ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► Here in the show document that we use, you know, just internally, we have a section for pre-show and it says in here "All John's apes gone."

00:00:07 ◼   ► I don't know what that means, but I'm assuming you've had a real bad like NFT related loss or something like that.

00:00:14 ◼   ► You know what it means then. You got it. Wait, what? Are you being serious? All my apes gone. Not as I don't know what NFTs are, but it's it's close.

00:00:21 ◼   ► Did you at any time have any NFTs? I never had any. I still don't.

00:00:27 ◼   ► It's a funny meme. I'm not sure I ever even knew like where even if I wanted to buy one, which I never did,

00:00:33 ◼   ► I don't even know how to buy an NFT. Like where do you go? You didn't miss out on anything.

00:00:38 ◼   ► Yeah, probably. Missed out on being scammed a lot probably. We'll put the "know your memes" link in there.

00:00:44 ◼   ► I think it's like some person who tweeted about losing all their ape NFTs. All my apes gone.

00:00:50 ◼   ► Oh, look at that. Oh, I did better than I expected. Look at me go. As usual, Marco hasn't seen it.

00:00:56 ◼   ► Anyway, all my apes are gone. All my apes gone, not are gone.

00:01:01 ◼   ► So what does this mean? You lost all of your zero NFTs that you had?

00:01:06 ◼   ► Yeah, so I've never done NFTs and I've never been into cryptocurrency because it's just not been my thing and there's many bad things about it.

00:01:15 ◼   ► But about a decade ago, there was some cryptocurrency thing that was like, "Hey, sign up for our website.

00:01:22 ◼   ► We'll give you 10 imaginary crypto coin things or whatever." And I signed up and I got 10 imaginary crypto coin things.

00:01:32 ◼   ► Wait, I'm sorry. Isn't imaginary crypto, isn't that redundant?

00:01:35 ◼   ► Yeah, whatever. I don't even know if it was a proof of stake or a proof of work one. It might have been a proof of stake one or something or might not even have been crypto.

00:01:44 ◼   ► I don't even understand it. It's like someone just said, "Hey, sign up for this thing. It's free. You get free whatevers." And I did. And I got free whatevers. And they were worthless.

00:01:52 ◼   ► And I ignored them. And then around 2021, Coinbase was popular and there's all these websites that are like, "Come here and manage your cryptocurrency."

00:02:05 ◼   ► And I was like, "I should get rid of this stuff. Can I just like sell it and get whatever meager amount of money it's worth or something?"

00:02:12 ◼   ► So I transferred all of my crypto whatever stuff to Coinbase and it was just so worthless and the transaction fees were high enough. And I was like, "Who cares? I don't want to deal with this." So I ignored it again.

00:02:25 ◼   ► And then in 2022, I think the people who ran Coinbase were under investigation for crimes or something.

00:02:33 ◼   ► I'm shocked.

00:02:34 ◼   ► And I was like, "I don't know if I want my... I should just get my stuff out of Coinbase because who knows what's going on with it."

00:02:43 ◼   ► So anyway, I transferred it back out of Coinbase and back on to wherever it came from originally. And then I ignored it some more.

00:02:51 ◼   ► You're probably committing some kind of tax fraud here. Like when you got your free whatevers, did you report their value of nothing to the IRS?

00:02:58 ◼   ► In fact, I did. It was so small. I told it to my accountant and it's been accounted for and it is worth so little that it doesn't matter. But yes, in fact, I did report it.

00:03:10 ◼   ► See, that's why I thought this was my fault is because last I heard you were using the same tax accountant that I am. And I thought maybe it was because of her that you had to divest and it created all sorts of problems. But it sounds like it's not my fault yet.

00:03:22 ◼   ► No, she just wanted to know what I had and I gave her all the accounting of the worthless stuff that I have. All I've been doing is moving it around like no things are happening.

00:03:33 ◼   ► And so with the upcoming change in presidential administration in our country, the crypto folks are all going wild. It's like, "Woo-hoo, there'll be no laws and we can do anything we want."

00:03:44 ◼   ► And so all the cryptocurrency is going up in value. I'm like, "All right, so this is a good time. I really just need to get rid of this." I know it's annoying in taxes to do anything with it to me, but I just want to not have it anymore.

00:03:55 ◼   ► So let me just get it and cash out whatever amount it's worth just so I don't have to keep reporting it or whatever. And so I went to do that and it's all gone.

00:04:06 ◼   ► What?

00:04:09 ◼   ► And I was like, "Did I lose track of where I put it?" Because I hadn't looked at it in a while. Like, maybe I just don't know. Was it in Coinbase? No, I'm pretty sure I removed it from Coinbase. It should be back in the thing. I looked at it.

00:04:21 ◼   ► And then, of course, the good thing about blockchain is it records all the transactions. And yeah, no, it's all gone. And not only is it all gone, it was all gone two years ago.

00:04:32 ◼   ► Wait, so where did it go? How did this happen?

00:04:37 ◼   ► Two years ago, someone stole it all. I didn't notice for two years.

00:04:42 ◼   ► That's special. How did they steal it? I mean, I'm presuming you don't know the specifics.

00:04:46 ◼   ► Yeah, no. So how did they steal it? Most likely, like what you're supposed to actually do with this stuff is have it in some place like Coinbase or have it in a hardware wallet where you have multi-factor authentication and all that other stuff.

00:04:56 ◼   ► And I never wanted to have a crypto hardware wallet. And when it was in Coinbase, it was probably the safest place that it has ever been because at least there they have a multi-factor login and everything.

00:05:06 ◼   ► But where it originally came from, the only thing there was was your public address, which is this big long string of crap, and your super secret key that you're supposed to tell nobody, which is this big long string of crap.

00:05:17 ◼   ► And their website was like, "Hey, do you want to see what your balance is? You should really have your money in one of these wallets or these things or whatever, but if you don't have it in any of these wallets, you can just look at your balance by putting your super secret string in here."

00:05:31 ◼   ► And then there's all these scary warnings like, "You should never actually do this. Never paste your secret key into a web page. This is bad. You should use a wallet."

00:05:39 ◼   ► And for the past 10 years, I've been like, "Eh, it's fine." I've been pasting my super secret key into the text field on web pages.

00:05:48 ◼   ► And at some point in the past 10 years, I must have pasted that secret key into the wrong web page at the wrong time or one of these websites was compromised or something.

00:05:56 ◼   ► And then someone just harvested that thing and took all my money two years ago and I didn't notice it until now.

00:06:04 ◼   ► So yeah, thus ends my cryptocurrency adventure. 10 years of owning a bunch of worthless coins that I was hoping to cash out for maybe $100 or something and it turns out I can't even do it.

00:06:17 ◼   ► The only good thing is that the person cashed out two years ago when it was worth even less than it is now. So they got nothing from me.

00:06:23 ◼   ► But the account that got stuff stole money from lots of people and they cashed out for like $400,000 or something.

00:06:30 ◼   ► But mine was just a tiny amount. A tiny drop in that bucket was my coins.

00:06:36 ◼   ► So how much would it have been worth? Did you do that computation?

00:06:40 ◼   ► It would have been a couple hundred bucks, but it was never real money. We got it for free. It was just a burden.

00:06:47 ◼   ► I probably paid more in having my accountant keep track of it over these years than I would have gotten.

00:06:53 ◼   ► I don't know. I think you just report that you have it and then it's the end of it. Who knows?

00:06:57 ◼   ► Anyway, thus ends my barely voluntary cryptocurrency adventure. It ends with it all getting stolen because I pasted my super secret key into web pages.

00:07:09 ◼   ► So let that be a lesson for you. Don't do that.

00:07:12 ◼   ► Something tells me you are neither the first person to have all your cryptocurrency stolen nor the first person to have lost money with cryptocurrency.

00:07:20 ◼   ► No, they get stolen all the time. That's the whole "all my apes gone" thing. How do people lose their apes?

00:07:24 ◼   ► It's so easy. Your security practices have to be better than ignoring all the warnings, which is what I was doing.

00:07:32 ◼   ► And it's a very attractive target because if someone can steal it from you, there's no recourse.

00:07:37 ◼   ► It's like, well, they've got it now. They're totally anonymous. You don't know who they are.

00:07:40 ◼   ► They've all taken it and transferred it and cashed out.

00:07:43 ◼   ► So it's like, you know, it's not there's no there's none of the things that are in our current financial systems like FDIC or like credit card chargebacks or all those all sorts of other things that give you some kind of out or like, you know, large transfers, triggering fraud notices and all that stuff.

00:08:03 ◼   ► But none of that stuff exists in the crypto world. So if they can if someone can find a way to steal it from you, it's free and clear to them.

00:08:09 ◼   ► So kudos to the person who stole my cryptocurrency and cashed out when the price was much less than it is now.

00:08:15 ◼   ► Yeah, it says all the security of a giant pile of cash and with no way to free to protect it really from anybody on the entire Internet. Like, that's great.

00:08:26 ◼   ► I think I would have noticed if a giant pile of cash was stolen two years ago, but the fact that I didn't even notice this for two years and the thing is it was stolen in November.

00:08:34 ◼   ► So I'm like, oh, it just happened two days ago. It's because the prices are looking at the data. It's like, oh, no, 2022.

00:08:40 ◼   ► That's amazing. Just to be clear, we appreciate those of you writing emails and tweets and whatnot to correct any of the things we just said.

00:08:50 ◼   ► We don't care.

00:08:50 ◼   ► Oh, just to be clear, we don't all appreciate, Casey appreciates it. I don't even appreciate those emails.

00:08:55 ◼   ► Like you could like if you're writing to tell us how awesome crypto is like, it's you can you can save your time.

00:09:01 ◼   ► Sorry, it's not for me. Maybe you can send them all to Casey because he appreciates them.

00:09:06 ◼   ► No, it's not for me either. And yes, to be clear, that was a bless your heart kind of we appreciate. Bless your heart for writing that email, but don't send it.

00:09:16 ◼   ► Yeah, I think the reason I was keeping it for all those years is because it just seemed like turning it into real money seemed like it was just like had more consequences.

00:09:24 ◼   ► And it's like the only way I care about this is if it's like as people putting in the chat room like that person who bought a pizza for 10000 Bitcoin and it would be worth like a billion dollars now or whatever.

00:09:35 ◼   ► I'm like, I'll just keep this for the rest of my life and maybe when I'm 80, it'll be worth a billion dollars or it'll just disappear.

00:09:39 ◼   ► And it turns out it was the second one just disappeared.

00:09:44 ◼   ► All right, let's do some follow up. And we have a decent amount of follow up with regard to my adventures in remote television.

00:09:52 ◼   ► Where we last left our heroes, if I'm not mistaken, was that my friend in southwestern Connecticut had nothing for TV service over the air TV service at his house.

00:10:03 ◼   ► And so we were trying to figure out, you know, some ways to get around this problem mitigated, etc.

00:10:07 ◼   ► So the first step that my friend was kind enough to take was to go visit his parents.

00:10:15 ◼   ► His parents live in New Milford, which coincidentally is right next to where I grew up.

00:10:19 ◼   ► And he took the antenna over there in the HD home run and had the HD home run scan or have the antenna and HD home run and work in concert to scan and see what over the air channels they got in New Milford rather than in the town in which my friend lives.

00:10:34 ◼   ► And would either of you like to guess how many channels we were able to receive in New Milford?

00:10:39 ◼   ► The same number?

00:10:41 ◼   ► Oh, no, literally zero.

00:10:43 ◼   ► Literally zero.

00:10:45 ◼   ► Connecticut is not known for its amazing radio signal reception.

00:10:48 ◼   ► Indeed. So that was a no go.

00:10:51 ◼   ► So the next thought we had was, all right, what if we used TV everywhere and I could have my friend Sean sign into his cable account on my channel server.

00:11:04 ◼   ► And hopefully that would give us his local channels.

00:11:07 ◼   ► And when it would do this via the Internet, TV everywhere is like, I remember movies everywhere or movies anywhere, whatever it was called, where you would know.

00:11:15 ◼   ► OK, so you buy physical media and then you can plug in a code and you will get license, if you will, to the same movie on maybe Apple TV or whatever the case may be.

00:11:25 ◼   ► And the specifics don't matter. You get the idea.

00:11:27 ◼   ► TV everywhere is kind of in a spiritual similar sense.

00:11:31 ◼   ► You sign in with your cable providers credentials and you get access to all the or at least a subset of, if not all of the channels that you subscribe to.

00:11:42 ◼   ► And so I thought this is going to work out great for both of us.

00:11:45 ◼   ► He enters his credentials in on the online portal.

00:11:48 ◼   ► Like I am not involved with this whatsoever.

00:11:50 ◼   ► He doesn't have to make me a child account, so to speak, or even literally, perhaps everyone will be happy.

00:11:55 ◼   ► It'll work out great. And we did that.

00:11:57 ◼   ► And when it worked and the channels goes and tries to find the lineup of what I love that it's called channels.

00:12:05 ◼   ► I hate those called channels.

00:12:07 ◼   ► The channels app tries to find Apple TV plus playing Apple TV on the Apple TV.

00:12:12 ◼   ► So it goes to figure out what television channels are accessible or available to it.

00:12:17 ◼   ► And the good news is it found hundreds.

00:12:20 ◼   ► The bad news is none of the local channels were included.

00:12:24 ◼   ► No good there either.

00:12:26 ◼   ► So Marco, at this point, you should start to get a cold sweat because at this point in our story, hardware was coming to your house, baby.

00:12:33 ◼   ► You didn't know it yet, but it was.

00:12:35 ◼   ► In all fairness, I did offer because that does seem like it would make the most sense.

00:12:39 ◼   ► You did. And you were very kind about it.

00:12:41 ◼   ► And even came back and asked me or gave a suggestion or something like that a couple of days later.

00:12:46 ◼   ► So that was very kind of you.

00:12:47 ◼   ► But a handful of listeners reached out and Steven was the first person, not Hackett, different Steven, was the first person that I saw reach out and say,

00:12:55 ◼   ► hey, you know, if you were to enter the Internet at a place in the New York metro area, say my friend Sean's house in western southwestern Connecticut,

00:13:07 ◼   ► you might find that if you go to, say, CBS's website and just try to watch their programming,

00:13:16 ◼   ► you might find that you get the local or the local football game, which might so happen to be the New York Giants.

00:13:22 ◼   ► I don't know why I didn't think of this, but yes,

00:13:24 ◼   ► that's exactly what I should have been doing this whole damn time.

00:13:26 ◼   ► I didn't need the HD home run.

00:13:27 ◼   ► I didn't need the antenna.

00:13:28 ◼   ► All I needed was this little knock, you know, this little baby PC up at Sean's house.

00:13:32 ◼   ► And that's what I can do.

00:13:33 ◼   ► And thanks to the magic of Tailscale, who is not sponsoring the show, but I love it so damn much.

00:13:38 ◼   ► I turned my iPad on to the I used the Connecticut PC as an exit node,

00:13:46 ◼   ► which is what Tailscale calls like, you know, when you're routing all of your traffic through a different computer.

00:13:51 ◼   ► So I got on the Internet by way of Connecticut, went to CBS.com.

00:13:57 ◼   ► Or actually, I think I used the app on my iPad, but it doesn't matter.

00:14:00 ◼   ► And sure enough, it wanted to play me a perfectly crisp feed of the New York Giants.

00:14:04 ◼   ► And so hypothetically, this should work for CBS.

00:14:07 ◼   ► I mean, it just did.

00:14:08 ◼   ► I understood that it works for Fox, and we'll see about ABC and NBC.

00:14:13 ◼   ► But this makes way more sense than anything I was trying so far,

00:14:18 ◼   ► and I feel like a dunce for not having thought of it.

00:14:20 ◼   ► So thank you to Steven and a handful of others who reached out as well to point that out to me.

00:14:25 ◼   ► I have a couple other options, but any thoughts or commentary at this point?

00:14:28 ◼   ► This is kind of amazing, like, that, you know, just like the the answer is basically like, just use a VPN.

00:14:34 ◼   ► Like, yeah, no one.

00:14:36 ◼   ► No one thought of that last week.

00:14:37 ◼   ► Like, we didn't think of it.

00:14:38 ◼   ► You didn't think of it like that.

00:14:39 ◼   ► I know.

00:14:41 ◼   ► It's ridiculous.

00:14:42 ◼   ► People in the chat room talked about VPNs last week.

00:14:44 ◼   ► I was still just thinking, why don't you just pay for this, Casey, but whatever.

00:14:47 ◼   ► Well, and so with that in mind, there are some options if you want to pay for it.

00:14:51 ◼   ► One or two people, Europeans or people who are American expats in Europe,

00:14:56 ◼   ► reached out to point out there is a service.

00:14:58 ◼   ► I think it's called Dazn.

00:15:00 ◼   ► I don't really know, but it's D-A-Z-N.

00:15:03 ◼   ► This is a service that is not available to Americans,

00:15:05 ◼   ► but perhaps if you had a VPN where you were exiting the Internet in Europe,

00:15:09 ◼   ► you might be able to sign up for it.

00:15:11 ◼   ► And I don't know how much it costs, but this is a way to give that company,

00:15:16 ◼   ► which in turn gives the NFL, your money,

00:15:18 ◼   ► so that you can stream the NFL games from the Internet.

00:15:22 ◼   ► This is of questionable legality, obviously,

00:15:24 ◼   ► on account of the fact that you're masquerading in Europe,

00:15:28 ◼   ► but hey, I'm also masquerading in Connecticut, so who am I to throw stones?

00:15:31 ◼   ► I haven't really looked into this much because I don't think it's necessary now.

00:15:34 ◼   ► Look, if you're going to pirate it, don't pay someone else to help you pirate it.

00:15:38 ◼   ► Just pirate it.

00:15:39 ◼   ► Or if you're going to pay for it, pay for the real thing.

00:15:41 ◼   ► Right, right, right.

00:15:42 ◼   ► So anyway, that's an option.

00:15:45 ◼   ► Then Chris H. pointed out to me that there is a package

00:15:51 ◼   ► that exists through the NFL in America that will let you watch replays of the games,

00:15:58 ◼   ► and I guess they're put online for you to watch not too long after the game ends.

00:16:03 ◼   ► So you can do that, and that is the far more affordable $100 a season

00:16:08 ◼   ► instead of the like several hundred dollars it is for full Sunday ticket.

00:16:12 ◼   ► I tend to want to watch them live, but this is a genuinely very good option

00:16:16 ◼   ► if you're willing to give up on watching them live, which I really appreciate.

00:16:22 ◼   ► Then there are a couple of things with regard to YouTube TV.

00:16:24 ◼   ► I was under the impression that you must have a full-on YouTube TV subscription

00:16:28 ◼   ► in order to get Sunday Ticket.

00:16:29 ◼   ► That is incorrect.

00:16:30 ◼   ► That is a misunderstanding on my part.

00:16:33 ◼   ► You do not need a full-on YouTube TV sub to get Sunday Ticket.

00:16:36 ◼   ► You can do that separately.

00:16:38 ◼   ► Additionally, since we're late in the season, it's worth noting that Sunday Ticket

00:16:41 ◼   ► is just $90 for the next couple weeks until the season is basically over,

00:16:47 ◼   ► which is something that's interesting to me, but still I feel like that's a temporary

00:16:51 ◼   ► band-aid on a larger problem.

00:16:54 ◼   ► And then finally, I was also very perturbed because this past Sunday you were supposed

00:16:58 ◼   ► to get an NFL Sunday Ticket for free, just for one day, so you can get a taste of it

00:17:03 ◼   ► or whatever.

00:17:04 ◼   ► And if you recall, my parents are YouTube TV subscribers.

00:17:07 ◼   ► That is legitimately how they get their television.

00:17:10 ◼   ► And so I have a child account off of their family, and every, every, every great once

00:17:16 ◼   ► in a while I will tune into YouTube TV for some reason or another.

00:17:18 ◼   ► It's extremely rare though.

00:17:19 ◼   ► But I thought, "Okay, this is my moment.

00:17:21 ◼   ► I will turn on YouTube TV and I will go and I will go to watch the Giants."

00:17:25 ◼   ► And they said, "No."

00:17:29 ◼   ► And it didn't work on the Apple TV, so I thought, "Okay, I'll do it on my iPad."

00:17:32 ◼   ► It didn't work.

00:17:33 ◼   ► Couldn't figure it out, couldn't figure it out, couldn't figure it out.

00:17:35 ◼   ► Kept saying, "I need to buy it, need to buy it."

00:17:36 ◼   ► And I'm looking at an email that says, "Oh, it's free on this past Sunday."

00:17:40 ◼   ► Turns out it was free on this past Sunday as long as you're not on any Apple or mobile

00:17:44 ◼   ► device.

00:17:45 ◼   ► What?

00:17:46 ◼   ► It's like, what the hell is the point then?

00:17:48 ◼   ► I guess if I had installed it on my TV, you know, like my smart TV, my LG OLED and whatever,

00:17:53 ◼   ► I guess maybe it would have worked.

00:17:54 ◼   ► But such an odd restriction.

00:17:56 ◼   ► Like yes, you can watch Sunday Ticket as long as you're not using any of the things that

00:18:00 ◼   ► you desire to use to watch it.

00:18:02 ◼   ► Yep, sounds great.

00:18:03 ◼   ► So, yeah, that is my adventures in television.

00:18:05 ◼   ► We'll see what happens.

00:18:06 ◼   ► I guess I don't even know the next time the Giants play.

00:18:08 ◼   ► And they are so abysmally bad this year.

00:18:11 ◼   ► I don't even know why I'm going through these efforts.

00:18:12 ◼   ► It's just a project at this point.

00:18:14 ◼   ► But nevertheless, that is my update.

00:18:16 ◼   ► And I know you both are very relieved to have received it.

00:18:19 ◼   ► Sports.

00:18:20 ◼   ► Sports ball, baby.

00:18:21 ◼   ► All right, Marco, I have assigned you, this is two consecutive weeks, I've assigned you

00:18:25 ◼   ► Vision Pro homework and Sorry Not Sorry.

00:18:27 ◼   ► Did you or did you not do your homework?

00:18:29 ◼   ► I did indeed do my homework.

00:18:32 ◼   ► I am very proud of you.

00:18:33 ◼   ► So the homework this week was Concert for One, Ray.

00:18:37 ◼   ► That's R-A-Y-E.

00:18:38 ◼   ► She is a singer, artist, etc. from London.

00:18:42 ◼   ► And this is a nine-ish minute video in the spirit of the Alicia Keys thing.

00:18:49 ◼   ► Where the Alicia Keys thing, I think it was like half an hour, 45 minutes or something

00:18:51 ◼   ► like that.

00:18:52 ◼   ► And this was, like I said, nine minutes.

00:18:54 ◼   ► But it's a nine minute performance in a studio.

00:18:57 ◼   ► I think it was recorded in London, if I'm not mistaken.

00:18:59 ◼   ► And it was Ray and a backing band, including strings and backup singers and traditional

00:19:05 ◼   ► instruments that you would expect in a band.

00:19:08 ◼   ► And I was curious to hear your thoughts, or if you prefer me to start, I can start, doesn't

00:19:13 ◼   ► matter to me.

00:19:14 ◼   ► You go ahead.

00:19:15 ◼   ► I'm curious to hear yours first.

00:19:16 ◼   ► All right.

00:19:17 ◼   ► So this, like I said, eight, nine minutes.

00:19:18 ◼   ► I had heard of Ray before, but had never heard any of their music.

00:19:24 ◼   ► And so I didn't know what to expect.

00:19:26 ◼   ► And this is yet another instance where I feel like this happens a lot, or maybe I'm making

00:19:31 ◼   ► it up, but I feel like a lot of times when you see Apple immersive video, one of the

00:19:35 ◼   ► first shots, if not the first shot, is like an extreme closeup of somebody's face.

00:19:41 ◼   ► We saw this in, not shrinking, excuse me, in submerged.

00:19:45 ◼   ► And we see this here and maybe over time I will get used to it.

00:19:49 ◼   ► Got to say, I don't love it.

00:19:52 ◼   ► I feel like I'm infringing on somebody's personal space by being that close.

00:19:56 ◼   ► I'm being a little dramatic here, but--

00:19:58 ◼   ► No, you're not.

00:20:00 ◼   ► I have the exact same complaint.

00:20:02 ◼   ► You are not being overdramatic.

00:20:04 ◼   ► It's weird.

00:20:06 ◼   ► It gives me the heebie-jeebies.

00:20:07 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:20:08 ◼   ► It feels like, okay, these shots start out so close that you can see the person's pores

00:20:15 ◼   ► on their face.

00:20:17 ◼   ► You can see the stubble where they shave.

00:20:20 ◼   ► It's too close.

00:20:23 ◼   ► It is way closer than anybody would ever stand.

00:20:27 ◼   ► And because you have the VR180 format, the immersive format, you are seeing it in 3D,

00:20:34 ◼   ► huge, life-size, right in front of you.

00:20:37 ◼   ► It looks like you are there.

00:20:39 ◼   ► And therefore, it looks and feels like you are standing way too close to this stranger.

00:20:46 ◼   ► As middle-aged men who try to be conscientious of the realities of the world, I take extra

00:21:00 ◼   ► precautions to try to make sure I'm not creeping anybody out.

00:21:04 ◼   ► I would never in a million years stand that close to a stranger.

00:21:11 ◼   ► That's never anything I would do.

00:21:13 ◼   ► And so it feels really off-putting.

00:21:17 ◼   ► And I think they are obviously doing it to show off.

00:21:22 ◼   ► They're doing it to wow you, so that you will say, "Oh my god, look how sharp it is.

00:21:27 ◼   ► It feels like I'm here."

00:21:28 ◼   ► And I think it's one of these things that they will grow out of, I hope.

00:21:32 ◼   ► If this platform ever gets a chance to mature, I think that's one of the first things that

00:21:38 ◼   ► will change as it matures, is they will stop getting so damn close to everyone's faces

00:21:45 ◼   ► and necks and bodies because it's just weird.

00:21:48 ◼   ► Do you think it might be like the train coming out of the movie screen when people first

00:21:53 ◼   ► saw movies and were worried the train was going to run them over?

00:21:55 ◼   ► Do you feel like you're that audience in the movie theater with the train coming at them

00:21:58 ◼   ► or no?

00:21:59 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:22:00 ◼   ► It's not as much like scared.

00:22:04 ◼   ► It's like I am infringing on somebody's personal space.

00:22:06 ◼   ► I'm not saying the feeling, I'm saying the idea that when people first experience that

00:22:10 ◼   ► so the story goes, they thought all the train is going to come out of the movie screen and

00:22:13 ◼   ► hit me, but obviously as sophisticated movie viewers who grew up with movies, we never

00:22:17 ◼   ► had that experience.

00:22:18 ◼   ► We didn't think the train was going to hit us.

00:22:21 ◼   ► Is it because you're old fuddy duddies and future generations will not be bothered because

00:22:27 ◼   ► they will understand at a more instinctive level that there is not actually a person

00:22:31 ◼   ► there?

00:22:32 ◼   ► Like you're not actually standing too close to somebody to a recorded video and you're

00:22:34 ◼   ► watching it in the same way that we're not worried about that.

00:22:37 ◼   ► I'm not saying this is the case.

00:22:38 ◼   ► I'm saying, have you thought about that angle?

00:22:40 ◼   ► Do you think that it's the type of thing where maybe you yourself will never get used to

00:22:46 ◼   ► it, but people who grew up with it won't have the same hang ups or do you think it's like

00:22:50 ◼   ► this isn't going to be bothersome no matter what?

00:22:52 ◼   ► I think it could be either way.

00:22:54 ◼   ► I'm leaning toward it.

00:22:57 ◼   ► Maybe if you are a child of the vision pro, then I presume it wouldn't be as bothersome,

00:23:01 ◼   ► but for anyone that has any amount of life experience before strapping this thing to

00:23:06 ◼   ► your head, I think it will be a little bit uncomfortable.

00:23:09 ◼   ► I don't know, but on the plus side, and Marco you touched on this briefly earlier, the fidelity

00:23:16 ◼   ► in this headset is just unbelievable.

00:23:19 ◼   ► You can see pores, you can see stubble.

00:23:21 ◼   ► It is incredibly crisp, just astonishingly crisp, or at least to me anyway.

00:23:28 ◼   ► So I really do appreciate the fidelity of it.

00:23:33 ◼   ► I do think that this was kind of fun, this particular video, because basically imagine

00:23:39 ◼   ► the camera did move a little bit forward and backward.

00:23:43 ◼   ► It did not move laterally at all.

00:23:45 ◼   ► The way the musicians were arranged was that to the left and the right of the camera when

00:23:50 ◼   ► it was positioned as far back as possible, there's a fair bit of space to the left and

00:23:54 ◼   ► the right, and then the musicians start angled toward the center of the frame.

00:23:58 ◼   ► I don't know if I'm doing a great job describing this, but suffice it to say as you got closer

00:24:02 ◼   ► to the back of the stage as you're watching it, the musicians were getting closer and

00:24:06 ◼   ► closer to you just by virtue of the way they're standing or sitting.

00:24:09 ◼   ► And that left this big kind of aisle, if you will, where Ray could move forward and backward.

00:24:15 ◼   ► And I feel like deliberate or otherwise, she did a little bit of playing with that.

00:24:19 ◼   ► She would walk forward or walk backward, and again the camera occasionally moved forward

00:24:22 ◼   ► and backward.

00:24:23 ◼   ► And I thought that that was kind of neat because I feel like depth means a little bit more

00:24:26 ◼   ► in this context than it does in 2D movie making.

00:24:30 ◼   ► And granted, it still means something there, but I don't know, it just hits different,

00:24:34 ◼   ► I feel, when you've got this immersive and 3D environment.

00:24:38 ◼   ► I watched it with the audio pods or whatever they're calling the strap.

00:24:43 ◼   ► I did not have AirPods in when I watched it.

00:24:45 ◼   ► And unlike the Weeknd music video that we talked about last week, I didn't feel like

00:24:52 ◼   ► the audio pods did a very good job with this.

00:24:54 ◼   ► I don't know what it was specifically.

00:24:56 ◼   ► It just sounded awfully tinny in a way that the Weeknds didn't, which is funny because

00:25:01 ◼   ► I would argue the Weeknd's music is inherently more bassy than Ray's.

00:25:07 ◼   ► But nevertheless, this is the first time, I think ever, that I've watched something

00:25:11 ◼   ► on the Vision Pro that I've thought, "Ugh, I really should put in AirPods."

00:25:14 ◼   ► Because the audio pods, and forgive me if I'm calling them the wrong name, are astonishingly

00:25:19 ◼   ► good at broadcasting into the open air, but kind of pointed at your ears.

00:25:24 ◼   ► And they sound really good.

00:25:25 ◼   ► Like, I've watched movies with them, I've watched other short features like this, and

00:25:29 ◼   ► I've never felt it's a problem until this one performance.

00:25:32 ◼   ► I don't know what it was, which was weird.

00:25:34 ◼   ► But that being said, I'm not a musician.

00:25:39 ◼   ► The only thing I can play with efficacy is a stereo.

00:25:42 ◼   ► And I don't know what it's like to perform music.

00:25:47 ◼   ► But I do know what it's like to be around live music.

00:25:51 ◼   ► And I've been around enough live music, not an overwhelming amount, but I've been around

00:25:54 ◼   ► enough that, to me anyway, and I don't think this is unique to me, there's something special

00:26:00 ◼   ► when a group of musicians, when they're just cooking, you know, you can just tell that

00:26:05 ◼   ► they're in it.

00:26:06 ◼   ► They're in it and they're all, I don't know if, vibing isn't the right word, and I probably

00:26:10 ◼   ► sound like an old man anyway, but it's just like they're all in the moment and everything's

00:26:13 ◼   ► clicking, and everything's firing, and it's just good.

00:26:17 ◼   ► And the second song that she performed, I feel like toward the tail end of that song,

00:26:23 ◼   ► you could tell everyone was just cooking.

00:26:25 ◼   ► And being able to look around and focus on the instruments that you want to focus on,

00:26:30 ◼   ► I know we've talked about this before, but that is so fun and so cool.

00:26:34 ◼   ► And God help me, I want to watch every piece of music content in this immersive environment,

00:26:40 ◼   ► because it's just so cool.

00:26:43 ◼   ► And I came away from it going from, I don't know who Ray is, to, wow, she's really good

00:26:47 ◼   ► and I should explore more of her stuff.

00:26:49 ◼   ► So, all in all, I really, really enjoyed it and I thought it was really good.

00:26:53 ◼   ► So Marco, what did you think?

00:26:55 ◼   ► Musically, she's obviously very talented.

00:26:59 ◼   ► It wasn't quite what I would normally choose to listen to, but I enjoyed the performance.

00:27:04 ◼   ► I like that, you know, from the technical point of view, you mentioned that the camera

00:27:08 ◼   ► really was not moving much.

00:27:10 ◼   ► It basically would switch between fixed shots.

00:27:14 ◼   ► Like it didn't, it wasn't, you said you thought it moved during some of the shots?

00:27:17 ◼   ► I didn't notice that.

00:27:18 ◼   ► I thought it did a little bit toward the back of the frame and then backward, you know,

00:27:24 ◼   ► toward where you would expect to be sitting.

00:27:25 ◼   ► I don't know how to describe it otherwise, but maybe I made that up, but I could swear

00:27:28 ◼   ► that I saw it move a couple of feet a couple of times.

00:27:31 ◼   ► Like I don't think it was very much and it was very slowly, not like that crash, like

00:27:35 ◼   ► dolly zoom that you saw in Submerged that kind of made you go, whoa.

00:27:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, or the weekend video where it's like there's a lot of motion in the weekend video.

00:27:43 ◼   ► But yeah, this one, yeah, it was basically switching between a small number of like fixed

00:27:47 ◼   ► shots.

00:27:48 ◼   ► I think that's the way to do it.

00:27:51 ◼   ► If you want to, 'cause like this one I had zero problems with motion sickness feeling.

00:27:55 ◼   ► Like it was totally fine.

00:27:57 ◼   ► I'm kind of learning as a viewer that a better way, like I'm tempted because the 180 degree

00:28:05 ◼   ► field of view is so novel.

00:28:08 ◼   ► I'm always tempted to look around to see like what's on the edges of this frame.

00:28:12 ◼   ► Like it's in the shot technically.

00:28:14 ◼   ► I'm like looking around, like what's on the edges?

00:28:16 ◼   ► But the problem is the edges are never in focus for lots of reasons.

00:28:19 ◼   ► I've kind of learned that like in order to prevent weird like eye strain and focus issues

00:28:24 ◼   ► with my eyes, I'm better off just looking in the middle of the frame the whole time.

00:28:29 ◼   ► Like just let, you know, let the camera framing show me where to look instead of trying to

00:28:35 ◼   ► like look around and get every single edge of every single frame.

00:28:38 ◼   ► Like figure out what's going on around me.

00:28:40 ◼   ► So that, I'm kind of learning how to watch it better.

00:28:43 ◼   ► And so I didn't have many problems with focus here.

00:28:45 ◼   ► The only weird thing about that is like there are moments where like when it would, you

00:28:50 ◼   ► know, the way it was staged was, you know, the artist was in the middle and then she

00:28:53 ◼   ► had like her backup instruments on one side and her backup singers on the other side.

00:28:58 ◼   ► Like left and right.

00:29:00 ◼   ► Kind of like in a line.

00:29:02 ◼   ► And the problem is that when they would show either the instruments or the backup singers,

00:29:07 ◼   ► only one of them would really be in focus.

00:29:10 ◼   ► And so, and I'd want to be like, oh, well that's, that singer sounds pretty good.

00:29:13 ◼   ► Cool.

00:29:14 ◼   ► But like I kind of want to look at the one behind her too.

00:29:16 ◼   ► And I kind of can't like, so there were kind of weird issues with, you know, with again,

00:29:20 ◼   ► selective focus is weird in this format because we think with our eyes, we think we can just

00:29:25 ◼   ► focus on anything in the frame.

00:29:26 ◼   ► Like because it looks like we are there.

00:29:29 ◼   ► And if we were actually there, that's how our eyes would work.

00:29:32 ◼   ► But it's shot more in that cinematic style where like, you know, the background's all

00:29:36 ◼   ► blurry and only the subject is in focus.

00:29:39 ◼   ► But I don't expect that from 3D.

00:29:40 ◼   ► Like my eyes don't expect that.

00:29:41 ◼   ► My eyes expect that I can focus on anything I want to because it feels like I am actually

00:29:45 ◼   ► in that room.

00:29:47 ◼   ► So the immersion is working in the sense that it is tricking me into thinking that my eyes

00:29:52 ◼   ► will work the way they would work in real life.

00:29:55 ◼   ► And that's another one of those kind of technical decisions that I think immersive video might

00:30:00 ◼   ► have to reconsider as it matures.

00:30:02 ◼   ► Like I think having very shallow depth of field is probably not the right call a lot

00:30:08 ◼   ► of the time if you're trying to show a whole scene.

00:30:11 ◼   ► I really think filmmakers should probably have very narrow apertures to get very big

00:30:16 ◼   ► depth of field because that's what we actually expect our eyes to be able to do when we're

00:30:20 ◼   ► watching it.

00:30:21 ◼   ► So all that being said, the idea of this series Apple's putting out there where there's basically

00:30:28 ◼   ► like five minute mini concerts being put on that are specially filmed just for this in

00:30:33 ◼   ► a special room, that's fine.

00:30:36 ◼   ► I don't think it's ideal, but it's fine.

00:30:39 ◼   ► I think in an ideal form, we would get a lot more of these.

00:30:46 ◼   ► It would be an actual concert with an actual audience and they would be like a little more

00:30:51 ◼   ► complete shows.

00:30:52 ◼   ► Like, you know, give me a whole set.

00:30:54 ◼   ► Give me at least an album worth, give me 45 minutes or something.

00:31:00 ◼   ► Instead of like basically, here's a little snack of content.

00:31:04 ◼   ► I feel like all we're getting on the Vision Pro is little snacks.

00:31:08 ◼   ► What that does, first of all, it's obviously, I keep harping on this, we need more content

00:31:14 ◼   ► on the Vision Pro.

00:31:15 ◼   ► You can still go through all of it the first night you have it.

00:31:19 ◼   ► But more than that, if you try to capture full concerts, it's easier, it's cheaper.

00:31:27 ◼   ► You can just film a concert that's already happening.

00:31:30 ◼   ► Just stick a VR camera in a good seat in the middle or even from where the soundboard is.

00:31:36 ◼   ► Usually that's kind of central, kind of midway into the audience.

00:31:40 ◼   ► Stick a VR camera on the front of that thing so people can just see a fixed view.

00:31:44 ◼   ► One thing I did think about with this, because they were mostly just switching between a

00:31:49 ◼   ► small number of fixed camera positions, I realized I actually would be fine if there

00:31:55 ◼   ► was literally just one.

00:31:58 ◼   ► Because whenever they would switch to one of the other ones, I wasn't really gaining

00:32:01 ◼   ► anything.

00:32:02 ◼   ► I was just getting too close to her pores.

00:32:04 ◼   ► But I would be totally fine to just have a fixed position where it's just like you have

00:32:10 ◼   ► a really good seat to a concert.

00:32:12 ◼   ► And again, I do think having an audience I think would really add to it.

00:32:18 ◼   ► Because that's part of the live music experience is there being an audience there and the audience

00:32:24 ◼   ► energy.

00:32:25 ◼   ► And musicians perform differently when there's an audience present than when there isn't.

00:32:31 ◼   ► Now obviously those are two very different art contexts and some people can be better

00:32:34 ◼   ► than one than they are at the other.

00:32:37 ◼   ► But if what you want is the experience of being in a concert, which I think this can

00:32:41 ◼   ► probably very well deliver if it's captured that way.

00:32:45 ◼   ► If what you want is that experience of being in a concert, this isn't that.

00:32:48 ◼   ► This feels like you are in a room while they're performing a demo for you.

00:32:52 ◼   ► And that's interesting.

00:32:53 ◼   ► And the music can be interesting.

00:32:55 ◼   ► But it's not a concert experience really.

00:32:57 ◼   ► A concert is other people in the audience and the musicians playing to those people

00:33:03 ◼   ► in the audience, not playing to a camera person with nothing else there.

00:33:08 ◼   ► So this is a fun experiment, but there is so much more they could do.

00:33:12 ◼   ► And I hope some day, some time, they actually just give us concerts.

00:33:19 ◼   ► I like the snacks, but I do agree that a concert would be incredible.

00:33:22 ◼   ► And all I can think about is, you know, imagine, and maybe this is just me, but imagine MTV

00:33:28 ◼   ► Unplugged being brought back, because as far as I know they haven't done one in years.

00:33:31 ◼   ► But can you imagine Unplugged in this kind of environment?

00:33:35 ◼   ► Like it would be amazing.

00:33:37 ◼   ► And I can imagine that, you know, if Fish or whomever that you're into, Marco, even

00:33:41 ◼   ► if they did exactly what we just saw for eight or ten minutes, I mean, that would be one

00:33:44 ◼   ► tenth of one Fish song.

00:33:46 ◼   ► But nevertheless, that literally would be a snack.

00:33:48 ◼   ► But anyway, imagine how amazing that would be.

00:33:51 ◼   ► And like I would kill to see like, you know, Dave Matthews Band or someone else that I

00:33:54 ◼   ► really enjoy in this kind of a format.

00:33:56 ◼   ► So that doesn't mean you're wrong.

00:33:58 ◼   ► I mean, I think more would be better for sure.

00:34:01 ◼   ► But I'm really digging the idea.

00:34:04 ◼   ► Please, Apple, just pump the brakes a little bit on the extreme close-ups.

00:34:07 ◼   ► - Also, like, can you, like it doesn't even have to, I mean, look, I would love for them

00:34:11 ◼   ► to actually, you know, record full concerts that are in full-size venues that are actually

00:34:15 ◼   ► happening with real audience members.

00:34:16 ◼   ► But it can even be something a little smaller scale.

00:34:18 ◼   ► If they wanted to do like a halfway point between this and what I'm actually asking

00:34:22 ◼   ► for.

00:34:23 ◼   ► Look at things like the NPR Tiny Desk Concerts.

00:34:28 ◼   ► It's one of the great gifts to music.

00:34:29 ◼   ► Like I love them.

00:34:30 ◼   ► - Oh, 100%.

00:34:31 ◼   ► - They get such great artists there and it's such a cool recording environment where, for

00:34:36 ◼   ► those of you who don't know, just look up YouTube for a Tiny Desk Concert and look for

00:34:40 ◼   ► any artists that you've even heard of, even ones you haven't.

00:34:44 ◼   ► It's totally worth seeing 'cause they literally just like host artists in like a part of the

00:34:49 ◼   ► NPR office and it's full of like carpets and bookshelves that are full of books and everything.

00:34:54 ◼   ► So the acoustics are great.

00:34:56 ◼   ► It's a very absorbent acoustic.

00:34:58 ◼   ► There's no echo.

00:34:59 ◼   ► It sounds very warm and it's usually just surrounded by a ring of like all the people

00:35:04 ◼   ► who work there just like kind of standing around the boundaries of like a big square

00:35:07 ◼   ► of desks, I guess, listening and clapping.

00:35:11 ◼   ► And so it's like a small audience, small club feel with amazing acoustics and they get top

00:35:16 ◼   ► tier acts, like really good acts to play these.

00:35:20 ◼   ► And yeah, they play five, six songs maybe.

00:35:22 ◼   ► They're playing for like a half hour.

00:35:24 ◼   ► That's a great format and that kind of thing would also, I think, be a good inspiration.

00:35:29 ◼   ► What can music look like in VR?

00:35:31 ◼   ► That, give us that.

00:35:32 ◼   ► Make it seem like we are there listening to that.

00:35:35 ◼   ► That would be wonderful as well if you wanna have something that's a little bit closer

00:35:38 ◼   ► than a full concert arena.

00:35:41 ◼   ► But there's so much potential here for just take events that are literally already happening

00:35:46 ◼   ► and just put us there, bring us there through a fixed camera.

00:35:50 ◼   ► Please more.

00:35:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, I would love tiny desk concerts in this format.

00:35:57 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that's, I don't know why I didn't bring it up 'cause I adore tiny desk concerts

00:36:01 ◼   ► and they are, I think, the modern version of MTV Unplugged.

00:36:05 ◼   ► I mean, they're not literally unplugged all the times, but I think this is the spiritual

00:36:09 ◼   ► successor to MTV Unplugged.

00:36:10 ◼   ► And coincidentally, Ray has a tiny desk, which I actually preferred the songs that she performed

00:36:16 ◼   ► in concert for one, but it's still very good.

00:36:18 ◼   ► So you can check that out if you wanted to get a taste for her music.

00:36:22 ◼   ► But yeah, I really, really dig this idea.

00:36:28 ◼   ► I don't think they've perfected it, but it's off to a great start.

00:36:32 ◼   ► - It's almost like, I think what I'm hoping for, what we are seeing so far with what Apple's

00:36:38 ◼   ► producing content-wise is it kind of has, I would say, the same problem that Apple's

00:36:44 ◼   ► keynote videos now have, where they're just kind of dripping with too much money.

00:36:51 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:36:52 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:36:53 ◼   ► Production-wise, it's like everything is too amped up, it's too perfect, it's too high

00:37:00 ◼   ► budget, it's too corporate.

00:37:02 ◼   ► I don't know if they have the capability to pull back from that a little bit or to give

00:37:06 ◼   ► it a little bit, I'm not saying spend less money, I'm saying make it look like it wasn't

00:37:12 ◼   ► so corporate.

00:37:13 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:37:14 ◼   ► - It seems almost synthetic at a point, as opposed to just natural, for lack of a better

00:37:20 ◼   ► way of describing it.

00:37:21 ◼   ► - And I would call it overproduced, especially.

00:37:25 ◼   ► It starts losing its humanity and kind of organicness.

00:37:28 ◼   ► And when you're talking about what the specs of the new iPhone are, fine, you can do that.

00:37:33 ◼   ► But when you're trying to show a performance of music, there should be some humanity still

00:37:40 ◼   ► left in there.

00:37:41 ◼   ► And I feel like Apple's current style, it squeezes a lot of that out, it makes it very

00:37:46 ◼   ► high polished, very high production, very high budget, very corporate feeling.

00:37:53 ◼   ► And part of why I love live music is because that's how studio albums sound.

00:37:58 ◼   ► Studio albums sound now very high budget, very production, all that stuff.

00:38:02 ◼   ► But live music usually is much more human.

00:38:06 ◼   ► That's part of why I like it.

00:38:07 ◼   ► And again, this is such a great format to make you feel like you are really there.

00:38:12 ◼   ► That's what this is great at.

00:38:14 ◼   ► You feel like you're really there.

00:38:16 ◼   ► And I think what I want to feel like is I am really in a little bit more human environment

00:38:22 ◼   ► and a little bit less produced environment.

00:38:24 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:38:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, you don't wanna be in Johnny Ive's white world.

00:38:27 ◼   ► - No.

00:38:28 ◼   ► - That's right.

00:38:29 ◼   ► - That's the bad place.

00:38:32 ◼   ► - We are sponsored this week by Aura Frames.

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00:38:44 ◼   ► ancient USB cable or maybe you needed to provide your own SD card or something like that.

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00:38:59 ◼   ► And they don't require any USB connections to anything.

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00:39:04 ◼   ► You just get on your phone and upload photos to the frame and it works via wifi and freaking

00:39:08 ◼   ► magic as far as I'm concerned.

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00:39:15 ◼   ► They just did it to be nice and genuinely these things are really great.

00:39:19 ◼   ► And we have one in our house on the wall and we gave one to my parents to put in their

00:39:22 ◼   ► house and they, especially my mom, freaking love this thing.

00:39:27 ◼   ► My mom uses it all the time to upload photos of her grandkids.

00:39:30 ◼   ► I can upload photos of her grandkids to her frame from here.

00:39:34 ◼   ► It really, really is great.

00:39:36 ◼   ► And if you're giving this as a gift, most of their frames, as far as I know, you can

00:39:40 ◼   ► actually get them most of the way set up without opening the box.

00:39:43 ◼   ► It's very, very clever and very well done.

00:39:46 ◼   ► And that honestly is indicative of these products as a whole.

00:39:49 ◼   ► They're very pretty.

00:39:50 ◼   ► The screen resolution is really great.

00:39:52 ◼   ► They support live photos.

00:39:53 ◼   ► You can tap on a little pad and you can see where pictures were taken for some of their

00:39:58 ◼   ► frames.

00:39:59 ◼   ► Genuinely, these things are really, really great.

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00:40:23 ◼   ► Thank you to aura for sponsoring the show.

00:40:29 ◼   ► John welcome back to the show.

00:40:30 ◼   ► Can you tell me about using large external drives with Mac OS please?

00:40:33 ◼   ► We've been talking about this topic since discussing storage prices and the new Mac

00:40:36 ◼   ► minis and the fact that unlike the laptops, it's not incredibly inconvenient to use external

00:40:42 ◼   ► storage, but Oh, how do you deal with that?

00:40:43 ◼   ► How do you divide up your stuff between your internal drive and your external drive and

00:40:48 ◼   ► what are the limitations?

00:40:50 ◼   ► One of the things that came up on past episodes was what about my photo library?

00:40:53 ◼   ► That's big.

00:40:55 ◼   ► And we discussed it in vague terms because none of us had the personal experience with

00:40:58 ◼   ► moving the photo library to an external drive.

00:41:00 ◼   ► It turns out Apple has a support document on it, which we will link in the show notes.

00:41:06 ◼   ► As Apple says to save storage space on your Mac, you can move your photos library to a

00:41:09 ◼   ► different storage device.

00:41:11 ◼   ► But there are some caveats though.

00:41:13 ◼   ► There's much more of the document, but just a little taste.

00:41:15 ◼   ► You can't store your library on a storage device use for time machine backups and to

00:41:18 ◼   ► avoid possible data loss.

00:41:20 ◼   ► Don't store your library on a removable storage device like an SD card, a USB flash drive,

00:41:24 ◼   ► or on a device shared over your network or the internet, including over a cloud based

00:41:27 ◼   ► storage service.

00:41:29 ◼   ► So as always, there are caveats, but Apple says that it is officially supported and they

00:41:32 ◼   ► can explain to you how.

00:41:35 ◼   ► But Mark Wickens wrote in with some personal experiences that show even though it's officially

00:41:39 ◼   ► supported there are other things that might thwart you.

00:41:44 ◼   ► Mark says, "I have my photos library and a cheap external SSD.

00:41:48 ◼   ► It's great, except occasionally the SSD will randomly unmount itself and I'll have to kill

00:41:51 ◼   ► the photos cloud sync process to get syncing working again after remounting or I could

00:41:55 ◼   ► just reboot.

00:41:56 ◼   ► But it happens about once a month so it's bearable and worth it to keep my faster internal

00:42:00 ◼   ► SSD reserved for day to day work.

00:42:02 ◼   ► I can say that OneDrive did not like syncing to its folder in an external SSD.

00:42:06 ◼   ► It coincided with various sleep issues and stuck processes.

00:42:09 ◼   ► That was over a year ago now so it might be fixed but I haven't risked trying it."

00:42:12 ◼   ► This is part of the experience of having stuff in external drives.

00:42:15 ◼   ► Everything should be fine, especially if they say it's officially supported, but you kind

00:42:19 ◼   ► of have to make sure that external drive stays mounted all the time just like your internal

00:42:23 ◼   ► drive would.

00:42:24 ◼   ► And some programs inexplicably get angry about having their stuff over there and so you kind

00:42:30 ◼   ► of have to go on a case by case basis to see which ones like it.

00:42:33 ◼   ► I still continue to think that booting from the external drive, quote unquote "booting

00:42:36 ◼   ► from the external drive" see past episodes about what's really happening.

00:42:39 ◼   ► But anyway, booting from an external drive simplifies things greatly because at least

00:42:42 ◼   ► your stuff is on the boot drive.

00:42:45 ◼   ► But speaking of that, when I was experimenting with Apple intelligence in the beta versions

00:42:51 ◼   ► of Mac OS, I was using an external drive on my wife's Mac studio to boot that thing, to

00:42:57 ◼   ► boot from that beta OS.

00:42:59 ◼   ► But it wouldn't let me use Apple intelligence.

00:43:00 ◼   ► I got through all the waiting lists and it said, "Sorry, Apple intelligence doesn't work

00:43:04 ◼   ► on an external drive."

00:43:05 ◼   ► And I was booting from that external drive and I hope that was just a beta thing.

00:43:09 ◼   ► Remember, we discussed it in the showcase.

00:43:10 ◼   ► I don't know if you were there.

00:43:11 ◼   ► No, I guess not.

00:43:12 ◼   ► Yeah, but anyway, I hope that was just like a beta thing or whatever.

00:43:17 ◼   ► I didn't really pay much attention to it.

00:43:18 ◼   ► But since we've been having this discussion, many, many people have said, "I would consider

00:43:21 ◼   ► booting from an external drive except if I do that, I don't get Apple intelligence."

00:43:25 ◼   ► So apparently that's still a thing in the released versions of Mac OS.

00:43:29 ◼   ► Why?

00:43:30 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:43:31 ◼   ► It seems like a weird limitation to me, but that's a thing.

00:43:34 ◼   ► So if you care about Apple intelligence, apparently you're booting from that internal drive until

00:43:38 ◼   ► Apple changes that.

00:43:40 ◼   ► So keep that in mind.

00:43:42 ◼   ► And finally on this topic, there's another thing that came up frequently that I think

00:43:46 ◼   ► we alluded to vaguely in past episodes if we have more concrete details, to try to save

00:43:51 ◼   ► space on whatever SSD you're booted from.

00:43:54 ◼   ► Like if you're booted from the internal one but you want to put stuff somewhere else in

00:43:58 ◼   ► 15.1, in Mac OS 15.1 there is an option in the Mac App Store if you just go to settings,

00:44:03 ◼   ► there's a checkbox that says, "Download and install large apps to a separate disk."

00:44:08 ◼   ► And the subtext is, "Apps larger than one gigabyte will download and install to the disk that

00:44:13 ◼   ► you choose."

00:44:14 ◼   ► And then you can pick a disk.

00:44:15 ◼   ► It's weird they don't let you put all the apps over there, just the big ones and you

00:44:17 ◼   ► don't get to pick that threshold size.

00:44:19 ◼   ► But if you've got some really big apps, like I can imagine maybe games have a lot of content

00:44:23 ◼   ► or other big creative apps, try that setting in the App Store to see if you can get your

00:44:30 ◼   ► files over there.

00:44:31 ◼   ► And I think that's for downloading, like for future downloads.

00:44:34 ◼   ► I don't think it moves any of your existing applications over, but I guess you could just

00:44:37 ◼   ► try copying them there or just deleting them and redownloading them if you wanted.

00:44:40 ◼   ► Although if they're large, they might be kind of onerous.

00:44:42 ◼   ► But yeah, part of dealing with an external drive, even if you rebooted from it, is working

00:44:48 ◼   ► out all of these issues.

00:44:50 ◼   ► Honestly, like this sounds like a lot of scary limitations.

00:44:54 ◼   ► You're like, "Oh, I don't want to do that.

00:44:56 ◼   ► I guess I'll just pay the Apple price for having the big internal thing."

00:44:58 ◼   ► That does simplify stuff, but as someone who has had a series of tower Mac computers where

00:45:05 ◼   ► they have had multiple drives installed in them, I know they're not external drives.

00:45:10 ◼   ► Technically they're internal, but from the OS's perspective, I wonder...

00:45:14 ◼   ► I haven't actually tried this because I can't use Apple intelligence on my Intel Mac anyway,

00:45:17 ◼   ► but someday when I get an ARM-based Mac, if I get one that supports internal storage,

00:45:21 ◼   ► I'll see what it thinks about booting from an internal drive that's connected to some

00:45:27 ◼   ► ancillary bus like SATA or something, some slow internal bus.

00:45:32 ◼   ► Does Apple intelligence run?

00:45:33 ◼   ► Would it say, "Sorry, you can't run Apple intelligence when you're booted from an external

00:45:36 ◼   ► disk."

00:45:37 ◼   ► And it'd be like, "But it's not external.

00:45:38 ◼   ► It's in the box."

00:45:39 ◼   ► Does that count?

00:45:40 ◼   ► Lots of weird caveats.

00:45:42 ◼   ► But anyway, in all my experience of having many drives inside of my big tower Macs, I've

00:45:46 ◼   ► been able to freely boot for many of them, and it has not made any difference in my life.

00:45:50 ◼   ► But of course, I'm still in the Intel world, so things are definitely different when it

00:45:54 ◼   ► comes to booting on Apple Silicon.

00:45:56 ◼   ► And by the time I finally go over to Apple Silicon, hopefully they'll have some of these

00:45:59 ◼   ► limitations worked out, but we'll see.

00:46:01 ◼   ► Do you honestly think that your first Apple Silicon Mac is going to have internal drive

00:46:05 ◼   ► bays?

00:46:06 ◼   ► Who knows?

00:46:07 ◼   ► Who knows?

00:46:08 ◼   ► It's a Game Four Extreme, and it comes in the big tower case, and I somehow decided

00:46:12 ◼   ► to buy it.

00:46:13 ◼   ► The odds are against it.

00:46:14 ◼   ► But you know, could happen.

00:46:15 ◼   ► This is the time where anything could happen.

00:46:17 ◼   ► Would it be like $8,000?

00:46:19 ◼   ► Do you remember what he spent on it?

00:46:22 ◼   ► His current one is as much as a damn Civic.

00:46:24 ◼   ► Or was, anyway.

00:46:25 ◼   ► Now it's worth as much as a Yugo.

00:46:27 ◼   ► But that's all right.

00:46:28 ◼   ► I was looking at something, sent us some feedback about someone was benchmarking one of the

00:46:31 ◼   ► dual GPU cards that you could get for my Mac Pro, and how amazingly fast it was, even compared

00:46:36 ◼   ► to modern video cards or whatever.

00:46:39 ◼   ► And they were like, "Oh, and I bought this on eBay or whatever, so I did an eBay search

00:46:42 ◼   ► to see how much these go for."

00:46:43 ◼   ► It's like the 6800X Duo, it's got two Radeon 6800 GPUs on a single card, and you could

00:46:51 ◼   ► put two of those cards inside my computer.

00:46:53 ◼   ► They still go for like $3,000 on eBay.

00:46:57 ◼   ► For each card.

00:46:58 ◼   ► Gracious.

00:46:59 ◼   ► Yeah, so you would think the price would be dropping rapidly, because who wants this?

00:47:04 ◼   ► It's old, it's obviously, like, why would you, you know, someone might need it, I guess,

00:47:09 ◼   ► but like, still, their original retail price was $5,000, and you can find them on eBay

00:47:13 ◼   ► for $4,000, $3,000 in that range, and yeah, that's not, that's well above the threshold

00:47:19 ◼   ► of me wanting to buy one to experiment with it.

00:47:21 ◼   ► It's only, I think it's only like almost as fast as an Nvidia 4090, although if you got

00:47:26 ◼   ► two of them, you'd be faster than a 4090.

00:47:28 ◼   ► Anyway, don't recommend, but there's a lot of cool technology, and for whatever reason,

00:47:35 ◼   ► it's still not dirt cheap.

00:47:37 ◼   ► One other eBay search I have, by the way, is for the, you know, the bent piece of metal

00:47:40 ◼   ► I have holding my internal drives?

00:47:42 ◼   ► It was like $400 because they made you buy a hard drive with it or whatever.

00:47:47 ◼   ► I have an eBay search on that just to see, surely the bent piece of metal that has no

00:47:51 ◼   ► electronics in it, surely the price of that will come down from a few hundred bucks.

00:47:55 ◼   ► The answer is no.

00:47:56 ◼   ► But still, if you find it on eBay, they're selling, they're being sold for, not just

00:48:00 ◼   ► being listed for, but being, you know, sold for multiple hundreds of dollars for a bent

00:48:04 ◼   ► piece of metal.

00:48:05 ◼   ► It's a wild world out there.

00:48:06 ◼   ► - By the way, for the record, my estimate of $8,000 is definitely wrong because right

00:48:11 ◼   ► now the current Mac Pro with the M2 Ultra is $7,000 if you want some of the GPU cores

00:48:19 ◼   ► disabled, or if you actually want the entire GPU power of the M2 Ultra, it's $8,000 for

00:48:24 ◼   ► the machine.

00:48:25 ◼   ► So there is no way that if they did an extreme with two Ultras next to each other, no way

00:48:31 ◼   ► that's less than 12 grand.

00:48:32 ◼   ► Like there's at least, and possibly more than that, maybe 15 grand to start.

00:48:36 ◼   ► Like it would be ridiculous.

00:48:39 ◼   ► - Odds are against it, but we'll see.

00:48:40 ◼   ► - I can't, I can't.

00:48:43 ◼   ► I am genuinely very curious and excited to see what is the final straw that breaks the

00:48:52 ◼   ► camels back that gets you to buy a new Mac because I feel like, I'm not even convinced

00:48:58 ◼   ► that being locked out of new versions of Mac OS is going to be enough to get you to upgrade.

00:49:02 ◼   ► - No, the real question is what will be the straw that breaks us back to get them to buy

00:49:06 ◼   ► a gaming PC?

00:49:07 ◼   ► That's the real question.

00:49:08 ◼   ► - That's true, that's true.

00:49:09 ◼   ► - I just bought a PS5 Pro.

00:49:10 ◼   ► I'm not getting a gaming PC, my PS5 Pro is great.

00:49:16 ◼   ► - Celeste Hudek writes, regarding the speculated quote unquote low price of $299 for Apple's

00:49:22 ◼   ► home device with a screen, well, a brand new iPad is only $50 more right now.

00:49:27 ◼   ► I bought one a few years ago and stuck it to my fridge.

00:49:29 ◼   ► It's always on with an all widget homepage that shows photo slideshows, calendar, and

00:49:33 ◼   ► weather and has some home controls.

00:49:35 ◼   ► It also controls the multi-room Sonos system.

00:49:39 ◼   ► - That's Apple's competition.

00:49:40 ◼   ► You know, if they're going to make a home thing that's kind of like an iPad but is much

00:49:44 ◼   ► more limited, doesn't have an app store.

00:49:46 ◼   ► Hopefully it won't cost as much as the low end iPad.

00:49:50 ◼   ► That would be a weird, I mean, not that Apple hasn't sometimes had really weird pricing

00:49:55 ◼   ► arrangements where you're like, why would anyone buy this when they can get this other

00:49:58 ◼   ► better thing from a product line for less money?

00:50:00 ◼   ► They've done that sometimes, but I feel like it really does put a ceiling on the potential

00:50:07 ◼   ► sane price for a home thing with a screen, unless it has features that Apple's iPad doesn't

00:50:14 ◼   ► like, for example, if it comes with very fancy high fidelity speakers that are better than

00:50:19 ◼   ► the ones that come with a $350 iPad.

00:50:22 ◼   ► But we'll see, they keep lowering the price of the bottom end iPad and I can't imagine

00:50:26 ◼   ► that the hardware in their home device is going to be much more powerful than the low

00:50:31 ◼   ► end iPad.

00:50:32 ◼   ► So hopefully that puts a ceiling on their price.

00:50:34 ◼   ► - So a few weeks ago, I think it was, there were some very, very funny Apple intelligence

00:50:40 ◼   ► notification summaries that I think John had collected and we will put links to these in

00:50:45 ◼   ► the show notes, but we wanted to take a quick nickel tour of all of them.

00:50:48 ◼   ► A friend of the show, Steve Trout Smith wrote, "Sometimes the summary is less helpful than

00:50:52 ◼   ► the subject line."

00:50:53 ◼   ► So the summary reads, "Netflix is sending an email to remind you about a new movie coming

00:50:57 ◼   ► out on Wednesday."

00:50:59 ◼   ► And what was summarized, the subject is, "Coming Wednesday, November 13th, hot frosty."

00:51:04 ◼   ► So the subject actually specified the movie, but the summary did not.

00:51:09 ◼   ► Well done.

00:51:10 ◼   ► - So the summary is like, people don't always, we talked about this before, about subject

00:51:13 ◼   ► lines versus summaries and how subject lines can lie to you and be incomplete and people

00:51:17 ◼   ► don't write good subjects.

00:51:19 ◼   ► But in the case where there is information in the summary, in the subject line, the summary

00:51:24 ◼   ► is trying to summarize not just the subject line, but the entire email and it has missed

00:51:28 ◼   ► out on the thing you might want to know about.

00:51:30 ◼   ► If you're going to give me one line description about a movie that's coming out soon and they

00:51:34 ◼   ► name the movie, name the movie, right?

00:51:37 ◼   ► But it's not a person doing this, it's just a big bucket of numbers and it didn't come

00:51:42 ◼   ► up with a useful thing.

00:51:43 ◼   ► And so in this case, it would have been better just to show the subject line, but it didn't.

00:51:46 ◼   ► And this, by the way, this is like, speaking of Apple intelligence, doesn't work on external

00:51:50 ◼   ► drives, doesn't work on my Intel Mac, all this other stuff.

00:51:53 ◼   ► I would be more bummed about that if I was more jazzed about the Apple intelligence features.

00:51:59 ◼   ► Like I've tried them on my wife's Mac, I tried them on my phone and my iPad.

00:52:03 ◼   ► Right now, for me personally, the Apple intelligence features are mostly a technical curiosity

00:52:07 ◼   ► and a thing I'm interested in looking at for the purposes of this show.

00:52:10 ◼   ► But in my day to day life, they're not exactly wowing me.

00:52:13 ◼   ► So I don't think so far, the lack of Apple intelligence is going to be a thing that drags

00:52:18 ◼   ► me to a new Mac sooner.

00:52:20 ◼   ► I actually think that the notification summaries, this whole follow up topic, notwithstanding,

00:52:25 ◼   ► I think they're generally pretty good.

00:52:26 ◼   ► They definitely miss from time to time, but by and large, I've actually been pretty pleased

00:52:31 ◼   ► with them.

00:52:32 ◼   ► But with that said, Chris Hancock had tweeted, tweeted, whatever, poor summary of the fight,

00:52:37 ◼   ► Siri.

00:52:38 ◼   ► So the summary is there are apparently 44 notifications from the New York Times, which

00:52:42 ◼   ► were summarized to be Mike Tyson defeated Jake Paul, Israeli aides under investigation

00:52:46 ◼   ► for leaks and record doctoring.

00:52:49 ◼   ► The three most recent notifications that it appears that Apple intelligence summarized

00:52:53 ◼   ► read as follows.

00:52:54 ◼   ► October 7 leak investigation, aides to Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel are being investigated

00:52:58 ◼   ► over accusations of leaks and record doctoring related to the Hamas war from the Atlantic.

00:53:03 ◼   ► Jake Paul defeated Mike Tyson, not the other way around via unanimous decision in Netflix,

00:53:08 ◼   ► high profile Netflix is high profile boxing showcase.

00:53:11 ◼   ► And then finally from the Atlantic, Mike Tyson, the former world heavyweight champion will

00:53:13 ◼   ► soon fight Jake Paul, the YouTube returned boxer follow along live.

00:53:16 ◼   ► That's exactly what I was talking about with sports results.

00:53:19 ◼   ► They can't get much simpler than a fight.

00:53:20 ◼   ► Two people, one of them is the winner and it got it wrong.

00:53:24 ◼   ► And if you read that summary, you could be forgiven for swiping it away because you're

00:53:29 ◼   ► not that into it.

00:53:30 ◼   ► And just the next day when talking with friends, like I can't believe Mike Tyson beat Jake

00:53:33 ◼   ► Paul.

00:53:34 ◼   ► They're like, what are you talking about?

00:53:35 ◼   ► Because you didn't watch it.

00:53:36 ◼   ► You didn't care.

00:53:37 ◼   ► You just read the notification.

00:53:38 ◼   ► That's a pretty important thing to get right.

00:53:40 ◼   ► Don't trust notification summaries.

00:53:41 ◼   ► If you see that little icon, which looks like two little lines and then like a little arrow

00:53:44 ◼   ► swooping down and you actually care about what it says, tap through.

00:53:50 ◼   ► We are brought to you this episode by Uncommon Goods.

00:53:53 ◼   ► Spark something uncommon this holiday season with incredible hand-picked gifts from Uncommon

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00:55:38 ◼   ► [Music]

00:55:41 ◼   ► The Department of Justice says Google must sell Chrome to crack open its search monopoly.

00:55:46 ◼   ► So reading from the verge.

00:55:48 ◼   ► There's kind of a lot here, but forgive me because I think it's all fairly important.

00:55:52 ◼   ► The Department of Justice says that Google must divest the Chrome web browser to restore

00:55:57 ◼   ► competition to the online search market.

00:55:59 ◼   ► And it left the door open to requiring the company to spin out Android 2.

00:56:03 ◼   ► The initial proposed final judgment refines the DOJ's earlier high level outline of remedies

00:56:08 ◼   ► after Judge Amit Mehta found Google maintained an illegal monopoly in search and in search

00:56:14 ◼   ► text advertising.

00:56:15 ◼   ► The filing includes a broad range of requirements the DOJ hopes the court will impose on Google

00:56:19 ◼   ► from restricting the company from entering certain kinds of agreements to more broadly

00:56:23 ◼   ► breaking the company up.

00:56:24 ◼   ► The DOJ's latest proposal doubles down on its request to spin out Google's Chrome browser,

00:56:29 ◼   ► which the government views as key access point to searching the web.

00:56:33 ◼   ► While the government isn't going so far as to demand Google spin out the Android business,

00:56:38 ◼   ► it's leaving the option open.

00:56:39 ◼   ► The government says a spin out could also be mandated should those other solutions prove

00:56:44 ◼   ► ineffective.

00:56:45 ◼   ► At restoring competition to the market, the DOJ says Google might even choose to divestiture

00:56:49 ◼   ► itself if the company doesn't want to comply with some of the other rules the government

00:56:53 ◼   ► is proposing against self-preferencing Google search in Android.

00:56:58 ◼   ► Other remedies the government is asking the court to impose include prohibiting Google

00:57:01 ◼   ► from offering money or anything of value to third parties, including Apple and other phone

00:57:04 ◼   ► makers to make Google's search engine the default, or to discourage them from hosting

00:57:08 ◼   ► search competitors.

00:57:10 ◼   ► It also wants to ban Google from preferencing its search engine on any owned and operated

00:57:15 ◼   ► platform like YouTube or Gemini, mandate it let rivals access its search index at "marginal

00:57:20 ◼   ► cost and on an ongoing basis," and require Google to syndicate its search results, ranking

00:57:25 ◼   ► signals and U.S. originated query data for 10 years.

00:57:28 ◼   ► The DOJ is also asking that Google let websites opt out of its AI overviews without being

00:57:33 ◼   ► penalized in search results.

00:57:35 ◼   ► In response, Google published a blog post saying the DOJ's proposed remedies go "way

00:57:40 ◼   ► overboard."

00:57:41 ◼   ► The post, attributed to Alphabet's chief legal officer Kent Walker, says the DOJ is "pushing

00:57:47 ◼   ► a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America's global technology

00:57:51 ◼   ► leadership."

00:57:52 ◼   ► That blog post response, it's spicy.

00:57:55 ◼   ► They are not happy.

00:57:59 ◼   ► On the one side, it's like the old man in me is kind of like, wow, that's a little inappropriate

00:58:02 ◼   ► to talk like that.

00:58:03 ◼   ► On the other side, I'm like, yeah, let's just call it like we see it.

00:58:06 ◼   ► Now, I'm not entirely sure I agree with how they see it, but nevertheless, I appreciate

00:58:10 ◼   ► the fact that they're just letting it all hang out.

00:58:12 ◼   ► So that's pretty good stuff.

00:58:14 ◼   ► And to be clear, this is just the DOJ saying this is what we think should happen.

00:58:17 ◼   ► There's no official decision yet, but they all like the DOJ won the case.

00:58:21 ◼   ► They're saying here's how we think, here are the remedies that we are proposing.

00:58:25 ◼   ► And it's going to be months and months until something actually happens.

00:58:27 ◼   ► But this is the time for Google to say the DOJ's proposed remedies are terrible and they're

00:58:31 ◼   ► going to cause the end of the world.

00:58:33 ◼   ► And it's time for the DOJ to ask for everything that it wants.

00:58:35 ◼   ► Split it all up, Chrome, split it this, split it whatever.

00:58:37 ◼   ► I don't know if I want to read Ben's take before we talk about ours.

00:58:40 ◼   ► So a friend of the show, Ben Thompson, had what I thought was a really good take on this.

00:58:45 ◼   ► Ben writes, and I'm picking and choosing a couple of things here, but Ben writes, "Chrome,

00:58:49 ◼   ► meanwhile, is an excellent input for a data factory.

00:58:52 ◼   ► Owning the browser is a bit like owning an operating system when it comes to the web.

00:58:55 ◼   ► The browser has to handle every single piece of data that comes and goes, including decrypting

00:58:59 ◼   ► encrypted data.

00:59:01 ◼   ► It's one of the pieces of software you, as a user, have to give absolute trust to.

00:59:06 ◼   ► It's unclear exactly what data Google harvests from this or how it builds proxies of your

00:59:10 ◼   ► browsing habits so it has plausible deniability in terms of harvesting information.

00:59:13 ◼   ► But there's no question that Chrome is a major asset for Google's business.

00:59:17 ◼   ► At a minimum, it ensures that Google searches front and center without having to pay any

00:59:20 ◼   ► traffic acquisition costs.

00:59:22 ◼   ► That more than anything is what rubs me the wrong way about these remedies.

00:59:24 ◼   ► At a very high level, the core issue in this case is that Google has been effectively paying

00:59:27 ◼   ► off Apple.

00:59:28 ◼   ► The one company with the resources and motivation to build a competitive search engine to ensure

00:59:32 ◼   ► that they don't compete with them.

00:59:34 ◼   ► To that end, the remedy seems obvious.

00:59:37 ◼   ► Make Google stop.

00:59:38 ◼   ► Stop paying Apple, that is.

00:59:39 ◼   ► I think that Google would dominate those search services regardless.

00:59:43 ◼   ► The crime was in paying off a competitor and demanding that Google give away the result

00:59:47 ◼   ► of nearly three decades of development and innovation instead of simply addressing the

00:59:50 ◼   ► problem at hand is too much."

00:59:52 ◼   ► So when I look at this, I kind of think that the EU approach is as problematic as their

00:59:57 ◼   ► solutions have been.

00:59:58 ◼   ► Their approach to deciding what the problem is is refreshing compared to the US version.

01:00:05 ◼   ► So in the US version, you have to prove that the company violated some existing US law.

01:00:11 ◼   ► And so the DOJ makes its cases based on what it thinks it can prove that you did wrong.

01:00:19 ◼   ► But very often, and I think in this case, the thing that a company did that's illegal

01:00:25 ◼   ► and then the remedies that would come from that don't actually solve what we think the

01:00:30 ◼   ► underlying problem is.

01:00:31 ◼   ► The EU just says, "There's insufficient competition in MarketX because we think there is.

01:00:37 ◼   ► And therefore, here's a bunch of remedies that we think will restore our competition."

01:00:39 ◼   ► And we can debate the remedies, but they basically decide there's not enough competition here.

01:00:43 ◼   ► There's too few companies that have too much power.

01:00:46 ◼   ► But you can't just go into court in the US and say, "I think there's too few companies

01:00:49 ◼   ► that have too much power and they should be knocked down a peg."

01:00:52 ◼   ► It's like, "Well, what law did they violate?"

01:00:54 ◼   ► There's not such broad regulatory control where you can just talk about it for a while

01:00:58 ◼   ► and decide, "We've all voted and we think there's not enough competition in this market."

01:01:05 ◼   ► And so they have to say, "Oh, they did this illegal thing and that according to this rule

01:01:08 ◼   ► and these antitrust laws that are really old."

01:01:10 ◼   ► And the remedies they come up with, what Ben's getting at is, "Look, the thing that Ben thinks

01:01:16 ◼   ► they did the most wrong is this, and he wishes they would just not do that."

01:01:20 ◼   ► And everyone looking at the case will say, "I think the thing Google did most wrong was

01:01:23 ◼   ► this, and therefore they should do that."

01:01:25 ◼   ► But the thing the government actually proved is that Google did X, and then the government

01:01:28 ◼   ► gets to pick what they think the remedies are.

01:01:30 ◼   ► And this is where these cases always seem to fall down in my lifetime anyway, where

01:01:33 ◼   ► the DOJ will win some kind of antitrust case against a tech company and say, "And the solution

01:01:37 ◼   ► is this."

01:01:38 ◼   ► And you look at the solution and you're like, "Wait, how is that going to fix things?"

01:01:43 ◼   ► So in this case, you got to break off Chrome because you having Chrome is not fair because

01:01:49 ◼   ► you get to favor yourself and you get to observe everyone's activity and yada, yada, right?

01:01:56 ◼   ► So that's got to be a separate company.

01:01:58 ◼   ► So many problems with that.

01:01:59 ◼   ► First of all, who would want Chrome?

01:02:02 ◼   ► I guess the obvious answer is Microsoft because they've been trying to.

01:02:06 ◼   ► They've been trying to have their own web browser, Edge.

01:02:10 ◼   ► IE was so damaged by being terrible for so many years that they had to come up with a

01:02:13 ◼   ► new name, and Edge uses the Chromium engine and Chrome is the world's most popular browser,

01:02:18 ◼   ► just like IE used to be, so Microsoft should buy it or whatever.

01:02:21 ◼   ► But the thing is, Chrome as a standalone business doesn't make any sense and is difficult to

01:02:26 ◼   ► run.

01:02:27 ◼   ► Just ask Mozilla.

01:02:28 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:02:29 ◼   ► I mean, the entire business model for web browsers for the last decade or more has been

01:02:33 ◼   ► get Google to pay you to be the default.

01:02:35 ◼   ► That's how everyone makes their money in browsers.

01:02:38 ◼   ► It costs such a huge amount of money to maintain a modern web browser because the web is complicated

01:02:44 ◼   ► and evolving.

01:02:45 ◼   ► So you need some pretty big source of funding to fund that development.

01:02:50 ◼   ► Web browsers are not simple and they're not static.

01:02:53 ◼   ► I guess people take them for granted.

01:02:54 ◼   ► They're like, "Oh, I just browse the web."

01:02:56 ◼   ► But from a technical perspective, the things that underlie web browsers are incredibly

01:03:01 ◼   ► complicated and change all the time.

01:03:04 ◼   ► There's security problems.

01:03:05 ◼   ► There's new standards.

01:03:06 ◼   ► It is a huge Herculean effort.

01:03:10 ◼   ► And by the way, that effort is made a million times worse if you are not the leader.

01:03:13 ◼   ► So one of the benefits Google gets to owning Chrome is that Chrome has massive market share.

01:03:18 ◼   ► It is dominant.

01:03:20 ◼   ► And that means Google, which has tons of web apps, like the Google web apps, not just Google

01:03:25 ◼   ► search, but all Google web apps are very important part of Google's whole value proposition.

01:03:32 ◼   ► It's much easier now for Google to ensure that all of its web apps work with the world's

01:03:37 ◼   ► most popular web browser because they own that too.

01:03:40 ◼   ► Back in the bad old days, Google would try to make web apps and half the world was on

01:03:44 ◼   ► IE and they would have to make their web apps work with a browser owned by a company that's

01:03:50 ◼   ► their competitor.

01:03:51 ◼   ► And that was difficult because sometimes that browser didn't do the things they wanted and

01:03:54 ◼   ► Google said, "Oh, we can make this cool thing in our web app if only the browsers did X,

01:03:58 ◼   ► Y, and Z."

01:03:59 ◼   ► And they'd have to beg them, "Please, can you add this feature to IE?

01:04:01 ◼   ► Please, can you retire IE 6?"

01:04:05 ◼   ► It made Google's life more difficult.

01:04:08 ◼   ► Chrome is the most valuable to Google by a huge margin, not just because it's the world's

01:04:15 ◼   ► biggest web browser ever, but because of the nature of Google's business and its advertising

01:04:19 ◼   ► business or whatever.

01:04:21 ◼   ► It is so valuable to Google and Google made it from nothing.

01:04:24 ◼   ► It wasn't popular when it started.

01:04:25 ◼   ► They made their own web browser.

01:04:26 ◼   ► They stuck with it, which is strange for Google.

01:04:29 ◼   ► And they just kept developing it.

01:04:31 ◼   ► They just kept developing it and it got to where it is.

01:04:33 ◼   ► And now in the US they're saying, "There's not enough competition for search advertising,"

01:04:39 ◼   ► which I basically agree with.

01:04:40 ◼   ► That's true.

01:04:41 ◼   ► And the fix is you have to get rid of Chrome.

01:04:46 ◼   ► And I don't think it's almost unprecedented.

01:04:50 ◼   ► The most popular, very important application, web browsers are a very important application

01:04:54 ◼   ► and the most popular one in the world, they're saying the one company that developed it and

01:04:59 ◼   ► can support it and can develop it, the one company that this is most valuable to, you

01:05:04 ◼   ► have to spin it off.

01:05:05 ◼   ► There's no way it can survive as an independent company because they have no way to make money

01:05:09 ◼   ► and they have to start getting into weird crypto stuff or they have to be even worse

01:05:12 ◼   ► than what Google was doing.

01:05:13 ◼   ► I mean, again, look at Mozilla trying to be an independent web browser and figuring out

01:05:19 ◼   ► that business model.

01:05:21 ◼   ► And the other option is, okay, well, it's an independent company, then Microsoft tries

01:05:24 ◼   ► to snap it up.

01:05:25 ◼   ► Is the DOJ not going to let Microsoft buy it because they're saying, "Oh, now we've

01:05:28 ◼   ► just transferred Chrome from one giant company to another and then we have to have another

01:05:32 ◼   ► trial against them."

01:05:33 ◼   ► Like, I don't see how Google getting rid of Chrome solves anything and it creates a whole

01:05:40 ◼   ► bunch of problems for the entire world wide web, which is an important platform that I

01:05:45 ◼   ► care about.

01:05:46 ◼   ► Not that Chrome is perfect and that Google should be able to, you know, like things that

01:05:49 ◼   ► Google does with Chrome are bad, but as Ben says, my perspective, tell them not to do

01:05:53 ◼   ► those things.

01:05:54 ◼   ► Don't say, "Oh, you've got to split Chrome into another company."

01:05:57 ◼   ► That'll solve the problem.

01:05:58 ◼   ► I don't think it will solve the problem.

01:06:00 ◼   ► I think it will make a whole bunch of new problems and I think it will make the Chrome

01:06:03 ◼   ► browser worse and I think it will make everyone's experience on the web worse and, yeah, it

01:06:07 ◼   ► will hurt Google a little bit.

01:06:09 ◼   ► But the goal is not just to do something mean that Google doesn't like.

01:06:12 ◼   ► Like it's not, you know, you're bad so you get punished.

01:06:15 ◼   ► Like we're supposed to be trying to solve the underlying problem, which is not enough

01:06:19 ◼   ► competition in search.

01:06:20 ◼   ► And there are a bunch of things in the remedy that go to that.

01:06:22 ◼   ► You can't pay people to have a privileged thing.

01:06:24 ◼   ► You can't, you know, you have to let people opt out of AI without, you know, downranking

01:06:28 ◼   ► them.

01:06:29 ◼   ► Like things that recognize the power that Google search has and saying you can't wield

01:06:33 ◼   ► that power in a way that stifles competition, yada, yada, right?

01:06:38 ◼   ► Those are all good, but splitting out Android is similar.

01:06:41 ◼   ► Splitting out Android, splitting out Google, like splitting out Android, but then saying

01:06:44 ◼   ► Android can't preference Google services.

01:06:47 ◼   ► What is Android if not an operating system for phones that is tightly integrated with

01:06:51 ◼   ► Google services?

01:06:52 ◼   ► It just has to be an operating system that doesn't have any services or lets you pick

01:06:56 ◼   ► from Google services.

01:06:58 ◼   ► And what's the alternative?

01:06:59 ◼   ► I don't think Apple is going to be vending a lot of its iCloud services to Android phones.

01:07:04 ◼   ► So it's just a mishmash of like OneDrive and Dropbox and whatever third party photos apps

01:07:11 ◼   ► are out there.

01:07:12 ◼   ► Like just if any of these remedies go through in the form that they're proposed, these big

01:07:18 ◼   ► ones about taking pieces of Google and chopping them off and throwing them out into the wilderness,

01:07:22 ◼   ► I don't think it's going to solve the problem and I think it's going to make things a real

01:07:26 ◼   ► mess for a long time.

01:07:27 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I'm not an expert in this kind of stuff, but when I look at what Google has

01:07:34 ◼   ► done over the years, they're obviously anti-competitive in a few pretty big ways.

01:07:40 ◼   ► At the same time, and I look at Chrome and I think Google's ownership over Chrome is

01:07:47 ◼   ► a huge problem.

01:07:49 ◼   ► It really is, they have used it in abusive ways, there is tons more abuse potential to

01:07:55 ◼   ► be had, it is very uncomfortable how much they control about the entire web via Chrome.

01:08:03 ◼   ► It's a little off, it's a little risky and it's not a great place for the web to be.

01:08:08 ◼   ► All that being said, I don't see how splitting up the company this way would really meaningfully

01:08:15 ◼   ► help a lot of that.

01:08:16 ◼   ► I think it would fail spectacularly and the fact is when you split up monopolies like

01:08:24 ◼   ► that, what can very easily happen over time is as the regulatory environment changes,

01:08:33 ◼   ► they can eventually kind of reform, like what AT&T largely did.

01:08:38 ◼   ► And so I think a more pragmatic solution here that's more likely to actually work is to

01:08:44 ◼   ► regulate the kind of behavior Google can do, but keep the company intact.

01:08:50 ◼   ► Keep Android, keep Chrome, because again, I don't see any plausible path for them to

01:08:57 ◼   ► be split off in a way that would actually achieve the goals that the DOJ probably wants.

01:09:03 ◼   ► And speaking of AT&T, like splitting off AT&T, when you take one big phone company and split

01:09:08 ◼   ► it into a bunch of little ones, those individual little phone companies are still profitable

01:09:14 ◼   ► sound businesses.

01:09:15 ◼   ► They're just smaller.

01:09:18 ◼   ► They sell phone service to people in a smaller geographic area, but phone service itself

01:09:22 ◼   ► is still profitable to sell.

01:09:24 ◼   ► People want it, it is a good product.

01:09:25 ◼   ► Android and Google are both effectively subsidized because what they do is serve the needs of

01:09:31 ◼   ► Google's other business, which is search advertising and selling advertising.

01:09:35 ◼   ► Android, if it was an independent business, would not be as free or cheap as it is to

01:09:40 ◼   ► all the different vendors, because right now it's like, oh, Android is open source, it's

01:09:43 ◼   ► free and you can port it or whatever, but hey, if you want to put it on your phone,

01:09:46 ◼   ► you have to use the Google Play services and so on and so forth.

01:09:48 ◼   ► If not, you've got to do a bunch of developing yourself, yada, yada.

01:09:51 ◼   ► Android is a standalone business.

01:09:53 ◼   ► Now it's got to start charging people.

01:09:54 ◼   ► Is it like, well, how do we pay for all these engineers who work on Android?

01:09:59 ◼   ► Subsidized businesses that serve the larger needs of a bigger company, a bigger abusive

01:10:03 ◼   ► monopoly, you can't just break them off like you could with the baby bells and say, Android,

01:10:07 ◼   ► you're free, go on your own, now we'll have competition.

01:10:10 ◼   ► Android is going to be like, how do we make money again?

01:10:13 ◼   ► Like, they have to raise their prices and then we go back to the bad old world where

01:10:18 ◼   ► cell phone makers are all developing their own OSs because they don't want to pay what

01:10:21 ◼   ► turns out to be a sustainable price for Android or everyone forks it and it's like they leave

01:10:26 ◼   ► Android behind because there's no reason to use the Google version if it doesn't privilege

01:10:30 ◼   ► Google services and Google is not forcing them to anymore.

01:10:32 ◼   ► Hey, maybe that's the goal to say Android is like Linux.

01:10:36 ◼   ► It's free to the world, it's open source, let a million different Android clones bloom.

01:10:40 ◼   ► No longer will Google be forcing you to use their services because they can't anymore

01:10:44 ◼   ► but it basically just makes it dissolve and the same thing with Chrome.

01:10:47 ◼   ► How are you going to pay for the development of Chrome?

01:10:49 ◼   ► Who's going to pay all those engineers to keep working on Chrome if it's not subsidized

01:10:52 ◼   ► because of how important it is to Google's other business?

01:10:56 ◼   ► It's not the same as breaking up the baby bells.

01:10:58 ◼   ► Those were, it's like, well, now you've just got a smaller phone company.

01:11:01 ◼   ► It would be like breaking Google up into a bunch of smaller Googles where there was like

01:11:04 ◼   ► a search engine for the left half of the United States and the right half but they still had

01:11:08 ◼   ► all the pieces together.

01:11:10 ◼   ► I just, I don't honestly, and I'm not against, I understand there would be more competition

01:11:15 ◼   ► briefly but I'm like we're at a stable equilibrium right now where the monopolies are abusing

01:11:21 ◼   ► their power.

01:11:22 ◼   ► We would like them to stop abusing their power but I'm not sure the solution to that is put

01:11:26 ◼   ► a stick of dynamite into monopolies and just blow their pieces all over the world and then

01:11:30 ◼   ► say, "Problem solved," and just walk away because I don't think that's the solution.

01:11:34 ◼   ► Again, the simpler version, make them not do the worst of the anti-competitive things

01:11:39 ◼   ► that they're doing.

01:11:41 ◼   ► That's not perfect.

01:11:42 ◼   ► They'll always find a way around it or whatever but I, there's less, I feel like there's less

01:11:46 ◼   ► collateral damage to just saying you can't pay Apple off, you can't privilege your products

01:11:52 ◼   ► and other products and so on and so forth but leaving intact the idea of you can continue

01:11:56 ◼   ► to put tons of money into developing Chrome because it is valuable to your business.

01:12:01 ◼   ► In Google's case, the EU type things are like, "Oh, you've got to have a choice screen, you

01:12:07 ◼   ► can't default to anything, yada, yada."

01:12:10 ◼   ► Google is still good enough that most people will pick them as the default because they

01:12:14 ◼   ► have brand recognition and a legacy of being a brand that people like so I don't think

01:12:19 ◼   ► Google should fear that type of competition.

01:12:21 ◼   ► They should say, "Bring it on.

01:12:22 ◼   ► None of our services are privileged.

01:12:24 ◼   ► None of our search engine is privileged, user choice for every single thing."

01:12:27 ◼   ► Now it is entirely open to competition.

01:12:29 ◼   ► Competition is free to form.

01:12:31 ◼   ► Maybe Apple will field a competitor, maybe Bing will get more leverage or whatever but

01:12:34 ◼   ► Google shouldn't shy away from that.

01:12:36 ◼   ► It would motivate them to make their search engine better and friendlier I think.

01:12:40 ◼   ► You can do all that without breaking these pieces up and saying Android and Chrome, you

01:12:45 ◼   ► have to sink or swim on your own as an independent business.

01:12:48 ◼   ► I'm very curious to see how this lands because it doesn't seem like it's tenable right

01:12:56 ◼   ► now.

01:12:57 ◼   ► Even though I think the Google response was a bit petulant whiny child, which I kind of

01:13:03 ◼   ► get, they're kind of making a point.

01:13:06 ◼   ► Of course they're being exceedingly dramatic about it but they're still making a decent

01:13:09 ◼   ► point and like you and like Ben have said, I don't feel like this is the right solution.

01:13:14 ◼   ► Safari by the way is a competitive browser.

01:13:17 ◼   ► There's Bing I guess but Apple hasn't made a competitive search engine which is Ben is

01:13:22 ◼   ► always saying that Google is essentially paying Apple off to prevent them from ever trying

01:13:25 ◼   ► to make a search engine which honestly I don't think Google should be afraid of because Apple

01:13:28 ◼   ► would not do a good job but whatever.

01:13:30 ◼   ► You never know.

01:13:31 ◼   ► Apple sometimes surprises you like they have.

01:13:33 ◼   ► Apple Silicon was a surprise to everybody.

01:13:34 ◼   ► Turns out Apple does a really good job on that, not so much on cars or video games or

01:13:39 ◼   ► a bunch of other stuff but anyway.

01:13:41 ◼   ► Safari exists and Apple subsidizes its development because it's important for them to have a

01:13:47 ◼   ► web browser that they control that's not owned by one of their competitors and it costs a

01:13:51 ◼   ► lot of money to develop Safari and that money is not, you know, if Safari was an independent

01:13:57 ◼   ► company they couldn't afford that.

01:13:58 ◼   ► How would Safari make money?

01:13:59 ◼   ► I guess from the Google search deal but that's going to soon be illegal anyway so like it

01:14:04 ◼   ► turns out giving away a web browser for free, one of the most complicated pieces of software

01:14:09 ◼   ► to develop and maintain that has to be compatible with the entire world wide web, that costs

01:14:14 ◼   ► a lot of money.

01:14:15 ◼   ► It needs to be funded somehow and we all agree that having more web browsers is better than

01:14:20 ◼   ► having fewer but all of those web browsers, if they're going to be competitive and useful,

01:14:26 ◼   ► need to have a source of funding and I think Apple funding Safari and Google funding Chrome

01:14:31 ◼   ► is a reasonable funding model to make two competitive web browsers for the world wide

01:14:36 ◼   ► web.

01:14:37 ◼   ► I don't think there can be 75 competitive web browsers because there's not enough different

01:14:42 ◼   ► funding models to fund 75 of them.

01:14:44 ◼   ► Maybe two is too few but throwing Chrome out into the woods and letting it wither, ending

01:14:48 ◼   ► up with just Safari, I keep leaving out Edge, I'm sorry Microsoft, or just leaving it open

01:14:54 ◼   ► source Chromium or whatever, I'm not saying there couldn't be a future with more competition,

01:14:58 ◼   ► there certainly can be but how to get there from here without tremendous disruption is

01:15:03 ◼   ► the difficult problem and of all the things that Google dominates and makes too little

01:15:08 ◼   ► competition at the very least Chrome actually does have some competition in Safari and I

01:15:14 ◼   ► guess Edge and Firefox and Opera.

01:15:18 ◼   ► You know all the Arc people have already written us.

01:15:21 ◼   ► But I mean those are a lot of the Chromium based browsers at Google would say hey look

01:15:24 ◼   ► we give away the main engine open source there can be lots of browser competition but in

01:15:28 ◼   ► the end all that matters is like how many people use this browser and if you look at

01:15:30 ◼   ► the market share ratios it's like it doesn't matter what those browsers do they basically

01:15:35 ◼   ► have to do what Chrome does just like back in the old days you just had to deal with

01:15:39 ◼   ► IE because as much as you may hate it so many people use it that it's a fact of life right

01:15:43 ◼   ► so and the fact that it used to be the same engine in both Safari and Chrome but they

01:15:48 ◼   ► sort of divorced into Blink and WebKit ages ago is you know another potential increase

01:15:55 ◼   ► in competition you know so of all the areas that where Google is causing problems this

01:16:00 ◼   ► is one where there actually is competition and we would like there to be more and I don't

01:16:04 ◼   ► think injuring Chrome is going to increase the competition that other stuff they propose

01:16:11 ◼   ► will increase competition you can't favor the search engine you can't pay Apple off

01:16:14 ◼   ► you can't you know punish people in Google search results you can't spy on people through

01:16:18 ◼   ► Chrome like stop them from doing all that data collection stuff one way to stop them

01:16:23 ◼   ► to say it's a whole different company and they won't share the data with you but that

01:16:26 ◼   ► seems pretty heavyweight.

01:16:29 ◼   ► Mark Erman had a report a few days ago now about allegedly a new Siri so reading from

01:16:36 ◼   ► Mark in Bloomberg the new Siri details of which haven't been reported uses more advanced

01:16:41 ◼   ► large language models or LLMs to allow for back and forth conversations the system also

01:16:46 ◼   ► can handle more sophisticated requests in a quicker fashion the new voice assistant

01:16:50 ◼   ► which will eventually be added to Apple intelligence is dubbed LLM Siri by those working on it

01:16:55 ◼   ► the company's planning to announce the overhaul soon as 2025 as part of the upcoming iOS 19

01:16:59 ◼   ► and Mac OS 16 software updates which are internally named Luck and Cheer like Apple intelligence

01:17:05 ◼   ► this fall the new features won't immediately be included in next year's crop of hardware

01:17:09 ◼   ► devices instead Apple's currently planning to release a new series of consumers as early

01:17:13 ◼   ► as spring 2026 about a year and a half from now holy freaking crap that's a long time

01:17:19 ◼   ► away the revamped Siri will rely on new Apple AI models to interact more like a human and

01:17:25 ◼   ► handle tasks in a way that's closer to chat GPT in Google's Gemini it also will make expanded

01:17:30 ◼   ► use of app intense which allow for more precise control of third-party apps so you will get

01:17:34 ◼   ► additional tweaks in the coming months as part of iOS 18 the iPhone's current operating

01:17:39 ◼   ► system the software will be able to draw on customer data to provide context for commands

01:17:43 ◼   ► and take action using the information on a user screen the iOS 18 version relies on a

01:17:47 ◼   ► first-generation Apple llm to determine if requests should use the existing Siri infrastructure

01:17:52 ◼   ► or be routed to a second llm that can handle more complex queries and tap into third-party

01:17:56 ◼   ► apps so buried at the very end of that summary is so oh by the way you're not totally for

01:18:02 ◼   ► you know forgetting this but like yeah iOS 18 also has promised and will have a version

01:18:09 ◼   ► of Siri that's llm power that is better you know the Siri we were promised back at WWDC

01:18:15 ◼   ► hey Siri will be better thanks to Apple intelligence it's not coming immediately but you know eventually

01:18:20 ◼   ► in the iOS 18 timeline you get a Siri with llm which makes me wonder how this iOS 19

01:18:27 ◼   ► one as is dubbed llm siri by the people working on it well that's llm siri what the hell is

01:18:32 ◼   ► the iOS 18 thing that uses llm siri is that sort of llm siri or half llm siri or llm siri

01:18:39 ◼   ► light it's a it's been a long time where it's like Apple intelligence is gonna make Siri

01:18:45 ◼   ► better but not when they updated the graphics which Mark Marko you know complained about

01:18:50 ◼   ► a few episodes ago and he's totally right you updated the graphics but you left the

01:18:53 ◼   ► same old dumb Siri back there answering the questions and so there goes your opportunity

01:18:59 ◼   ► to dazzle people with your new you know voice assistant and accompanying new appearance

01:19:05 ◼   ► instead you just get the accompanying new appearance but same old thing and so at some

01:19:09 ◼   ► point in the iOS 18 timeline there'll be a slightly better one that uses llms but now

01:19:14 ◼   ► we have to hear about oh no the real one where Siri's actually gonna be good that's iOS 19

01:19:19 ◼   ► but not launching with iOS 19 you know halfway through iOS 19's lifetime so maybe mid 2026

01:19:27 ◼   ► come on this is so stupid it's like Siri it's like we got him this time like Siri is is

01:19:36 ◼   ► always gonna get better in a couple of years look we we have yet to see the like the quote

01:19:44 ◼   ► unquote good Siri with iOS 18 it has not shipped yet so maybe once that ships that will remove

01:19:52 ◼   ► a lot of the pent-up demand for Siri to get better but honestly I don't trust them Siri

01:19:59 ◼   ► has zero credibility to me Apple has promised so many times that Siri is getting better

01:20:06 ◼   ► it's smarter than ever it's better than ever and it is still so disappointing to so many

01:20:12 ◼   ► people so often it's still so unreliable and inconsistent so often Siri has no credibility

01:20:20 ◼   ► and Apple's claims about Siri Apple's demos about Siri Apple's stated features of what

01:20:26 ◼   ► Siri can do all have no credibility to me because I have been burned I have I have gotten

01:20:32 ◼   ► my hopes up so many times and Apple has said now it's better and then I go try it and it

01:20:40 ◼   ► is the same old inconsistent dumb mess so maybe the iOS 18 one that still hasn't you

01:20:47 ◼   ► know actually shown itself maybe that really will be better maybe this alleged iOS 19 and

01:20:54 ◼   ► a half one will be even better than that I'll believe it when I see it.

01:20:59 ◼   ► I think we're all excited by it because of the promise of LMs that was the whole Apple

01:21:04 ◼   ► intelligence announcement at WWDC it's like I know we've been saying for years and years

01:21:07 ◼   ► that Siri's gonna get better and it totally hasn't and it's been disappointing but now

01:21:11 ◼   ► there's an actual concrete technology that you see in other competing products everyone

01:21:15 ◼   ► else is using it you can see their demos you can use their products right now as we're

01:21:20 ◼   ► on stage announcing our thing you can go and talk to chat GPT and do it like this is you

01:21:24 ◼   ► know LMs there's real promise it's not just like vague oh we're working on Siri and it's

01:21:29 ◼   ► gonna be better whatever there's a concrete technology that you can look at and say yeah

01:21:33 ◼   ► put that in Siri because that is like what Siri does but better and Apple says yes we

01:21:38 ◼   ► are totally gonna put that into Siri and it's coming in iOS 18 just not immediately in iOS

01:21:42 ◼   ► 18 but eventually in iOS 18 it's coming and so I think that's why we're all we have our

01:21:47 ◼   ► hopes up more than usual because it's not just vague promises it's like we feel put

01:21:52 ◼   ► it this way I feel like out here that Apple could make Siri better with this I'm like

01:21:57 ◼   ► I see the ingredients put them together mix it up like I it seems to me like this should

01:22:02 ◼   ► work I you know I didn't know how the old Siri worked but I've used lots of L1 power

01:22:06 ◼   ► products I'm like yes use that and we're just waiting for them to use it right we haven't

01:22:11 ◼   ► seen what they have an iOS 18 we've just seen a bunch of canned demos and who knows what

01:22:15 ◼   ► that's representative of but a story now that iOS 18's thing is called LMS Siri I'm like

01:22:21 ◼   ► does that just mean that even inside Apple they're like the Iowa or the iOS 19 thing

01:22:25 ◼   ► is called LMS Siri does that mean inside Apple the iOS 18 thing is already like we know this

01:22:31 ◼   ► is not going to be that great we're just doing it because we said we were going to do it

01:22:35 ◼   ► but practically speaking we really need to be working on the real LMS Siri for iOS 19

01:22:40 ◼   ► and we're so far behind on that that it's not going to even come out when iOS 19 comes

01:22:44 ◼   ► out and that's that's disappointing right we will have had the new fancy graphics for

01:22:50 ◼   ► like an entire year before the iOS 19 one comes out that put backs those fancy graphics

01:22:58 ◼   ► with an engine that's better now we'll see well maybe the iOS 18 better Siri one will

01:23:03 ◼   ► be better Apple has a little bit of a branding problem here I guess like I'm one of the things

01:23:07 ◼   ► I collect is in Merlin collects them too but I don't know I see when I send it to Merlin

01:23:11 ◼   ► these just ridiculous spoken or typed query and then replies from Apple's various things

01:23:20 ◼   ► where you'll see the text that it understood so it's not like it misunderstood your voice

01:23:24 ◼   ► or whatever and you'll see the most nonsensical ridiculous reply from Apple voices isn't and

01:23:29 ◼   ► they often come on Apple TV right and the question for all this is like what is Siri

01:23:35 ◼   ► when I talk to my home pod is that Siri when I talk to my Apple TV remote is that Siri

01:23:39 ◼   ► when I talk to my phone is that Siri when I talk to my Mac is that Siri some of those

01:23:43 ◼   ► things are some of those things aren't which of those things will be getting better in

01:23:47 ◼   ► iOS 18 or iOS 19 I have a feeling the home pods not going to get better will the Apple

01:23:52 ◼   ► TV get better I don't know presumably the phone will because that's their flagship platform

01:23:55 ◼   ► and probably the Mac because you can do better things there because that's lots of RAM but

01:23:59 ◼   ► like Apple's got this problem that they have a lot of things that you can talk to that

01:24:04 ◼   ► currently do nonsensical stuff when you talk to them and only some of them eventually might

01:24:09 ◼   ► get better but the others probably won't but Apple just has one brand and they say it's

01:24:15 ◼   ► Siri Siri is everything when you talk to Apple stuff and that is not the way things are so

01:24:21 ◼   ► yeah I mean at this point they just really need the Apple intelligence announcement was

01:24:29 ◼   ► like they have a good idea they you know the way they're approaching it makes sense if

01:24:34 ◼   ► you go listen to when we talked about Apple intelligence I think their their approach

01:24:37 ◼   ► to using LM technology to enhance their products make sense they just need to do it and now

01:24:43 ◼   ► we're just waiting around for them to do it and the things they released so far like I

01:24:46 ◼   ► said are not super compelling to me I mean it's not that they're bad like they do what

01:24:51 ◼   ► they're more or less supposed to do the way we expect with them to do them but they're

01:24:55 ◼   ► not particularly compelling but I talk to my devices all the time and when they don't

01:24:59 ◼   ► listen to me or do something that I think is not correct I think to myself this could

01:25:04 ◼   ► be better and that would be a material improvement so I am waiting patiently to see what this

01:25:08 ◼   ► is like but meanwhile just like we were talking about iPhone 17 while we were waiting for

01:25:13 ◼   ► the iPhone 16 come out apparently now we're just talking about iOS 19 LM Siri while we're

01:25:18 ◼   ► waiting for the 18 one to come out it's so bad you know I I really I don't love when

01:25:25 ◼   ► one of us and it could be any of us calls for you know like a firing or something like

01:25:30 ◼   ► that I'm not saying anyone should do that but who would do that no one but one of us

01:25:35 ◼   ► certainly definitely but I and I'm not saying that somebody should be fired but I am saying

01:25:42 ◼   ► something is fundamentally broken either Apple is just incapable of this which I don't think

01:25:49 ◼   ► is the case I really don't or there's some political infighting that has prevented forward

01:25:54 ◼   ► progress but like Apple keeps trying to make Siri happen and it hasn't happened yet I mean

01:26:01 ◼   ► it was 2011 when Siri debuted that's two years before ATP that's three years before Declan

01:26:10 ◼   ► like it has been a long time and they still can't get it right they still can't get it

01:26:16 ◼   ► right and I just I don't understand I just don't understand like it is getting better

01:26:24 ◼   ► in little itty bit here little itty bit there but it sure seems like everything around it

01:26:30 ◼   ► is now to your collective points is now getting better in leaps and bounds and where all the

01:26:37 ◼   ► other like assistants are running Siri is at best at a mildly brisk walk and it's just

01:26:44 ◼   ► it's not an it wasn't it hasn't been enough for at least five years probably ten but it's

01:26:49 ◼   ► certainly not enough now and to say oh well we got you in 18 months come on figure out

01:26:56 ◼   ► a better way figure out a better way I don't care if it's acquisition I don't care if you

01:27:00 ◼   ► have to fire the whole damn team that's not actually what I'm advocating but I'm fired

01:27:03 ◼   ► up about it it just do something Apple and do something and do it so that we can see

01:27:10 ◼   ► don't promise something don't open the komodo and tell us oh it's gonna get better just

01:27:15 ◼   ► bring and do something do something so let me for the first time ever be the voice of

01:27:21 ◼   ► reason on this topic please yes please this is a fun change of a change of roles for you

01:27:26 ◼   ► and me I know right all right so I think Tim Cook should keep his job no I don't not for

01:27:33 ◼   ► this though so we we heard like rumblings here and there there's been like you know

01:27:37 ◼   ► reports from the information and from Mark Gurman stuff like that over over the last

01:27:40 ◼   ► couple of years that basically there was this project to remake Siri to in it with a whole

01:27:47 ◼   ► different approach to how they were doing the language processing possibly with LMS

01:27:51 ◼   ► I think but I think that actually predates the LM craze and apparently the story was

01:27:56 ◼   ► that the group that had like the new rebuilt Siri they like lost the battle internally

01:28:03 ◼   ► and that they instead decided to like keep the old one going and just keep working on

01:28:08 ◼   ► it instead and wasn't the reasoning by the way wasn't the reasoning kind of like a iMovie

01:28:12 ◼   ► 8 or Final Cut Pro 10 kind of reasoning which is basically like the new stuff looks great

01:28:16 ◼   ► but you would be drop it because the new stuff is new it doesn't have all the same features

01:28:21 ◼   ► of the old one so we'd have to explain to our customers that you know for the past X

01:28:25 ◼   ► years you've been able to ask Siri to do these things but now you can't anymore because we

01:28:29 ◼   ► replaced it with a new and improved one that doesn't have all the features of the old one

01:28:33 ◼   ► I seem to recall that being part of the decision making which is always the way it is like

01:28:38 ◼   ► inside a company when someone's got a new idea for a technology or whatever it's very

01:28:43 ◼   ► often difficult to sell it if it doesn't do literally everything that the old one did

01:28:48 ◼   ► and Apple has gone against that a few times in the past like with Final Cut Pro 10 or

01:28:51 ◼   ► whatever the new version of iMovie that they replaced the old one with and remember they

01:28:54 ◼   ► shipped both the old and the new version of iMovie for a while to avoid this problem to

01:28:59 ◼   ► say we have a new structure for how we think iMovie should work it doesn't do all the things

01:29:03 ◼   ► the old one did but we still think it's such a good idea that we're going to ship the new

01:29:07 ◼   ► one and the old one so you can keep using the old one and in the meantime we will try

01:29:12 ◼   ► to build the new one up to match the feature set or they can just do what they did with

01:29:15 ◼   ► photos on the Mac which is make a new version that doesn't have the features of the old

01:29:17 ◼   ► one and say tough luck the old features are gone but in the case of Siri the rumor was

01:29:22 ◼   ► I think that the new folks said we have a new approach to Siri and it's better but it

01:29:27 ◼   ► doesn't do literally every single thing the old one did and that's enough for the people

01:29:31 ◼   ► who are against it to kill it and say well do we want to explain to our customers why

01:29:35 ◼   ► our voice assessment just got less capable?

01:29:37 ◼   ► Yeah and I don't to be fair I don't know if we actually had that level of information

01:29:42 ◼   ► on it but it did yeah I believe that was part of the like the gist of the rumors we were

01:29:46 ◼   ► hearing anyway so there was that that pretty pretty firm rumor a couple years back that

01:29:51 ◼   ► basically Siri was going to be rewritten the project lost the battle internally and they

01:29:55 ◼   ► kept the existing one now separately from that Apple intelligence happens seemingly

01:30:01 ◼   ► and that that seemed to be unrelated to the to the reporting on that whole Siri drama

01:30:06 ◼   ► that would seem to proceed it so it's possible that maybe they for this kind of first iteration

01:30:15 ◼   ► of Apple intelligence that is this year maybe they figured out some some quick ways to bolt

01:30:21 ◼   ► the LLM's onto the old Siri but that maybe the much better approach that they're working

01:30:27 ◼   ► on for a year and a half from now or whatever is that is a new Siri so I think it that that

01:30:34 ◼   ► narrative if true I think is very plausible and would would kind of explain the timeline

01:30:39 ◼   ► now the second aspect of that though is that the whole reason they have all this time and

01:30:47 ◼   ► they can take their sweet ass time and they can ship Siri that sucks for so long is because

01:30:56 ◼   ► they don't allow competition on a technical level on iOS for the voice assistant like

01:31:00 ◼   ► this is what happened that like this is the downside you know what we've seen for a very

01:31:06 ◼   ► long time is that when Apple has a lot of strong competition they get their act together

01:31:13 ◼   ► usually and compete well they can do amazing things when they can somehow preclude competition

01:31:21 ◼   ► from happening they get complacent and they don't do that well what they put out might

01:31:28 ◼   ► not be the best of the best in class and I think what we're what we see now is on iOS

01:31:33 ◼   ► it's so locked down it's so you know it's so impossible for anybody to compete with

01:31:39 ◼   ► them in certain areas and the voice assistant is one of those as chat GPT and all these

01:31:46 ◼   ► other ones have been coming up over the last couple years if they if there was an API for

01:31:51 ◼   ► them to replace Siri they would have destroyed Siri by now we wouldn't even be talking about

01:31:56 ◼   ► Siri anymore because none of us would be using it for anything because there would be some

01:32:00 ◼   ► kind of plug-in architecture instead they did the no money changes hands deal where

01:32:04 ◼   ► a chat GPT is integrated into the existing voice assistant as a stopgap and I know you're

01:32:09 ◼   ► talking about competition on iOS which is actually very relevant but of course there

01:32:13 ◼   ► is actually competition on Android with its voice assistants which tend to be doing better

01:32:17 ◼   ► than Apple's but at Google's doing exactly the same thing and trying to keep as much

01:32:21 ◼   ► competition away from their built-in voice assistant as well but yeah Apple at least

01:32:25 ◼   ► felt enough pressure to say and we're partnering with chat GPT and if our thing craps out you

01:32:32 ◼   ► can say give up and chuck at the chat GPT which is not a great solution.

01:32:36 ◼   ► Right but because nobody can compete like because chat GPT couldn't make an app to officially

01:32:43 ◼   ► replace Siri look at how many of our like nerds and our power user friends have used

01:32:48 ◼   ► the action button on our iPhone 15s and 16s to just open chat GPT like how many times

01:32:55 ◼   ► have you asked chat GPT a question that it would have been nicer if you could have just

01:32:59 ◼   ► you know used a you know a voice hail command you know freely on your phone or held down

01:33:05 ◼   ► a button or whatever to do it like there's a reason we do that because chat GPT for a

01:33:08 ◼   ► lot of things is simply better and if it had the ability to integrate with things the way

01:33:13 ◼   ► Apple intelligence and Siri do it could be even better and I have no doubt that Apple

01:33:19 ◼   ► would have its butt handed to it and Siri would be even more marginalized among power

01:33:25 ◼   ► users as Safari is because you know from Chrome users but instead Apple does not have to compete

01:33:31 ◼   ► in this area they have technically foreclosed competition.

01:33:34 ◼   ► Yeah Apple dictates the terms that you're going to access chat GPT on their system it's

01:33:37 ◼   ► a third-party app or when you integrate it with Apple's own thing Apple's thing comes

01:33:41 ◼   ► first and then chat GPT only with a warning dialogue after and yada yada.

01:33:45 ◼   ► And as a result Apple does not have to compete very well in the area of voice assistance

01:33:51 ◼   ► and I don't know if it's directly because of that but the reality of that and effect

01:33:55 ◼   ► of that is that because they don't have to compete they don't compete very well they

01:34:00 ◼   ► are taking their sweet time they they totally missed the LLM revolution they're coming to

01:34:06 ◼   ► it late and they're coming to it on you know kind of a slow timeline kind of dipping their

01:34:11 ◼   ► feet in slowly and it does seem like that is giving them some advantages in the sense

01:34:16 ◼   ► that they're able to do things in like a more thought-out way they're able to be a little

01:34:20 ◼   ► bit more careful how they do it they're doing certain things in a more privacy focused way

01:34:24 ◼   ► than everyone else is doing but the reality is they don't really have a fire lit under

01:34:28 ◼   ► their butts because they don't have to compete and whereas if iOS was not as locked down

01:34:34 ◼   ► as it was they would actually have real competition here and they would work harder and faster

01:34:39 ◼   ► and probably produce better output so this is one of those areas where it is actually

01:34:44 ◼   ► better for both Apple and Apple's customers for them to be less locked down because that

01:34:51 ◼   ► creates fewer areas that they will foreclose competition and get complacent and lazy and

01:34:58 ◼   ► deliver half-assed products and Siri for its entire lifetime calling it half-assed would

01:35:04 ◼   ► be a generous compliment it is so it is quarter-assed at best and way less than that in reality

01:35:10 ◼   ► it has been a really rough unreliable untrustworthy product for its entire lifespan and maybe

01:35:18 ◼   ► if there was easier competition in that area maybe they would they would actually make

01:35:22 ◼   ► it better faster.

01:35:23 ◼   ► Sounds like there's a great job opening for you and the European Commission because I

01:35:27 ◼   ► think they agree with you every part of the operating system that Apple's integrated would

01:35:31 ◼   ► benefit from competition you should be able to replace the Photos app, the voice assistant,

01:35:35 ◼   ► the web browser all that stuff should not default to Apple and should be pluggable and

01:35:39 ◼   ► the European Commission is trying very hard to make that happen across not just Apple's

01:35:42 ◼   ► platforms but Facebook's platform, Google's platform and all those platforms so yeah they've

01:35:47 ◼   ► got the same idea we'll see if their remedies end up going in that direction or not but

01:35:53 ◼   ► yeah in the meantime like the half Siri solution you described Apple doesn't give technical

01:35:57 ◼   ► details about you know when they promised to LLM they promised a better Siri and iOS

01:36:02 ◼   ► 18.4 or whatever their target was back when they talked about it WWDC and we all just

01:36:07 ◼   ► assume Apple Intelligence better Siri we just we read between the lines and we say LLM I

01:36:13 ◼   ► don't know if Apple said it explicitly LLM it's perfect and as we discussed before even

01:36:17 ◼   ► Apple Intelligence was released the idea of having an LLM you speak to something the LLM

01:36:25 ◼   ► starts what you say and the LLM has been trained on the 75 things that Siri can do and the

01:36:30 ◼   ► precise way you have to word it to make them work and that's what your LLM does it takes

01:36:35 ◼   ► whatever BS you say translates it to a command that Siri will understand and makes it do

01:36:42 ◼   ► it and that would make Siri way better because Siri can actually do a lot of things but it's

01:36:46 ◼   ► incredibly frustrating when you talk to it and it's like oh it's not as bad as a text

01:36:50 ◼   ► adventure where it's like it doesn't understand your sentence entirely but it thinks and understands

01:36:54 ◼   ► it and does something totally off the wall here's the example I just sent to Merlin most

01:36:59 ◼   ► recently it's an Apple TV one the Apple TV ones are usually the best and it shows the

01:37:02 ◼   ► text that it understood from the user and the text was let's watch Family Guy perfectly

01:37:08 ◼   ► valid sentence you can see what it understood there's no like it didn't miss here a word

01:37:13 ◼   ► or pick a word that sounds the same but is spelled differently let's watch Family Guy

01:37:17 ◼   ► they're talking to their television set the response from the thing on Apple TV which

01:37:23 ◼   ► uses the Siri logo which may or may not actually be quote unquote real Siri this is what Apple

01:37:28 ◼   ► TV said if you think it could be serious ask me to call emergency services or someone you

01:37:34 ◼   ► trust that was the response to let's watch Family Guy and I looked at let's watch Family

01:37:39 ◼   ► Guy I'm like what how like it doesn't even make any sense like is there it's not just

01:37:46 ◼   ► I don't I don't know I don't know let's watch Family Guy do you want me to call emergency

01:37:51 ◼   ► services I mean maybe I don't am I having a stroke I don't know this that's this is

01:37:57 ◼   ► where an LLM could help I know the Apple TV knows how to find a show based on and even

01:38:01 ◼   ► capitalize family a capital F capital G it knows it's a proper noun I bet he can find

01:38:07 ◼   ► that as a TV show somewhere and start playing it because it's a TV and that's what it does

01:38:13 ◼   ► and instead it offers to call families emergency services so yeah a half an LLM in front of

01:38:20 ◼   ► Siri treating Siri as like like a lot of the LMS treat like calculators or other sort of

01:38:24 ◼   ► things that would be great a full-fledged LM Siri might be a disaster because it could

01:38:31 ◼   ► start doing even more ridiculous things and Apple has less of a way to control it but

01:38:36 ◼   ► we're just all out here using the plain old dump Siri that we don't even know if it's

01:38:41 ◼   ► the same Siri everywhere and we're just looking for relief and this is kind of unfair to be

01:38:45 ◼   ► like oh rumors about a future thing are making me feel worse that I don't have the current

01:38:49 ◼   ► thing but it's a little bit of Osborne effect and it's a little bit I mean there's always

01:38:54 ◼   ► going to be a better version of everything right but I for me and maybe I'm getting hung

01:38:58 ◼   ► up on this but like the fact that the thing is called LM Siri internally maybe that's

01:39:02 ◼   ► what the iOS 18 one is called to German is never precise in these rumors but it really

01:39:06 ◼   ► does make me sad to think that the thing I've been waiting so patiently for somewhere around

01:39:11 ◼   ► the midpoint of the life of iOS 18 it seems like Apple itself already doesn't have that

01:39:17 ◼   ► much confidence that it is the thing that we all hope it's going to be but we'll see

01:39:21 ◼   ► I mean I'm willing to keep an open mind and try it when it comes out but in the meantime

01:39:25 ◼   ► I'll just enjoy those snazzy graphics.

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01:41:18 ◼   ► All right let's do some Ask ATP and Andrew Hodgson writes is there a way to get the performance

01:41:26 ◼   ► course to spin up when doing normal activities like file management spreadsheets internet

01:41:30 ◼   ► browsing etc.

01:41:31 ◼   ► I'm a M4 Pro Mac Mini I can never seem to get them going and I didn't know if there's

01:41:36 ◼   ► a way to tell the system to make use of them rather than just stick with the efficiency

01:41:41 ◼   ► course otherwise it seems a bit of a waste of those extra cores.

01:41:45 ◼   ► I did wonder if the high power low power options and settings energy might have an impact or

01:41:49 ◼   ► if there was some other setting that could be tweaked.

01:41:51 ◼   ► Maybe the answer is that the M4 Pro chip is simply overkill for these types of tasks.

01:41:54 ◼   ► I think that is the answer but I don't know tell me I'm wrong.

01:41:58 ◼   ► So some of the tasks especially things like file management you're going to be spending

01:42:01 ◼   ► most of your time waiting for IO so having a faster CPU is not going to impact things

01:42:06 ◼   ► because that's not the bottleneck.

01:42:10 ◼   ► The high power mode is interesting it's a feature that I was interested in a couple

01:42:14 ◼   ► years ago I think and it's spreading to more Macs I think the Mac Mini's got it as well

01:42:18 ◼   ► but I believe all that basically is is a different fan curve which is a way of saying like for

01:42:25 ◼   ► a given set of inputs from temperature sensors what should the output fan speeds to be beyond

01:42:30 ◼   ► all the fans and you could graph it on a curve in an old school simple scenario where there

01:42:34 ◼   ► was one thing that had a temperature and one fan obviously modern Macs are more complicated

01:42:38 ◼   ► than that although some of them still only have one fan but anyway high power mode my

01:42:43 ◼   ► understanding is it just makes the fans go higher RPM sooner so it makes your Mac noisier

01:42:48 ◼   ► it blows more air through it and the theory is that it will allow your the things that

01:42:54 ◼   ► get hot to sustain their maximum throughput for a longer period of time because you're

01:43:00 ◼   ► not waiting for them to get hot you're sort of preemptively cooling them by blowing more

01:43:03 ◼   ► and more air on them that's the idea with high power mode.

01:43:05 ◼   ► It doesn't change as far as I know anything having to do with what's scheduled on what

01:43:09 ◼   ► kind of cores inside your Mac that's another thing you don't control we've talked about

01:43:13 ◼   ► before when trying to speed up jobs like file compression and stuff when software runs whatever

01:43:22 ◼   ► job is going to run there are tools that it has to indicate what it thinks the priority

01:43:29 ◼   ► should be is this is this a high priority thing that the computer should do ASAP or is

01:43:33 ◼   ► it a low priority thing that it should do just whenever it gets around to it a lot of

01:43:37 ◼   ► that prioritization affects what cores things will be scheduled on background processes

01:43:42 ◼   ► said that the low priority will run on the efficiency cores foreground processes that

01:43:46 ◼   ► need lots of fancy computing that are said to be the highest possible priority may run

01:43:51 ◼   ► on the performance cores but my question for Andrew is are you waiting around for your

01:43:56 ◼   ► computer to do things like what thing are you waiting for when you're doing file management

01:44:00 ◼   ► and spreadsheets and internet browsing are you twiddling your thumbs and saying come

01:44:04 ◼   ► on come on page load if that's happening it almost certainly isn't because you are CPU

01:44:09 ◼   ► bound it's probably your network connection or it's IO with the file system or something

01:44:15 ◼   ► else like you it would take some pretty sophisticated performance analysis to figure out what is

01:44:20 ◼   ► the bottleneck that is making you wait for something if you're staring at your iStat

01:44:25 ◼   ► menus thing and you're annoyed because the power cores aren't be used but you're not

01:44:29 ◼   ► waiting for anything don't be annoyed it's using the appropriate resources for you it's

01:44:34 ◼   ► saving your battery life it's reducing your power usage it's reducing the heat it's you

01:44:39 ◼   ► know just because it's not using the power cores it's not a reason to complain about

01:44:42 ◼   ► now if you have something that you're waiting for and you're sure it's CPU pound and it's

01:44:45 ◼   ► not using the power cores I would talk to the developer of that program but that's not

01:44:49 ◼   ► something that you as the user have control over I don't think there's any tool out there

01:44:53 ◼   ► where you can say like shuttle everything to the power cores that ignore the efficiency

01:44:57 ◼   ► cores and honestly I don't think you'd want to do that because it would produce more heat

01:45:01 ◼   ► it would probably go slower because you have lots of things running in parallel and you

01:45:03 ◼   ► want to use this as efficiency cores and Apple's efficiency cores are and they're more efficient

01:45:08 ◼   ► than the power cores but they're good cores too so don't worry about it too much they're

01:45:13 ◼   ► good cores Brent.

01:45:15 ◼   ► And keep in mind also so one thing that you might see if you if you're watching a tool

01:45:20 ◼   ► like iStat menus or if you're watching an activity monitor if you're watching your CPU

01:45:24 ◼   ► usage between the cores you might notice that some one or two of the efficiency cores might

01:45:30 ◼   ► be maxed out like all the time doing something like photo indexing or spotlight indexing

01:45:36 ◼   ► or whatever else that is not a sign that you need to somehow convince those tasks to run

01:45:43 ◼   ► on the performance cores basically Mac OS has been seemingly tweaked since the Apple

01:45:50 ◼   ► silicon era to let certain background tasks basically do whatever they want as long as

01:45:57 ◼   ► they do them on the efficiency cores because the efficiency cores are so much less power

01:46:02 ◼   ► consuming than the performance cores that you can basically run a couple of them like

01:46:06 ◼   ► for free almost all the time and not even notice a hit to battery life or an increase

01:46:12 ◼   ► in heat like they're so power efficient that Mac OS therefore lets things like photo indexing

01:46:19 ◼   ► or whatever just max out one of them forever as long as it wants to and if you ever actually

01:46:24 ◼   ► you know need that power for something else usually these things are prioritized such

01:46:29 ◼   ► that other other processes can take priority if they all of a sudden need a burst of everything

01:46:33 ◼   ► you've got but for the most part if you see efficiency cores maxing themselves out for

01:46:39 ◼   ► a long time that's normal don't you don't and you don't have to worry about it.

01:46:43 ◼   ► And speaking of photo stuff it's you know like I said it's a software problem if you

01:46:46 ◼   ► think there's something you're waiting for and you wish it would use the power cores

01:46:49 ◼   ► talk to the developer which is why I've tried to talk to Apple through my podcast and say

01:46:53 ◼   ► Apple give me a giant button and photos that says do photo analysis now using all my resources

01:46:57 ◼   ► Apple has not provided that instead they're using background jobs that you know run whenever

01:47:02 ◼   ► they feel like it when the system thinks that the resources are available and they run on

01:47:06 ◼   ► the efficiency cores and they don't use all the resources and I hate it that is a software

01:47:11 ◼   ► problem is Apple's photos application could or their photos demon could have a giant button

01:47:17 ◼   ► that says do face recognition now do it just on this individual single photo use all the

01:47:22 ◼   ► resources in the system that button doesn't exist but it's not the fault of Mac OS Mac

01:47:27 ◼   ► OS is just doing what it's told by the applications and the applications are saying do photo analysis

01:47:32 ◼   ► on the background on an efficiency core it's fine and most of the time that's what you

01:47:37 ◼   ► want but sometimes you just want to do it now and I really hope they provide that button

01:47:41 ◼   ► someday.

01:47:42 ◼   ► It's my money and I need it now.

01:47:45 ◼   ► All right James Wilby writes why are apps seemingly ballooning in size I've looked at

01:47:49 ◼   ► a few app update sizes recently and it's not uncommon to find apps that are between 300

01:47:54 ◼   ► and 500 megabytes or even beyond Tesla and the unified network app are my examples why

01:47:58 ◼   ► is this is it just a load of assets or is it just a load of baggage along for the ride

01:48:03 ◼   ► it could be either but generally speaking isn't it like analytics frameworks and stuff

01:48:07 ◼   ► like that like crashlytics I think is huge and I'm trying to think of some of the other

01:48:11 ◼   ► ones or firebase maybe like aren't those typically quite large I mean the actual code is not

01:48:17 ◼   ► that large now code keep in mind that the the modern code culture is if you need one

01:48:28 ◼   ► thing like one little function or one you know piece of functionality from a piece of

01:48:34 ◼   ► code you import an entire library an entire framework possibly an entire services built

01:48:41 ◼   ► in frameworks and you don't even look at what it does to your project that is the modern

01:48:45 ◼   ► coding culture in every way in web programming and application programming mobile everything

01:48:51 ◼   ► everyone has this kind of framework itis and library itis of just like I need you know

01:48:55 ◼   ► like that joke about the you know is even function in JavaScript like yeah I'll import

01:49:00 ◼   ► an entire library for that like rather than see if I can just have that function by itself

01:49:04 ◼   ► that that applies at every scale so you have you do have huge amounts of code you have

01:49:10 ◼   ► duplication within code especially for larger companies you might have like you know a large

01:49:16 ◼   ► company's app suppose they need a library to like you know parse URLs out of strings

01:49:22 ◼   ► or whatever their app might have 10 different functions that do that because just out of

01:49:27 ◼   ► sheer scale like that they have hundreds of people working on the app and at different

01:49:31 ◼   ► times different people have added different versions of that same thing in different ways

01:49:36 ◼   ► so code size is bigger these days by a lot and a lot of that is just just due to this

01:49:42 ◼   ► kind of culture of anything you need just import some framework or library and don't

01:49:47 ◼   ► even look at how big it is don't even care and definitely don't try to write it yourself

01:49:51 ◼   ► or copy out just that function no so anyway there's that but also the assets tend to be

01:49:59 ◼   ► way bigger than you might think because again like if you are you know suppose you're you're

01:50:05 ◼   ► writing a library that offers some kind of you know some kind of UI well if you have

01:50:10 ◼   ► any images in that UI then that library is going to include every single image that might

01:50:14 ◼   ► ever be displayed on that screen it's going to include it in possibly different designs

01:50:17 ◼   ► different resolutions different color schemes light and dark mode like there's so many different

01:50:22 ◼   ► versions of all those things and yes you can if you try to keep things small and simple

01:50:26 ◼   ► you can like you know use some basic vectors and or you know have like a like a SVG or

01:50:32 ◼   ► PDF version of your icon that you just render in different colors or different contexts

01:50:35 ◼   ► like you can do that but ultimately the reason why nobody does that except people like me

01:50:40 ◼   ► who waste their time doing it the reason why no one else does it is because there is no

01:50:45 ◼   ► incentive whatsoever to make apps small these days none I can tell you this as somebody

01:50:51 ◼   ► who has a very small app no one cares and nobody is going to pick your small app over

01:50:58 ◼   ► your competitors 300 megabyte app no because that's not that isn't how people choose apps

01:51:02 ◼   ► these days so it is possible to make smaller apps but there is no incentive to so everyone

01:51:09 ◼   ► just kind of gets sloppy and lazy and doesn't really care and obviously for things like

01:51:14 ◼   ► games the assets are a problem you know they just the the amount of textures you have and

01:51:20 ◼   ► all the various 3d data and everything else like it just it adds up real fast and the

01:51:26 ◼   ► general approach is like you said to package up everything that your app is going to need

01:51:31 ◼   ► Apple TV prevents that and it's one of the reasons game developers dislike it because

01:51:35 ◼   ► people just want to package up everything all the images all the different things all

01:51:39 ◼   ► the things that you know and you know demo videos sound like stuff that could potentially

01:51:45 ◼   ► be downloaded is like just package it all in the app so the code size is bigger the

01:51:48 ◼   ► asset size bigger and the motivation is to just package it all in there and sometimes

01:51:54 ◼   ► there's even repetition of assets depending on how you're you know folding things in you

01:51:57 ◼   ► might have the same asset in there multiple times and having something that deduplicates

01:52:01 ◼   ► assets across different frameworks is a big pain and yeah just the sizes just keep going

01:52:06 ◼   ► up I was I was in messing with Windows when I was trying to do that I cloud stuff and

01:52:12 ◼   ► one of the things I mess with when I'm in there as I download the latest version of

01:52:15 ◼   ► Unreal Engine and I like to look at their little demos to see how the engine is advancing

01:52:19 ◼   ► 5.5 just came out it has a bunch of new features I was like I want to you know let me find

01:52:24 ◼   ► some of the cool demos my old 5.0 demo no longer worked fine I'll download the 5.5 version

01:52:29 ◼   ► of that it's just like a demo showing you their various you know features for texturing

01:52:34 ◼   ► large landscapes and dynamic lighting and stuff like that and the demo was 100 gigabytes

01:52:41 ◼   ► oh my word yeah it's pretty big Unreal Engine itself you know it seems small in comparison

01:52:49 ◼   ► right a few hundred megs gig even or whatever and the the file and this is not it this is

01:52:54 ◼   ► not a game this is just a demo thing showing a bunch of features of the engine then I updated

01:53:00 ◼   ► the I didn't update to the latest version of flight simulator which actually improves

01:53:02 ◼   ► this but I have a old Microsoft flight simulator 2020 I think it is that itself is 100 over

01:53:08 ◼   ► 100 gigabytes and when I needed to update it it needed to redownload a substantial portion

01:53:14 ◼   ► of that things are big that's one of the advances of the new version of flight simulator 2024

01:53:20 ◼   ► is that it dynamically streams a bunch of stuff so the download can be smaller it's

01:53:24 ◼   ► still very large but they're making progress there so I think there is a breaking point

01:53:30 ◼   ► but iOS apps are not a hundred gigabytes each unless they're a really really big game but

01:53:34 ◼   ► yeah they're just them apps individual apps being 500 megabytes it's one of the reasons

01:53:39 ◼   ► that Apple rolled out that feature years ago that says like do you want us to basically

01:53:44 ◼   ► remove apps that you haven't used in a long time we'll leave the icons on your screen

01:53:48 ◼   ► but they get like a cloud icon or whatever next to them right we'll leave the icon there

01:53:52 ◼   ► if you ever want to launch it or redownload it but just like I don't know if you know

01:53:55 ◼   ► this but like you know a couple dozen 500 megabyte apps like here and there it starts

01:54:00 ◼   ► to add up real fast and all of a sudden a lot of your phone storage is taking up with

01:54:03 ◼   ► apps that you never launch that wouldn't matter if every single app was 20 megs but if they're

01:54:08 ◼   ► in the hundreds of megabytes each and you've got 11 pages of those apps plus folders yeah

01:54:12 ◼   ► that can be taking up a lot of room so yeah I mean it's kind of an uphill battle things

01:54:17 ◼   ► to get bigger over time that's generally one of the reasons we make better computers I

01:54:21 ◼   ► don't think there's any sense in trying to hold the line on application size because

01:54:25 ◼   ► we do want better fancier assets better fancier libraries now with LLMs with people having

01:54:31 ◼   ► models inside their applications or even if they're dynamically downloaded even Apple

01:54:35 ◼   ► itself does it for the first time use the cleanup feature it will say downloading cleanup

01:54:38 ◼   ► it's downloading a model and that model is big and they didn't want to make it part of

01:54:42 ◼   ► the iOS 18 distribution for whatever reason they wanted to be a separate download maybe

01:54:46 ◼   ► so they can update it independently but anyway it's big every one of these model things is

01:54:50 ◼   ► big they take up lots of memory and they take up lots of disk space and if every app has

01:54:55 ◼   ► two or three different models plus the OS has its models it's just making the apps bigger

01:54:59 ◼   ► so yeah the market point stands if developers care they can do a lot to make things smaller

01:55:05 ◼   ► but in general over the entire history of computing the apps just get bigger and we'll

01:55:10 ◼   ► continue to do so.

01:55:12 ◼   ► Thank you to our sponsors this week Aura Frames, Uncommon Goods, and Masterclass and thanks

01:55:17 ◼   ► to our members who support us directly you can join us atp.fm/join.

01:55:22 ◼   ► One of the many perks of being an ATP member is ATP overtime our weekly bonus topic.

01:55:28 ◼   ► This week overtime will be about services on Mac OS.

01:55:32 ◼   ► You're gonna get to hear John Siracusa talk about services on Mac OS and me and Casey

01:55:38 ◼   ► say oh yeah that exists.

01:55:41 ◼   ► You can join atp.fm/join to hear whatever that's gonna be and many other things.

01:55:46 ◼   ► Thank you so much and we'll talk to you next week.

01:55:50 ◼   ► Now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin cause it was accidental.

01:55:59 ◼   ► Oh it was accidental.

01:56:03 ◼   ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him cause it was accidental.

01:56:10 ◼   ► Oh it was accidental.

01:56:13 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at atp.fm and if you're into mastodon you can follow

01:56:22 ◼   ► them at c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s so that's Casey Liss m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m-n-t Marco Arman s-i-r-a-c-u-s-a

01:56:38 ◼   ► Siracusa it's accidental.

01:56:40 ◼   ► They didn't mean to, accidental.

01:56:44 ◼   ► Tech podcast so long.

01:56:48 ◼   ► Oh Thanksgiving driving is gonna happen I'm not looking forward to this.

01:56:58 ◼   ► There are a lot of advantages to living on Long Island.

01:57:02 ◼   ► Many things are easy, way easier than the beach and even easier than many other places

01:57:06 ◼   ► I've lived.

01:57:08 ◼   ► Living is an easy drive away, all the roads here are wide and the parking lots are huge.

01:57:15 ◼   ► American suburbia done to the max but certain things are still walkable and small.

01:57:20 ◼   ► It's pretty great overall.

01:57:23 ◼   ► The one problem about living on Long Island, it's similar to a problem living in Brooklyn,

01:57:28 ◼   ► is that it's great as long as you never have to leave.

01:57:31 ◼   ► But leaving Long Island is unpleasant.

01:57:35 ◼   ► Not because you just miss it so badly, no.

01:57:39 ◼   ► Because you have to go through the New York City surrounding metro area to get out of

01:57:45 ◼   ► Long Island.

01:57:46 ◼   ► Wow, is that unpleasant.

01:57:48 ◼   ► So in a couple of days I'm gonna have something like a six hour drive, the first two and a

01:57:55 ◼   ► half of which will be going like 40 miles.

01:57:59 ◼   ► No thank you.

01:58:00 ◼   ► You gotta get yourself a helicopter or you gotta get your relatives to move north and

01:58:04 ◼   ► east so you can take a boat off the island which is less traffic.

01:58:08 ◼   ► There are many things that I joke about I will never want to buy or own and then I end

01:58:16 ◼   ► up buying them and owning them and you make fun of me and that's fair.

01:58:20 ◼   ► I still have had zero temptation to own a boat.

01:58:24 ◼   ► You're not supposed to get your own boat, you're supposed to take a ferry where you

01:58:26 ◼   ► can drive your car onto it but it doesn't help you because your relatives are not in

01:58:29 ◼   ► Connecticut or Rhode Island or Massachusetts, right?

01:58:32 ◼   ► So you're going the wrong way.

01:58:34 ◼   ► Yeah it's not gonna be fun.

01:58:36 ◼   ► I've probably shared this numerous times but my very limited memory of driving on Long

01:58:41 ◼   ► Island was leaving, is LaGuardia Long Island or no?

01:58:46 ◼   ► That's JFK.

01:58:47 ◼   ► They were both on Long Island.

01:58:48 ◼   ► Okay.

01:58:49 ◼   ► There's plenty of room, I don't know why they wouldn't put them both there.

01:58:52 ◼   ► Yeah right.

01:58:53 ◼   ► So leaving LaGuardia, I don't remember the specifics but I remember you needed to follow

01:58:58 ◼   ► signage, this was 20 years ago now, but you had to follow signage that seemed like it

01:59:01 ◼   ► was heading deeper into Long Island in order to actually exit Long Island the way I wanted

01:59:07 ◼   ► to to get to western Connecticut.

01:59:09 ◼   ► And so I needed to like, I'm making this up, but I needed to go like eastbound for like

01:59:14 ◼   ► for the first road or two in order to actually end up going northbound or something like

01:59:18 ◼   ► that.

01:59:19 ◼   ► It was ridiculous.

01:59:20 ◼   ► And then I remember, and I've told this story many times on the show, I remember going to

01:59:22 ◼   ► Jones Beach to see a concert and that was the most utterly bananas set of roads that

01:59:29 ◼   ► I needed to take to get from western Connecticut to Jones Beach, including popping off the

01:59:33 ◼   ► interstate and/or highway, popping off the highway and then going through like a freaking

01:59:38 ◼   ► neighborhood to get on the next highway.

01:59:39 ◼   ► It was insanity.

01:59:42 ◼   ► And that apparently, my understanding is that's just Long Island.

01:59:45 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:59:46 ◼   ► Luckily there's easy public transportation to both airports so there's no problems.

01:59:50 ◼   ► Take that and you won't have to drive.

01:59:52 ◼   ► Thanks RM.

01:59:53 ◼   ► You really did us dirty on that one.

01:59:56 ◼   ► But yeah, I don't envy you.

01:59:57 ◼   ► So how many charging stops are you expecting to make?

02:00:00 ◼   ► 13?

02:00:01 ◼   ► Ideally zero.

02:00:02 ◼   ► You can make it the whole way?

02:00:04 ◼   ► Uh, yes.

02:00:05 ◼   ► But I can't make it there and back.

02:00:08 ◼   ► But I can usually charge at my in-laws place just overnight like out of a circular saw

02:00:12 ◼   ► outlet they have in their barn.

02:00:14 ◼   ► So I have like, I run a giant like 30 amp extension cable like out there barn and...

02:00:20 ◼   ► Which weighs like 50 pounds.

02:00:21 ◼   ► Oh yeah, it's like thicker than a garden hose.

02:00:24 ◼   ► It's a whole thing.

02:00:26 ◼   ► But it does, I've done that for years, like back when I had the Tesla I did it then too.

02:00:32 ◼   ► And it does work.

02:00:34 ◼   ► It can charge a whole EV like roughly overnight, which is fine.

02:00:38 ◼   ► It's a lot of driving.

02:00:40 ◼   ► I don't miss that part of my parents being in Connecticut.

02:00:44 ◼   ► Because they've been down here in Virginia since just before Declan was born.

02:00:47 ◼   ► And generally speaking that's very convenient and I prefer it.

02:00:52 ◼   ► I don't love that I no longer have an excuse to go to the New York metro area.

02:00:57 ◼   ► I don't like that we don't have a cheap, which is to say free place to stay, one metro north

02:01:03 ◼   ► ride away from Manhattan.

02:01:06 ◼   ► But nevertheless, not having to drive 8 to 10 hours to get to and from Connecticut for

02:01:13 ◼   ► holidays, I am not complaining about not having to do that.

02:01:17 ◼   ► We will wake up on, well I think we're going to go Wednesday afternoon, and we will drive

02:01:22 ◼   ► a sum total of maybe 50 minutes if there's traffic to get to my parents.

02:01:26 ◼   ► It'll be glorious.

02:01:27 ◼   ► John, what are you doing for the holiday?

02:01:30 ◼   ► John: I was going to say, when do you two think you're going to start hosting your own

02:01:33 ◼   ► Thanksgiving, sir?

02:01:34 ◼   ► Is that just never going to happen?

02:01:35 ◼   ► Alan: It does from time to time with us, but it's not common.

02:01:39 ◼   ► Coincidentally, I think Erin's going to be cooking most of Thanksgiving at my parents

02:01:42 ◼   ► because my mom, for all of her wonderful qualities, is not a stellar cook and Erin is.

02:01:48 ◼   ► So she's been conscripted, enlisted, whatever word I'm looking for, in order to do a lot

02:01:52 ◼   ► of the cooking at mom and dad's.

02:01:55 ◼   ► But we've done Thanksgiving at our house from time to time, but it is not common.

02:02:00 ◼   ► Yeah, well just being home.

02:02:02 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't like traveling at all in the winter.

02:02:05 ◼   ► I definitely don't like traveling for Thanksgiving.

02:02:07 ◼   ► It's such a bad holiday, especially with the school schedules because schools don't give

02:02:10 ◼   ► kids that much time off.

02:02:12 ◼   ► So if you're trying to like, "Oh, we'll travel for Thanksgiving, but we'll try to travel

02:02:18 ◼   ► on odd days," you basically end up having to pull your kids out of school or have the

02:02:21 ◼   ► missed days on either side.

02:02:23 ◼   ► Otherwise you're just traveling when the whole rest of the world is traveling and it's miserable.

02:02:26 ◼   ► So whether you're driving or flying or doing anything, it's just miserable.

02:02:30 ◼   ► So yeah, Thanksgiving at home in New England, that's what we're doing.

02:02:34 ◼   ► I envy that so much.

02:02:37 ◼   ► You envy that until you have to cook and clean up everything because that is the part that

02:02:41 ◼   ► comes along with that is you don't just get to show up somewhere and then someone feeds

02:02:43 ◼   ► you.

02:02:44 ◼   ► Well honestly, so I actually did host Thanksgiving years ago.

02:02:48 ◼   ► This was before ATV.

02:02:50 ◼   ► This was like 2006 or so.

02:02:52 ◼   ► I had messed up my back and so I had been advised by a doctor not to take long car rides

02:02:58 ◼   ► for a little while as I slowly fixed my back.

02:03:03 ◼   ► And so my family all came to me and I hosted Thanksgiving in a little like 500 square foot

02:03:08 ◼   ► apartment, like a one bedroom apartment.

02:03:10 ◼   ► I hosted my entire family on my little like, you know that like that rectangular wooden

02:03:16 ◼   ► Ikea table that everyone had because it came as a set with a table and four chairs for

02:03:21 ◼   ► 100 bucks.

02:03:22 ◼   ► I hosted Thanksgiving on that little table.

02:03:25 ◼   ► Like we just made it work.

02:03:27 ◼   ► You know, we like had some people sit like at the counter and stuff like it.

02:03:30 ◼   ► It was fine.

02:03:31 ◼   ► And honestly, that was one of the best Thanksgiving we ever had.

02:03:33 ◼   ► It was great.

02:03:34 ◼   ► It's funny because I think my best holiday travel experience of all time, I don't remember

02:03:38 ◼   ► what year it was, it was also before ATP, but for whatever reason, Aaron and I traveled

02:03:43 ◼   ► on Christmas morning, which was very unusual for us.

02:03:47 ◼   ► And typically we would tell our families like, you know, if, if my side has Thanksgiving,

02:03:52 ◼   ► then her side has Christmas and that's that.

02:03:54 ◼   ► And this was when mom and dad were still in Connecticut and we left Richmond on Christmas

02:04:00 ◼   ► morning relatively early, but not absurdly so.

02:04:04 ◼   ► And it is not like what Marco's dealing with.

02:04:06 ◼   ► I'm not saying my troubles were as bad as Marco's are, you know, getting off of Long

02:04:10 ◼   ► Island, but for, for us to get to Western Connecticut, we basically took 95 the whole

02:04:16 ◼   ► way up, including every major city on the Eastern seaboard from here to there.

02:04:21 ◼   ► So you would go through DC, which is always a nightmare.

02:04:23 ◼   ► You would go through Baltimore, which was usually okay.

02:04:26 ◼   ► Philadelphia, the whole of New Jersey, Manhattan, et cetera, et cetera.

02:04:31 ◼   ► And on Christmas morning that year, I think we might've made what is typically between

02:04:36 ◼   ► an eight and 10 hour drive in like six, six and a half hours or something like that because

02:04:42 ◼   ► nobody was on the road and it was amazing.

02:04:46 ◼   ► It worked so well.

02:04:48 ◼   ► And I think we would genuinely think about doing that all the time.

02:04:50 ◼   ► If we still had to make those runs to Connecticut, it was so great.

02:04:54 ◼   ► Oh man, that was the best.

02:04:56 ◼   ► (beeping)