00:00:00 ◼ ► So I had the pleasure today of unboxing one of the new iMacs. Have either of you done this?
00:00:04 ◼ ► I don't think so. Why, yeah, I haven't. Why are you, why are you in possession of a new iMac?
00:00:09 ◼ ► It's not for me, I was helping someone else set it up, but I was unboxing it and I gotta say, it was
00:00:14 ◼ ► a pleasure. Like, it gave me such kind of old Apple fun vibes, even though, like in certain ways it's
00:00:21 ◼ ► very modern, you know, because it has all of Apple's all like, you know, paper-based packaging now,
00:00:25 ◼ ► like, you know, there's no plastic anywhere. Which I really do like, by the way, I think we've talked
00:00:29 ◼ ► about that in the past, but generally speaking, Apple's packaging has gotten really, really,
00:00:33 ◼ ► really good. And aren't they using like the bags from the Apple store? I think like even the handles,
00:00:38 ◼ ► which feel like their rope, are actually like recycled paper or something like that. Yeah,
00:00:43 ◼ ► that was one of the first paper things they did ages ago, yeah, years and years ago. But yeah,
00:00:47 ◼ ► so the iMac box is like, it's in many ways, it has a lot of the similar elements as like the Mac Pro
00:00:53 ◼ ► and XDR boxes with like those big like arrow panels that like kind of butterfly out when you
00:00:57 ◼ ► open it up. But of course, obviously in the consumer line, but it's still like, it's pretty
00:01:03 ◼ ► elaborate cardboard work to make like this pretty well cushioned thing with no plastic anywhere in
00:01:09 ◼ ► sight. It's pretty remarkable. But what's nice about it is this was a green iMac. And you know
00:01:14 ◼ ► how like, you know, the typical iMac box, you have like the outer cardboard, like the brown cardboard
00:01:18 ◼ ► shipping box, and then inside of it, you have the nice white Apple box. Then you have a little
00:01:22 ◼ ► handle on top, the handle, it's green, you open it up, everything that can be tinted green is tinted
00:01:30 ◼ ► green, like because this is the color of the iMac. So like, first of all, you open up the box and you
00:01:34 ◼ ► see the the like screen overlay, like the big sticky thing that covers up the screen for
00:01:39 ◼ ► protection. On the front of it, it says hello written in the Macintosh Hello style, you know,
00:01:45 ◼ ► so like the first thing you see you open it up that the cardboard butterflies out and you see
00:01:48 ◼ ► it saying hello under like the translucent paper cover. It's delightful. And every single accent,
00:01:56 ◼ ► it's the it's the accent color of the computer, like, it was so well done. It very much reminded
00:02:02 ◼ ► me of like, you know, old Apple be back when we were all buying desktops. I mean, John still is,
00:02:06 ◼ ► but no one else. It was honestly it was delightful. And so I just wanted to kind of shout that out,
00:02:12 ◼ ► like, in a world where most of us aren't even buying desktops anymore. It was really nice to
00:02:16 ◼ ► see Apple putting a ton of little detail work into making the desktop unboxing experience in 2024.
00:02:24 ◼ ► Pretty delightful. I think the candy color iMacs predate both of your Mac use, but that was back
00:02:30 ◼ ► when they were shipping with Mac OS 9. And they did the same thing where Mac OS 9 would ship and
00:02:35 ◼ ► the accent color inside the interface, like the basically the scroll thumb color and like the
00:02:40 ◼ ► text selection color and everything would match the color of the computer you got. Yeah. And the
00:02:43 ◼ ► background to a desktop background, the full desktop background. It's a it's a it's an iMac
00:02:48 ◼ ► tradition. Apple, as we often discuss on the show, they really could use more use of color
00:02:59 ◼ ► I know as we're recording this, it's the 28th of August. And that means it's not quite September,
00:03:06 ◼ ► but you might be listening to this in September. And you know what, darn it, we're close enough
00:03:09 ◼ ► to September. And what is September, gentlemen? It is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, which means
00:03:15 ◼ ► it's time for the Marco offset. What are we talking about? So hey, if you live in a backwards
00:03:22 ◼ ► country like we do, health care is a real problem. And if you live in any country, then childhood
00:03:29 ◼ ► cancer is a real problem. And there is an establishment in St. Jude, in St. Jude, in Memphis,
00:03:35 ◼ ► Tennessee, excuse me, called St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. And they are a truly phenomenal
00:03:41 ◼ ► organization that wants to end childhood cancer. They would like no child to die from childhood
00:03:47 ◼ ► cancer ever. That's their goal. Their final form is to have them just go away because childhood
00:03:55 ◼ ► cancer is cured. That is the goal. So why do you care? Why am I telling you about this? Because
00:04:00 ◼ ► September, like I said, is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. And our friends at Real AFM,
00:04:04 ◼ ► which is also us, you know what we mean, they/we are trying to raise as much money as possible for
00:04:11 ◼ ► St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Currently, as we record, the goal is $500,000. The campaign
00:04:17 ◼ ► has been officially open for eight-ish hours, and we have already raised $30,000, which is truly
00:04:25 ◼ ► incredible. That is so very cool, but we can do more. And I know that both the Relay and ATP
00:04:31 ◼ ► listeners really, really do come out and support this wonderful organization. So if you're
00:04:37 ◼ ► interested, you can go to stjude.org/ATP to kind of fast track your way straight into the donation.
00:04:43 ◼ ► Or if you'd like more information, you can go to stjude.org/relay. And hey, here's the thing.
00:04:49 ◼ ► Relay's been trying to get to $3 million lifetime. We've already crossed it. Honestly, I think we
00:04:56 ◼ ► should just shoot for four. Let's shoot for four this year. You never know. Could happen.
00:04:59 ◼ ► It's an audacious goal, but it could happen. So how do we get to $4 million, which is my goal,
00:05:05 ◼ ► not Relay's? Then you got to donate. So stjude.org/ATP. Let me just kind of talk about a
00:05:11 ◼ ► couple of things real quick, and then I'd like to explain the Marko or have Marco explain the Marco
00:05:15 ◼ ► offset. So here's the thing is that 400,000 kids worldwide get cancer each year. 400,000. That's a
00:05:22 ◼ ► lot of kids. In many countries, four out of the five kids who develop cancer will not survive,
00:05:28 ◼ ► mostly due to lack of access to quality care. So St. Jude and Relay and ATP, we all think that's
00:05:35 ◼ ► no good. That is no good at all. So what are we trying to do? We're trying to raise money to help
00:05:40 ◼ ► fix that problem. So St. Jude needs your help because St. Jude, they pay for everything. They
00:05:46 ◼ ► pay for patient families to come and be with their sick child. They pay for everything. I
00:05:52 ◼ ► actually went to Memphis in April for a big conference for fundraisers, and I cannot eloquently
00:05:59 ◼ ► describe what it's like to be there. It is unreal seeing a mass of people so wholly dedicated to
00:06:06 ◼ ► just saving lives. It's phenomenal. And the way they can afford to do this is from people like you
00:06:12 ◼ ► and me and donating at stjude.org/ATP. In a couple of weeks, I will be going back to Memphis. I'll be
00:06:20 ◼ ► going back to St. Jude campus in order to participate for my very first time in a 12-hour
00:06:25 ◼ ► telethon event, which we call the podcast-a-thon, with our friends Mike Hurley, Stephen Hackett,
00:06:36 ◼ ► and you can watch me melt into a puddle during that time. It'll be great. It'll be fun for
00:06:39 ◼ ► everyone. So again, please, if at all possible, go to stjude.org/ATP. Here's the thing, and they've
00:06:46 ◼ ► kind of asked me to read this, but I think it's accurate. So when we rally for a common cause,
00:06:51 ◼ ► we become more than a community. We become beacons of hope for all. I mean, think about that. Think
00:06:55 ◼ ► about if your kid was sick or your sibling was sick and suddenly somebody swoops in and so many
00:07:02 ◼ ► words says, "Don't worry, I got this," because that's what St. Jude is basically doing. So
00:07:05 ◼ ► that's why we're asking all of you to join Relay and St. Jude in ATP this September for
00:07:08 ◼ ► Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. Together, we can help cure childhood cancer. Now, okay,
00:07:12 ◼ ► what if you don't care about childhood cancer, which you should? What if you just want to feel
00:07:16 ◼ ► better about your rampant consumerism? Marco, how do we do that? So here's what's about to happen.
00:07:21 ◼ ► We're about to have Apple announce a whole bunch of tech devices, mostly iPhones, probably Apple
00:07:26 ◼ ► watches, and maybe some new Macs later in the fall. So this is Apple device consumerism season.
00:07:33 ◼ ► This is when all of the best and most popular devices come out, and many of us try to find
00:07:38 ◼ ► justifications for why we absolutely need to buy these things even though we have a phone that
00:07:43 ◼ ► works fine and we have a watch that works fine. But we could theoretically not buy these things.
00:07:49 ◼ ► But you and I both know that's not going to happen. Of course, we're going to buy these
00:07:53 ◼ ► things. So here's how you assuage your guilt as a rampant consumer who is wastefully throwing away
00:07:59 ◼ ► your money on phones and watches and Macs and things that you don't necessarily need. I mean,
00:08:04 ◼ ► look, you could use your old one for a little while longer, right? But you won't. So we know
00:08:08 ◼ ► you're going to buy new stuff. Here's what you do. Donate a chunk of money to St. Jude when you do
00:08:14 ◼ ► this. Think about whatever the, you know, what case is describing as the Markov offset. This is a
00:08:18 ◼ ► term we've come up with over the last couple of years for describing. Here's my strategy for how
00:08:23 ◼ ► to figure out what a good minimum donation to St. Jude is. When you buy your new Apple product this
00:08:29 ◼ ► fall or Apple products this fall, think about amounts of money that are kind of added on during
00:08:35 ◼ ► the process that you kind of just accept or tack on without thinking too critically about them.
00:08:42 ◼ ► Things like sales tax or cost of accessories, cost of storage upgrades, cost of Apple care,
00:08:49 ◼ ► these kind of additional costs that are above and beyond the base price of the, you know, the most
00:08:55 ◼ ► basic model of thing that you could get. So if the iPhone starts at a thousand bucks of the line that
00:09:00 ◼ ► you want and you say spend another hundred bucks to double the storage and then you spend another
00:09:05 ◼ ► 60 bucks on the case, you're at 160 bucks. Maybe you spend another, you know, 60 bucks on tax,
00:09:10 ◼ ► you're at 220, I think. Yeah. So you're at 220 with those kind of add-ons over the base.
00:09:17 ◼ ► That is your minimum donation to St. Jude. So here's what you do. Whenever you buy these
00:09:22 ◼ ► products in the next, you know, coming weeks and months, well, hopefully coming weeks because then
00:09:27 ◼ ► it'll be during the drive. But when you place your order for your new iPhone and Apple Watch in a
00:09:32 ◼ ► couple of weeks, maybe, figure out that baseline minimum of the add-on price that is like,
00:09:38 ◼ ► what are you getting that's a little bit extra? That's your minimum. So in my example, my minimum
00:09:46 ◼ ► So 220 is your minimum, then that's your minimum donation to St. Jude. So if you've done that
00:09:54 ◼ ► configuration there, consider a 220 donation to St. Jude. Now, if you are fortunate enough,
00:09:58 ◼ ► you can give more, that's great. We encourage that. But that's kind of a good baseline of like,
00:10:03 ◼ ► here's an amount of money that while making my frivolous technology purchase that I purchased
00:10:08 ◼ ► that I probably could have gone another year or two without making, when I'm making this
00:10:12 ◼ ► frivolous technology purchase, I'm throwing away another $200 in just add-ons and fees and taxes.
00:10:18 ◼ ► If that, if I can spend it that easily, I can give at least that much to this amazing charity
00:10:23 ◼ ► doing amazing work for the world. So that's the Marco offset. I encourage you to give generously.
00:10:33 ◼ ► but also seriously offered, hey, if you have the top donation and the donation list, if you reach
00:10:39 ◼ ► out to me, send you forward me a copy of the receipt and give me a mailing address, as long as
00:10:44 ◼ ► the United States Postal Service can mail something to your address, I will send you some not for sale
00:10:49 ◼ ► ATP stickers. I, in the course of the last eight hours, I have two batches of ATP stickers to send
00:10:55 ◼ ► out because one person, and I don't recall if they want to be anonymous or not. So forgive me for not
00:10:59 ◼ ► naming them, but one person donated $8,000. And then the other person said in so many words,
00:11:05 ◼ ► hold my beer and donated $10,000. That's $18,000 of the 30,000 raised between two ATP listeners,
00:11:12 ◼ ► which is incredible. So you don't have to donate eight or $10,000, but if you donate at least $10,000
00:11:19 ◼ ► and one cent, as I said here right now, then you too can earn some hilariously overpriced
00:11:25 ◼ ► ATP stickers. So reach out to me, forward me your receipt and give me a mailing address, and I will
00:11:30 ◼ ► dispatch them as soon as possible. The competition for the world's most expensive stickers. And I
00:11:35 ◼ ► know we just talked about you're buying a new tech device, you're going to pay a minimum amount of
00:11:39 ◼ ► that you paid for the accessories and these people competing to get the top donation. So that keeps
00:11:44 ◼ ► rising or whatever. That's great for the people who are hearing that and say, I think I could swing
00:11:50 ◼ ► that. That's great. If you're listening to that and you're like, that's ridiculous. I'm barely
00:11:54 ◼ ► have enough money to get by a $5 donation is fine. Don't stop yourself by saying, Oh, this pledge
00:12:00 ◼ ► drive is just for people who can donate hundreds of dollars to buy new iPhones over the years.
00:12:04 ◼ ► Give a single dollar. Like I swear, like they will, anything you do helps, right? Like they,
00:12:14 ◼ ► that's what, that's what these donations are made. It's the relay listeners adding up all this money
00:12:19 ◼ ► or whatever. They're not all giving $10,000. I swear to you, people are giving five bucks,
00:12:30 ◼ ► There you go. All right. So let's do some follow up. I hear that things may be different in
00:12:36 ◼ ► Overcast land. What's going on there? So I re-added streaming as discussed last episode.
00:12:41 ◼ ► That update is out. I've been in kind of a bad place mentally over the reaction to the update.
00:12:56 ◼ ► I described my star ratings being lower as a small fire on a big building that nevertheless
00:13:01 ◼ ► I needed to put out. And so I'm happy to say that since the streaming update, there has been a sharp
00:13:09 ◼ ► rise in the average score of new ratings. So I think that has made a substantial difference.
00:13:17 ◼ ► So thank you everybody who has updated your ratings since then or added new ones. Thank
00:13:24 ◼ ► you for that. I'm also happy to announce now that what I've been working on for the last week or so
00:13:34 ◼ ► Oh, hooray. That makes me very happy because I have mostly adjusted to the current one, but I
00:13:40 ◼ ► still my natural reaction after so many years is to swipe laterally. So that makes me very happy.
00:13:45 ◼ ► Yeah. And it was very hard to do because in Swift UI, there was not a good way to detect pixel
00:13:55 ◼ ► perfect scroll positions of a scroll view until iOS 18, which added like a scroll geometry thing
00:14:02 ◼ ► that you can finally actually read it. And I I've been experimenting with this for a while trying to
00:14:07 ◼ ► get because because the reason I need scroll positions is when in the current UI, when you
00:14:13 ◼ ► switch over to like from the artwork view to the info view, I animate down the height of the of the
00:14:20 ◼ ► main playback controls to make more room for it to give the info view as much room as it can get.
00:14:26 ◼ ► And in order to do that, I have to know like, well, if you're dragging across and you like don't
00:14:32 ◼ ► drag all the way, well, how how do I know where you are in that in that in that animation to know,
00:14:37 ◼ ► like how far to bring that bar down. So I tried all these different hacks, including like wrapping
00:14:42 ◼ ► a UI kit UI scroll view in Swift UI. And then, of course, inside that scroll view, the content
00:14:49 ◼ ► that I'm putting in it is itself Swift UI again. So it kind of like, you know, go back and forth
00:14:54 ◼ ► through UI kit. And let me tell you, that creates so many shortcomings and problems. Like and I
00:15:01 ◼ ► tried I tried making that work for like two weeks, I couldn't get it to work well enough and have no
00:15:07 ◼ ► like massive showstopping problems. So anyway, I finally figured out a way to do it where the
00:15:14 ◼ ► animation works okay. On iOS 17. It works a lot better on iOS 18. So I'm working on that now that
00:15:22 ◼ ► should be out fairly soon, at least into beta. And I'm looking forward to sharing that with
00:15:29 ◼ ► everybody because honestly, like, it does make the app better. It does make it easier. You can
00:15:33 ◼ ► swipe the whole screen again, like you know, just like the old version. It is a much better design.
00:15:42 ◼ ► until fairly recently. So is I'm sorry, is the swipey stuff is that requiring iOS 18 then? So
00:15:49 ◼ ► no, the way it's going to work the way the way I have it right now, which is probably how it's
00:15:53 ◼ ► going to ship is you the swiping works no matter what. But on iOS 18, as you drag across, and as
00:16:01 ◼ ► the controls shrink downward to make to make as much room as possible for the info on iOS 18,
00:16:06 ◼ ► that will be pixel perfect. On iOS 17. It will stay at the top height until you are halfway
00:16:14 ◼ ► through it at the halfway point, it will then animate itself down all the way. And so it's
00:16:21 ◼ ► there's kind of like this threshold, like at the halfway point, it will cross that threshold
00:16:25 ◼ ► and do the whole animation at once as opposed to, you know, doing it pixel perfect as it tracks your
00:16:30 ◼ ► finger. It looks okay at high speed. If you do it at slow speed, you'll catch the transition.
00:16:35 ◼ ► But you know, that small price to pay for a much more usable interface. And you know, the way my
00:16:41 ◼ ► users are like, by December, I'm going to probably have like 70% iOS 18 usage anyway. So it doesn't
00:16:46 ◼ ► really matter. I know there's one of your pet obsessions making all the animations beautiful
00:16:50 ◼ ► and everything. But honestly, I think from a user's perspective, the thing that counts so much more
00:16:55 ◼ ► than the pixel precision of the transition word were scrutinized is the responsiveness of when I
00:17:00 ◼ ► put my thumb on it and I move does the thing move immediately and in tracking with my thumb,
00:17:06 ◼ ► and I think users will say the forgiving of they will not even noticed almost anything else at
00:17:12 ◼ ► normal swipe speeds, as long as it is responsive. So I would sacrifice attractiveness of the
00:17:18 ◼ ► transition even on iOS 18 if it took away from the responsiveness at all, right. And you know,
00:17:24 ◼ ► again, like users aren't running your animations at one 100 speed so they can scrutinize every
00:17:30 ◼ ► pixel or whatever, they just want to put their thumb on the screen, move it to the side and see
00:17:33 ◼ ► the info real quick. Believe me, some of my users are that picky. But yeah, overall, and it is very
00:17:38 ◼ ► fluid and responsive on both of us is just because again, like it's all Swift UI, it's all very
00:17:43 ◼ ► efficient, you know, with the way it's drawing the UI and updating things and everything like,
00:17:50 ◼ ► I have finally built up like decent Swift UI skills. So like, if something is possible to do
00:17:56 ◼ ► in Swift UI, I can probably figure out how to do it. It just takes a little bit of time. And you
00:18:00 ◼ ► know, that my usual pattern of doing it is like, I will start trying to solve a problem, I will build
00:18:07 ◼ ► up this ridiculous amount of complexity as I try different things and figure out different what
00:18:12 ◼ ► works, what doesn't try different approaches, then I'll like whittle it all back down to like the
00:18:16 ◼ ► distilled essence of here's the one thing that I that really worked well, like it's a whole,
00:18:21 ◼ ► it's a whole process. But I'm very happy to, to be able to do this so quickly. Like this is part
00:18:28 ◼ ► again, part of the reason why the rewrite has been just so massively productive, is that,
00:18:34 ◼ ► and that now that it's done, is I can do pretty substantial changes like this in, you know, now
00:18:40 ◼ ► days and a week or two instead of like months that it would take before like it's so much faster to
00:18:46 ◼ ► iterate. It's so much faster to change and design like to restructure redesign screens and controls
00:18:57 ◼ ► That's awesome. Mom, very, very glad to hear that things are looking up and looking better. They
00:19:01 ◼ ► are literally looking up because that's the way the graph is moving. Yeah. So that's very good
00:19:05 ◼ ► news. We had some feedback with regard to the max screen sharing like badge and we were talking
00:19:10 ◼ ► about, Oh, could we do something visually or something like the Siri animation in iOS 18?
00:19:14 ◼ ► What can we do to make it more obvious without having to nag the users? This okay. Is this okay?
00:19:20 ◼ ► Is this okay? So Josh Hattersley writes, even the existing colorful icon indicating screen capture
00:19:25 ◼ ► approach has its downsides. Some friends and I occasionally stream movies for group watch events
00:19:30 ◼ ► and discord. And while I normally do so from a windows machine, I tried recently for my Mac,
00:19:34 ◼ ► I was extremely annoyed to find that the colorful badge Apple slaps on captured windows also appears
00:19:38 ◼ ► in the streamed video, even in an app, like however you pronounce I I N A we've went, we've went
00:19:43 ◼ ► through this years ago. I don't remember, uh, which hides the title bar frustrating. And it
00:19:47 ◼ ► feels like there should be a method to dismiss it. So I was saying last week that Apple really needs
00:19:51 ◼ ► to do, although it may be tricky if, uh, if an app like I N A is not using the, uh, the right API.
00:20:05 ◼ ► but the output of that streaming app, like when it says, okay, I'm projecting my screen to all
00:20:10 ◼ ► my friends so they can see it. The friends don't need to see the screen recording badge. It's not
00:20:14 ◼ ► for them. I think Apple should like, this is what I was saying. If they ever did like a Siri type
00:20:18 ◼ ► border, that part should be omitted from screen recording itself. And from any output of that or
00:20:24 ◼ ► whatever, because its purpose is to inform the person who initiated the screen recording or
00:20:28 ◼ ► who's on the computer that is running the app that is recording the screen. That's just for them.
00:20:32 ◼ ► It doesn't need to be in the output or the recording or the outgoing stream. And I hope
00:20:36 ◼ ► that's something that either if Apple already does that, I hope apps that use those APIs,
00:20:41 ◼ ► learn how to get just the part they want and not the badge. And if Apple isn't already doing that
00:20:45 ◼ ► suggestion, maybe I'll file it as a feedback. I mean, not really familiar with the APIs cause
00:20:48 ◼ ► I don't have any screen recording apps, but I just assume that's a logical thing to do. And it amazes
00:20:52 ◼ ► me that like the badge is going out in the streams and stuff. Yeah. It's something else. Oh yeah. One
00:20:57 ◼ ► more thing that I didn't put in there about screen recording. Someone I forgot who it was. It didn't
00:21:00 ◼ ► make any of the notes, but someone showed a picture probably, or maybe it was a screenshot of a Apple
00:21:05 ◼ ► TV projecting something. Apparently you can do screen recording and Apple TV. Uh, somehow either
00:21:10 ◼ ► is it like a diagnostic thing to do screen recordings for like feedbacks or maybe there
00:21:14 ◼ ► apps to do it, but either way, there was a giant solid red border around the entire television.
00:21:18 ◼ ► And that is the indicator apparently an Apple TV to let you know that the screen is being recorded,
00:21:23 ◼ ► not quite as elegant as the Apple intelligence wavy thing or whatever, but gets the job done.
00:21:27 ◼ ► That's special. Uh, John, you had some good news in your own world. You have finally gotten to the
00:21:32 ◼ ► front of the line. Yeah. The Apple intelligence wait list, uh, Quinn Nelson suggested that I log
00:21:37 ◼ ► out of my Apple ID and back in, but it turns out I didn't have to do that. I just updated whatever
00:21:41 ◼ ► the latest beta 15 one is. Cause I'm on the 15 one train and I went into Apple intelligence and I was
00:21:46 ◼ ► like, yay, you're in a it's Apple intelligence. This is Syria personal intelligence system
00:21:50 ◼ ► integrated deeply into your Mac apps and Siri learn more dot, dot, dot right underneath that
00:21:54 ◼ ► as a little box that says Apple intelligence is not available when starting your Mac from an
00:21:58 ◼ ► external volume. Whoops. Cool. So I am through the wait list and I have learned that I think I
00:22:05 ◼ ► mentioned this on a past show, but there it is right in my face. I cannot use any Apple
00:22:09 ◼ ► intelligence features in the beta because I am indeed booting from an external desk. I don't
00:22:14 ◼ ► know what that limitation is about, but it is what it is. And I'm not putting 15 one beta on the
00:22:19 ◼ ► internal SSD of my wife's computer. I don't blame you. All right. Uh, with regard to making photos,
00:22:27 ◼ ► memories using Apple intelligence, um, Simon writes in to say, I cannot get Apple, Apple's AI
00:22:32 ◼ ► to create a photos memory of the times my kids have gotten dirty. So, uh, Simon includes some
00:22:38 ◼ ► screenshots and the prompt that he typed or said was my kids are covered in dirt to which Apple
00:22:44 ◼ ► says, try another description to create a memory, add details to your description or choose a new
00:22:48 ◼ ► person place or event from your library. So Simon tried again, my kids getting dirty while they play
00:22:59 ◼ ► dirty while they eat and play unable to use that description. Uh, okay, fine. My kids playing in
00:23:03 ◼ ► sand, try another description, create a memory, add details, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:23:13 ◼ ► which for the most part I applaud, but they might have swung a little too far in one direction.
00:23:18 ◼ ► That was the prompt that we read on a last week's episode, like nothing filthy. So my suggestion was
00:23:23 ◼ ► you have, what about your kids like getting dirty or like getting food on her face or whatever.
00:23:27 ◼ ► It's so hard to tell what these different responses kind of like when like home pod tells
00:23:31 ◼ ► you different things or whatever, which one of these responses is because Apple intelligence is
00:23:36 ◼ ► baited in and just configure how to do these and which one of these is because of the, um,
00:23:40 ◼ ► the, what do you call it? The prompt preamble or whatever you call it that said nothing filthy,
00:23:45 ◼ ► right? You can't tell, am I being denied because of that nothing filthy thing or am I being denied
00:23:50 ◼ ► because it just wouldn't work either way? I guess we'll all find out when we get this and start using
00:23:54 ◼ ► it and start trying to make memories of ourselves. If we get thwarted on things that we didn't hear
00:23:59 ◼ ► mentioned in the little preamble, and we know it's just Apple intelligence being weird, but it's not
00:24:03 ◼ ► an easy problem. Like these, the nuances of, you know, my kid getting dirty while they eat, right.
00:24:09 ◼ ► And, and the prompt saying nothing filthy, I can see where there might be some confusion there,
00:24:20 ◼ ► Yeah. So Evan Jao, uh, put up a YouTube video where they figured out how to do prompt injection
00:24:28 ◼ ► against Apple intelligence. It's a pretty wild, um, it's only like a 10 minute video, so it's worth
00:24:33 ◼ ► watching, but it is pretty cool what they ended up doing. And it involves a lot of, uh, disassembly,
00:24:38 ◼ ► not in the, like, you know, the, the computer code way necessarily, but like, how do I, you know,
00:24:43 ◼ ► how do I get it, what they're using, where's that data stored? How can I modify that and inject my
00:24:49 ◼ ► own thing with it? It, like I said, it's very, very much worth your time if you have 10 minutes
00:24:52 ◼ ► to spare. Yeah. And this is just another, another one of the weaknesses of a lot of L and based
00:25:01 ◼ ► difference between, uh, in-line data and data that is provided in a different channel. Uh, so
00:25:07 ◼ ► the thing you're typing to an LLM, you want that to be processed, right? All the other stuff where
00:25:12 ◼ ► you're saying, this is not what the person is typing, but this is what we're trying to tell you
00:25:15 ◼ ► on the side, LM like instructions to the LM. You really want those things to be separate,
00:25:20 ◼ ► but the way most of these systems work is it's all just being one big wad that you throw in the top
00:25:30 ◼ ► So if you watch this prompt injection thing, he's just looking through like the config files
00:25:34 ◼ ► and figuring out what do I have to put inside the text that gets fed to the top of this big system,
00:25:44 ◼ ► you set it off with double curly braces, or you put it in an angle brackets or whatever.
00:25:47 ◼ ► That's an example of trying to put stuff in line. It's in the same place as your message. It's kind
00:25:52 ◼ ► of like back in the day when you would on Twitter, where you would try to like quote tweet something,
00:25:59 ◼ ► it would just be a bunch of text. And inside that text would be the URL of the tweet that you're
00:26:04 ◼ ► trying to quote tweet. But later when Twitter officially supported that, I don't actually know
00:26:07 ◼ ► the Twitter API, but I'm assuming what they did was said, okay, now when you quote tweet something,
00:26:12 ◼ ► you get to say what you want to say in your tweet. And then you tell us the URL, the thing you're
00:26:17 ◼ ► quote tweeting, but that's not part of your text. It's totally separate. Like in the API request,
00:26:21 ◼ ► you say, here's my text and here's a whole other field, which is, and by the way, this is the thing
00:26:26 ◼ ► I'm quote tweeting. So you don't have to worry about reading the text and trying to find the URL.
00:26:30 ◼ ► And once you find the URL, figure out if it's a Twitter URL, and if it's a Twitter URL, figure out
00:26:34 ◼ ► if it's a tweet, you don't have to do any weird parsing or whatever. And if these systems use
00:26:40 ◼ ► something like that, they wouldn't be as vulnerable to just typing a double curly brace and then
00:26:46 ◼ ► putting a bunch of special instructions and typing two closing curly braces, and then going back to
00:26:49 ◼ ► what you were saying, because you get to type that in the text box and she can watch it. Like,
00:26:53 ◼ ► he's just typing like text edit and he's selecting it and firing up the writing tools and saying go.
00:26:58 ◼ ► And they do totally different things. Like they don't do like whatever feature he suggested. It's
00:27:03 ◼ ► because the text that he selected, Oh, we did a double curly brace inside the text. And now we've
00:27:08 ◼ ► escaped out of the text world. And now we're into this world and parsing those things out and making
00:27:13 ◼ ► it so people can't inject that in there is a much harder problem than you think it is. But that's
00:27:17 ◼ ► how these systems work. And they don't have to they don't have to work this way. Like Apple could
00:27:20 ◼ ► have made it so that when you select a bunch of text, and you right click it and do the writing
00:27:24 ◼ ► tools thing with Apple intelligence, it could take that text, put it into one separate bucket,
00:27:28 ◼ ► and then take another bucket and say, here are the instructions to our system and send them as
00:27:32 ◼ ► two separate blobs. So like, it would never parse an instruction out of the text that was selected.
00:27:38 ◼ ► But that's not how it currently works, at least in the beta he was using the instructions that are in
00:27:41 ◼ ► the text get interpreted by the system and make it do all sorts of things. And those those
00:27:46 ◼ ► instructions are just plain text strings, whether they're double curly braces, or angle brackets,
00:27:51 ◼ ► or whatever, you can find what they are in a bunch of config files. And even if they can
00:27:54 ◼ ► encrypt those config files, or try to hide it or whatever, like people can figure it out. So
00:28:09 ◼ ► gravestone to the day I die. Maybe because I grew up with extensions, it just does not bother me the
00:28:15 ◼ ► way it does you because I like that in the file name, it's clear what this file would have that
00:28:20 ◼ ► without literally putting it in the file name. So how did you have that in Mac OS in the in
00:28:29 ◼ ► it was metadata separate from the file name. The system would never look at the system would never
00:28:34 ◼ ► try to parse anything out of the file name. Never. No, no, this is you and me having two different
00:28:38 ◼ ► conversations, which I think the two of us do a little too often. There was separate information,
00:28:42 ◼ ► just like there's separate information like where's the creation data in a file? Is that in the file
00:28:45 ◼ ► name? No, it's somewhere else. No, no, no, you're missing my point, probably because I'm not
00:28:49 ◼ ► presenting it well. What I'm saying is I'm looking at a finder window or whatever the hell the
00:28:53 ◼ ► equivalent was in classic Mac OS. It was called Explorer back then. Yeah, it's called Windows
00:28:58 ◼ ► Explorer. I have 10 different files in this folder or directory or whatever, and three of them are
00:29:02 ◼ ► pieces of text, two of them are images, and the rest are a smattering of other styles of file.
00:29:08 ◼ ► How do I know as a user what's text and what's an image? You asked this question as if that's not a
00:29:13 ◼ ► thing that can happen today on your Mac. Do you have show all file names extension at all times
00:29:16 ◼ ► turned on? No, I don't. So how if you have a bunch of files in the finder and the file name
00:29:21 ◼ ► extensions are not visible, how can you tell what kind of files they are? I guess that's fair. All
00:29:24 ◼ ► right, touche, touche. I mean, I think I do typically see the file names. Where is that?
00:29:29 ◼ ► I know what the setting you're thinking of. Some people turn that on, which I guess I could
00:29:32 ◼ ► understand you forgetting that that's not the default. No, I don't have it on. But like it's
00:29:36 ◼ ► not the default to turn it on. And if you don't turn it on, most of the time the system tries to
00:29:40 ◼ ► hide them by simply literally hiding that part of the file name. It's still in the file name,
00:29:44 ◼ ► but it's hiding it. And then your question is exactly the same case. Well, how do you tell?
00:29:47 ◼ ► No, that's fair. You look at the icon. If you're in list view, you look at the kind column, right?
00:29:50 ◼ ► That's that's how we did it. Fair enough. I mean, either way, I just really don't see why this is so
00:29:58 ◼ ► offensive to you, but it's fair. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm not saying you're wrong. It's
00:30:00 ◼ ► the principle. I guess. I don't know. I'm sure. I bet if I grew up the way you did, I would probably
00:30:05 ◼ ► also be deeply offended by it. I had a glimpse of a better world and it was taken away from me.
00:30:08 ◼ ► But I'm still glad to still I'd much rather still have Max even with the sport. At least we didn't
00:30:14 ◼ ► get drive letters. Am I right? That is actually drive letters are a true abomination. I am
00:30:19 ◼ ► right there with you on that one. All right. Moving right along. How do you add grammar
00:30:30 ◼ ► how do I do that? So that was a question again, when we were looking at the prompts that people
00:30:35 ◼ ► pulled out of Mac OS or wherever they were, the prompt said, please produce only valid JSON.
00:30:39 ◼ ► And I discussed how just mind bending it is that you have to put that again in line with the text
00:30:45 ◼ ► that's being fed in. You have to put these instructions in plain English in line and then
00:30:49 ◼ ► cross your fingers and hope to get it done. Because there's nothing particularly special about
00:30:52 ◼ ► saying, please provide valid JSON or only output valid JSON or please produce JSON that's valid
00:30:56 ◼ ► or please send your output in the format of JSON. Like you can say it a million different ways.
00:31:00 ◼ ► It's just text. This is not offset by double curly braces. This is not a special instruction
00:31:05 ◼ ► to the engine. It's literally just the plain text sent exactly the same as your text. Right.
00:31:10 ◼ ► And I like that's doesn't seem particularly reliable. Great. But Stephen Tierney was the
00:31:21 ◼ ► slightly less ridiculous. So he writes, you can constrain the output format of an LLM by
00:31:27 ◼ ► specifying a formal grammar. And he linked to an example from the Llama open source LLM. I'll put
00:31:33 ◼ ► a link in the show notes to the readme and GitHub. It's basically just like a BNF type grammar where
00:31:37 ◼ ► you say, this is what JSON looks like. And it's a grammar that defines the valid structure of JSON.
00:31:42 ◼ ► I'll put another link to a recent paper on the topic called LLM generation with grammar
00:31:46 ◼ ► augmentation from one of the authors of the paper. They write all the compared approaches use
00:31:52 ◼ ► constrained decoding to filter syntactically invalid tokens during generation. They remove
00:31:58 ◼ ► the set of bad tokens when the LLM is choosing the next token. So basically the LLM goes through
00:32:02 ◼ ► this process and for every token, which is basically like a letter or a part of a word or
00:32:06 ◼ ► whatever, it has a list of possible candidates and like probability. And then there's this other
00:32:11 ◼ ► system where you pick one of them. You don't always pick the highest probability, but you pick one of
00:32:14 ◼ ► the ones that's near the top. Right. And what it does, it says, okay, LLM during this normal process
00:32:19 ◼ ► produce all the possible tokens, the candidates that we might pick. But before we do the picking
00:32:24 ◼ ► process, if we decide which one we want, again, it's probably going to be one of the top ones,
00:32:28 ◼ ► although it's not always the topiest top one. That's part of what the temperature setting does.
00:32:31 ◼ ► Right. Before we pick that one, delete any token that would make the output invalid JSON,
00:32:39 ◼ ► because it knows like it based on the grammar, like, okay, we just did like the end of a double
00:32:44 ◼ ► coded string, right? The next call, the next token has to be like a colon or a curly brace. Like,
00:32:48 ◼ ► you know, in the grammar, what is even valid for the next token? Is any letter valid? Does it have
00:32:53 ◼ ► to be like, is it any letter or a double quote or calling? It knows. And so it just goes through
00:32:57 ◼ ► to the candidate list and just deletes everything that wouldn't be valid. And you hope there's
00:33:04 ◼ ► hopefully something's left. And it usually is because the candidate list is very, very long.
00:33:07 ◼ ► Right. And that's one way where you can constrain the grammar. Now there's possibility that you
00:33:12 ◼ ► might have to backtrack where you end up at a terminal condition where you didn't, you can't
00:33:15 ◼ ► produce any more tokens because you deleted all of them or whatever. And there were some earlier
00:33:19 ◼ ► versions of this. It did slow down inference a lot, but a lot of them use the similar approach.
00:33:23 ◼ ► We'll put a link in the show notes to a Reddit discussion where someone tried to explain like
00:33:26 ◼ ► the pipeline of like the text goes into a tokenizer that goes into the model. They would get the list
00:33:31 ◼ ► of candidates, then a sampler takes it, then you get the winner and then you keep doing that.
00:33:35 ◼ ► And then the grammar filter just goes in between the candidates and the sampler. And OpenAI has a
00:33:39 ◼ ► similar type of feature where you tell it what kind of output you want. Again, this is different
00:33:44 ◼ ► than asking for plain JSON, but even given all of that, like I said, if you want to make sure
00:33:50 ◼ ► that your candidate list contains something that will be valid JSON, you should also still ask for
00:33:56 ◼ ► it because that makes it much more likely that near the top of the candidate list, or at least
00:34:00 ◼ ► somewhere in the candidate list will be tokens that would make it valid JSON. So you still have
00:34:05 ◼ ► to say please and thank you, like please produce valid JSON. And by the way, even if you, you know,
00:34:11 ◼ ► when we pick your tokens, I'm going to delete all the choices that aren't valid JSON and only pick
00:34:15 ◼ ► from the ones that are left. Cool. I mean, it makes sense. It's something though. And we also had
00:34:23 ◼ ► Nate write in and point out that the notification history that I think John was asking for is
00:34:31 ◼ ► basically the one that exists in Android right now. It's better in Android. Could be better still,
00:34:35 ◼ ► but hey, they have a notification history and it shows you your notifications. Here's all
00:34:39 ◼ ► your notifications in the last 24 hours grouped by application. And it gives you a little summaries
00:34:43 ◼ ► of it. You could have even more information because again, what I was looking for was like,
00:34:46 ◼ ► show me all the notifications that have gone by, when did they appear and what action did I take
00:34:53 ◼ ► on them if any, right? And at what time did I take the action? Like stuff that the system surely knows
00:34:58 ◼ ► at the time you do it, but just like record it and keep a rolling 24 hour window. It's not probably
00:35:01 ◼ ► not that much data because it happens to me all the time. A notification comes and go, whether
00:35:06 ◼ ► maybe I actually did something with it, maybe I swiped it away and actually I want to see it again.
00:35:16 ◼ ► I'm at certain point in the list, but at any point I can say, show me things that have gone by in the
00:35:20 ◼ ► list already. And I can scroll backwards or forwards. That's just not how notifications work
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00:37:32 ◼ ► We'll do more of that next week. But we wanted to note that Apple has announced their September
00:37:38 ◼ ► event. It will be the 9th of September, which is a Monday. It'll be Monday, September 9th at
00:37:51 ◼ ► excited for it. I think it's going to be really fun. And we're going to talk about what we expect
00:37:56 ◼ ► later. But any thoughts about that, gentlemen? We're going to talk about the little invitation,
00:38:00 ◼ ► which I got it made a little odd this year. So people haven't seen the artwork will describe it.
00:38:05 ◼ ► It's like an Apple logo with what I guess is supposed to be kind of like the new Siri kind
00:38:10 ◼ ► of glowy effect around it. But it doesn't really look like the old Siri. It doesn't quite look like
00:38:15 ◼ ► the effect that goes around your screen when you activate Apple intelligence and the new iOS and
00:38:19 ◼ ► iOS 18. But I think that's what they're going for. And then the slogan in white text with a similar
00:38:24 ◼ ► kind of multicolored glow behind it is it's glow time. Apple intelligence isn't even launching
00:38:32 ◼ ► with these phones. And now I know there's going to be features that are like whenever you activate
00:38:36 ◼ ► Siri, it's going to glow. So I guess, yes, it is glow time because now you're going to be activating
00:38:40 ◼ ► Siri and it's going to glow around your screen. So technically it's glow time. But do you really
00:38:44 ◼ ► want to highlight the feature that everyone is going to associate with Apple intelligence, even
00:38:49 ◼ ► though you know Apple intelligence isn't shipping with these phones? It's kind of weird. I guess
00:38:53 ◼ ► this is the invitation. So okay. I was a little bit careless, but we have a very strong tradition
00:39:02 ◼ ► I feel like I ask this question every year and I never recall what the answer is because,
00:39:05 ◼ ► hey, it's me. Has there ever really been a strong correlation between this and like a actual new
00:39:14 ◼ ► announcement? You know, this clearly is reminiscent of Siri, but Siri has been around for a while.
00:39:19 ◼ ► Have we ever seen like the dynamic island as an example, like that wasn't teased in any way,
00:39:24 ◼ ► shape or form in an event poster. Was it like, have we really ever gotten one of those in the
00:39:28 ◼ ► last 10 years? You have asked this multiple times, although I think the question is shifting slowly
00:39:32 ◼ ► over the years, but you used to ask, has any one of these invitations ever hinted at anything that
00:39:36 ◼ ► it was actually in the presentation? And the answer is yes, it totally has. Now you're asking,
00:39:41 ◼ ► has it hinted at something that we didn't know about at all? I think maybe the closest we can
00:39:46 ◼ ► come there is one of the ones that was like, the invitations basically let us know that there was
00:39:51 ◼ ► going to be Mac stuff. And at that point we were so disillusioned that nobody thought any Mac stuff
00:39:55 ◼ ► would be announced because the Mac was really down in the dumps. But when we saw the invitation,
00:39:59 ◼ ► like that's gotta be Mac stuff. And it was, it was Mac stuff. I forget what the particular
00:40:03 ◼ ► invitation was or which one it was, but yeah, these things often do have hints about what
00:40:07 ◼ ► they're going to show. Sometimes it's boring, like this year they're like, yeah, the glowy effect.
00:40:10 ◼ ► We've all seen it in the betas and that's what they're going for, but it's glow time. It's so
00:40:14 ◼ ► weird. And I, I don't, I do think that a lot of times the invitation has a thing and a theme or
00:40:20 ◼ ► whatever that is not, they don't, you won't see the presentation and say that was the glow time
00:40:25 ◼ ► presentation because they're not going to say it's glow time in the presentation. They're probably
00:40:28 ◼ ► not even going to show this graphic or whatever, but they will of course show their new OS and
00:40:32 ◼ ► their new phones and all the other stuff. So anyway, it's, you know, I, I don't think this is
00:40:38 ◼ ► revealing anything. Like I can't even think of anything that hasn't been rumored that could
00:40:43 ◼ ► possibly be hinted at by this invitation, but you know, it can happen. Hey, so hell might be
00:40:51 ◼ ► freezing over. There are rumors. This was posted on Bloomberg that Apple is going to increase the
00:40:59 ◼ ► Ram in their base max or back book pros. Like what, what, huh? What we're not going to be
00:41:06 ◼ ► stuck with. Oh, like just got an error network changed. Oh, we're not going to be stuck with
00:41:10 ◼ ► eight gigs forever and forever. Is this the first time during the history of our show existing that
00:41:16 ◼ ► this is going to maybe happen? Right. I'm going to say like, what, how long has eight gigs been
00:41:20 ◼ ► around? Like, and when we're talking about is the base model max, whatever the cheapest Mac is
00:41:24 ◼ ► for years and years, the cheapest Mac laptop would come with four gigs of Ram. And then one glorious
00:41:30 ◼ ► day Apple said, you know what? The cheapest Mac, even the, whatever the lowest end Mac we have now
00:41:35 ◼ ► is going to come with eight. And I think that day may have been before the beginning of the show 11
00:41:40 ◼ ► years ago. Right. We looked it up like they remember some, somebody looked it up and pointed
00:41:44 ◼ ► out to us and it, there was, I believe like if you, if you went to like, you know, if you said
00:41:49 ◼ ► only like new models, there was like, I think the Mac book air was the last one to have a low
00:41:54 ◼ ► configuration of that at some point. But like, if you look to just whatever was for sale, I think
00:42:00 ◼ ► the MD one Oh one that that old, like the last one that had the CDU drive, um, that one, which
00:42:06 ◼ ► stuck around for a very long time in the sales channel. I think that one started up at four also.
00:42:12 ◼ ► And that might've been the last one that was actually for sale. Yeah. And despite this,
00:42:16 ◼ ► let's say conservative approach Apple has taken to Ram Ram prices do fluctuate over time. You
00:42:23 ◼ ► can look at the graph. It's not smooth, but in general, Ram becomes cheaper for the same amount
00:42:28 ◼ ► of memory over time. And despite the fact that Apple has always done it this way, there's nothing
00:42:35 ◼ ► particular about Ram that absolutely dictates that you must go from four to eight. You could go from
00:42:41 ◼ ► four to six or four to five. Now probably it's, you don't want it to be powers of two and there,
00:42:46 ◼ ► you can't get out, you can't, everything you want. It can't go from four to 4.75 because they
00:42:50 ◼ ► probably don't sell things in those units or whatever. Right. But you, you don't always have
00:42:55 ◼ ► to double it. And as the amount of Ram gets larger and larger, doubling becomes much more significant.
00:43:00 ◼ ► You're, you know, you're adding one gig of Ram, then you're adding four gigs of Ram. Then you're
00:43:04 ◼ ► adding eight gigs of Ram. Like, because you will, you know, from one to two and two to four and four,
00:43:08 ◼ ► like it just, you don't necessarily have to double it. Again, Ram is usually sold in powers of two
00:43:14 ◼ ► and it usually makes sense to do the doubling or whatever. But what it means if Apple is going to
00:43:19 ◼ ► really hold the line on Ram for a long time is it's not a smooth ramp. It's like just eight,
00:43:25 ◼ ► eight, eight, eight, eight for just years and years and years. And you're like, oh, it's okay.
00:43:29 ◼ ► Well, you know, when it went from four to eight, it's like, wow, everyone gets eight. That's going
00:43:31 ◼ ► to be great. And then you're like, eight is okay. And then you're like, well, you know,
00:43:34 ◼ ► you probably shouldn't buy one with eight. And you're like, oh, really don't get the base model.
00:43:38 ◼ ► It has it. You really need to get 16, like eight outstays. It's welcome. And it's like, you know,
00:43:42 ◼ ► you could have gone to 12 at some point in there, but instead it's just going to be eight forever.
00:43:46 ◼ ► And this rumor is we're going to go from eight to 16, which I'm all for. I'd rather go from eight
00:43:52 ◼ ► to 16. Right. But I'd rather not always have to wait for the doubling because it's going to become
00:43:57 ◼ ► untenable. Like what about when you're just going from 64 to 128, that's a missing 64 gigs of Ram
00:44:07 ◼ ► only shipping with 64 gigs of Ram. And then finally you get 128, right? How about a 96?
00:44:12 ◼ ► How about throw a 96 in there somewhere? You know, like it should be smooth. And this is all the more
00:44:17 ◼ ► frustrating because of that weird, it's not even a rumor. It was a teardown that I think basically
00:44:21 ◼ ► confirmed this. Like they opened up an M4 iPad and look at the M4 SoC and it had 12 gigs of Ram on it
00:44:28 ◼ ► because the Ram is on the SoC. It's like written right next to the actual little chip. It's like
00:44:32 ◼ ► on the package with the SoC, right? It had 12 gigs of Ram in it. Only eight was exposed to the iPad,
00:44:36 ◼ ► but those, the chips were a six and a six. Now people are like, well, maybe those are Ram chips
00:44:41 ◼ ► that only, you know, four of the six gigs work on those Ram chips. And other people said that's not
00:44:46 ◼ ► how Ram usually works. Are they just disabling that Ram or whatever? It was like, Hey, that made
00:44:50 ◼ ► me hopeful that the next low end Mac would start at 12 instead of eight, because we had seen M4 SoCs
00:44:57 ◼ ► that Apple shipped that have 12 on them. Again, I'm way happier with 16, but it shows that 12
00:45:03 ◼ ► was possible, is possible. Apple did ship 12 on machines that granted it didn't expose all or
00:45:09 ◼ ► whatever. And they could have done that on the M3 or on the M2 or whatever, but they didn't. So
00:45:13 ◼ ► this may be the year when the M4 Macs, the plain old M4 Macs, not the M4 Pro, not the M4 Macs,
00:45:20 ◼ ► those will have tons of Ram, you know, whatever, just a plain old M4 Macs. That's probably going
00:45:23 ◼ ► to ship in the MacBook Air, obviously. The iMac, what am I missing? The Mac mini, right?
00:45:30 ◼ ► Plain old M4 starting at 16 gigs of Ram. Long overdue and it will make the M4 line a great time
00:45:38 ◼ ► to buy in. You won't have to scare people away from the basis of base models, except for the
00:45:43 ◼ ► fact that it probably have 256 SSD, which is insane and they should double that too. But anyway,
00:45:48 ◼ ► setting that aside, you won't have to tell everybody, Oh, you're going to get a MacBook Air
00:45:51 ◼ ► or you're going to get an iMac. You just make sure you double the Ram to 16 and you'll be fine. And
00:45:56 ◼ ► of course they charge you like $200 for that extra Ram, which is disconnected from all reality. And
00:46:00 ◼ ► then suddenly the base price doesn't look that good. So it seems like when the M4 Macs come out,
00:46:05 ◼ ► you can buy the base model and it won't be terrible. So we are getting real time follow
00:46:10 ◼ ► up from the chat from David Schaub and the desktop Macs, if I'm reading this graph, right,
00:46:16 ◼ ► which I think I am, desktop Macs went to eight gigs of Ram in 2012. When did we start the show?
00:46:24 ◼ ► It was 2013, right? So that was before the show started. Laptops, however, went in 2017.
00:46:43 ◼ ► You look back and you're like, really? They were selling Macs with that little base Ram?
00:46:48 ◼ ► Because we just all get into this mindset. We tech nerds of like, Oh, of course you would never
00:46:54 ◼ ► Apple holds the base amount of Ram for so long that we just get trained. This is a great machine.
00:47:00 ◼ ► You don't have to do anything to it except pay 200 extra bucks for more Ram. But everything else
00:47:04 ◼ ► about it is great. You're like, wait, why doesn't it, like, why can't I just get the cheapest one?
00:47:08 ◼ ► I'm like, well, that doesn't come with enough Ram. It's like, well, why would they sell it?
00:47:11 ◼ ► This is what happens if you talk with a non-tech person. They say, well, why would they sell it if
00:47:14 ◼ ► it doesn't have enough Ram? It's like, well, it has enough, but if you want the machine to last
00:47:18 ◼ ► longer and it will be a little bit better, and like you have to go through, it used to be worse
00:47:21 ◼ ► with spinning disks, obviously. SSD makes this better, but it's still not an excuse. Like it
00:47:24 ◼ ► just, it lets you get away with less Ram for longer, but there is a time limit. You can't
00:47:30 ◼ ► hold it at eight gigs for 50 years. You have to increase the amount of Ram and looks like 2024/
00:47:36 ◼ ► 2025. We're going to go from eight to 16 and we will enjoy a blessed two, three, four, maybe even
00:47:42 ◼ ► five years where we're all happy with the base Ram on max. I'm excited. I mean, we'll see what happens,
00:47:47 ◼ ► but that would be excellent. So yeah. So with that in mind, there's also a rumor that the iPhone
00:47:52 ◼ ► 17, not the one that we're going to hear about in just a few weeks, next year's iPhone, iPhone 17
00:47:58 ◼ ► will feature 12 gigs of Ram. This is reading from MacRumors. Next year's iPhone 17 models will come
00:48:04 ◼ ► with 12 gigs of Ram up from the eight gigs of Ram expected across Apple's upcoming iPhone 16 models.
00:48:08 ◼ ► According to the Weibo user PhoneShipExpert, the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus feature six gigs of Ram,
00:48:15 ◼ ► while the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max come with eight gigs of Ram. The difference is said to be
00:48:19 ◼ ► the reason why Apple intelligence is only currently supported on the iPhone 15 Pro models. Since it's
00:48:24 ◼ ► a requirement for Apple intelligence, all four of Apple's upcoming iPhone 16 models are expected to
00:48:28 ◼ ► feature eight gigs of Ram as is the rumored iPhone SE 4. So this is the Apple intelligence Ram
00:48:35 ◼ ► dividend on the phones. Obviously it's forcing all the phones up to eight gigs because we know based
00:48:40 ◼ ► on what Apple has shipped already that the six gig ones can't do it. Now, obviously max were already
00:48:44 ◼ ► shipping with eight gigs, but there's more stuff going on and contending for Ram on the average
00:48:48 ◼ ► Mac than there is on the average phone given the different environments or there can be any way,
00:48:55 ◼ ► Why? Why is this the year that we go from eight to 16? I think the answer is Apple intelligence.
00:49:01 ◼ ► Like I think that's why that all of a sudden the phones are going up, all of a sudden the Pro and
00:49:07 ◼ ► Non-Pro phones are going to have the same amount of Ram and it's going to be more than they had
00:49:10 ◼ ► last year. Like it's still kind of weird to me that the 15, I mean it shows kind of how blindsided
00:49:14 ◼ ► Apple was by the whole LLM stuff, that the 15 line had this bifurcation where the Pros can run the
00:49:20 ◼ ► LLM stuff but the Non-Pros can't because they only had six and they're not making that mistake with
00:49:25 ◼ ► the 16 line and apparently not with the 17. We're all going to have it. Maybe the 17 line,
00:49:30 ◼ ► this rumor just says the iPhone 17 models will come with 12 gig. Does that mean all of them will?
00:49:35 ◼ ► I mean, again, I welcome it. I think it's useful even if it wasn't for Apple intelligence,
00:49:40 ◼ ► but if that's what it takes, if it takes a new incredibly Ram hungry feature that Apple wants
00:49:55 ◼ ► but this upcoming month, I guess, this upcoming event, iPhone 16 camera improvements. These are
00:50:01 ◼ ► rumors about the cameras for next month. Again, reading from MacRumors, the summary is that the
00:50:06 ◼ ► ultra wide camera will go from f/2.4 to f/2.2 aperture. The 16 and 16 Plus may support macro
00:50:15 ◼ ► photography for the first time. The iPhone 16 Pro, the human sized iPhone 16 Pro, not the
00:50:21 ◼ ► gigantic, gigantic one that I have will gain the 5X Tetra prism telephoto camera, which will make
00:50:27 ◼ ► my decision making very complicated for this upcoming month. The iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max
00:50:33 ◼ ► will feature an upgraded ultra wide camera with a 48 megapixel sensor with the same pixel binning
00:50:38 ◼ ► features. The main camera, it will have an f/2.2 aperture up from f/2.4 and support 48 megapixel
00:50:44 ◼ ► Pro Raw photography. It all sounds good. I'm happy that the, that, you know, I will finally get the
00:50:50 ◼ ► 5X lens in my size phone. I won't have to pull a casey and jump up. So I'm looking forward to it.
00:50:57 ◼ ► Yeah, there were some other items in this article as well. I've just pulled out the most
00:51:00 ◼ ► relevant and interesting ones. But one of the things I didn't put in, because that's not an
00:51:04 ◼ ► improvement is the rumor is that the main camera, no change. Exactly the same for the Pro models.
00:51:15 ◼ ► I mean, obviously there'll be processing changes and there's always something that Tout and Apple
00:51:18 ◼ ► has done it a couple of times where they really haven't actually improved the camera hardware at
00:51:22 ◼ ► all, but they have find a way to make you think that it's better or whatever. But the rumor is,
00:51:26 ◼ ► this is going to be one of those years, but you know, they make up for the other changes.
00:51:29 ◼ ► Suddenly the ultra wide getting, you know, a 48 megapixel sensor with pixel binning and having
00:51:34 ◼ ► a better aperture. That'll really hopefully make the ultra wide a lot better camera. I forget if
00:51:39 ◼ ► there was a, I might've simped out, I forget if there was a rumor about the selfie camera
00:51:43 ◼ ► improving, but that's always welcome. So it's not always, and especially these days, it's not
00:51:47 ◼ ► always about like how much better is the 1X camera getting? Cause it seems like they're really
00:51:51 ◼ ► pressing up against the size and cost constraints that they want to, at least that Apple wants to
00:51:58 ◼ ► dedicate to camera. Other phone makers are dedicating even more size and even more cost
00:52:03 ◼ ► to their cameras. But with Apple's current design, I'm not sure, you know, we can't expect the kind
00:52:10 ◼ ► of changes we got during like the big camera, you know, blow up era with someone should do a graph
00:52:16 ◼ ► of this, of how rapidly and dramatically the cameras improved when Apple started making them
00:52:22 ◼ ► way bigger. It used to be flushed with the back of the phone. And then all of a sudden they weren't
00:52:26 ◼ ► and they became less and less flush over time. And they took up more and more room and the camera
00:52:30 ◼ ► improvements during those years, when they went from a tiny little flush pinhole to these gigantic
00:52:35 ◼ ► mountains, huge improvements, but the, even though the camera bump has been getting still getting
00:52:40 ◼ ► bigger, it's getting bigger, more slowly in the area dedicated to the cameras is also slowing.
00:52:44 ◼ ► So yeah, the 1X camera is probably not going to be that big of a leap. Well, they're running out of
00:52:48 ◼ ► space to expand into on the back of the phone. Well, you got to do, I guess I've always said
00:52:52 ◼ ► that you can't, you know, you got to do the full width, right? And maybe have fewer bigger cameras,
00:52:56 ◼ ► like look what the Pixel 9 does. They've been the full width of the phone for a while now. And
00:53:00 ◼ ► their lower end phone just has two cameras side by side. And the high end one has three cameras
00:53:04 ◼ ► side by side. Like, you know, we'll see what they do on the slim. And if they actually changed the
00:53:09 ◼ ► design of the non slim ones, but yeah, I don't, I don't think like, you could make better cameras
00:53:15 ◼ ► with bigger sensors, but they will take up more room and stick out more and cost more money.
00:53:19 ◼ ► And every bit of space inside a phone that you take up with cameras space that you can't put
00:53:23 ◼ ► battery in or any other parts in. So it is a balancing act, but we've definitely seen the
00:53:28 ◼ ► rate of improvement of the 1X camera really slow down and lean heavily on processing features. But
00:53:44 ◼ ► like raw quality of the cameras changes pretty slowly these days, just again, because we are
00:53:56 ◼ ► processing does change every year. You know, and even even when in the past, even when they have
00:54:01 ◼ ► occasionally had a generation where like the basics of the camera didn't change between one
00:54:06 ◼ ► and the following phone. Usually the processing is tweaked or is able to be more advanced,
00:54:12 ◼ ► maybe be less heavy handed in certain ways. And like, as I've spent more of the last couple of
00:54:17 ◼ ► years getting back into real cameras, like big cameras, one of the I mean, obviously, again,
00:54:22 ◼ ► like there's there's certain things that smartphones will just always be worse at because they're so
00:54:26 ◼ ► optically, you know, very, very small sensors, very, very small lenses that have to be very
00:54:31 ◼ ► inexpensive relative. But also, there's certain things that phones are way better at and generally
00:54:36 ◼ ► always will be like stacking multiple exposures together to generate HDR and different effects
00:54:42 ◼ ► and different processing steps. But it is still very, very clear to me, when I look at a phone
00:54:48 ◼ ► picture versus a big camera picture, you can you can spot the differences very quickly if you know
00:54:53 ◼ ► what to look for, because phone pictures are still so heavily processed by default. And there are
00:54:58 ◼ ► like there's recent things like I know, didn't Halide just release a cool like raw mode that's
00:55:04 ◼ ► less or like that's basically unprocessed? Yeah, it's like called zero processing or something.
00:55:12 ◼ ► Obviously, there's some amount of processing just to get a reasonable picture off of the sensor,
00:55:16 ◼ ► but they do almost no processing. And if you ever wondered what it would look like if you didn't
00:55:23 ◼ ► apply most of the iPhones processing, the answer is noisy. Yes, they're very tiny sensors. And
00:55:34 ◼ ► sunlight and you're like, wow, why would anyone ever use the zero processing mode? It's like,
00:55:39 ◼ ► well, in good lighting, what you're saying is phone don't try to do the thing where you take
00:55:44 ◼ ► 17 exposures and make everything look beautiful and have it all be exposed. And like this weird,
00:55:48 ◼ ► you know, artificial exposure bracketing HDR type thing, let the sky blow out or let this
00:55:53 ◼ ► thing be in shadow or whatever. And if there is enough light, you won't get that much noise.
00:55:57 ◼ ► And it is, you know, it's it's it's not a feature that most people want. The default should still be
00:56:02 ◼ ► all the processing on. But it is fun to just see like what are these cameras capable of? Honestly,
00:56:12 ◼ ► aren't that terrible. Like it's not too long ago that I owned like when my son was born in 2004,
00:56:17 ◼ ► we had a digital camera that took pictures that were just about as noisy. Only there was no there
00:56:22 ◼ ► was no option to add processing to make them better. So technology marches on. So if you want
00:56:26 ◼ ► to try that, download the I think it's in the latest version. I think I might be on the beta,
00:56:30 ◼ ► but I think it's in the latest release version of Halide, that zero processing feature. They have a
00:56:35 ◼ ► big blog post about it. It's fun to try. Yeah, I was I was also very impressed, honestly, by like
00:56:40 ◼ ► how how decent the sensor the raw sensor stuff is. But yeah, you do get a lot of the rainbow,
00:56:51 ◼ ► you know, having to crank up its sensitivity a lot in a lot of different lighting conditions.
00:56:55 ◼ ► And so anyway, one of the biggest differences when you look at iPhone pictures versus versus like
00:57:01 ◼ ► bigger camera pictures is you can tell there's been a lot less processing done to the bigger
00:57:06 ◼ ► camera pictures. Now again, in certain conditions, this is not what you want, especially in terms of
00:57:10 ◼ ► like, you know, if you need to combine multiple exposures to get larger dynamic range, for
00:57:14 ◼ ► instance, that's something that the phones are just so much better at, and probably always will be.
00:57:19 ◼ ► But the big cameras, you can really like a big camera version, if you take it, if you like in
00:57:26 ◼ ► the spot, and you take the same picture with a big camera, and then a phone, barring, you know,
00:57:32 ◼ ► exposure differences for things like HDR. Other than that, like, usually the big camera one will
00:57:41 ◼ ► edge sharpening, like all these like these kind of artifacts of the heavy handed processing. And so
00:57:46 ◼ ► one thing I hope for every year that I don't usually get too much. Sometimes it gets worse.
00:57:53 ◼ ► But usually what I hope for with the new phones every year is that they've developed better
00:57:59 ◼ ► processing so that it is a little bit less obvious, like so it can be a little bit less
00:58:08 ◼ ► sensor size and the realities of those optics and phones, it's very hard to make it not require a
00:58:14 ◼ ► lot of processing to look good. But over time, we do approach that we do get better over time.
00:58:20 ◼ ► Some phone generations are a step back. I'm not super happy with the 15 in this regard. I think
00:58:27 ◼ ► it does apply very strong processing by default. But I think it actually is better than the 14 was
00:58:33 ◼ ► in that same area. So hoping hoping for more improvements there. And that usually requires
00:58:38 ◼ ► not only you know, just slight improvements to the camera here and there. But that also usually
00:58:48 ◼ ► signal processing pipeline. And you know, where AI comes in and help sometimes to or ml or whatever
00:58:53 ◼ ► we're calling it this this few year period. All those things help to but anything that can make
00:58:58 ◼ ► the camera make this make the photos appear less heavily processed. I very much welcome those
00:59:04 ◼ ► changes when we can get them. There's an interesting parallel with the AI thing like the one of the
00:59:08 ◼ ► one of the knocks against the early and even some of the current like image generators. So like Dolly
00:59:13 ◼ ► or whatever, where you just ask it to make you an image based on a text prompt is that they had real
00:59:17 ◼ ► difficulty with text because they didn't know or care what letters were. So if they had a sign
00:59:20 ◼ ► with text on it, it would look like, like Greek text where it's like, oh, this isn't a real
00:59:24 ◼ ► language. They aren't real letters. It's just like you can tell it's supposed to be text, but they're
00:59:27 ◼ ► not. There's no actual alphabet. They're just these blurry smear of letters, right? Because it,
00:59:31 ◼ ► you know, it didn't consider that an important part of the image. And whenever it sees signs
00:59:35 ◼ ► in his training that it's like, oh, just a bunch of high contrast lines on a background,
00:59:38 ◼ ► you know, anyway, the parallel to that in over processed phone pictures is they take a picture
00:59:44 ◼ ► of real text on a real sign. But then they apply their processing to it. And their processing,
00:59:52 ◼ ► blobs of paint instead of sharp individual pixels. And they're doing that sort of denoise
00:59:56 ◼ ► and lump everything together and it will make text unreadable. So if you ever tried to use your phone
01:00:00 ◼ ► to take a picture of some tiny text, so then you could pinch and zoom on the text, you may be
01:00:04 ◼ ► surprised to find that when you pinch and zoom, the text looks like a total mess. It looks like
01:00:08 ◼ ► that AI generated text and you can't even read it. You're like, wait, is the text actually blurry
01:00:12 ◼ ► on the, you know, this little temple, not stem, not stick of my eyeglasses because you're trying
01:00:22 ◼ ► processing of your phone totally mangled it and made it unreadable. That is an example of where
01:00:28 ◼ ► process zero, which is the actual brand name that they're using for this, hey, let's process zero
01:00:32 ◼ ► would come in handy. Cause yes, it would be noisy, but it won't take the letter forms and melt them
01:00:37 ◼ ► into nothing. And sometimes we talk about, oh, I can tell a phone picture from a real picture,
01:00:41 ◼ ► like, oh, well you're just pixel peeping, which is what they mean by that is you're zooming in
01:00:45 ◼ ► to the picture. So you can see at an individual pixel lever that, oh, this is totally blobby and
01:00:50 ◼ ► gross. Whereas if you zoom in on a real camera, it looks nice as you zoom in and right up to the
01:00:55 ◼ ► point where you actually see the individual pixels kind of right. But like pixel peeping
01:01:00 ◼ ► has said derisively. Well, first of all, that is getting a closer look at the quality. But second,
01:01:05 ◼ ► there's a thing called cropping, which with real cameras you can do if you didn't frame the shop
01:01:09 ◼ ► well or perfectly with a real camera, it's usually better to, oh, I helps with this. It's usually
01:01:15 ◼ ► better to get more of the background that you want so that if you need to reframe, you can just crop
01:01:20 ◼ ► in a little bit. Or if you take a big picture and the most interesting part is in the upper right
01:01:24 ◼ ► corner or whatever, you can crop in on that. But you can only do that if when you crop in,
01:01:28 ◼ ► which is another way of zooming, throw away everything, except for this tiny square pinch
01:01:32 ◼ ► and zoom until only this tiny square is visible on the screen. They're both the same operation.
01:01:36 ◼ ► If you do that with a phone picture, you're like, oh, this is unusable. This person is a wax blob,
01:01:41 ◼ ► right? They are an impressionist painting. I can't make out a single thing at a regular size. It
01:01:46 ◼ ► looks okay because they're small. But when I crop in all of a sudden pixel peeping becomes, I just
01:01:52 ◼ ► want to crop this. I just want to crop and only have this person in the picture. And with a real
01:01:55 ◼ ► camera, you can do that because the quality of the pixels doesn't immediately go into wax melted blob
01:02:01 ◼ ► the second you view it at more than one X zoom or even less than one X, because sometimes the phone
01:02:07 ◼ ► screen doesn't even show the entire picture. So, yeah, I'm a little bit of a big camera bigot,
01:02:12 ◼ ► despite the fact that I take tons of pictures on my phone and mostly enjoy how they look. But
01:02:16 ◼ ► I know the weaknesses and I know better than to try to crop a tiny one third portion of a
01:02:22 ◼ ► phone picture and expect it to look good, especially if it's a person, because they will look like
01:02:25 ◼ ► a melted wax horror. Cool. All right. So our sub topic that I alluded to earlier. So allegedly,
01:02:36 ◼ ► Apple will support JPEG XL, which will sit alongside heath, JPEG, heath, max pro raw and pro
01:02:42 ◼ ► raw max. And the initial reports I read on about this seemed to hint that Apple invented JPEG XL,
01:02:48 ◼ ► but having looked at the Wikipedia entry, that doesn't seem to be the case. No, I don't understand
01:02:53 ◼ ► these stories that put like a new format from Apple called JPEG XL. Like just Google the term
01:02:57 ◼ ► before you write that story. But before we get to that, though, have any of you heard of heath max?
01:03:02 ◼ ► No, I was just thinking, I don't recall what that is. I mean, I didn't Google it either. Like,
01:03:07 ◼ ► I'm assuming it's just some variant of heath and heath has been around for a while. What
01:03:09 ◼ ► the heck is heath max? I have no idea. Like, we had only two image formats for so long. And then
01:03:18 ◼ ► when they added heath, which was now, I mean, a good number of years ago, that was like such a
01:03:23 ◼ ► big change. And kind of like what makes me a little bit nervous about this JPEG XL news is like,
01:03:31 ◼ ► we still don't really have amazing support for heath in the ecosystem around our computers and
01:03:37 ◼ ► phones. Well, I mean, that's that I think is a thing in favor of JPEG XL, which we'll get to in
01:03:43 ◼ ► a second when we get to the forum. But I did just look up heath max. That's just what they call what
01:03:46 ◼ ► they call the 48 megapixel thing where you get all the actual 48 megapixels and you don't bend it,
01:03:50 ◼ ► they're calling that heath max. Well, so the way it was was that originally when the 48 megapixel
01:03:55 ◼ ► came out, the only way you got all 48 megapixels was if you did a raw shot, if I recall correctly.
01:04:02 ◼ ► Then they eventually added with 14 Pro heath max, which is, yes, I would like a 48 megapixel image,
01:04:09 ◼ ► but feel free to compress it. Right. It's not raw. Right. So the heath, heak, heif, heic,
01:04:17 ◼ ► whatever that whole when Apple introduced that format, right. Their pitch was, here's a new
01:04:21 ◼ ► image format. Again, it's not an Apple invention. It's some standardized thing that Apple likes and
01:04:26 ◼ ► probably had some part in. And what their pitch was, you get better quality images for the same
01:04:32 ◼ ► size or you get smaller images, you know, like it was a better format, right? Compressed images.
01:04:37 ◼ ► It's not a raw format. It's a compressed thing. The format is very flexible. We can do all the
01:04:41 ◼ ► things we need to do. We can implement all the features we want to implement. I forget if this
01:04:45 ◼ ► is the one that they implemented the little live picture thing in. Instead of having the sidecar
01:04:49 ◼ ► thing, they combined it. But anyway, the pitch was it's a better image format, right? And we're
01:04:54 ◼ ► judging that by the quality of the image at a given size. And even though it was weird, we're
01:04:58 ◼ ► like, well, but it's not like it's Apple's proprietary format. This is a format that anybody
01:05:02 ◼ ► can use. It's an open thing and it's better than JPEG. And that frustration that we have about like,
01:05:08 ◼ ► oh, only Macs and stuff can read those things, mostly mitigated by the fact that when you share,
01:05:13 ◼ ► it would convert it to a JPEG. And if you didn't like it at all, you can go into settings and say,
01:05:17 ◼ ► I don't want to ever use this hee-feek stuff. Just shoot everything in JPEG. And it would still work.
01:05:21 ◼ ► But I left everything on the default, which was shoot everything in hee-feek or whatever,
01:05:25 ◼ ► because they take up less room on my phone or they take their better quality at the same size
01:05:30 ◼ ► or whatever. Like it's a better image format. And I was figuring before I read the story that,
01:05:35 ◼ ► you know, this hee-feek thing, we'll just, you know, tough it out for another, you know,
01:05:41 ◼ ► five to 10 years. And eventually you'll see more widespread support for this format. And it won't
01:05:45 ◼ ► be that big of a deal. Honestly, it hasn't been that big of a deal for me because of the sharing
01:05:49 ◼ ► stuff or whatever. But then this JPEG XL story comes out and it's like, well, if you were waiting
01:05:54 ◼ ► around for hee-feek to become so standard that it's as common as JPEG, that seems like that is
01:06:00 ◼ ► never going to happen for reasons that we will explain now. Right. Oh, so JPEG XL supports lossy
01:06:07 ◼ ► and lossless compression of ultra high resolution images up to one terapixel, up to 32 bits per
01:06:14 ◼ ► component, up to 4,099 components, including alpha transparency, animated images and embedded
01:06:19 ◼ ► previews. It has features aimed at web delivery, such as advanced progressive decoding and minimal
01:06:25 ◼ ► header overhead, as well as features aimed at image editing and digital printing, such as
01:06:28 ◼ ► support for multiple layers, CMYK and spot colors. It is specifically designed to seamlessly handle
01:06:35 ◼ ► wide color gamut color spaces with high dynamic range, such as REC 2100 with the PQ or HLG
01:06:42 ◼ ► transfer function. I understood about a third of what I just read. So there are some sweet features
01:06:47 ◼ ► involved. There's independent tiles. So decoding of sections of a large image by allowing images
01:06:52 ◼ ► to be stored in tiles, progressive decoding, more specifically, excuse me, it's a mode specifically
01:06:58 ◼ ► designed for responsive loading of large images, depending on the viewing device's resolution.
01:07:06 ◼ ► complimentary modes that can be used depending on the image contents, efficient encoding and decoding
01:07:11 ◼ ► without requiring specialized hardware. JPEG XL is about as fast to encode and decode as old JPEGs
01:07:15 ◼ ► using libjpeg turbo and in order of magnitude faster to encode and decode compared to HEQ with
01:07:20 ◼ ► X265. It is also parallelizable. JPEG XL can losslessly transcode a widely supported subset
01:07:28 ◼ ► of JPEG files, making it about making about 20% smaller file sizes possible due to JPEG XL's
01:07:38 ◼ ► JPEG file to be reconstructed bit for bit. JPEG XL, and I think this is a kicker, is a royalty
01:07:46 ◼ ► three clause BSD license. Or he can heaf. They were better image formats and they had their
01:07:52 ◼ ► very brief time in the sun, but not enough to become industry standard. And here comes JPEG XL,
01:07:57 ◼ ► which is basically better than them in every possible way, including the most important one,
01:08:02 ◼ ► which is royalty free. Open BSD implementation, royalty free, open source, parallelizable,
01:08:11 ◼ ► supports all the new modern things, huge image files, transparency. Just think of all the image
01:08:15 ◼ ► formats that we've lived with and all the weird soup that we've had. We had GIFs, which are
01:08:19 ◼ ► fun, but they had only go up to 256 colors. We have JPEGs, but there was a kind of blurry,
01:08:28 ◼ ► then you needed to do PNG. But PNG was the only one that supported transparency, but then I
01:08:31 ◼ ► didn't support transparency in PNGs. And even today, even when I'm putting stuff on my website,
01:08:36 ◼ ► it's like, I'm going to put up this image. Oh, I want it to have transparency. I guess I'll have
01:08:39 ◼ ► to use a PNG, but of course, PNGs are basically uncompressed, even though you can squish them
01:08:42 ◼ ► down a little bit farther. So JPEGs are much smaller than PNGs, but then JPEGs are blurry,
01:08:46 ◼ ► especially if you have text, because they don't do a good job with that. And there was progressive
01:08:50 ◼ ► JPEGs when we had modems, so the JPEG would slowly fade in or whatever. But then there's
01:08:54 ◼ ► those old JPEG 2000, and then there's WebP and all the weird Google formats, and what is it, AVIF,
01:09:00 ◼ ► and then there's all these wars about, I hate it when I download a WebP image because MacOS doesn't
01:09:04 ◼ ► like those, and I always have them converting them, so I have a retro batch thing that converts
01:09:07 ◼ ► all the WebP images into PNGs, and of course, there's Photoshop formats. This solves all of
01:09:13 ◼ ► them, supports everything that they all support, is totally open, has the name JPEG in it, which is
01:09:18 ◼ ► really important. I mean, it probably is from the Joint Photographic Experts Group, but being called
01:09:22 ◼ ► JPEG something is important. Now, granted, it didn't help JPEG 2000, but putting 2000 in the
01:09:27 ◼ ► name wasn't a great move, right? And Excel makes it sound like it's extra large, but I think that's
01:09:31 ◼ ► not what the Excel stands for. But this has all the features, and it's royalty-free, and it's
01:09:37 ◼ ► open source, and it's made for modern hardware. Parallelizable, the thing with the tile encoding
01:09:43 ◼ ► or whatever, it's parallelizable, because you can break up your image into chunks and decode them
01:09:47 ◼ ► all in parallel, and if you're just showing one quarter of an image, it can just decode that
01:09:50 ◼ ► corner of the image. It's so well thought out and well designed to not have any of the weaknesses of
01:09:56 ◼ ► the existing formats. And by the way, it also makes smaller files at the same quality or better
01:10:01 ◼ ► looking files at the same size, right? So I am ready to throw heeck and heef in the dustbin of
01:10:08 ◼ ► history. I'm ready to go all in on JPEG Excel, provided everybody starts supporting it. That
01:10:14 ◼ ► means Mac OS, Chrome, every platform needs to support this, which almost sort of mostly
01:10:21 ◼ ► happened with WebP. I think WebP on the web works okay, as this name suggests, but when you download
01:10:27 ◼ ► a WebP onto your Mac, Mac OS is like, pfft, you know? And whatever the other format that Google
01:10:34 ◼ ► X is, AVIF or whatever, there's a bunch of other image formats that are better than most of the
01:10:39 ◼ ► existing ones that are kind of competing with heeck and heef and all that. But the only thing JPEG
01:10:45 ◼ ► Excel does not go forward with is it does support animation. Why do we have quote unquote animated
01:10:49 ◼ ► GIFs for so long? Because it was the only image format that supported animation, and then there
01:10:52 ◼ ► was like animated PNGs, but that didn't get very widely supported. These days when we say, I'm
01:10:55 ◼ ► uploading a GIF, they just convert it to MP4 behind the scenes, right? And like Twitter and
01:11:00 ◼ ► Mastodon or whatever, they don't actually show you an actual GIF because actual GIFs are humongous
01:11:05 ◼ ► because it's individual frames that are individual GIFs or whatever. And this is not a video format,
01:11:11 ◼ ► so it doesn't solve all the problems. Like H.265 will live on and all that other good stuff. But
01:11:14 ◼ ► I am excited about JPEG Excel. And I hope, unlike heeck and heef, this does sweep across the entire
01:11:26 ◼ ► that not happening are companies that are really tied to their formats, either because they own the
01:11:34 ◼ ► patents on them or because they've already invested in the starting infrastructure that understands
01:11:38 ◼ ► WebP and process them or whatever. And I hope we get over that. Again, this being royalty free
01:11:42 ◼ ► should help. Being royalty free also means people don't make money from it. So some people are
01:11:46 ◼ ► motivated not for that format, not to spread, but my fingers are crossed on this. And this is just a
01:11:53 ◼ ► rumor. We don't even know if it's true, right? I haven't even seen the betas. And even in the,
01:11:57 ◼ ► is JPEG Excel going to be the default? Are they going to talk about it in the event? And because
01:12:01 ◼ ► they did talk about heeck and heef, they said, hey, we've got a new image format and it makes
01:12:04 ◼ ► better images, right? And don't worry, it'll be compatible because when you share it, it'll
01:12:08 ◼ ► convert to JPEG. I assume they would take the same approach to JPEG Excel. And where does that leave
01:12:13 ◼ ► heeck and heeck? Are they still even going to be an option? Or are they just going to be removed
01:12:16 ◼ ► from the menu and it's going to be plain old JPEG, same as it ever was, or JPEG Excel, which is the
01:12:21 ◼ ► extra large version, but not really. Yeah, this I'm hoping this takes off because heeck and heef/heek,
01:12:28 ◼ ► I know one's the container and one's the format. Heef has just still, it's been around for a while.
01:12:33 ◼ ► It has never gotten good enough support across the industry to the point where like, if you are
01:12:38 ◼ ► taking a photo from an iPhone and sending it anywhere or using it anywhere else besides
01:12:44 ◼ ► another iPhone, you've probably been just having to convert it to JPEG. And to the point where like
01:12:48 ◼ ► Apple's own frameworks will do that for you a lot of the time, because that is usually what people
01:12:53 ◼ ► need to do. I would love for JPEG Excel to get wide enough support everywhere that we don't have
01:13:00 ◼ ► to do this dance anymore in a few years. Because JPEG has been a wonderful format for the entire
01:13:07 ◼ ► tech industry for the 150 years that we've had it. We do have better techniques now. We do have
01:13:14 ◼ ► better compression now. We do have like different needs now. It is time to hopefully retire JPEG
01:13:22 ◼ ► and replace it. And the only reason we're still using JPEG is because it is like the kind of
01:13:28 ◼ ► universally compatible version. Now, everything I just said is also true about MP3. And I say that
01:13:34 ◼ ► with love because I love the MP3 file format. I think it's a lot easier to replace JPEG than to
01:13:40 ◼ ► replace MP3 for a lot of reasons. Well, I mean, here's the difference though, because you mentioned
01:13:43 ◼ ► JPEG and how much you love it and it's been around for a long time. But JPEG has obvious problems,
01:13:49 ◼ ► which is the reason people used anything that wasn't JPEG. First of all, if you have something
01:13:53 ◼ ► that's like line art or something like that, like a black and white line art, a GIF is better for
01:14:00 ◼ ► sharpness. 256 grays in a GIF, for example, is going to give you sharp, crisp edges, none of that
01:14:05 ◼ ► weird compression artifact stuff or whatever. It'll be a real small file or a PNG or something
01:14:10 ◼ ► like that. JPEG makes things blurry and gross unless you crank up the quality and then it makes
01:14:14 ◼ ► your file size bigger. It is made for photos. It relies on your perception of human perception,
01:14:20 ◼ ► and it's great for photographs. But black text on a white background, line art, tiny text that
01:14:27 ◼ ► becomes a fizzy mess, that is JPEG's weakness. Transparency, not a thing in JPEG, except for
01:14:33 ◼ ► probably JPEG 2000. Animation, I believe there is an animated JPEG. There's motion JPEG formats or
01:14:38 ◼ ► whatever, but lots of things that we eventually found to be useful in image formats. Plain old
01:14:43 ◼ ► JPEG at most implementations simply doesn't support. Not true of MP3. MP3 has a lot of things
01:14:48 ◼ ► going for it. Number one, pretty much every thing you could think to do with an audio file, MP3
01:14:53 ◼ ► supports. And number two, MP3 is so close to the perceptual limits of human hearing and file sizes
01:15:01 ◼ ► in the grand scheme of things are so low that we don't care that you can make a better sounding,
01:15:06 ◼ ► slightly smaller file with AAC or whatever, because the difference isn't that big. You know
01:15:10 ◼ ► what I mean? Maybe for hours and hours of video or something like that, and maybe for multi-channel
01:15:14 ◼ ► formats is a whole other thing. But MP3 for its role doesn't really have any of those glaring
01:15:19 ◼ ► weaknesses. No transparency in an image format for the web is so killer. And there's no equivalent to
01:15:25 ◼ ► that for like, "Oh, here's the problem with MP3." And so it was bad when we were doing MP3s at really
01:15:30 ◼ ► low bit rates, but a 320 kilobit MP3, that's fine for 99% of the planet for basic two-channel audio
01:15:40 ◼ ► or mono audio. And so, yeah, I think MP3 has still got more legs, but JPEG, like again, the reason
01:15:46 ◼ ► anybody uses formats other than JPEG is because they know JPEG's weaknesses and they know this
01:15:51 ◼ ► has to be a ping, this has to be a GIF, or this has to be something else entirely because JPEGs
01:15:56 ◼ ► can't do it all. But JPEG XL, like those old things I said, I don't know if this is the case,
01:16:01 ◼ ► but when I read support for both photographic and synthetic imagery with two complimentary modes,
01:16:05 ◼ ► I think it's going to be one mode where it recognizes line art. I don't know if that's true.
01:16:09 ◼ ► I'm putting my hopes and dreams in that one line there. And then the other thing where it can
01:16:13 ◼ ► transcode existing, most existing JPEGs and make them 20% smaller essentially losslessly, and you
01:16:19 ◼ ► can reverse that. That means that like, if you have a library full of JPEGs, like if you've shot
01:16:23 ◼ ► JPEGs for years and years on your phone, and then when heat came out, let's say you didn't pick that
01:16:28 ◼ ► format, but either way, if you've got JPEGs on your phone, this format can make all your JPEGs
01:16:33 ◼ ► 20% smaller, like losslessly, not re-encoding them and making them look worse. Just take that JPEG and
01:16:38 ◼ ► replace it with a file that is exactly the same, but it's 20% smaller. That's one of the great
01:16:44 ◼ ► things about having JPEG in the name and saying it will subsume your existing JPEGs and make them
01:16:50 ◼ ► smaller. And 20% is not a small number. So, again, we're just reading a feature list and this is from
01:16:54 ◼ ► the Wikipedia page and it makes everything sound like, you know, wonderful and roses. And we'll see
01:16:58 ◼ ► if this is really true or if all my hopes and dreams are accurately represented by these
01:17:03 ◼ ► bullet points. But this is looking great to me. I mean, just recently I've been putting images
01:17:08 ◼ ► up on my website and, you know, it's just like, why are images such a mess still on the web?
01:17:13 ◼ ► And here's JPEG XL. Come to save us all. Probably people said the same thing about JPEG 2000 and,
01:17:21 ◼ ► - I hope so, 'cause like, if you think about like what it takes for a new image format to
01:17:26 ◼ ► really like gain a foothold and really, you know, get as widely supported as JPEG and PNG are today,
01:17:40 ◼ ► various devices, server-side, you know, open source libraries, you know, server-side language
01:17:47 ◼ ► support, different, you know, CDN support, obviously browser support, different phones,
01:17:53 ◼ ► whether cameras are gonna shoot this format. Like there's so much out there that either processes
01:18:00 ◼ ► or converts or resizes or displays images. And this is part of the reason why we haven't had
01:18:07 ◼ ► more formats that really take a foothold because the world of just tech and software and hardware
01:18:15 ◼ ► that deals with images is so vast. So for this to really take off, obviously having, you know,
01:18:29 ◼ ► any kind of royalty requirement on a format, that means that the entire ecosystem of open source
01:18:35 ◼ ► tools and of server-side, you know, language supports and everything, it's probably not gonna
01:18:43 ◼ ► - And there's gonna be format wars 'cause they're like, well, you have your royalty one and I have
01:18:46 ◼ ► my royalty one and I want mine because I get money from it and you want yours 'cause you get money
01:18:49 ◼ ► from it. And even in this case, there's an open source implementation, but it's not like a copy
01:18:54 ◼ ► left type of, you know, GNU public license or whatever. It's BSD, which is the one that says,
01:18:58 ◼ ► take it, make money off it, whatever. Like, it's not even a restrictive open source license.
01:19:02 ◼ ► - Yeah, so that really is setting the stage for this to be widely adopted. So we'll see. I mean,
01:19:10 ◼ ► the only other thing that generally tends to hold back new formats from being adopted besides,
01:19:22 ◼ ► the only other thing that tends to hold things back is if it's not a big enough improvement over
01:19:27 ◼ ► the ubiquitous established format. That was always the problem with JPEG 2000. And I think to some
01:19:33 ◼ ► degree that was a problem with HEAF. I think this might be enough overall improvements to finally
01:19:40 ◼ ► make it worth people actually like putting in the work to implement this. So I hope this goes that
01:19:46 ◼ ► way because again, like JPEG really has had its time. It's been wonderful, but this is a lot of
01:19:52 ◼ ► advancement over that and I hope we get the chance to actually use it. - And even if it isn't, even
01:19:57 ◼ ► if it turns out this is not a big enough jump for it to be adopted industry-wide, I'll say the same
01:20:01 ◼ ► thing that I said when Apple went to HEAF/HEAF. Even if this is only a format that only Apple
01:20:06 ◼ ► ever uses, if it makes all the pictures on my phone a little bit smaller and they all just get
01:20:10 ◼ ► converted to JPEG anytime they're exported, which again has basically been my experience,
01:20:14 ◼ ► I never have to think about the fact that this phone is always taking pictures in HEAF/HEAF unless
01:20:18 ◼ ► I like look at, see that format in the photos menu on my Mac when I export, I'm like, "Oh yeah,
01:20:22 ◼ ► that's right. That is a format." I don't have to think about it, but they take up less room in my
01:20:28 ◼ ► iCloud photo library. They take up less room on my phone. That's worth doing. That's why I didn't
01:20:34 ◼ ► change that option. I want my pictures to be smaller. I keep taking pictures. I want them to be,
01:20:38 ◼ ► like I said, I want them to be smaller or better quality at the same size and just keep making
01:20:42 ◼ ► those formats better. So probably like half my collection is JPEGs before they introduce HEAF
01:20:46 ◼ ► and then half of them is the new format and then I'll start with JPEG XL. I would prefer it if
01:20:52 ◼ ► it went industry-wide and solved those problems. But to give another example, because of Apple,
01:20:58 ◼ ► I use the photo screensaver on all of our Macs and I have my favorites for my photo album being
01:21:02 ◼ ► like the floating images going up and down your screen. It's like pictures of my family and
01:21:06 ◼ ► everything. They're all the favorites from my photos library. The screensaver has a feature
01:21:10 ◼ ► that says, "Hey, pick an album from your photos library in this little picker and we'll use that
01:21:16 ◼ ► to feed this slideshow." But I can tell you that once you push up around 200,000 pictures, that UI
01:21:21 ◼ ► gets very upset. So what I do instead, Apple, you could fix this, but anyway, what I do instead is
01:21:27 ◼ ► I go to the favorite collections in photos and I export them all to a folder on my Mac somewhere.
01:21:33 ◼ ► And I don't export them at 100% size because they're just going to be in a screensaver and
01:21:36 ◼ ► they're usually pretty small in that floating screensaver. So I export them in like the
01:21:39 ◼ ► quote unquote large size instead of original size. And I do that in HEAK. And when I used to do that
01:21:44 ◼ ► in JPEG, the folder was way bigger and now the folder is smaller. And I like that, right? And
01:21:50 ◼ ► then you just point the screensaver at the folder and it can somehow handle that one. It couldn't
01:21:52 ◼ ► handle the thing in the photo picker library. I try not to push my photo library too much. I don't
01:21:57 ◼ ► want to upset it. But anyway, just for that thing, taking up less space on my phone and taking up less
01:22:03 ◼ ► space in the favorites folder that is on all the Macs in my house, for that alone, please, I welcome
01:22:09 ◼ ► JPEG XL. But yeah, I really hope it does sweep across the whole industry because it seems like
01:22:14 ◼ ► it just finally resolves all of the issues. It's the image format that does everything we want
01:22:18 ◼ ► image formats to do and hopefully does it well. All right. You want to do some Ask ATP? Let's do
01:22:24 ◼ ► it. All right. So Tom Thorpe writes, "It's that new iPhone time of year again and time to ask the age
01:22:29 ◼ ► old question whether to restore from backup or start fresh. I've been on the same backup for 10
01:22:34 ◼ ► years, but I'm starting to think it would be nice to start fresh partially because I want to clear
01:22:37 ◼ ► out unused apps, but I also still can't help but imagine it would clear out the cruft, provide
01:22:42 ◼ ► better battery life, et cetera. What are the pros and cons of doing so today? What would I lose by
01:22:47 ◼ ► starting fresh? And what would I get any of my imagined benefits?" I don't think I've ever
01:22:54 ◼ ► started fresh. I think I'm still carrying the same iOS installation, if you will, from my 3GS way
01:23:01 ◼ ► back when. So I don't think I can say from experience whether it would be a good idea or not.
01:23:08 ◼ ► Generally speaking, I don't think it's a bad idea. The thing that scares me the most personally is
01:23:15 ◼ ► losing my iMessage history, which, granted, is basically a black hole anyway because search is
01:23:21 ◼ ► terrible in messages. But I don't know, it gives me the heebie-jeebies to think of losing it.
01:23:26 ◼ ► But I guess, man, go for it and report in and let us know if it was a mistake, especially if you take
01:23:34 ◼ ► a backup first. I mean, it's not going to hurt anything. You'd always go back to your backup.
01:23:36 ◼ ► All right. So Marco, correct me. I mean, the whole thing of like, "Well, you could always back up."
01:23:42 ◼ ► I feel like, yeah, you can, but after a couple of days of using the new one, it's like how when you
01:23:48 ◼ ► undo in an undo stack, as soon as you make any change, you can't redo anymore because there's
01:24:07 ◼ ► that is like creating new data, writing new things, you're not going to want to ever go
01:24:12 ◼ ► back to that backup because it'll be too disruptive or you will lose something that you've done.
01:24:17 ◼ ► So basically, that's usually a pretty one-way transition. I would say if you actually want to
01:24:29 ◼ ► sure, go ahead, do it. I don't think, though, that it's necessary with modern OS installations
01:24:37 ◼ ► in almost every case, especially on the phone. On the Mac, sometimes you can build up a whole
01:24:44 ◼ ► So it's rarely necessary on the Mac. I would say on the phone, it's basically never necessary.
01:24:50 ◼ ► I think, like you, Casey, I think I've either never done it or I've done it maybe once in total ever,
01:24:55 ◼ ► but I don't think it's really necessary because iOS is already so controlled and limited. You're
01:25:02 ◼ ► not throwing in texts, you're not throwing in weird preferences that live around forever in some
01:25:08 ◼ ► directory. You don't need to run iPhone cleanup utilities to find lost and abandoned files.
01:25:13 ◼ ► There's so much in the iPhone that because of the technical limitations imposed on apps and because
01:25:20 ◼ ► of all the containerization of all the app's data and everything, you don't really need most of that
01:25:25 ◼ ► stuff. Now, whether you want to go through your apps and clean out apps, that's a different story,
01:25:30 ◼ ► but you can just delete the apps. You don't need to reinstall the whole thing from scratch instead
01:25:35 ◼ ► of bringing over your restore. I think mostly what you'd be doing by doing a fresh installation
01:25:42 ◼ ► without a restore and manually starting things from scratch, I think most of what you're doing
01:25:46 ◼ ► there is causing a lot of time loss, possibly some data loss in apps that don't transition over
01:25:53 ◼ ► at all or well or perfectly, all for a benefit that I'm not sure is real, or at least I'm not
01:26:02 ◼ ► sure it would be anything you would ever notice. So I would recommend if this is not something that
01:26:07 ◼ ► you really think you need to specifically do because of a specific reason you're trying to
01:26:11 ◼ ► get rid of, I would say don't do this. Just bring your stuff over. It's not going to make a
01:26:18 ◼ ► meaningful impact on stuff like battery life or things like that. That's mostly a myth on iOS, and
01:26:24 ◼ ► there's other ways to control that, like deleting apps. So just go through, like if you really want
01:26:27 ◼ ► the same effect, go through and delete a bunch of apps that you don't use anymore. You can do that.
01:26:31 ◼ ► Just do that. It's fine. Before I address Tom's question, I'll just say that all three of us are
01:26:36 ◼ ► in agreement for just general people who don't have this specific question. Our advice is just
01:26:40 ◼ ► transfer data from your old phone. It's what everybody does. It's the default. That's what
01:26:44 ◼ ► we recommend. Flat out, not even close. Now, Tom's question is like, I think I might have a problem.
01:26:50 ◼ ► I think I might want to do this. What are the trade-offs here? What would I lose by starting
01:26:54 ◼ ► fresh? Marco kind of already addressed this. It is possible to lose something because if you have an
01:26:58 ◼ ► app, especially older apps, but who knows, it could be modern ones too, that don't have any kind of
01:27:03 ◼ ► cloud sync type thing, and you start fresh and you reinstall that app, the data that was associated
01:27:09 ◼ ► with that app that was on your old phone is still sitting on your old phone. And that's the only
01:27:13 ◼ ► place it is because it doesn't have any kind of like it saves it up to iCloud or it puts it on
01:27:23 ◼ ► If you did a backup on restore, did a data transfer, you would keep that data most of the
01:27:26 ◼ ► time. Right. But if you, but if you have an app like that and you're like, okay, let me download
01:27:30 ◼ ► that app from the app store and you launch it and you see nothing in the app, you're like, hey,
01:27:33 ◼ ► where's all my stuff. It's back on your old phone. So it totally is possible to lose data. Again,
01:27:37 ◼ ► good apps don't do that. They have some kind of cloud sync thing, the use cloud kit or whatever.
01:27:40 ◼ ► That's how people expect iOS apps to work, but there's no way as an end user for you to really
01:27:45 ◼ ► know what is this app doing? Is it just storing things inside its container locally on my old
01:27:58 ◼ ► a pretty significant risk. There's another reason to keep around your old phone when you're setting
01:28:03 ◼ ► up your new phone, just to make sure that's not the case. As for what I get any of my imagined
01:28:07 ◼ ► benefits, there are scenarios where a fresh install will save you, but they're pretty obscure.
01:28:12 ◼ ► So because everything is so containerized or whatever, the usual way that you're going to get
01:28:17 ◼ ► any kind of benefit is there's some kind of problem situation, usually having to do with
01:28:22 ◼ ► corrupt data. Like there's some kind of file format or data or whatever associated with an app that
01:28:27 ◼ ► for whatever reason, a bug in the program or who knows something, it got mangled. And so it's
01:28:33 ◼ ► sitting on your SSD on your phone and it is improperly formatted. And maybe you don't notice
01:28:38 ◼ ► because it's some obscure corner of some database that some file uses to keep track of its stuff,
01:28:43 ◼ ► right? But the way this could potentially manifest is let's say that app runs in the background once
01:28:48 ◼ ► an hour for 60 seconds. If during that 60 seconds it goes into a tight loop because it's decoding
01:28:54 ◼ ► code, gets tripped up over the bad formatting and just goes around and around and does an infinite
01:28:58 ◼ ► loop for 60 seconds before it gets killed, you don't know that's happening behind the scenes.
01:29:03 ◼ ► But once per hour, there's a little tight infinite loop for 60 seconds, draining a little tiny bit of
01:29:07 ◼ ► your battery because of some tiny corrupt database and something you have no visibility into this.
01:29:12 ◼ ► The app developer thinks there's nothing wrong with my app. I don't know what the problem is.
01:29:14 ◼ ► He would have to diagnose and get your actual data file to determine that your data file was corrupted
01:29:19 ◼ ► maybe by a bug of three versions ago in his program. And you've been slinging that corrupt
01:29:22 ◼ ► database file around from phone to phone to phone, burning tiny little bits of power on it and
01:29:28 ◼ ► multiply that by three or four apps that have this problem. If you do a fresh install of those apps
01:29:33 ◼ ► and it syncs a new thing down from the cloud or whatever, you wouldn't have that problem, right?
01:29:37 ◼ ► If it's corrupt in the cloud and you do a fresh install and you install that app and it syncs to
01:29:41 ◼ ► the cloud, you've got the same problem. You know what I'm saying? And you don't know unless you're
01:29:50 ◼ ► The only one saying is you could have problems on your phone. Do a fresh install, reinstall all the
01:29:56 ◼ ► apps that you lose, and restore all those problems. Because all the problems were like corrupt data in
01:30:01 ◼ ► the cloud or something like that or any bug related to that, right? Because you never know, like, is the
01:30:05 ◼ ► problem that I have, like people have this concept of like, I think there's cobwebs inside their phone
01:30:09 ◼ ► or whatever, but it's, you know, there are specific things that applications could be doing that could
01:30:14 ◼ ► be causing you a problem. And I'm not even sure where the ratio is, but a huge number of those
01:30:19 ◼ ► are not solved by setting up a new phone at all because it's just going to faithfully reproduce
01:30:24 ◼ ► every single one of those problems. If you just delete that entire app, then hey, problem solved.
01:30:28 ◼ ► But if it's an app that you use every day and you had a problem over there, you're also going to have
01:30:31 ◼ ► a problem over here in a lot of circumstances. And that's not satisfying, right? On the Mac again, it
01:30:36 ◼ ► is much more likely that there's some leftover files or something you never use that you can just
01:30:40 ◼ ► clear out and doing that manually is very difficult and I do not recommend people do it. And it takes
01:30:44 ◼ ► a lot of experience not to hose yourself, so, you know, that's why the Mac is what the Mac is. But
01:30:48 ◼ ► on the phone, your tools are fresh install or backup, delete app or not delete app. And that's
01:30:56 ◼ ► pretty much where it ends. And that's good. You don't want more tools than that, but sometimes
01:31:00 ◼ ► you have problems that you can't escape by doing a fresh install. And that's just a break. So I
01:31:06 ◼ ► would recommend not doing it. You didn't say you had any specific problem. You just want your thing
01:31:10 ◼ ► to be better. Getting a new phone and setting it up as a fresh phone by itself will empty out a lot
01:31:15 ◼ ► of stuff. Like when you transfer data from your phone, it's not transferring like every single
01:31:20 ◼ ► thing that was on your phone to your new phone. It's transferring the things that it thinks it
01:31:23 ◼ ► needs to transfer. And everything else on your new phone is fresh. Probably all like the caches
01:31:28 ◼ ► directories, the spotlight indexes are going to be recreated or whatever the heck Apple intelligence
01:31:32 ◼ ► is doing. It'll sync your photos down from iCloud fresh. So if a bunch of photos were corrupt over
01:31:37 ◼ ► there because of some heated up part of your SSD flipped a bunch of bits or something, you won't
01:31:42 ◼ ► have that problem over here as long as they weren't corrupt in iCloud. Just restore from backup. It
01:31:46 ◼ ► will still be a fresh phone even if you don't start from zero. And if you do start from zero and you
01:31:50 ◼ ► have a lot of stuff, you will spend hours and hours and hours trying to get it back like your old
01:31:54 ◼ ► phone. And as soon as you think you have a good and you sell your old phone or wipe it or whatever,
01:31:58 ◼ ► then you're going to find the thing that you missed and it was only on your old phone and you
01:32:01 ◼ ► deleted it. So don't do it. All right. Michael Quinn writes, "So we all buy new iPhones in a
01:32:07 ◼ ► few weeks, spend the next 12 months training them as our personal AI assistant with stuff securely
01:32:11 ◼ ► stored on board. What happens after that? Does that transfer to iPhone next? Do we have to retrain
01:32:18 ◼ ► every iPhone forever a la waiting for photos and spotlight to rescan and index each year?
01:32:22 ◼ ► Kind of sucky experience if so. Maybe another barrier for upgrading if you know you're going
01:32:26 ◼ ► to lose your personal AI." This is a really good point and holy crap, I would assume since Apple
01:32:33 ◼ ► is a company that knows what they're doing and cares that it would transfer, but then photos.
01:32:37 ◼ ► So I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen. I mean, I think Michael's answer here,
01:32:43 ◼ ► Michael's question here contains the likely answer. So what Michael says in the question is,
01:32:47 ◼ ► "Do we have to retrain every phone forever a la waiting for photos/spotlight to rescan and index
01:32:53 ◼ ► each year?" I think it's probably going to end up working much like spotlight indexing because that
01:33:00 ◼ ► is kind of what it's built upon or at least that is like the structure that they have built it with.
01:33:05 ◼ ► So chances are, and again, I don't think we know this yet, but chances are the way Apple intelligence
01:33:10 ◼ ► indexing or assistant learning will work on the phone is very similar to photos in that when you
01:33:17 ◼ ► get a new phone or you do a restore, it'll spend the first couple of nights that it's plugged in
01:33:22 ◼ ► all night indexing your data and training itself on that data. It's going to be, or you know,
01:33:28 ◼ ► it'll as it's sitting on your desk during the transfer, it'll heat itself up like crazy,
01:33:38 ◼ ► Apple does have a history of features like, for instance, like some of the people training
01:33:44 ◼ ► metadata stuff in the photos app. Apple has a history of having features that have local
01:33:58 ◼ ► but then they have ways for other devices or restores on that same device later down the road
01:34:03 ◼ ► to re-index and basically get that same data somehow on them. So I think it will be very
01:34:09 ◼ ► similar to that process where whatever you have like taught it, that will probably, and by the
01:34:15 ◼ ► way, we don't even know necessarily what that means yet, but I don't know if any of the features that
01:34:19 ◼ ► we've seen even have things that you can teach them besides indexing content from your apps,
01:34:25 ◼ ► but whatever effort you put into training Apple intelligence will probably carry over just fine.
01:34:35 ◼ ► I think are going to be based upon either, you know, just kind of global knowledge list models
01:34:40 ◼ ► that you're not putting your special, you know, special spin on or index content from apps that
01:34:46 ◼ ► can just get re-indexed as when you have a new phone. So photos is a good example of this because
01:34:51 ◼ ► I think one of the photos things he's probably referring to is face recognition. And that's
01:34:55 ◼ ► feature resource introduced. Photos would scan all your photos and find people and find their faces
01:34:59 ◼ ► and do all that stuff. And you get a new phone that would have to re-scan them and re-find all
01:35:02 ◼ ► the faces. And it was frustrating because the scanning for faces is not perfect. And sometimes
01:35:07 ◼ ► you have to correct it. No, this isn't my mom. This is my grandmother. No, this isn't my first
01:35:11 ◼ ► kid. It's my second kid. And you would do those corrections because it would get it wrong. And
01:35:15 ◼ ► then you get a new phone and you're like, geez, it's getting it wrong again. I corrected the same
01:35:19 ◼ ► photo that it thinks is my mom, but it's actually my grandma. It's literally the same photo. I
01:35:22 ◼ ► corrected it on the other thing. This is like Michael's question. If I do all this stuff on my
01:35:26 ◼ ► phone, do I get a new phone? Do I have to like, essentially like I lose all that information?
01:35:29 ◼ ► And so Apple added a feature, I think a year or two after this, the face recognition came out,
01:35:35 ◼ ► that said, we will transfer your face recognition data from your old thing to your new thing.
01:35:41 ◼ ► But they didn't mean get your faces set up all the way you want them on your old phone. And when
01:35:47 ◼ ► you get your new phone, it'll be just like that. That's not what they meant. The way they implemented
01:35:52 ◼ ► it was anything you manually did on the old phone, when you corrected that and said, that's not my
01:35:58 ◼ ► mom, it's my grandma or whatever, right? That action by the user, those actions were recorded
01:36:05 ◼ ► and transferred to your new phone and synced to your new phone or whatever. Everything else was
01:36:09 ◼ ► not. So what would happen is it would transfer over basically like the manually entered info,
01:36:14 ◼ ► which is probably pretty small because you just manually do one or two things, but you got
01:36:17 ◼ ► thousands of photos. Then it would rescan all of your photos and do face recognition augmented by
01:36:22 ◼ ► your corrections. But the rescanning is probably like a new version of iOS and a new code base or
01:36:27 ◼ ► whatever. And who knows, it's not going to, first of all, you have to do the rescanning because that
01:36:31 ◼ ► so it takes time and energy or whatever, it's usually not that long. And second, it's probably
01:36:36 ◼ ► not going to end up in the same state as your old phone because that was scanned, you know,
01:36:39 ◼ ► some of those photos were scanned two versions of iOS ago, depending on how old your phone is
01:36:43 ◼ ► or whatever. And there's totally different code scanning. And by the way, it's scanning with the
01:36:47 ◼ ► benefit of all your manual data, whereas those are scanning with only the benefit of some of
01:36:50 ◼ ► your manual data that exists at the time the scan took place. And so you end up with your new phone,
01:36:58 ◼ ► because I meticulously arrange my, you know, select my faces and everything. And on the Mac,
01:37:04 ◼ ► your iPhotos library is essentially a folder on your Mac. I can never lose that folder because
01:37:09 ◼ ► when I go to another Mac and pull up the same photo library, faces are all over the frickin'
01:37:14 ◼ ► place. It doesn't benefit from all of my stuff. Like this is a carefully curated collection of
01:37:20 ◼ ► things that have been scanned over the course of years, plus my manual corrections or whatever.
01:37:23 ◼ ► So that is what they did with photos. What might they do with AI? There's no technical reason for
01:37:31 ◼ ► both photos or AI that they couldn't take your complete semantic index or whatever they're
01:37:37 ◼ ► calling it and transfer it wholesale to your new phone. They could do it through the cloud,
01:37:42 ◼ ► because they have end-to-end encrypted things in the cloud where Apple would have no access to
01:37:45 ◼ ► the information, but it would go up to the cloud in a way that Apple has no access to it because
01:37:49 ◼ ► it's end-to-end encrypted. Not like your iCloud messages backup where they can read it all or
01:37:53 ◼ ► whatever, but like totally encrypted and pull it down to your phone. It could be device-to-device
01:37:57 ◼ ► transfer where it never touches any Apple server, but it goes directly from your phone to your other
01:38:01 ◼ ► phone. They could do that, but I kind of understand why they don't want to. Well, for multiple reasons.
01:38:07 ◼ ► One is that I think the amount of manual information in the vein of like, "Oh, I'm correcting the face
01:38:15 ◼ ► in this picture for AI" is going to be small. People like this question envision like, "Oh,
01:38:19 ◼ ► I've got this AI on my phone and I've trained it up to really know me or whatever." You haven't
01:38:23 ◼ ► trained it up. You're not retraining any models here, right? Basically, all you did was throw your
01:38:28 ◼ ► data in it and let it chew it up. If you allow it to chew up that same data on your new phone,
01:38:33 ◼ ► it should more or less come to the same result or maybe better because it's a new version of the
01:38:38 ◼ ► model or whatever, but it's not as if you are retraining the model, so to speak, and it's somehow
01:38:42 ◼ ► the model is getting smarter and learning you or whatever. You are just feeding it more data into
01:38:47 ◼ ► that semantic index thing and that it's reading that or whatever. That same process should be
01:38:53 ◼ ► pretty much 100% repeatable on your new phone because, again, like the LLMs and all their
01:38:57 ◼ ► weights and all their numbers or whatever, you are not changing those by talking to the LLM.
01:39:01 ◼ ► Those never change unless Apple releases a new model. It's only the semantic index stuff that's
01:39:06 ◼ ► there. How did that index get formed? It got formed without your intervention. It got formed
01:39:09 ◼ ► when you were sleeping and your phone was plugged in and it was scanning all your data. As long as
01:39:12 ◼ ► that data is over there, the semantic index will be over there. I kind of understand why Apple
01:39:16 ◼ ► wouldn't copy it. Also, like I said, if they make improvements to that, you want to do the scanning
01:39:22 ◼ ► with the new improved system rather than taking the scan that was made with the one-year-old
01:39:26 ◼ ► system and transferring it to your new phone. That's how I guess this is going to work. Again,
01:39:30 ◼ ► we don't know for sure. Apple Intelligence hasn't even shipped, let alone had anyone transfer from
01:39:34 ◼ ► one phone to another. But I don't know. Let's put it this way. I think it'll be better than photos
01:39:40 ◼ ► because I think photos, there is actual work that you're doing and like a presentation of all the
01:39:47 ◼ ► faces that you don't get reproduced. I think with Apple Intelligence, whatever happens on your old
01:39:51 ◼ ► phone, when you set up a new phone, it should all be reproduced because I think there's less manual
01:39:56 ◼ ► stuff. Thanks to our sponsor this week, Trade Coffee. Thanks also to our members who support
01:40:02 ◼ ► us directly. You can join us at atp.fm/join. One of the perks of membership is ATP overtime,
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01:41:07 ◼ ► And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey,
01:41:54 ◼ ► He's got his new COVID vaccine. He's got his new COVID vaccine is what he's saying. I need
01:42:03 ◼ ► No, in my personal opinion, October is the right time for flu shot based on no science,
01:42:07 ◼ ► no medicine, just an opinion. There is science, but like there is science about the timing. It's
01:42:12 ◼ ► any of these shots because your immunity is strongest. I think like at first, you know,
01:42:17 ◼ ► right after you get the shot, your immunity is the strongest and it does fade over time.
01:42:20 ◼ ► So there's a strategy that says wait until you're farther into like cold and flu season to get your
01:42:23 ◼ ► flu shot. Same thing with COVID. But the thing is, especially with COVID, you get COVID tomorrow.
01:42:28 ◼ ► So yeah, it's going to be worse in the winter. But if you get it tomorrow, waiting was the wrong
01:42:33 ◼ ► move. But if you don't get it tomorrow, waiting was the right, you know what I mean? And flu,
01:42:36 ◼ ► I think is more, has more of a seasonal bump to it. So you can probably gain that a little
01:42:40 ◼ ► bit better. But like, I just know so many people have gotten COVID lately. Like the summer has been
01:42:44 ◼ ► a pretty big surge and it's out there and it's waiting for you to get it. And so I'm going to get
01:42:48 ◼ ► the COVID shot immediately. I'm also going to get the flu shot immediately because I don't even
01:42:51 ◼ ► bother timing that and I just don't want to have to go back and forth, you know what I mean? To get
01:42:55 ◼ ► multiple shots. But yeah, recommended when you're in there getting your COVID shot, get your flu
01:42:59 ◼ ► shot. And if you want to wait and take the risk, feel free. But if you get COVID before the shot,
01:43:02 ◼ ► that sucks because you got COVID and it also sucks because you can't get the shot until you've been
01:43:06 ◼ ► over COVID for some amount of time too. So not great. Yeah. Yeah. I am stunned that we didn't
01:43:14 ◼ ► bring it home from Europe and I feel like our time is ticking because it's, it appears from what the
01:43:20 ◼ ► kids are telling us that like half of their elementary school is out for multiple days at a
01:43:24 ◼ ► time. And then occasionally some of them will come back with masks on. And so you put two and two
01:43:29 ◼ ► together and you know exactly what's going on. It's only a matter of time. So here's hoping that
01:43:34 ◼ ► I dodge it at least long enough to get through the podcastathon. And then if I come down with it
01:43:41 ◼ ► after that, so. And COVID was out there in Europe with you. A bunch of people who were there got it.
01:43:45 ◼ ► A bunch of people were there with it and got it while they were there or brought it back. And,
01:43:48 ◼ ► you know, it just, you dodged it. Oh, it's every, like all summer, it's been everywhere. Like we,
01:43:54 ◼ ► we got it in our, in my family, we got it in May and it's been like, everyone has it around here
01:44:01 ◼ ► all summer long. I just talked to one of my friends here today, just, is just coming off of
01:44:05 ◼ ► it. Like from the last nine days, like every, it's everywhere. Like, you know, we, we like to think
01:44:12 ◼ ► that we're like past the era of COVID. We're not only are we so not past it and not only are we
01:44:17 ◼ ► probably never going to be past it. But the only things that are really different now is that it's
01:44:24 ◼ ► for most people, it is less severe to get it now than it used to be because we have some, you know,
01:44:29 ◼ ► experience with it in our bodies now. But it's, it's still very widespread and still causing
01:44:34 ◼ ► problems for a lot of people. And so it's just everywhere. So yeah, definitely get your vaccines.
01:44:40 ◼ ► Like, yeah, they're not perfect. They're also a lot better than nothing. So get your vaccines.
01:44:45 ◼ ► That's, it's not a big deal. Just please, for the love of God, like do, do what you can to help.
01:44:50 ◼ ► **Matt Stauffer** Yeah. You know, you read a story, it's like, oh, the vaccine is for a strain that's
01:44:53 ◼ ► not even circulating. That's true. But like what the vaccines, you know, aren't, even if they don't
01:44:57 ◼ ► stop you from getting it, they make the symptoms more mild. And that's what you want. Like you want
01:45:02 ◼ ► every, you want every bit of help you can get, even if it helps just a little, even if it makes
01:45:05 ◼ ► you like a little bit less, because there is still the possibility that you're going to have a bad
01:45:09 ◼ ► experience or get long COVID. Like that is still happening to people. Like we benefit from, quote
01:45:14 ◼ ► unquote, benefit from the fact that a lot of the people that COVID was going to kill, it has killed
01:45:18 ◼ ► like millions, right? So those people are dead and they're, you know, and the people who are still
01:45:22 ◼ ► here are the people who didn't die or didn't catch it. And we have lots of vaccines and that makes the
01:45:27 ◼ ► symptoms less severe. But yeah, it's just not, not a thing that you want. Same thing with the flu
01:45:31 ◼ ► shot. Do they guess right on the strain or whatever? It's just like every little bit helps,
01:45:36 ◼ ► right? And in, you know, the, the studies say it does help. It does help if you've gotten
01:45:40 ◼ ► vaccine, vaccinated. It does help if you've gotten vaccinated recently. And it does help if you've
01:45:44 ◼ ► gotten vaccinated recently with a strain that is somewhat close to the one that's currently
01:45:50 ◼ ► circulating. So just do it. Yeah. That's highly recommended. And same thing with flu shot and
01:45:59 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, honestly, like one of the, I wouldn't necessarily, it's hard to say like upsides,
01:46:05 ◼ ► but you know, a silver lining of all of this is that it seems like in recent years, as part of
01:46:11 ◼ ► the COVID vaccines ramping up it seems like getting almost any vaccine has gotten a lot easier. Cause
01:46:17 ◼ ► like the, like, you know, major drug store chains now have not only, you know, they, they, they had
01:46:23 ◼ ► flu before, but not in, I think the numbers they have now. And most people weren't thinking to go
01:46:29 ◼ ► and get it as much as they are now, especially younger people. Now you can go to like any drug
01:46:33 ◼ ► store in the U S at almost any time you want and get a COVID shot. You can get a flu shot. You can
01:46:40 ◼ ► get other commonly needed shots like HPV, like a lot of people should be getting like, there's so
01:46:45 ◼ ► many, it's so easy now to get access to so many vaccines that are just like in drug stores,
01:46:52 ◼ ► widely available for little to no money. It's actually, you know, to have built up all that
01:46:57 ◼ ► infrastructure now is, is quite, quite an upside. And if you have a primary care doctor and you do
01:47:02 ◼ ► annual visits, that's also a great time to do it. Time your annual visit for right before flu season,