looking at cars, I would like a car.

02:07:03   I think she also eliminated EVs along with me

02:07:07   because they're just very expensive,

02:07:08   especially if she's looking for a car for herself,

02:07:09   and she's not, I don't think there's any EVs

02:07:11   that she really likes either.

02:07:12   So there's nothing out there

02:07:13   that she's like pining for or desires or whatever.

02:07:16   And when it comes to non-EVs, she wants a stick.

02:07:21   - I mean, I love that.

02:07:22   I love that, but good luck.

02:07:23   - I mean, this is the reason I'm not forcing her

02:07:25   to buy stick cars.

02:07:26   Every car we've owned has been stick

02:07:27   because that's what she wants.

02:07:29   She's driven automatic.

02:07:30   She drives rental cars.

02:07:31   We're watching our friend's car now,

02:07:33   and they ask us to drive it every once in a while,

02:07:34   and she drives it.

02:07:35   She wants a stick.

02:07:36   And, you know, she knows they're being rare,

02:07:38   and she knows eventually we won't have one,

02:07:39   and we'll have an EV or whatever.

02:07:40   But, you know, she's out there saying,

02:07:44   and she doesn't know what's available, what's out there,

02:07:47   but I do-- - Golf R and Golf GTI.

02:07:49   Or maybe GTI already folded,

02:07:51   but the Golf R is briefly still available.

02:07:53   - We were like, we went from let's buy a kid car

02:07:57   and have it be automatic to let's not do that,

02:08:00   and let's get a third stick car,

02:08:01   which would make my children's head explode.

02:08:04   It's like, you got another car, and it's also stick?

02:08:07   And it's like, I have news for you

02:08:08   about the cars we've purchased in our life.

02:08:11   And we can't drive it?

02:08:13   Anyway, I know what's out there with stick.

02:08:14   Obviously, Accord doesn't have stick anymore.

02:08:16   So that is limited.

02:08:17   My wife does know that.

02:08:18   I've told her about it

02:08:18   before she could begin her morning period many years ago.

02:08:22   But many other cars do have stick shifts in them.

02:08:24   But since getting her 2017,

02:08:27   she has, 2017 Accord with stick shift,

02:08:29   she has some new requirements

02:08:31   that have been added to the I want a new car.

02:08:34   Can you guess what her new requirements are?

02:08:36   - Carplay.

02:08:37   - That's one of them.

02:08:39   And by the way, how did she get that requirement?

02:08:41   None of our cars have Carplay.

02:08:42   We've never owned a car with Carplay.

02:08:44   How did she get that?

02:08:44   Because she knows it exists and she's used it.

02:08:47   - Yeah, exactly.

02:08:48   - She's seen the forbidden fruit.

02:08:50   And so, and not only does she want Carplay,

02:08:53   she wants wireless Carplay.

02:08:55   - Oh, good friggin' luck.

02:08:56   You're either getting like a Kia,

02:08:58   which there's nothing wrong with that, or a BMW.

02:09:00   That's your choice.

02:09:01   - I have personally never used Carplay.

02:09:03   - By the way, I can tell you, Tina,

02:09:06   the latency really sucks on wireless Carplay.

02:09:10   It is convenient though.

02:09:11   Like, Tiff's car has it.

02:09:12   She, you know, her in her i3.

02:09:15   It is convenient, but the latency never stops being annoying.

02:09:20   - It's not great, but I don't personally get

02:09:24   as offended by it as you do.

02:09:25   But I mean, you're not entirely wrong.

02:09:27   All right, but don't worry, we're getting sidetracked.

02:09:28   - So I was trying to picture, I would say like,

02:09:30   wireless, like I have to say,

02:09:32   I have to preface this by saying I've never used it,

02:09:33   but in my, like, you know, I have suspicion

02:09:37   that maybe you would actually prefer wired

02:09:39   just because of the reliability and latency or whatever.

02:09:42   But whatever, right?

02:09:43   There's that, and what is the other,

02:09:45   there's one other thing that she wanted.

02:09:46   - Well, hold on, for the record,

02:09:48   because I know Tina is or will listen to this,

02:09:51   is listening or will listen,

02:09:53   wireless Carplay, if you do the kind of driving that I do,

02:09:58   which maybe she does not,

02:09:59   so take this with the appropriate amount of caveats

02:10:01   and salt and whatnot, I tend to be in the car 10,

02:10:04   maybe 15 minutes at a time.

02:10:06   It is very unusual.

02:10:08   I'm in the car for more than about 15 minutes.

02:10:09   And so it's a lot of shorter trips.

02:10:11   And because of that, it's,

02:10:14   I realize how entitled I sound right now,

02:10:16   but it's very burdensome to take my phone out of my pocket

02:10:18   or in her case purse, perhaps,

02:10:20   and plug it in and then take, you know, unplug it,

02:10:23   put it back in the pocket slash purse, whatever.

02:10:24   I find if you're doing a lot of short trips like I am,

02:10:27   I personally think that even with the higher latency,

02:10:30   that juice is worth the squeeze.

02:10:32   And furthermore, these little boxes like the one I have,

02:10:35   they're not phenomenal, but they work just fine.

02:10:38   It is more than sufficient if you're not, you know,

02:10:41   a complete snob about it, that it will get the job done

02:10:45   and you can retrofit wireless into a wired only car.

02:10:49   So I wouldn't go too bananas on insisting wireless,

02:10:53   but I don't think on the surface

02:10:56   there's anything necessarily wrong with it.

02:10:58   I would just, I would cave on wireless carplay

02:11:00   long before I would cave on many of the other things

02:11:02   that I'm sure are requirements.

02:11:03   - Yeah, and I will say too, like what you said about like

02:11:05   your driving pattern of like frequent short trips,

02:11:08   like wireless carplay is very good for that.

02:11:10   Like it is very convenient for that.

02:11:11   As long as you don't actually really like interact

02:11:14   with the screen that much, 'cause the interaction is like,

02:11:17   the latency will annoy you, but it is nicer

02:11:21   than the alternative of just like Bluetooth controls.

02:11:22   Like it's nicer than that at least.

02:11:23   So in most cases, so yeah, I get that.

02:11:27   - So what was the other feature she wants?

02:11:29   - Other than a stick shift,

02:11:31   I don't think you guys do a lot of highways.

02:11:33   - These are new features, like, so obviously it's a stick shift

02:11:35   but this is the thing, the request that she's never had

02:11:37   for any previous car that she suddenly has.

02:11:39   Wireless carplay is one, because it didn't exist last time

02:11:41   she bought a car.

02:11:42   - And most of the cool new like, you know,

02:11:44   adaptive cruise features and stuff,

02:11:45   most of those are not available on sticks.

02:11:48   - You say that, but my car has radar cruise

02:11:51   and it won't come to a complete stop, but it will slow down.

02:11:55   So that's actually exactly what I was going to say.

02:11:56   I was going to say some sort of radar, you know,

02:11:59   or I forget the like industry standard term for it,

02:12:02   but basically--

02:12:03   - Adaptive cruise control.

02:12:04   - There you go, thank you, adaptive cruise control.

02:12:06   That was going to be my guess.

02:12:07   - Yeah, that's a great feature, like,

02:12:09   that's something you want if you don't have it.

02:12:12   - Yeah, well, she's never had it,

02:12:14   and unlike carplay, apparently she hasn't experienced it

02:12:17   enough to want to know.

02:12:18   The thing that she demands, that is a hard requirement now,

02:12:22   because she's had it once, heated seats.

02:12:25   - Oh, I didn't even think about that, of course.

02:12:26   - I know that sounds boring to you,

02:12:27   people who get fancy cars all the time,

02:12:29   but again, I don't know, I never purchased a car

02:12:31   for more than $25,000.

02:12:32   We have the very first car we have ever owned

02:12:35   with heated seats is her current car,

02:12:37   which is a 2017 Honda Accord.

02:12:38   - Oh, no, 100%, it is a requirement.

02:12:40   - By the way, don't stop there,

02:12:41   get the heated wheel too, trust me.

02:12:42   - I was gonna say the same thing.

02:12:43   So my car does not have a heated wheel,

02:12:45   Erin's car does, and every time I get in her car,

02:12:49   in the winter, it annoys the crap out of me,

02:12:51   because even in our preterned winters, John,

02:12:53   it is still delightful to have a heated steering wheel.

02:12:57   So again, I wouldn't make that a requirement

02:13:00   in the same way I wouldn't require wireless carplay,

02:13:03   but I would strongly, strongly encourage it.

02:13:06   - So the things I've outlined to you,

02:13:09   stick shift, heated seats, wireless carplay,

02:13:11   and given both of our tastes in cars,

02:13:15   you will not be shocked to learn that,

02:13:17   I mean, if I just said manual transmission alone,

02:13:20   like if you go like CarMax or Autotempest or something,

02:13:23   it just eliminates every car in the country,

02:13:24   you could check that check.

02:13:25   (laughing)

02:13:26   You go to transmission, like we found 80,000 matches,

02:13:29   check the manual transmission checkbox, two matches.

02:13:32   That's before you do wireless carplay and heated seats.

02:13:37   And then before you consider our taste in cars.

02:13:41   - Well, and the problem that you're having is,

02:13:43   I don't think a brand new car

02:13:45   is necessarily going to fix your problem.

02:13:47   It might, but it won't necessarily fix your problem,

02:13:49   because--

02:13:50   - Oh, I'm not shopping brand new cars at this point.

02:13:52   Those things will search used cars, let's, I like--

02:13:54   - Yeah, yeah.

02:13:55   - You know what I mean?

02:13:55   Like, I'm not being like, oh, you have to,

02:13:57   I'm going to these search sites to try to find like

02:13:59   the big mega ultimate meta search, try CarMax,

02:14:02   try Autotempest, try Cars and Bids, try like,

02:14:05   just everything.

02:14:07   And if some, the best thing is,

02:14:08   if you do any search terms first,

02:14:10   if you put anything in first, like heated seats,

02:14:12   it just removes the manual transmission option from the menu,

02:14:15   because they know there's zero matches

02:14:17   once you've selected that stuff.

02:14:18   - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:14:19   Yeah, so I mean, that's the thing is that,

02:14:21   I don't think even going new would help you.

02:14:23   And going used, I mean, again, I'm tunnel visioned on it,

02:14:27   because it's sitting below me in the garage,

02:14:30   but a GTI or a Golf R, that would do the trick.

02:14:33   I'm trying to think of other,

02:14:35   like a couple, a handful of year old BMWs--

02:14:37   - She's listening now, and she's trying to claim

02:14:38   that she never actually required wireless carplay,

02:14:41   but I contest this.

02:14:43   - Honestly, I'm team Tino on this one.

02:14:44   - Your contesting is noted.

02:14:45   - Yeah, your contesting is noted and ignored.

02:14:49   I would say, of several year old BMW,

02:14:53   you'd be insane to do it, but you could do that.

02:14:56   So here's an example of a car that exists

02:14:58   that would fulfill most of her requirements,

02:15:00   especially if you let go of the wireless carplay.

02:15:03   The very last stick shift Honda Accord,

02:15:07   you could get with these features on it, right?

02:15:09   That was like the 2022, like the previous generation,

02:15:11   like the last one. - Yeah, but there are like

02:15:12   four of them in the country.

02:15:13   - Right, so here's the problem.

02:15:14   There's a lot of those cars,

02:15:17   but the only ones that have,

02:15:19   she thinks, I don't know if she demanded leather,

02:15:21   but she wanted leather,

02:15:21   but the only one that has leather heated seats

02:15:24   and a stick shift, at the end of every Accord generation,

02:15:27   for many years now, they do the Accord Special Edition.

02:15:30   So they'll have like, you know,

02:15:31   whatever generation Accord it'll be,

02:15:32   the 2018, '19, '20, '21, '22, only the '22 model year,

02:15:37   the very last model year where they even offer

02:15:41   a special edition, right?

02:15:43   So the only Accord that you can get with a stick shift,

02:15:45   with leather heated seats,

02:15:47   is the Accord Sport Special Edition in 2022.

02:15:51   That car does not exist.

02:15:53   That's just, like everyone, it doesn't exist for sale.

02:15:58   The people who bought them are keeping them.

02:16:00   They don't come up on any searches,

02:16:02   cars and bids, maybe one will pop up every once in a while

02:16:05   and get snatched up for some ridiculous price.

02:16:07   Forget about that car.

02:16:09   Nowhere, nowhere in the entire continental tonight.

02:16:11   You wanna get shipped from New Mexico?

02:16:12   Sorry, it doesn't exist anywhere.

02:16:13   And you know, how large radius would you like to search?

02:16:16   3000 miles? Sure, zero matches.

02:16:19   So that eliminated that.

02:16:21   So I was looking for stuff, I'm like,

02:16:24   is there any car that satisfies these things?

02:16:25   Can I find it?

02:16:26   And it just narrowed down so much to this tiny aperture

02:16:30   of acceptable makes, models, and trim levels.

02:16:34   Oh, and by the way, I often have a requirement

02:16:36   about cars that I've mentioned

02:16:37   that you've heard me talk about.

02:16:39   No sunroof.

02:16:40   You've heard that one, right?

02:16:40   - Oh, you are, you are the worst.

02:16:42   - Not because I'm against sunroofs,

02:16:44   but because I'm for having headroom.

02:16:47   And most of my height is in my neck and my upper body.

02:16:51   And when I sit in the car,

02:16:52   I don't want my head to hit the headliner.

02:16:55   - You're losing all your hair anyway, don't worry about it.

02:16:57   - It is true, I'm losing a lot of it.

02:16:58   It's enough of it there that when my head hits the headliner

02:17:00   it is annoying, right?

02:17:01   Yeah, I feel really bad for you.

02:17:02   Try adding that into the mix.

02:17:04   Leather, heated seats, stick shift, wireless carplay.

02:17:08   No sunroof?

02:17:10   - Yeah, get out of here with the slick top.

02:17:11   You're gonna have to cave on the slick top.

02:17:12   - Again, the Accord Sports Special Edition 2022, I believe,

02:17:15   fulfills these requirements minus maybe the wireless carplay,

02:17:18   but that car doesn't exist.

02:17:19   And so I'm doing all the research,

02:17:21   I'm bringing it back to her saying,

02:17:23   "Yeah, well, this, that, the other thing, whatever."

02:17:26   I had to bring her, I said, "Look, a car exists

02:17:30   that fulfills a lot of your requirements,

02:17:33   but it's got a sunroof."

02:17:36   And she's like, "Great, buy that."

02:17:37   (both laughing)

02:17:39   - Okay.

02:17:40   - And I said, "But the sunroof in my head!"

02:17:42   And she's like, "I don't care, it's my car,

02:17:43   what do you care?"

02:17:44   I'm like, "But I don't, even if I never drive your car,

02:17:47   I passage in your car,

02:17:49   and my head will be hitting the ceiling."

02:17:51   - Is that a verb?

02:17:52   - Yeah, I'm making it one right now.

02:17:54   And so I went to the car dealer,

02:17:57   we went shopping ourselves and went to some car dealers.

02:18:00   One of them was closed on Sunday, which I didn't understand.

02:18:03   - Yeah, that drives me--

02:18:03   - The service department closed on Sunday, fine.

02:18:05   The showroom, people shop for cars on weekends.

02:18:07   Anyway, I'm like, "Look, we're gonna,

02:18:11   I'll sit in, I'll sit in the car.

02:18:12   I'll see, because you know, you can say,

02:18:14   'Oh, sunroof takes up headroom,' or whatever, blah, blah, blah."

02:18:16   And one of the cars we looked at,

02:18:18   not that we were gonna buy, is we looked at the Integra.

02:18:20   - Oh, that is a good answer!

02:18:22   That's such a good answer, why didn't I think of that?

02:18:23   Well, it's expensive, but it's such a good answer.

02:18:25   - I mean, we're not, it's a $50,000 car,

02:18:27   we're not getting that, but anyway.

02:18:28   But since it's basically--

02:18:29   - Is Tina not worth it to you?

02:18:30   I think she's worth it.

02:18:31   - Since it's basically a Civic, I'm like,

02:18:33   "Well, let me check this for headroom."

02:18:35   Head was hitting hard in the Integra,

02:18:36   but the, just, it's not made for me

02:18:39   with the sunroof, or whatever.

02:18:41   But that's not, you know, whatever, so like,

02:18:44   there's one model and one trim level

02:18:46   that fulfills your requirement, it's got a sunroof,

02:18:48   I will go sit in it.

02:18:49   I went by myself to a car dealer to sit in a car

02:18:54   to see if it fit in my head.

02:18:56   And I don't like car dealers, no one likes car dealers.

02:18:59   What I was hoping is, you know when you go in,

02:19:00   they got a bunch of cars, like, indoors,

02:19:02   and you can just, like, wander around

02:19:03   and, like, open the door and sit in them?

02:19:04   That's what I wanted to happen.

02:19:05   Because then I can get in and out in five minutes.

02:19:07   That didn't happen.

02:19:09   There was, the car that I wanted was parked out front,

02:19:12   wanted to sit in.

02:19:13   I went in and I asked the receptionist,

02:19:15   and I said, "Can I just go sit?"

02:19:17   Like, it wasn't one of the inside ones, it was an outside.

02:19:19   "Can I just go to that car out there,

02:19:20   "can I just go sit in it?"

02:19:22   And he's like, "Yeah, sure, go ahead,

02:19:23   "I don't know if it'll be unlocked though."

02:19:24   I go, "Of course it's locked."

02:19:25   I come back in, I said, "Oh, it turns out it was locked."

02:19:27   And she says to me,

02:19:28   "I'm gonna have to get a salesperson."

02:19:31   And she says it with that look, like she knows.

02:19:34   She knows what happens when you get a salesperson.

02:19:37   'Cause now you've got a car salesperson.

02:19:39   And it's like, I just wanna, so.

02:19:41   'Cause they come and they attach to you like a leech,

02:19:44   and they wanna sell you a car, it's their job, I get it.

02:19:47   She gets a salesperson, salesperson comes over,

02:19:49   opens the door for me, I sit in it.

02:19:51   Headroom's not great, better than the Integra though.

02:19:54   But headroom's not great, I try the passenger seat,

02:19:56   I lean the seat back a little bit, you know what I mean?

02:19:57   You try to do all the tricks,

02:19:59   of course the passenger seat

02:20:00   does not go up and down at all, right?

02:20:02   The driver's seat does go up and down,

02:20:05   but it doesn't go down that far, but I'm like, whatever.

02:20:08   So I go, I spent way too long with the salesperson,

02:20:11   they did not sell me a car.

02:20:13   They tried real hard though.

02:20:14   I went back and I said, to my wife, I said,

02:20:17   "I think I can live with the sunroof since it's your car.

02:20:22   "It's not as bad as the Integra.

02:20:24   "I will suffer with my head hitting the headliner,

02:20:28   "if this is what you want."

02:20:29   And she said, "Yes, it was."

02:20:30   And I did the search.

02:20:32   How many cars with these features,

02:20:35   in the color that we wanted,

02:20:37   exist within, let's say 500 miles?

02:20:40   - Well, with the color that you want,

02:20:41   I mean, at this point,

02:20:42   you're looking for a needle in a haystack

02:20:43   and then you're gonna say,

02:20:44   "I want a blue or whatever red needle."

02:20:46   - Yeah, right.

02:20:47   Color matters. - Ugh, crazy.

02:20:48   - Again, if I'm spending new car money,

02:20:51   I want a car that I like.

02:20:52   - Wait, did you tell us what car it is?

02:20:53   Did I miss this?

02:20:54   - Not yet, we're getting to it.

02:20:55   - Okay, all right, all right.

02:20:56   - And how many existed?

02:20:59   Two.

02:21:00   500 mile or two.

02:21:03   - Okay, stop right there.

02:21:04   Please, please, John, for the love

02:21:06   of everything that is good and holy,

02:21:08   if that car is anywhere near or even better

02:21:11   on the other side of Virginia,

02:21:12   I will give you all of my money

02:21:14   if we can road trip that bad boy back to Boston.

02:21:16   I will do anything to be on that trip with you.

02:21:19   - Well, they do like the, you know,

02:21:19   you would assume that if it's far away

02:21:21   that you could do some kind of dealer trade

02:21:22   with a local dealer or whatever,

02:21:23   but anyway, two cars.

02:21:25   So I'm like, "All right."

02:21:27   So we're just noodling.

02:21:29   We're just thinking, just like, "Well, whatever."

02:21:30   I'm like, "I'm not buying a car.

02:21:31   "We're visiting car dealers.

02:21:33   "I'm sitting in them.

02:21:34   "We're not buying a car.

02:21:35   "I'm just looking around."

02:21:35   But then there's like two.

02:21:37   And so I send emails to people.

02:21:40   I contact them through their various websites or whatever,

02:21:42   and I say, "Hey, I've got VIN numbers now, right?"

02:21:46   I say, "Hey, do you actually have this car?"

02:21:49   That's question number one.

02:21:50   - Yeah, that's good.

02:21:51   - Fair, fair.

02:21:52   - And you may be shocked to learn

02:21:55   that car dealers are anxious to get back to you about cars.

02:21:58   They get back to me, "So you don't have this car."

02:21:59   I ask them a second question,

02:22:00   which is, "Can you just tell me what color it is?"

02:22:03   'Cause I don't wanna give them the answer.

02:22:05   You know what I mean?

02:22:06   I want them to tell me.

02:22:08   I want them to go and look at it, right?

02:22:11   And they tell me the correct answer.

02:22:13   And they're all like,

02:22:14   "This is the big thing with car dealers.

02:22:15   "This wasn't the last time I."

02:22:16   They're all like, "When should we schedule a test drive?

02:22:17   "When do you wanna schedule a test drive?

02:22:18   "Do you wanna schedule a test drive?

02:22:19   "Let's schedule a test drive.

02:22:20   "When are you gonna come and look at this?"

02:22:21   I'm like, "I'm just asking you questions over email person.

02:22:23   "Chill out, right?"

02:22:25   They're being salesperson.

02:22:25   - Find some chill.

02:22:26   - Right?

02:22:28   And then, I forget what day this was.

02:22:30   This was like Monday of this week.

02:22:32   I was like, "There's two of these cars.

02:22:33   "I really don't like any of the other colors.

02:22:35   "She really seems to want a car.

02:22:37   "We've already given up on giving the kids what they want."

02:22:40   So, one of the dealers, the one that's closer to her work,

02:22:43   I call her at work and I say, "Don't come home.

02:22:47   "Rather than going home,

02:22:47   "do you wanna just go to the car dealer

02:22:48   "who just knew your work and look at this car?"

02:22:51   - Oh my God, did you impulse buy a car, John Siracusa?

02:22:54   - I wouldn't call this impulse buying

02:22:55   if you based the amount of research I'd done up to this point.

02:22:57   But anyway. - No, fair, fair.

02:23:00   - But I'm at the point now where I know this too.

02:23:01   So, we drive up there to her.

02:23:03   We both drive together to the dealer,

02:23:05   which is further up from where her work is.

02:23:08   We look at this car.

02:23:09   She test drives it.

02:23:12   She likes it.

02:23:14   The headroom is better than the Integra.

02:23:19   I can live with it.

02:23:21   We go back and I'm like, "Well,

02:23:23   "I think we should get this car."

02:23:25   - Oh my word.

02:23:26   - Because look, I spent a month on this.

02:23:28   We know when we recorded the member special.

02:23:29   I was already looking into this then,

02:23:31   which is why I brought up the question.

02:23:34   And I was like, "I don't have any other answers.

02:23:36   "This is the best answer to this problem.

02:23:39   "And if we don't get this car."

02:23:42   And so, here I am in a situation

02:23:44   where I'm gonna negotiate the price of a new car

02:23:47   with a salesperson, trying not to let them know

02:23:50   that according to my searches,

02:23:52   two of these exist within 500 miles.

02:23:54   (laughing)

02:23:56   - Yeah, you're buying this car

02:23:57   no matter what they make you pay for it.

02:24:00   - Part of my research was, I'd mentioned that

02:24:03   the person who asked about new cars,

02:24:05   and I mentioned that Car Edge service,

02:24:06   I had signed up for that a little while ago.

02:24:09   And one of the things they'll give you

02:24:10   is there's lots of services.

02:24:11   It's like, "What is the invoice price?

02:24:13   "What would be a fair price for this car?"

02:24:15   You know, that type of thing.

02:24:17   And so I had, before I went to this dealer,

02:24:19   this would be a fair price for the car,

02:24:21   minus any kind of incentives or whatever.

02:24:23   It's like, it gives them a little bit of profit

02:24:25   to the dealership.

02:24:26   They'll probably accept this,

02:24:28   but you're not getting ripped off.

02:24:29   I had that price in my mind.

02:24:31   Went into that negotiation.

02:24:32   I'm very proud of myself.

02:24:33   I got within $100 of that price.

02:24:35   - Well done.

02:24:36   - $100, within $100 of the quote unquote fair price

02:24:40   for the thing.

02:24:41   Part of it was by saying,

02:24:42   "Well, I have two other cars that I can go to."

02:24:45   And I listed the one in the color that it didn't like,

02:24:47   'cause of course I never told them it didn't like the color.

02:24:48   Don't tell the dealer what colors you like, right?

02:24:50   I was, you know, it was a blue one.

02:24:52   I was like, you know,

02:24:53   "Well, there's a blue one and another white one."

02:24:55   And the dealer was pushing back.

02:24:56   - Wait, wait, wait, a white car just happened to you?

02:24:58   - Oh my God.

02:24:59   - Oh my God, this is getting more and more delicious.

02:25:01   - And he was like, "Well, is that other car,

02:25:04   "are you sure that's not the same car as this?

02:25:06   "Because we got a call from a dealer about this car

02:25:07   "and they wanted to take it from us or whatever."

02:25:09   I'm like, "No, no, these are other cars.

02:25:10   "I can show you the emails.

02:25:11   "I'm like, here's whatever."

02:25:12   Basically let him think,

02:25:14   there are other places where I could go for this car

02:25:16   even though I would never buy the blue one, right?

02:25:18   Oh my God.

02:25:19   And so-- - You got a white car.

02:25:21   - Anyway, I got within $100 of the price.

02:25:22   - Oh my God, he got a white car.

02:25:23   - Very proud of myself.

02:25:24   He's going through the thing,

02:25:25   "Okay, we agreed on this price."

02:25:27   And then obviously tax title and blah, blah, blah.

02:25:30   That's the thing about the car,

02:25:31   I just think they don't include tax title

02:25:32   or whatever in the fair price.

02:25:34   We agree on the price.

02:25:35   And then he says, "And then of course $129

02:25:37   "for the locking wheel nuts."

02:25:39   - I'm sorry, what?

02:25:40   No, absolutely not. - The locking wheel nuts.

02:25:43   And I said, "I don't want locking wheel nuts."

02:25:45   He's like, "Well, they're already on the car."

02:25:47   - Well, take 'em off.

02:25:48   - I said, "Yeah, well, why don't you take 'em off?"

02:25:49   I was like, "Well, but they're already on the car."

02:25:50   I was like, "I'm sorry, no."

02:25:52   And I was like, everything was going so smoothly.

02:25:54   And I basically got into a shouting match with this guy.

02:25:56   I was like, "Look, when we agreed upon this price,

02:25:58   "when we agreed this is gonna be the price

02:26:00   "before tax title and fees,

02:26:02   "it was the price for the car that's sitting out there.

02:26:04   "Whatever's on that car,

02:26:06   "that was what we were negotiating, this number.

02:26:09   "We weren't negotiating this number plus other things."

02:26:11   And he takes me out to the car and he's like,

02:26:12   "On the sticker it has $129 locking wheel nuts

02:26:15   "as a separate line item."

02:26:16   I was like, "I don't care.

02:26:17   "We were negotiating for that car,

02:26:20   "everything that that car is.

02:26:22   "Not parts of that car, not partial,

02:26:25   "that car and that was this number."

02:26:26   And then we would add tax titles and fees.

02:26:27   And so I'd never gotten so angry at a car.

02:26:30   Anyway, he went back to his manager and took the $129 off.

02:26:35   - Damn right he did, good for you, John.

02:26:36   - And he made some big excuse of like,

02:26:38   "Oh, we can't take it off the price,

02:26:39   "but we'll just subtract it."

02:26:40   I was like, "I don't care what you subtract it, dude.

02:26:41   "Just subtract it."

02:26:42   Right?

02:26:43   Oh, and then by the way, the incentives of like,

02:26:46   "Is there any incentives?

02:26:47   "Can we do any blah, blah, blah, blah?"

02:26:48   The one incentive that we were eligible for

02:26:50   was the Honda loyalty program thing.

02:26:53   And yes, now you're revealing everything about it.

02:26:55   Guess what?

02:26:56   We are loyal Honda customers.

02:26:58   And I got another $500 off

02:27:01   just because I already own a Honda.

02:27:03   - Oh, good for you.

02:27:04   Would you buy a Civic?

02:27:05   - As you should have already guessed by now,

02:27:07   what is the only car that could possibly be?

02:27:09   It is the Honda Civic in the most expensive trim level

02:27:13   the Honda Civic is offered in,

02:27:14   because that is the only one that has wireless carplay

02:27:17   with other seats and heated seats.

02:27:18   - Oh my God.

02:27:19   - And a stick shift and a sunroof.

02:27:22   - I cannot believe you just bought yourself a white,

02:27:24   well, bought Tina a white Civic.

02:27:25   This line in the show, in our internal show notes,

02:27:31   kid car revisited, that has sat there for like two weeks.

02:27:34   If I had known that this was the direction

02:27:36   this conversation was going,

02:27:38   we wouldn't have even done the-

02:27:39   - This happened this week.

02:27:40   - We should have done an emergency episode, dammit.

02:27:42   - I picked up the car today.

02:27:45   Oh my God.

02:27:45   - Wait, so is it a Civic SI or a Civic Civic?

02:27:47   - No, we looked at the SI, but it wasn't the specs,

02:27:50   the requirements that I just gave you

02:27:52   are not available in the SI.

02:27:54   And also the SI is more expensive.

02:27:55   We could have saved $5,000 if she didn't want heated seats.

02:27:59   We could have got the sport trim.

02:28:02   - Heated seats are really, really good.

02:28:04   - $5,000, these are $5,000 heated seats.

02:28:06   - Especially 'cause you live in New England,

02:28:08   winter is a big part of your life.

02:28:09   - My car doesn't have heated seats, I think it's fine,

02:28:11   but she wants them, so she can.

02:28:13   - After this, she deserves the heated seats, dammit.

02:28:16   - Anyway.

02:28:17   - Oh, and this is a turbocharged car.

02:28:18   I don't think you've owned a turbocharged car.

02:28:19   - I mean, they're all turbos now, you know.

02:28:22   - Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm just saying.

02:28:23   - We've got a white Honda Civic hatchback.

02:28:26   - A hatch? You got a hatch?

02:28:28   - The hatchback and sedan looks so similar in the Civic.

02:28:31   And I wanted a hatchback because we don't have a hatchback.

02:28:34   And as you know, as Marco knows,

02:28:35   hatchbacks have a lot of utility.

02:28:37   - I'm sorry, am I making this up?

02:28:39   Didn't you give me boatloads of crap

02:28:41   for not having a car-shaped car?

02:28:43   - Yeah, I don't want a Volkswagen Rabbit or a Golf.

02:28:45   I don't want that kind of hatchback.

02:28:46   Look at the car, it looks exactly like the sedan.

02:28:49   It's just like, it's barely different in profile.

02:28:52   It looks like a sedan.

02:28:53   That's why I got it.

02:28:54   - This looks a lot like Tracy's car.

02:28:56   (laughing)

02:28:57   - Yeah, it sure does.

02:28:58   - And why did I pick white?

02:28:59   - It's the best color for this car.

02:29:01   - Well, absolutely.

02:29:02   The S-I also, not the S-I, the Civic Type R,

02:29:06   also looks best in white.

02:29:08   - I don't even see white as an option here.

02:29:10   Oh, no, there I do, nevermind.

02:29:11   Sorry, I have the, what is it, Noir or whatever it is,

02:29:14   that darkens, that synthetically darkens websites.

02:29:17   And so I had that on.

02:29:18   And the white paint swatch was colored black

02:29:21   because dark mode, by mistake.

02:29:23   This doesn't look bad, this looks nice.

02:29:25   I mean--

02:29:26   - Yeah, so people wondering, you know,

02:29:28   our recommendations for buying cars

02:29:29   and the services we offer and the advice we have,

02:29:31   I just followed all that and this is what I ended up with.

02:29:34   So can't say we don't put our money where our mouth is.

02:29:36   - So a white car, a white hatchback happened to you.

02:29:39   - No, I intended, I wanted the hatchback.

02:29:41   I absolutely wanted it because it's useful

02:29:44   to have something with a hatch for like taller items.

02:29:46   - Yes.

02:29:47   - Especially since this is obviously,

02:29:48   smaller than the Accord, right?

02:29:49   And so I'm gonna get a small, like if the sedan version,

02:29:52   if this, the trunk is very confined,

02:29:55   the opening is confined, it is very confined,

02:29:57   the hatch really helps with that.

02:29:59   It gives you way more space than you get

02:30:02   with the sedan version.

02:30:03   And it looks almost like the sedan.

02:30:04   So all my, you know, hatred of hatchbacks

02:30:08   that look like a Volkswagen Rabbit,

02:30:09   doesn't apply to this car.

02:30:11   Who knows if I'll ever get to drive it anyway,

02:30:13   it's my wife's car.

02:30:13   So anyway, the kids are driving her old car,

02:30:16   as they have always been.

02:30:17   They have always been driving that car.

02:30:19   And they will continue to drive it.

02:30:20   And now we have three stick shift cars.

02:30:21   And just to review, my history of car purchases,

02:30:26   go like this, Civic, Civic, Accord, Accord,

02:30:29   Accord, Accord, Civic.

02:30:30   All stick shift.

02:30:32   - You're pretty consistent at least.

02:30:34   - You are consistent, which is funny

02:30:35   because I have never bought more than one car

02:30:39   from the same company.

02:30:41   - And I have never bought cars from any other company

02:30:43   except for Honda.

02:30:44   - Did you even look at like a GTI or anything like that?

02:30:47   - We like Hondas.

02:30:48   We like them.

02:30:49   - Yeah, but it doesn't mean that there's not

02:30:51   other better things, Jon.

02:30:52   - We looked at other things.

02:30:53   It's just, I mean, we're a Honda family

02:30:56   and we got $500 off for being a Honda family.

02:30:58   (laughing)

02:30:59   - I mean, they are good cars.

02:31:00   Like I'll give you that.

02:31:01   - And even things like they haven't screwed themselves up.

02:31:03   Like they haven't gone like all touch screen

02:31:05   or done anything weird.

02:31:06   The interior is the, I think, my favorite mix

02:31:09   of physical and touch screen type controls.

02:31:12   Yeah.

02:31:13   - The real question is, are you going to,

02:31:15   for your future car purchases, convert to hatchback

02:31:18   once you realize how good it is?

02:31:20   - No, hopefully I'm gonna convert to EV.

02:31:22   That's what's gonna happen to me, but not anytime soon.

02:31:25   - But you just crapped all over every EV on the market.

02:31:27   - I know, but eventually all the EVs will change to NACS

02:31:30   and there'll be EV sedans that I like.

02:31:32   Like this is gonna be years in the future.

02:31:35   - Yeah, this is, congratulations to really Tina

02:31:37   for getting what she wanted because I cannot imagine

02:31:42   the amount of bickering and grief that you gave her

02:31:46   over heated seats and most especially a sunroof.

02:31:48   - No, no, I just tried to convince her

02:31:50   and she didn't want to be convinced.

02:31:51   So there was no heated arguments.

02:31:54   I just needed to sit in it and be able to say,

02:31:56   I can tolerate this.

02:31:57   I can passenge and not die.

02:31:59   - It's a glowing roofie.

02:32:01   - Yeah, 'cause like the Integra, I was really surprised.

02:32:03   The Integra was worse.

02:32:04   It did feel like they're basically the same car.

02:32:06   Like that's why it was part of the reason

02:32:08   I was showing her the Integra.

02:32:09   She's like, why can't I get a fancy car like Integra?

02:32:11   I'm like, A, the good one is $50,000 and B,

02:32:13   this is just a Civic.

02:32:14   When you see the Civic, you'd be like, oh.

02:32:15   Like you sit inside them, they're very, very similar.

02:32:18   And by the way, finding sticks of Integra

02:32:21   is talking to the dealer over there is also very difficult.

02:32:24   The packaging is better on the Civic.

02:32:25   Civic is just a better car than the Integra

02:32:27   unless you get the Type S and those are very expensive

02:32:29   and don't exist.

02:32:30   - The Integra Type S you mean or the--

02:32:32   - Yeah, the Integra Type S.

02:32:34   They're very hard, very hard to come by

02:32:35   and they're very expensive,

02:32:36   much more than we wanted to spend.

02:32:37   - Well, I'm very curious, again, congratulations.

02:32:40   You've done this well, you've done it right.

02:32:42   I'm proud of you for sticking to your guns

02:32:45   about the locking wheel, lug, whatever things.

02:32:48   You know, it's funny, when we bought the Volvo,

02:32:50   I'm sure I've told the story,

02:32:51   but when we bought the Volvo, I told the dealer,

02:32:53   I do not want any stickers on that car.

02:32:55   I do not want a plate surround.

02:32:57   - I totally forgot.

02:32:59   I do that same thing and I totally,

02:33:00   after we came home from the dealer,

02:33:02   after negotiating the price and say we're gonna buy it,

02:33:04   I'm like, I forgot to tell them

02:33:06   all those things you just said.

02:33:07   No sticker, no plaque, no dealer branding.

02:33:11   - Yep, yep. - Whatever, whatever.

02:33:12   I was like, oh, stupid me.

02:33:14   I buy a car once every seven to 10 years,

02:33:17   but I totally forgot, I was so mad at myself.

02:33:20   - Yeah, well, so when we bought the Volvo,

02:33:22   which was seven years ago and a week or something like that,

02:33:26   I think it was July, so a few weeks, July of 2017.

02:33:29   Anyways, I vividly remember going to the car

02:33:32   and saying, oh, the sticker's there.

02:33:35   And the salesperson looked at me like, yeah?

02:33:38   We're not gonna buy this car.

02:33:39   And he's like, what?

02:33:41   I told you I will not have the sticker on this car.

02:33:44   And he rolled his eyes so hard

02:33:46   that I think they fell out of his damn head.

02:33:48   But then he had a mechanic or who knows or detail

02:33:51   or whatever come over with a heat gun

02:33:53   and pull the sticker off the car

02:33:55   and I was not going to sign any paperwork until he did

02:33:58   and I stand by it and I will stand by it forever.

02:34:00   - That's pretty nice of him

02:34:01   considering you'd already agreed to buy that car

02:34:03   and signed all the paperwork for it.

02:34:04   - No, I don't think I had signed it at that point.

02:34:05   I think I was just looking at it.

02:34:06   - If you hadn't signed it,

02:34:07   then yes, you have the power there, but yeah.

02:34:08   But the good news is,

02:34:09   because even though I totally forgot about this,

02:34:11   this dealer was great.

02:34:12   Not only did they not put anything on this car,

02:34:14   he pointed out to me, I noticed this already,

02:34:16   but he pointed out to my salesperson,

02:34:17   pointed out to me,

02:34:19   I didn't even put a license plate surround on for you.

02:34:21   - Nice.

02:34:22   - Like, thank you.

02:34:23   - That's good stuff.

02:34:24   - It's just literally, I've never seen this.

02:34:26   Everyone always does license,

02:34:27   it's easy to take that off, you're just unscrewed or whatever,

02:34:28   but then he didn't even put that on

02:34:29   and he pointed it out to me

02:34:30   because he could tell, based on me yelling at him

02:34:34   about the lug nuts, that I didn't want that.

02:34:35   I was like, thank you, I appreciate that.

02:34:37   - Is Massachusetts a barbaric Commonwealth like we are?

02:34:40   - Front plate states, it is.

02:34:42   It's fine.

02:34:44   - I hate it, I hate it so much.

02:34:46   Virginia is a front plate barbaric Commonwealth.

02:34:49   - I don't think it's barbaric, I think it's fine,

02:34:51   but I've got the front plates.

02:34:54   - Well, congratulations to Tina.

02:34:55   I'm glad she stuck to her guns and got what she wanted.

02:34:57   See, she did the negotiation with you,

02:34:58   so you would do the negotiation with the dealer.

02:35:00   She doesn't deal with the dealer, she just watches me do it.

02:35:02   I think she was a little bit upset when I was yelling.

02:35:04   And by the way, all of our cars have locking lug nuts,

02:35:06   it's just that I'd never wanna pay for them

02:35:08   because I didn't ask for them.

02:35:09   So if you're gonna put them on there,

02:35:10   I'm getting them for free.

02:35:11   - I have to concede, I am a little upset at Tina

02:35:15   because I would have given infinite dollars

02:35:18   to have a video recording of you yelling at this dealer

02:35:22   and would have given nearly infinite dollars

02:35:24   for a voice memos recording of you yelling at the dealer.

02:35:26   - As listeners to this podcast would know,

02:35:28   it's not angry yelling, it's incredulous yelling.

02:35:31   Like when you hear me on the podcast

02:35:32   talking about some bad soccer feature, it's like, no.

02:35:34   I was like, we just negotiated the price for that,

02:35:38   I was literally pointing, for that car.

02:35:40   That's the number we agreed on.

02:35:41   Remember that whole thing where we were talking

02:35:43   about the numbers and you're going to ask your manager

02:35:44   or whatever and we agreed on a number,

02:35:45   we said yes, this is the number we can both agree.

02:35:46   It was for that car.

02:35:48   Everything that's in that car,

02:35:49   that's the number we agreed on.

02:35:51   I was incredulous, I'm like, are you kidding me?

02:35:53   You can't say, and also, other parts of that car

02:35:57   we're now going to itemize and add to the price.

02:35:59   So I was, I mean, would I have not bought the car

02:36:02   with the 100, at that point I probably would have,

02:36:04   oh, here's the final kicker, right?

02:36:06   When I came home and like reloaded one of my tabs

02:36:09   that had that search in it, zero matches.

02:36:12   So guess what, that car that was listed twice,

02:36:15   there was one of these cars.

02:36:16   (laughing)

02:36:17   500 miles and I just bought it

02:36:20   because you could say Impulse bought it.

02:36:22   After a month of research, I saw that it was available.

02:36:25   I saw it had been on the market for 29 days

02:36:27   and I found the one that was,

02:36:29   and I was lucky, we picked,

02:36:30   they both said they had the car

02:36:32   but only one of them really had the car

02:36:34   and we randomly picked that one

02:36:35   because it was close to my wife's work.

02:36:38   - That's incredible.

02:36:39   - And so when I bought that car, it disappeared.

02:36:40   Now there's zero of these cars within 500 miles.

02:36:43   - That's incredible.

02:36:44   I'm a little sad that we didn't get to do

02:36:46   a road trip together but ultimately I'm glad

02:36:48   that a white car in a white hatchback happened to you.

02:36:50   - I was ready to ship a car from New Mexico in CarMax

02:36:54   but you know, 'cause it was like,

02:36:56   ooh, rest free, it'll be great.

02:36:57   (door opening)