Connected

00:00:00 ◼   ► [Music]

00:00:07 ◼   ► Hello and welcome to Connected episode 528 for Wednesday, November 20th, 2024.

00:00:17 ◼   ► Have we officially decided if the date is going back at the top of the show?

00:00:21 ◼   ► Did it? Was it ever? I don't know.

00:00:24 ◼   ► No, I don't think it ever was. I think you're thinking of Upgrade, which is my other program.

00:00:27 ◼   ► I don't think anybody on this show has ever read the date until you just did it.

00:00:30 ◼   ► No, Federico has been doing it when he does the introduction.

00:00:32 ◼   ► Has he?

00:00:32 ◼   ► Mm-hmm.

00:00:33 ◼   ► Well, maybe he just likes it too then.

00:00:35 ◼   ► Maybe.

00:00:35 ◼   ► I guess that's up to you to decide, is to keep her in the document.

00:00:38 ◼   ► I guess so.

00:00:40 ◼   ► Anyways, hello, my name is Stephen Hackett. I'm joined by Ricky Benjamin, Mike Hurley.

00:00:45 ◼   ► Hello.

00:00:46 ◼   ► Hello.

00:00:47 ◼   ► Got some hot topics today.

00:00:49 ◼   ► Yes, there's no Federico this week.

00:00:51 ◼   ► Mm-hmm.

00:00:52 ◼   ► He's off today.

00:00:53 ◼   ► I'm making up for it with hot topics.

00:00:55 ◼   ► Hot topics.

00:00:57 ◼   ► Mm-hmm.

00:00:58 ◼   ► Like the store?

00:00:59 ◼   ► No.

00:01:01 ◼   ► Did y'all have hot topic in the UK?

00:01:03 ◼   ► No, but I know what it is. I've consumed enough American content to know what hot topic is.

00:01:07 ◼   ► I'm sure it's one of these things where like there was a hot topic somewhere, but like it's not the same idea.

00:01:13 ◼   ► But I get it. It's like a lot of like band t-shirts and emo stuff is my understanding.

00:01:17 ◼   ► Yeah. We had one.

00:01:19 ◼   ► Okay.

00:01:20 ◼   ► It may not surprise you that I was kind of into it.

00:01:23 ◼   ► What kind of things would you buy from hot topics?

00:01:26 ◼   ► Mostly black things.

00:01:28 ◼   ► Okay.

00:01:30 ◼   ► Wake me up.

00:01:31 ◼   ► Like stuff like that.

00:01:32 ◼   ► Wake me up inside.

00:01:34 ◼   ► Lot of Evanescence gear.

00:01:36 ◼   ► Tour shirts.

00:01:38 ◼   ► I have a question for you.

00:01:39 ◼   ► Okay.

00:01:40 ◼   ► How's your iPhone?

00:01:41 ◼   ► Sticky.

00:01:42 ◼   ► Yeah, what happened to you?

00:01:44 ◼   ► We had breakfast for dinner the other night.

00:01:48 ◼   ► Amazing.

00:01:49 ◼   ► It was great. Waffles, bacon, eggs, etc.

00:01:52 ◼   ► And I was, we ate and I was cleaning up and my phone was on the table and I knocked over an open, mostly full thing of maple syrup.

00:02:04 ◼   ► And straight onto my phone.

00:02:11 ◼   ► And it was one of those things that maybe you've had this.

00:02:15 ◼   ► It took a second for me to kind of like register what was happening.

00:02:19 ◼   ► Right.

00:02:20 ◼   ► Like I think I didn't catch it.

00:02:21 ◼   ► There wasn't some heroic save.

00:02:24 ◼   ► So the phone's fine.

00:02:26 ◼   ► Like I rinsed off the phone and let it dry.

00:02:29 ◼   ► But the Peak Design case that I've been using, as you may know, has a lot of fabric.

00:02:37 ◼   ► And it's a little stained.

00:02:39 ◼   ► You can kind of see like in direct sunlight where there's a stain.

00:02:42 ◼   ► But anytime I take a phone call, and this has been a week, I kind of get a little whiff of maple syrup.

00:02:49 ◼   ► I mean, it's in the fibers. You're never getting that out.

00:02:52 ◼   ► I mean, thank God it's not a fine woven case.

00:02:55 ◼   ► You know, like game over.

00:02:58 ◼   ► I guess what is really funny is when you ordered that Peak Design case, either for your error or theirs, you got two of them and you gave me one and I'm never going to use it.

00:03:06 ◼   ► It's just in a drawer.

00:03:07 ◼   ► So like you could have had a replacement case, but now you don't. You have to have the sticky case.

00:03:12 ◼   ► Now I got the sticky case.

00:03:14 ◼   ► So is the phone buttons okay?

00:03:16 ◼   ► Because I once spilled some maple syrup on an Apple TV remote and that thing would never work correctly ever again.

00:03:21 ◼   ► Like you press the buttons and it would like it wouldn't it would not return correctly.

00:03:25 ◼   ► That's not good.

00:03:26 ◼   ► Yes. Honestly, it seems fine.

00:03:28 ◼   ► Like the case took the majority of the damage.

00:03:35 ◼   ► The phone, the phone seems okay.

00:03:37 ◼   ► You said a thing and also posted a thing, which is one of my favorite.

00:03:41 ◼   ► I think it's a Southernism to call a container a thing, a full thing, a full thing.

00:03:47 ◼   ► Yeah, I like that.

00:03:48 ◼   ► I like that. Another one that I like is the way that you use the word visit.

00:03:53 ◼   ► What do you mean?

00:03:55 ◼   ► Like we're going to visit for a while.

00:03:57 ◼   ► Yeah, we're going to have it.

00:03:58 ◼   ► Sometimes you can use it as a noun.

00:04:00 ◼   ► We're going to have a visit.

00:04:01 ◼   ► Yeah, stuff like that.

00:04:02 ◼   ► I like I like the use of the word visit and the use of the word thing.

00:04:06 ◼   ► You know, we're going to visit for a while and drink out of a thing.

00:04:09 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:04:10 ◼   ► That sounds like a good time, honestly.

00:04:12 ◼   ► That sounds like a great time.

00:04:13 ◼   ► See what I mean?

00:04:14 ◼   ► I love it. I love it.

00:04:16 ◼   ► There are certain like things in like Southern living, I guess,

00:04:19 ◼   ► or the have we call it Southern culture, which just ingratiates to people.

00:04:23 ◼   ► And I think this is it.

00:04:24 ◼   ► Like things like that. I like it.

00:04:25 ◼   ► It's nice.

00:04:26 ◼   ► Maybe.

00:04:27 ◼   ► I've never thought about either of those being weird, which I think goes to your point.

00:04:30 ◼   ► Yeah, why would you? You live there.

00:04:32 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:04:33 ◼   ► It's true.

00:04:34 ◼   ► Why would it be weird to you?

00:04:35 ◼   ► My whole life.

00:04:36 ◼   ► Mm hmm.

00:04:37 ◼   ► My whole life.

00:04:39 ◼   ► The minivan and the marble story continues.

00:04:45 ◼   ► I got two updates here.

00:04:47 ◼   ► People may remember I spoke about when I was on my sabbatical.

00:04:51 ◼   ► I was going to try to find what sounds like a marble under the floor somewhere in my wife's minivan that you hear sporadically.

00:04:58 ◼   ► So I thought I had fixed it.

00:04:59 ◼   ► Turns out I had it.

00:05:01 ◼   ► Two things.

00:05:02 ◼   ► One, I had to get a tire and get a tire replaced on the van.

00:05:07 ◼   ► That it sustained some damage.

00:05:09 ◼   ► And as I was turning into the tire shop, I heard the marble, which was just a real like gut punch from the universe to me.

00:05:18 ◼   ► I'm like, you know, this tire is like barely, you know, like it took a big chunk out of the side of the tire.

00:05:24 ◼   ► My spouse had a pothole in her van and.

00:05:28 ◼   ► Like, well, you know, I'll take it and get the tire replaced.

00:05:31 ◼   ► I knew the tire was dead and I was turning in and heard it.

00:05:35 ◼   ► I was like, yeah, come on.

00:05:37 ◼   ► And then listener Josh wrote in and I think Josh probably right.

00:05:41 ◼   ► So this is listener Josh.

00:05:43 ◼   ► After hearing Stephen discuss the marble in his minivan, I was reminded of a Reddit post where marble was stuck in the floor vents under the driver's seat.

00:05:52 ◼   ► There were vertical supports in the vent where the marble would get trapped and then at an unknown time, release from that position to a new one.

00:06:02 ◼   ► And I think Josh is onto something here, because when I took the seats out of the van and pulled a bunch of the carpet back, what I discovered is there's no really like open space that touches metal.

00:06:15 ◼   ► The marbles is rolling around, right?

00:06:17 ◼   ► It wouldn't it couldn't roll around if it were trapped in between like the insulation and the carpet.

00:06:21 ◼   ► But it being an event does make sense.

00:06:24 ◼   ► And what makes me really think this is true.

00:06:28 ◼   ► And I hadn't thought about this.

00:06:29 ◼   ► And then I read this and it clicked.

00:06:31 ◼   ► When you hear the marble, it's always for the same amount of time.

00:06:35 ◼   ► The marble isn't like it's not a free range marble.

00:06:38 ◼   ► It's moving within a set distance wherever it is trapped.

00:06:42 ◼   ► So next time I take the van apart looking for this because it is now war between me and this marble.

00:06:50 ◼   ► I'm going into the vents.

00:06:52 ◼   ► I'm going to the vents, Mike.

00:06:54 ◼   ► I think it's the only way.

00:06:55 ◼   ► As we said before, you cannot take the car apart. You should not.

00:07:01 ◼   ► You maybe could, but you should not.

00:07:03 ◼   ► I think is maybe a better way to say I'm not testing you here.

00:07:06 ◼   ► This is not a challenge.

00:07:08 ◼   ► I'm not like Steven, you can't do it because I don't want to challenge you because I really don't want you to do it.

00:07:12 ◼   ► Because I worry about your family.

00:07:15 ◼   ► That they can't go anywhere.

00:07:18 ◼   ► You just cars just strewn all over the lawn.

00:07:21 ◼   ► Another sudden thing.

00:07:23 ◼   ► Okay.

00:07:26 ◼   ► But maybe the vents.

00:07:28 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:07:29 ◼   ► Have you had a conversation with the children?

00:07:33 ◼   ► About the marble?

00:07:34 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:07:35 ◼   ► No one has fessed up to losing a marble in the van.

00:07:39 ◼   ► Maybe this is maybe a dad thing, right?

00:07:42 ◼   ► That like maybe you've got I would like to hear about it.

00:07:44 ◼   ► Like do you have a way in which you would try and get the children to give you information?

00:07:50 ◼   ► Like there's like an amnesty.

00:07:54 ◼   ► No one's going to get in trouble for this. Is there a way to do that?

00:07:57 ◼   ► Right.

00:07:58 ◼   ► So like a hey, you're not in trouble, I just need to know.

00:08:02 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:08:03 ◼   ► Kind of thing.

00:08:04 ◼   ► Or so I've rewatched Silo season one in preparation for season two.

00:08:09 ◼   ► Okay.

00:08:10 ◼   ► My word, season one is I'd forgotten how good it was.

00:08:13 ◼   ► It's so good.

00:08:14 ◼   ► But they have a thing in the Silo that's like basically a forgiveness day.

00:08:17 ◼   ► Like you can confess to doing bad things and you're not in trouble for them.

00:08:21 ◼   ► It's like that's what I need.

00:08:23 ◼   ► I will say the side of the van that it's on is where our youngest child sits.

00:08:30 ◼   ► And our youngest child, and Mike you've been in my house, you may have noticed this, a little bit messy.

00:08:36 ◼   ► His room's a disaster all the time. There's stuff everywhere.

00:08:38 ◼   ► I don't know if I mean you, you know, you maybe categorize him as messy.

00:08:41 ◼   ► I just categorize him as busy.

00:08:43 ◼   ► Sure. Yes. Yeah.

00:08:45 ◼   ► He's just got a lot going on, man. He hasn't got time to clean up.

00:08:47 ◼   ► He's got a lot. He's 10. There's a lot of stuff to do.

00:08:49 ◼   ► He's got to get out of his way. All right. He's got some work to do.

00:08:51 ◼   ► Yeah. One of my favorite stories about that particular child was the first time Jason came to Memphis.

00:08:56 ◼   ► Our youngest was maybe like three or two or three, maybe like he was little.

00:09:02 ◼   ► And he says like, yeah, he just like running through the house like a ball of energy.

00:09:05 ◼   ► He's like, yep, that hasn't changed.

00:09:07 ◼   ► So it's, I think it's on him.

00:09:09 ◼   ► And I think he would be the one to have a marble, like just hanging out, just carrying it around.

00:09:15 ◼   ► Right now, I think at the bed of my truck, there's at least three sticks that he's picked up on the way back to the truck from school pickup that are all very important.

00:09:24 ◼   ► You know, they're all named sticky, which is kind of funny.

00:09:28 ◼   ► That makes sense. That makes sense.

00:09:30 ◼   ► I mean, obviously, what else would you call a stick? So anyways, just name it after your phone.

00:09:34 ◼   ► Hey, oh, maybe. Oh, hang on. I got it.

00:09:43 ◼   ► Maybe I don't need to get the marble out. Maybe I just need to trap the marble.

00:09:48 ◼   ► What if I just pour a thing of maple syrup down the AC vents in the van?

00:09:56 ◼   ► And it solidifies, you know, like in Jurassic Park, they like to fly in amber.

00:10:01 ◼   ► I could do that. And the van would smell delicious.

00:10:04 ◼   ► Steven finds a way, you know?

00:10:06 ◼   ► That's right.

00:10:07 ◼   ► That's right. I see you, Steven.

00:10:09 ◼   ► I think I would be sleeping in the van if I tried that.

00:10:12 ◼   ► Yeah. At least it would smell good.

00:10:14 ◼   ► It would smell good. Mike, tell us about macOS virtualization.

00:10:18 ◼   ► I mean, I'm going to try. I mean, I read a headline. You can tell me if this is a problem or not.

00:10:23 ◼   ► I've been seeing this reported around the Internet. So M4 Macs cannot run macOS virtual machines prior to Ventura 13.4.

00:10:31 ◼   ► So if you try and boot up a virtual machine of an older version of macOS, the virtual machine just won't boot.

00:10:38 ◼   ► It's just a black screen. This is not a case on other Apple Silicon Macs.

00:10:41 ◼   ► I'm going to read a quote here from a piece of 9to5Mac.

00:10:44 ◼   ► According to researcher Ksaba Fitzell, it seems most likely that the bug affects an early part of the kernel boot,

00:10:51 ◼   ► which would require Apple to release new IPSW files for older versions of macOS so that they would work with M4 Macs.

00:10:57 ◼   ► However, this is unlikely to happen.

00:11:00 ◼   ► And so also, basically, other Apple Silicon Macs cannot virtualize from before macOS 12.

00:11:07 ◼   ► This feels like nothing to me, but I figured that you would be -- I don't know.

00:11:11 ◼   ► You would always -- you would be a person who likes to -- I know you do it -- run virtual machines of older versions of macOS.

00:11:18 ◼   ► But the fact that it can't go earlier than 12, I mean, you've just lost one version of macOS.

00:11:24 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, yes, you've lost one version of macOS.

00:11:27 ◼   ► But I think it's just an opportunity to talk about the bigger challenges around preserving old software.

00:11:34 ◼   ► Right? Like, this is always a challenge when you move between processor platforms.

00:11:39 ◼   ► And it's not a horsepower problem, right?

00:11:41 ◼   ► Like, the M4 is plenty fast enough to emulate x86 and PowerPC software, right?

00:11:47 ◼   ► It's different than -- our older listeners may shudder when I say this --

00:11:55 ◼   ► it's different than like virtual PC, which was back in the day on a PowerPC Mac.

00:12:00 ◼   ► You could emulate x86 to like run like Windows 2000.

00:12:05 ◼   ► And it was so slow.

00:12:08 ◼   ► Like, on the G4 that I tried it on, Mike, like, you would click the start button in Windows,

00:12:12 ◼   ► and you'd be like, one, two, there it is.

00:12:15 ◼   ► Like, unusable under most circumstances.

00:12:20 ◼   ► It's different now. These machines are really fast.

00:12:22 ◼   ► But it's more complicated than just horsepower.

00:12:25 ◼   ► The OS has to know -- the client OS has to know what's going on,

00:12:30 ◼   ► or someone has to build a layer in between.

00:12:33 ◼   ► Even when Apple Silicon first shipped, there were issues with the ARM version of Windows

00:12:40 ◼   ► that you couldn't run that.

00:12:42 ◼   ► And I don't know where that stands at the issue.

00:12:45 ◼   ► Like, I know you can do parallels and stuff now.

00:12:47 ◼   ► But this is always a challenge, and if this truly is up to Apple to fix,

00:12:55 ◼   ► that's maybe not going to happen.

00:12:58 ◼   ► But it may be that someone figures this out,

00:13:01 ◼   ► and someone builds something that allows this to work.

00:13:06 ◼   ► Or you could do what I recommend, build a cabin and fill it with computers,

00:13:10 ◼   ► and then you can run whatever OS you want.

00:13:13 ◼   ► I don't know, maybe this is just one of these things that I don't understand.

00:13:15 ◼   ► But, like, what are people doing?

00:13:21 ◼   ► Like, what are you wanting to do on Mac OS 12 Monterey?

00:13:27 ◼   ► What is that? I'm actually asking you.

00:13:31 ◼   ► What are people doing?

00:13:33 ◼   ► I think there's a case from the development perspective.

00:13:38 ◼   ► Like, you're building a Mac app, and you support back X number of versions,

00:13:42 ◼   ► and you want to make sure that your new feature works or something like that.

00:13:45 ◼   ► That's probably the most--

00:13:47 ◼   ► Yeah, but what if you need to test Mac OS 11?

00:13:50 ◼   ► You can't, can you?

00:13:52 ◼   ► You have an old machine, or you drop support for it.

00:13:55 ◼   ► Or you just hope for the best, which is not a good development practice either.

00:14:01 ◼   ► But I don't know how many people are doing that.

00:14:04 ◼   ► Well, the information's out there, I guess.

00:14:06 ◼   ► If you need to do this, don't buy an M4 Mac, I guess, is the thing.

00:14:11 ◼   ► I think some of this stuff I just don't get it.

00:14:14 ◼   ► You know me, I don't like to hold onto anything.

00:14:16 ◼   ► I just let it all go, right?

00:14:18 ◼   ► So it's the same as, like, game preservation.

00:14:20 ◼   ► I understand the idea of it, but I don't know what people are doing with it all, you know?

00:14:26 ◼   ► Yeah, let it go, let it go.

00:14:29 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. You don't need these Macs anymore.

00:14:32 ◼   ► That's good.

00:14:33 ◼   ► Hey, Mike, guess what?

00:14:34 ◼   ► What?

00:14:35 ◼   ► What's the membership sale time?

00:14:37 ◼   ► [imitates music]

00:14:39 ◼   ► Is it a quiz?

00:14:40 ◼   ► No, that was a different one.

00:14:42 ◼   ► It was a different noise.

00:14:43 ◼   ► Right now, you can go to giverelay.com.

00:14:47 ◼   ► The link is in the show notes.

00:14:49 ◼   ► It's also really easy to remember, giverelay.com.

00:14:53 ◼   ► We have 20% off all annual membership plans across the network, running until December 18th.

00:15:01 ◼   ► If you're not a member of Connected, now's a great time to sign up.

00:15:05 ◼   ► So what do you get?

00:15:06 ◼   ► A bunch of our shows have extra content for their members.

00:15:10 ◼   ► So if you go to this website, you can see this.

00:15:13 ◼   ► It's 10 shows currently have ad-free longer versions, including Connected.

00:15:19 ◼   ► We do Connected Pro each week, and you don't get any ads,

00:15:22 ◼   ► and you get an extra chapter at the beginning and some stuff at the end.

00:15:25 ◼   ► And you support us directly, which is really awesome.

00:15:29 ◼   ► The advertising market is tough, and membership has really made our company continue to be sustainable.

00:15:34 ◼   ► And so this is a great time to jump on board with that.

00:15:37 ◼   ► But no matter what plan you back, you get access to a bunch of shared common perks.

00:15:43 ◼   ► So you get access to the Relay Members Discord, the best place on the internet,

00:15:47 ◼   ► a monthly behind-the-scenes newsletter, wallpaper packs,

00:15:51 ◼   ► and access to a couple of members-only podcasts that we do each month.

00:15:57 ◼   ► One is called Backstage and one is called Spotlight. They're both excellent.

00:16:00 ◼   ► Backstage is Stephen and I talking about what's happening behind the scenes at Relay FM.

00:16:05 ◼   ► We answer questions from the Discord.

00:16:07 ◼   ► And Spotlight, Kathy Campbell, host of Conduit on Relay and Roboism,

00:16:14 ◼   ► she interviews a host, so one of the many hosts that we have, and also ancillary people.

00:16:21 ◼   ► Jill from St. Jude was on an episode in September, but mostly host,

00:16:25 ◼   ► also with questions from Discord members.

00:16:28 ◼   ► And so they are two pieces of monthly bonus content that all Relay members get.

00:16:33 ◼   ► But if you sign up for one of the specific shows and you'll get that 20% discount

00:16:38 ◼   ► for an annual subscription or membership, however you would want to call it,

00:16:42 ◼   ► you'll also get the bonus content that those shows produce as well.

00:16:45 ◼   ► So as Stephen said, for Connected, you get an extra chapter and no ads.

00:16:49 ◼   ► And I think this is a great deal. 20% off and you get an entire year.

00:16:53 ◼   ► So this is great for you or it's great for a gift.

00:16:56 ◼   ► So maybe you would like this as a gift so you can send this website to a loved one,

00:17:01 ◼   ► or maybe you would like to buy this for a gift for somebody in your life.

00:17:04 ◼   ► Well, something that Stephen has done this year,

00:17:06 ◼   ► because Stephen puts this wonderful website together,

00:17:08 ◼   ► is to make it easier than before to actually just buy this membership for yourself

00:17:13 ◼   ► if you wanted to do that.

00:17:14 ◼   ► I think this is a wonderful price. 20% off and it's running until when, Stephen?

00:17:18 ◼   ► December 18th.

00:17:20 ◼   ► Yeah, so we would really appreciate it. It really helps support the show

00:17:24 ◼   ► and it supports any show that you subscribe to.

00:17:28 ◼   ► But if you're listening to this, we're going to ask you to become a Connected Pro member.

00:17:32 ◼   ► Yeah, it's a great--I think it's a great deal and it means a lot to us.

00:17:38 ◼   ► And if you are a member, thank you. We appreciate it and yeah, it's good.

00:17:44 ◼   ► It's a good time of year, Mike.

00:17:45 ◼   ► Become a member of another show.

00:17:47 ◼   ► Yeah.

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00:19:21 ◼   ► Mike, I got some news.

00:19:25 ◼   ► Okay.

00:19:26 ◼   ► The era of the butterfly keyboard is over.

00:19:29 ◼   ► I didn't know we were still in it.

00:19:31 ◼   ► We're still in it. We're still in it.

00:19:33 ◼   ► Apple was.

00:19:34 ◼   ► I thought that ended a long time ago.

00:19:35 ◼   ► Yeah, Apple was.

00:19:36 ◼   ► Just last week, they wound down their long-running repair extension program for the butterfly keyboard,

00:19:42 ◼   ► where they would fix your computer for free.

00:19:45 ◼   ► It is the only repair extension program, or REP, if you're in the know.

00:19:50 ◼   ► It's the only REP I can think of that was updated to include a computer the day that computer went on sale.

00:19:57 ◼   ► So in 2019, when they revised the 13 and 15-inch MacBook Pro in the air,

00:20:04 ◼   ► those machines were introduced into the repair program the day they came out,

00:20:08 ◼   ► which is just a real vote of confidence on Apple's part.

00:20:13 ◼   ► It was a weird time. It was a weird time.

00:20:15 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:20:16 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, it was a sad time, too.

00:20:21 ◼   ► That era was just pretty depressing to talk about the computers.

00:20:28 ◼   ► It wasn't just this one.

00:20:31 ◼   ► When did it start?

00:20:33 ◼   ► It started with the 2015 MacBook, but when it kind of went mainstream was 2016 with the MacBook Pro.

00:20:41 ◼   ► So this is like a similar – in the Pro Show today, we spoke about the iMac Pro and kind of was reflecting on that.

00:20:48 ◼   ► And the iMac Pro was also a response to this period of time, where Macs were bad for various reasons.

00:20:56 ◼   ► There were not good options.

00:20:58 ◼   ► The new computers they were introducing, like the MacBook, were disappointing, ultimately,

00:21:04 ◼   ► from a power perspective, battery life perspective, heat perspective, throttling, and the keyboard,

00:21:10 ◼   ► even though the design of the MacBook was so nice, but it was ultimately a letdown in a bunch of ways.

00:21:16 ◼   ► And then there was the slow rollout and multiple attempted fixes of this butterfly keyboard,

00:21:23 ◼   ► which is unbelievable that it lasted for four years we were dealing with this.

00:21:28 ◼   ► And every time there would be a new one, it would be like, "And they improved the keyboard!"

00:21:32 ◼   ► And it's like they just kept making it a little bit better, a little bit better, a little bit better.

00:21:36 ◼   ► I think by the end, they did actually have, I think, what was a fine enough product from a repelability perspective.

00:21:44 ◼   ► It wasn't breaking as often, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it was just like, time to move on.

00:21:50 ◼   ► It still was never as good or as reliable as the previous system.

00:21:54 ◼   ► Yeah, they tweaked it. Rather famously, they added a little layer of protection in there, and they tried a couple different things.

00:22:01 ◼   ► I think by 2019, they were more reliable, but the reputation of these machines was just real bad.

00:22:10 ◼   ► And when I was putting this link together on 512 this morning, I wrote about it a little bit,

00:22:17 ◼   ► and then I went to go find a picture of this laptop, and I really was struck.

00:22:21 ◼   ► Basically, nothing out of this generation of laptop is still with us, other than the big trackpad.

00:22:28 ◼   ► But the keyboard got replaced, and they did that with the only 16-inch Intel MacBook Pro, and then it came to the others.

00:22:39 ◼   ► But the touch bar is gone, the keyboard is gone, and the "all you need is Thunderbolt" promise also gone.

00:22:49 ◼   ► The Apple Silicon MacBook Pro has brought back HDMI, MagSafe, and the SD card slot.

00:22:54 ◼   ► It's just so wild to look at this picture of this computer and be like, "You got so many things wrong with this."

00:23:02 ◼   ► And to their credit, they've walked it back, but the further we get from this period, the more it stands out to me.

00:23:09 ◼   ► It's like, man, there was some stuff going on over there.

00:23:12 ◼   ► I love the way it sounded, the keyboard though.

00:23:15 ◼   ► It did sound pretty good.

00:23:16 ◼   ► Like, if you were really going for it, it had a good sound. It was very snappy sounding.

00:23:23 ◼   ► Yeah, I have one of these.

00:23:25 ◼   ► That was the pieces of it crunching apart.

00:23:27 ◼   ► That could be possible. It was just like you were losing a bit of material every time you typed.

00:23:32 ◼   ► It's like eroding, like the keyboard would just erode over time.

00:23:36 ◼   ► Yeah, it was a shame. It was a shame that that was just a rough time to be in.

00:23:40 ◼   ► But look at this now.

00:23:41 ◼   ► My favorite thing that came out of that was Jason wrote a, and we produced it for Upgrade,

00:23:48 ◼   ► a true crime episode of Upgrade called "Who Killed the Butterfly Keyboard?"

00:23:53 ◼   ► I think it was our Christmas episode. You're in that episode playing a character.

00:23:57 ◼   ► I need to re-listen to this.

00:23:59 ◼   ► I know that we had people playing characters. It was a whole thing. That was a good time.

00:24:05 ◼   ► It's like a 35-minute thing. It was tons of fun.

00:24:08 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure, if I'm remembering correctly, I think somebody played Tim Cook.

00:24:15 ◼   ► Maybe it was me.

00:24:16 ◼   ► Or maybe we edited something together. I don't remember. Maybe it was you.

00:24:20 ◼   ► But yeah, it was a good time. I'm going to add this back to my queue because I want to re-listen to this.

00:24:24 ◼   ► But that was my favorite thing that came out of it all.

00:24:26 ◼   ► That was really good. I had forgotten about that until I saw it. You had put it in Notion this morning.

00:24:32 ◼   ► Very good.

00:24:33 ◼   ► Yeah, so the Repair Exchange Program is over.

00:24:36 ◼   ► So if you still have one of these and you have trouble out of it,

00:24:40 ◼   ► officially you're out of luck. But I would say that if you have a failure, go make your case to Apple.

00:24:48 ◼   ► And they may have mercy on you.

00:24:50 ◼   ► But I also can't imagine there's a ton of these running around anymore.

00:24:54 ◼   ► I'm sure they're out there. I'm sure people listening have one in their bag right now.

00:24:58 ◼   ► But I think that overall, I think a lot of people will move past these as soon as they could.

00:25:03 ◼   ► Yep.

00:25:04 ◼   ► Rest in peace, butterfly keyboard.

00:25:06 ◼   ► Take them from us too soon, you know?

00:25:09 ◼   ► Not soon. That's not true at all.

00:25:11 ◼   ► Too soon. Too soon.

00:25:13 ◼   ► Do you remember we did a live show in Chicago and the E key had fallen off my laptop right before the show.

00:25:22 ◼   ► And so I brought a – spoilers for a live show that was six years ago –

00:25:27 ◼   ► I brought a clamshell iBook to do the show with because I couldn't type on my own laptop anymore.

00:25:32 ◼   ► Yeah, wasn't it like we couldn't update the show notes because you –

00:25:38 ◼   ► I couldn't get on mine.

00:25:39 ◼   ► Yeah, you had to put them on like a USB key or something and like load them in just as a text file.

00:25:46 ◼   ► In text edit.

00:25:47 ◼   ► Oh man, that was a good time.

00:25:48 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:25:49 ◼   ► That was a good time.

00:25:50 ◼   ► Like no one can change anything or I won't know about it.

00:25:52 ◼   ► Oh, that was a good time.

00:25:54 ◼   ► It was.

00:25:55 ◼   ► Speaking of good times.

00:25:58 ◼   ► Okay.

00:25:59 ◼   ► Text-based social media.

00:26:01 ◼   ► It's rocking and rolling, huh? It's like 2018 over here.

00:26:05 ◼   ► Is it?

00:26:06 ◼   ► So you have talked about Blue Sky on a couple of shows.

00:26:09 ◼   ► You all spoke about it on Upgrade Plus, which is the new version of Upgrade.

00:26:14 ◼   ► You also spoke about it on Cortex this week.

00:26:17 ◼   ► I've listened to a lot of you this week.

00:26:19 ◼   ► I'm like weirdly on top of my podcast right now.

00:26:22 ◼   ► That's the way to go, man.

00:26:23 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:26:24 ◼   ► And so you've been using it a little bit.

00:26:28 ◼   ► I've been using it a little bit.

00:26:29 ◼   ► You've shared your feelings about it.

00:26:32 ◼   ► And I don't know, I just kind of wanted to have that discussion with you since you've had that discussion with other people.

00:26:39 ◼   ► I felt left out a little bit, but.

00:26:41 ◼   ► Well, like here we are.

00:26:42 ◼   ► Here we are.

00:26:43 ◼   ► If Blue Sky had started to pick up like two days later than it did, then it would be first here, wouldn't it?

00:26:49 ◼   ► It would be.

00:26:50 ◼   ► If you think about it.

00:26:51 ◼   ► It's just the march of time.

00:26:52 ◼   ► The march of time.

00:26:54 ◼   ► It's really more like the November of time.

00:26:57 ◼   ► Currently.

00:26:59 ◼   ► Why do you have to do this?

00:27:01 ◼   ► You know, why do you have to do this?

00:27:04 ◼   ► Blue Sky has some interesting features.

00:27:07 ◼   ► Like on the surface of it, it looks, I say this with as much respect as possible, as if they totally ripped off Twitter.

00:27:16 ◼   ► Like it looks like Twitter.

00:27:18 ◼   ► Like down to the icons.

00:27:19 ◼   ► I mean it started there, right?

00:27:20 ◼   ► Down to, yeah, well yeah it did.

00:27:21 ◼   ► Because it was like Jack Dorsey's like, "We're going to federate Twitter."

00:27:24 ◼   ► Before that was a word that people were using.

00:27:26 ◼   ► Jack Dorsey's gone from Blue Sky.

00:27:30 ◼   ► He's back in his, he's doing whatever Jack Dorsey does.

00:27:35 ◼   ► Eating only grass that he grew himself on the side of a mountain or something.

00:27:42 ◼   ► What a guy.

00:27:43 ◼   ► But they have built a lot of features that are really interesting.

00:27:48 ◼   ► Mostly around content moderation and control.

00:27:50 ◼   ► So they've got content filters set for adult content.

00:27:56 ◼   ► A lot of options around that.

00:27:57 ◼   ► Including like non-sexual nudity.

00:28:01 ◼   ► A lot of options.

00:28:02 ◼   ► They have custom feeds and they have a pretty good directory of like feeds that have been built.

00:28:08 ◼   ► And some of them are really interesting and you can just basically add it to your account.

00:28:12 ◼   ► Now just today as we're recording this, Threads is rolling out a similar feature to everybody with custom feeds.

00:28:19 ◼   ► Think about these like lists in sort of the Twitter world.

00:28:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:28:25 ◼   ► Where you've got, you know, I had one for like politics and news.

00:28:29 ◼   ► There weren't people that I followed.

00:28:31 ◼   ► I didn't want it in my normal timeline.

00:28:33 ◼   ► But back in the day in Tweetbot I could like bounce over there and see what was going on.

00:28:36 ◼   ► Yeah, I never used lists.

00:28:38 ◼   ► Hmm.

00:28:39 ◼   ► But I understand the thinking behind it.

00:28:41 ◼   ► I think at the time it was just kind of like, "If I want this content, I'll just get the content."

00:28:44 ◼   ► But I think I maybe understand it a little bit more now.

00:28:47 ◼   ► And yeah, like Blue Sky has some interesting ones.

00:28:49 ◼   ► And they have some that are set that you can subscribe to.

00:28:54 ◼   ► And some that are like the idea is like, so for example, you have a mutual so you can get like a mutuals list.

00:29:00 ◼   ► So it's just posts from people you follow and who follow you, right?

00:29:04 ◼   ► There has to be that link.

00:29:06 ◼   ► And they have like a popular with friends, which I think is interesting.

00:29:09 ◼   ► I think it's like, it's like nuzzle.

00:29:11 ◼   ► It's just like an interesting, it is an interesting way to get an algorithm that is not too far away from you.

00:29:21 ◼   ► If that makes sense.

00:29:22 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:29:23 ◼   ► So it's like it's stuff that you aren't following, like accounts that you aren't following or some that you are.

00:29:28 ◼   ► But it's like what is popular?

00:29:30 ◼   ► I find that to be interesting.

00:29:31 ◼   ► I find that to be interesting.

00:29:32 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:29:33 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:29:34 ◼   ► Lots of interesting ideas around there.

00:29:36 ◼   ► They have DMs, which are much more like Twitter's DMs.

00:29:41 ◼   ► Macedon has private replies, which I always feel like I'm going to screw up.

00:29:46 ◼   ► I don't like the way those work at all.

00:29:48 ◼   ► And then Threads does not have DMs.

00:29:50 ◼   ► And, you know, I think they would say, well, if you want to DM, use another meta product like Instagram or, or Messenger or something.

00:30:02 ◼   ► But I think the thing that most people like about Blue Sky in terms of moderation is they have really robust post interaction settings.

00:30:09 ◼   ► And so you can allow a single post to be quoted or not quoted.

00:30:14 ◼   ► You can set who can reply, everybody or nobody or mentioned users or followed users.

00:30:21 ◼   ► And I think all of that's really well done.

00:30:24 ◼   ► And the UI, I think is actually really good when you look at the post interaction settings, like it's clear.

00:30:29 ◼   ► I think what's going to happen when you check the various boxes.

00:30:34 ◼   ► I think all that's really good.

00:30:35 ◼   ► And my, like, my issues aren't with Blue Sky itself, like where I continue to struggle with is like, I ultimately think any social media that is like this will always end up in the same place.

00:30:53 ◼   ► Like no matter how good the intentions are or how unique the technology is.

00:30:58 ◼   ► Ultimately, there's something fundamental about the, you have X number of text characters, like that sort of social media, I think can't help but wander into the same place.

00:31:08 ◼   ► It always ends up over time.

00:31:10 ◼   ► Yeah, probably.

00:31:12 ◼   ► I think that there is a spectrum of what that result can look like.

00:31:19 ◼   ► But I think I broadly agree with you, right, that like there are certain traits that modern text-based social media have that the app icon will not change.

00:31:37 ◼   ► And like it is but a matter of time until a service will trend towards what Twitter was.

00:31:48 ◼   ► But I mean, of course, Twitter has continued.

00:31:53 ◼   ► It's gone further away than even what it was when we were there, right?

00:31:58 ◼   ► So like Twitter was a thing.

00:32:01 ◼   ► I mean, it was a different company then, like when I left, but then it continued to get worse and worse and worse in the ways that I don't like.

00:32:09 ◼   ► So even these services had the ability to do that.

00:32:12 ◼   ► Like I would say, like for me, Blue Sky feels like the closest to old Twitter that I've experienced out of Mastodon threads and this.

00:32:24 ◼   ► And part of it is, I think, part of the reason that it's getting a bit of a resurgence is like we all have interests in our life or people in our life that didn't leave Twitter, right?

00:32:37 ◼   ► And so like for me, because I decided I didn't want to log in anymore, not just not post anymore, there were certain like areas of my interest where I was just not getting content from those people.

00:32:50 ◼   ► For me, it's gaming, right? So like people in gaming, like gaming, Twitter didn't leave, right?

00:32:56 ◼   ► And so I was not really seeing very much text-based content from those people.

00:33:03 ◼   ► Like they would every now and again, some of these gaming creators would pop up on threads, but they weren't giving their best content to threads.

00:33:13 ◼   ► They were like cross-posting or like, you know, they're just like hanging out, like posting the occasional thing.

00:33:19 ◼   ► But like they were all still on Twitter, right? Because they were still getting the news on Twitter.

00:33:22 ◼   ► And so they were like sharing news on Twitter and sharing opinions and stuff like that.

00:33:26 ◼   ► And so like I think everybody has that corner and it feels like Blue Sky is, it's like post-election, it's like Blue Sky has been able to capture up a bit more of this.

00:33:37 ◼   ► And I think that's what's happening.

00:33:39 ◼   ► I don't really know why people have, like why people particularly chose Blue Sky.

00:33:46 ◼   ► I think a lot of people chose threads, like tried threads and didn't like it.

00:33:50 ◼   ► And so they, I think I hear a lot about threads is like people say the algorithm's really bad.

00:33:56 ◼   ► And that is not my experience with threads.

00:34:00 ◼   ► And I do wonder if it's because I did kind of commit to it.

00:34:03 ◼   ► And so maybe it has learned a bit about me.

00:34:06 ◼   ► I think it takes that.

00:34:08 ◼   ► But anyway, it seems like people are overall, or like people don't really seem to like threads or threads the app or whatever it is.

00:34:17 ◼   ► So they're trying out Blue Sky.

00:34:18 ◼   ► Its owner, maybe.

00:34:20 ◼   ► I know that that's a thing, but that's not what I'm seeing people say.

00:34:24 ◼   ► Like the people that I'm talking about, which is like the content creators that I follow, they're not complaining about the fact that it's meta-owned.

00:34:31 ◼   ► Because everybody's still using Instagram.

00:34:33 ◼   ► So like, you know.

00:34:34 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that's a little bit of an our own echo chamber kind of thing.

00:34:39 ◼   ► Because it's like, do you know and trust who owns Blue Sky?

00:34:42 ◼   ► Because Blue Sky's own too.

00:34:44 ◼   ► That doesn't really feel like a thing to me.

00:34:48 ◼   ► Like if you truly, truly care about who owns your social media, I mean set up your own Mastodon server I suppose.

00:34:54 ◼   ► Or don't use them all.

00:34:57 ◼   ► I don't know. Because someone's controlling it.

00:34:58 ◼   ► It doesn't matter what's happening. Someone's controlling something somewhere.

00:35:02 ◼   ► But like when it's about Twitter evolved, there's a couple other things.

00:35:09 ◼   ► One, there's no algorithm in your face.

00:35:11 ◼   ► So that feels like old Twitter, right?

00:35:13 ◼   ► But the discovery tools are there if you want them.

00:35:15 ◼   ► Like when I was using Twitter, it did not default to the For You.

00:35:19 ◼   ► Like that was the thing that you had to go to.

00:35:21 ◼   ► And I think that was the thing that got changed at some point.

00:35:23 ◼   ► Blue Sky only has an official app.

00:35:26 ◼   ► So it doesn't feel good like a third party app does.

00:35:29 ◼   ► Yeah, no.

00:35:30 ◼   ► There were iPhone apps pretty bad.

00:35:32 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:35:33 ◼   ► But remember, if you remember, I used the official Twitter app.

00:35:36 ◼   ► I know. Yeah.

00:35:37 ◼   ► I moved away from the third party apps because I just wanted to get the actual experience of the service.

00:35:43 ◼   ► And also the notifications are a disaster.

00:35:46 ◼   ► Like everything is mixed together and you can't filter them out from each other, which I find hilarious.

00:35:51 ◼   ► So like it's hard for me right now to see replies because the service is popping off.

00:35:57 ◼   ► Like I'm getting followers, I'm getting likes and da da da da da.

00:36:00 ◼   ► So it's like it's hard for me to actually see the replies from people.

00:36:05 ◼   ► So it's interesting.

00:36:08 ◼   ► Like I'm giving Blue Sky like a college try here.

00:36:13 ◼   ► Like I am wanting to spend some time on it.

00:36:18 ◼   ► I like that at the moment it has a lot of the content creators that I want to hear from.

00:36:24 ◼   ► So that's cool.

00:36:25 ◼   ► Like I like that.

00:36:26 ◼   ► It's actually for me at the moment, I'm enjoying it a little bit more than threads because I'm actually getting stuff that I've missed.

00:36:32 ◼   ► Like I don't know what this feeling is going to be like in a little bit of time.

00:36:36 ◼   ► Like with all of these things, now I have three places.

00:36:38 ◼   ► And so like I'm not really now I have no idea what goes where because like I felt like I had a good sense of like I'm talking to our listeners on the don.

00:36:49 ◼   ► And like no, I'm talking to my tech nerds on the don.

00:36:55 ◼   ► Right.

00:36:56 ◼   ► And then I have a lot of listeners that aren't the straight like Apple nerds and there a lot of those people are on threads.

00:37:03 ◼   ► Right.

00:37:04 ◼   ► And so like I could kind of split it.

00:37:05 ◼   ► And now now what's Blue Sky?

00:37:07 ◼   ► Like I have no idea.

00:37:08 ◼   ► Agreed.

00:37:09 ◼   ► But I'm just like I'm like trying it all out.

00:37:12 ◼   ► But you know I've just added another app that I've put a 15 minute app limit on.

00:37:16 ◼   ► I have 15 minute app limits on all these things.

00:37:18 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:37:19 ◼   ► Trying to like.

00:37:20 ◼   ► But now I know I've gone from 30 to 45 total.

00:37:22 ◼   ► So I might do some tweaking there.

00:37:25 ◼   ► My main the main criticism I have about Blue Sky is that they chose every possible bad way to deal with usernames.

00:37:35 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:37:36 ◼   ► Every decision they seem to have made about how usernames work feels bad.

00:37:42 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:37:43 ◼   ► Before we dive into that Discord is popping off.

00:37:46 ◼   ► There are third party apps for Blue Sky.

00:37:48 ◼   ► Seems like they're all kind of mediocre.

00:37:51 ◼   ► So then my point stands.

00:37:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:37:54 ◼   ► One's called Gray Sky.

00:37:55 ◼   ► One's called Gray Sky.

00:37:56 ◼   ► And the other is called Skeets.

00:37:59 ◼   ► And I will not install it because of its name.

00:38:01 ◼   ► Get out of town.

00:38:02 ◼   ► Get out of town.

00:38:03 ◼   ► I'm not interested.

00:38:04 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:38:05 ◼   ► This is like when Maestellon had toots.

00:38:06 ◼   ► Do you remember that?

00:38:07 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:38:08 ◼   ► People got toots.

00:38:09 ◼   ► But like so the username system if you choose like a standard username.

00:38:16 ◼   ► Right.

00:38:17 ◼   ► So like you just sign up and you just say like oh this is my username.

00:38:20 ◼   ► Every user is like you choose whatever it is.

00:38:25 ◼   ► So you choose your username.

00:38:27 ◼   ► So say I chose iMike.

00:38:28 ◼   ► So it would be like iMike.BSky.Social.

00:38:32 ◼   ► That is your username.

00:38:33 ◼   ► Like you then become like BSky.App/profile/ and then it would be iMike.BSky.Social.

00:38:44 ◼   ► Terrible.

00:38:45 ◼   ► Terrible, terrible, terrible.

00:38:46 ◼   ► And then everyone's like oh just get your own domain name.

00:38:49 ◼   ► You can have your own domain name.

00:38:50 ◼   ► So I'm like alright I did that.

00:38:52 ◼   ► So now I'm BSky.App/profile/Mike.Social.

00:38:57 ◼   ► That's not ideal either.

00:38:59 ◼   ► No.

00:39:00 ◼   ► Like none of these.

00:39:01 ◼   ► It's really weird to me because it's like it's hard to communicate like for Blue Sky.

00:39:06 ◼   ► Like I guess just just find me.

00:39:09 ◼   ► Like it was Maestellon was hard enough.

00:39:11 ◼   ► Like now this one is even more complicated I think.

00:39:15 ◼   ► Like you know with Maestellon and then eventually it just became like oh you could just work

00:39:18 ◼   ► it out and find someone.

00:39:19 ◼   ► But now like I don't even have like a consistent thing.

00:39:23 ◼   ► Like so I don't know if I'm going to change it.

00:39:25 ◼   ► I saw what you did today.

00:39:26 ◼   ► You've done an interesting thing which is like a whole new thing.

00:39:29 ◼   ► You've got a whole new domain.

00:39:30 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:39:31 ◼   ► iSomH86.net and it just redirects to 512.

00:39:36 ◼   ► Because I've embraced the 86 in my username.

00:39:40 ◼   ► I just I don't like this.

00:39:42 ◼   ► I don't like I think they chose every wrong decision.

00:39:45 ◼   ► Why can't I just choose a username?

00:39:47 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:39:48 ◼   ► And that be 8.

00:39:49 ◼   ► I mean I think a lot of that is with the because they have their own federation protocol called AT.

00:39:57 ◼   ► I kind of feel like so.

00:39:59 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:40:00 ◼   ► Like no one else can federate with them.

00:40:02 ◼   ► They're not federating with anyone else and they also make all of the decisions.

00:40:04 ◼   ► So like if I go to Blue Sky I should just be able to search someone's name and they pop up.

00:40:09 ◼   ► Like I don't know why it's so complicated.

00:40:10 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:40:11 ◼   ► I think this is the whole like server name thing is was with that in mind.

00:40:16 ◼   ► But I agree with what I think Jason said or someone said in upgrade plus.

00:40:20 ◼   ► That's Jason or that other guy.

00:40:22 ◼   ► Whoever the other guy is.

00:40:24 ◼   ► I don't know that guy.

00:40:25 ◼   ► That's a guy.

00:40:26 ◼   ► Who's Casey?

00:40:28 ◼   ► The that the we don't need two of these right.

00:40:32 ◼   ► We don't need Mastadons Federation Activity Pub and AT.

00:40:40 ◼   ► I think Activity Pub's already one like because Threads is integrating with it and Threads is the biggest one of any of these networks by far.

00:40:47 ◼   ► Like Blue Sky's popping off but Threads is monumentally bigger.

00:40:51 ◼   ► Yeah but now Blue Sky's way bigger than Mastodon.

00:40:54 ◼   ► So so has Mastodon has Activity Pub won?

00:40:59 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:41:00 ◼   ► Like yeah Threads is is like federating with it.

00:41:03 ◼   ► But what if they also decide to federate with AT at some point?

00:41:07 ◼   ► I mean Activity Pub is also in WordPress and some other things like maybe Activity Pub wins but Mastodon loses like we just don't know.

00:41:16 ◼   ► And that's on one hand like exciting and fun because Twitter just had Monopoly on this for whatever it was 15 years.

00:41:25 ◼   ► But in the meantime it's a little frustrating.

00:41:28 ◼   ► And like I think it's you know like for me with between Mastodon and Threads if people just cross post everything I tend to follow them on Mastodon if they're like Apple relay people.

00:41:42 ◼   ► And my Threads is much more kind of like people in my real life because they've just opened it from Instagram right.

00:41:51 ◼   ► And then like some news and political stuff.

00:41:53 ◼   ► And so yeah I don't know where Blue Sky fits in with that.

00:41:57 ◼   ► I also continue you know I really like Blue Sky having a moment has like reopened this for me of like where does any of this fit in my life.

00:42:07 ◼   ► And like I use them all I use it all too much less than Twitter a lot less than Twitter.

00:42:12 ◼   ► I too have the limits set up and I most days follow those limits on my phone.

00:42:19 ◼   ► But because I can't shake that all like that this that this format has an inherent end point in the dark place.

00:42:31 ◼   ► Regardless of what you do in terms of moderation and content settings and stuff just that this format is has something about it that intrinsically drifts towards dark things.

00:42:44 ◼   ► Like where do I fit into that right like I like reading what I read on it is it just that I post less is that I don't use it at all like do I just use it for work announcements like I continue to really struggle with that.

00:42:59 ◼   ► And I think I'd basically kind of put that just out of my mind for a long time.

00:43:03 ◼   ► But with Blue Sky being you know kind of coming into its own at the moment it's kind of reopened all that for me. I don't know what the answer is but it's just where I am with it to be to be real honest.

00:43:14 ◼   ► Yeah I'm not sure that we should have gone anywhere after Twitter like I don't know if it was beneficial.

00:43:21 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:43:22 ◼   ► I think it could have been a moment to to leave social media if that was something that you wanted to do.

00:43:27 ◼   ► And you did it for a while.

00:43:28 ◼   ► Yeah and then someone naming no names.

00:43:32 ◼   ► Federico.

00:43:33 ◼   ► Told me told me that I should join Mastodon for the good of our business.

00:43:38 ◼   ► That sounds like Federico.

00:43:39 ◼   ► This sounds like Federico.

00:43:41 ◼   ► It does.

00:43:42 ◼   ► And I you know I.

00:43:45 ◼   ► The thing for me now is there are three services right to use.

00:43:52 ◼   ► And if I'm trying to talk about my work.

00:43:57 ◼   ► I have to now post all three of those services.

00:44:00 ◼   ► This has become easy to do with tools like croissant which I love.

00:44:05 ◼   ► Croissant.

00:44:06 ◼   ► It has Blue Sky.

00:44:07 ◼   ► Croissant.

00:44:08 ◼   ► You know I've been using it this week to post stuff everywhere.

00:44:10 ◼   ► But like I'm just not sure that that is really serving anyone.

00:44:13 ◼   ► I don't feel like I particularly want to double down on any area like on any like I was going to double down on any of them it would be threads because I swear I had the most followers.

00:44:23 ◼   ► But I'm also not sure that that is the best place.

00:44:26 ◼   ► Like I don't really have a good sense for where the best place is.

00:44:28 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:44:29 ◼   ► So I kind of feel stuck in needing to post things everywhere.

00:44:34 ◼   ► And at a point where I'm not even really sure if people if that's like helping people.

00:44:39 ◼   ► And I don't feel like I want to choose one.

00:44:43 ◼   ► Because I don't know what the I don't know which what one I prefer.

00:44:48 ◼   ► Because I'm using them so little.

00:44:50 ◼   ► And if I'm going to choose one of these because it's like for business reasons I have to choose the one that will provide the most benefit in the long run.

00:45:01 ◼   ► And that is unknown at this stage.

00:45:03 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:45:04 ◼   ► Currently it's Macedon but that may not be the case forever.

00:45:07 ◼   ► But is it?

00:45:09 ◼   ► I think I think it is like in just just as you've been talking about it's going through my replies on threads and Macedon.

00:45:18 ◼   ► Like Macedon is where listener type stuff reader type stuff is happening not threads.

00:45:24 ◼   ► That's where I get the most replies but I get the most likes and re-shares on threads.

00:45:29 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:45:30 ◼   ► So then what's the best one?

00:45:32 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:45:33 ◼   ► You know it's very complicated.

00:45:35 ◼   ► I mean look maybe I get the most likes and re-shares on threads because I have like way more followers on threads than I do on Macedon.

00:45:44 ◼   ► So yeah I don't know man.

00:45:47 ◼   ► And then I feel like whenever I talk about this it's like this whole conversation feels like antithetical to the whole point of it.

00:45:54 ◼   ► Because I'm not particularly giving people a good sell on why they should follow me on any of these services.

00:45:59 ◼   ► Where I'm like I don't know what to post.

00:46:02 ◼   ► You know?

00:46:03 ◼   ► I kind of wished I could just post freely but like it just doesn't I just don't really feel like I can do that anymore.

00:46:10 ◼   ► Like this is just a thing that has changed over time which I think is part of what you're like alluding to.

00:46:14 ◼   ► Everybody knows this right? Like you post something on social media because it's like it's meme forever.

00:46:18 ◼   ► You post something and it's like oh I can't believe you'd say this.

00:46:21 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:46:22 ◼   ► Like there's just too much of that and it's like that's a real it could be a real drain on your on your mental health.

00:46:28 ◼   ► Like you're just like being scared to say anything.

00:46:31 ◼   ► Like I don't feel scared to say things on podcasts to say them you know?

00:46:34 ◼   ► Because like people it's just like a different expectation.

00:46:38 ◼   ► And yeah so yeah I don't really know what to do.

00:46:43 ◼   ► I use these services primarily to keep up with people now.

00:46:49 ◼   ► Like I am a much more of a consumer than I am like a creator on these platforms.

00:46:56 ◼   ► I think that's probably good but also like should I be a creator on these platforms?

00:47:04 ◼   ► Is that better for my business?

00:47:07 ◼   ► Like I haven't I at this point I have no idea.

00:47:10 ◼   ► What I know is I had I don't know 40,000 followers on Twitter or whatever.

00:47:14 ◼   ► I don't have that combined across all three services and everything seems fine.

00:47:19 ◼   ► So like maybe maybe I maybe I never needed it in the first place.

00:47:24 ◼   ► Like I have no idea at this point.

00:47:26 ◼   ► Or maybe the I'm gonna say this gently.

00:47:33 ◼   ► Maybe the follower number doesn't mean anything at all.

00:47:37 ◼   ► Like yes there were 40,000 on Twitter but they either all weren't real or there were people who weren't active.

00:47:46 ◼   ► I'm the same way. Like I didn't have 40,000. I think I had like 30,000 on Twitter.

00:47:49 ◼   ► And yeah.

00:47:50 ◼   ► You're doubting the 40,000 mic heads that were out there?

00:47:54 ◼   ► Hanging on to my every word?

00:47:55 ◼   ► Did someone buy you like 10,000 followers at some point?

00:47:58 ◼   ► Someone bought 3,000 followers for me once but then I got somebody to help me write a block list.

00:48:04 ◼   ► That's good.

00:48:05 ◼   ► And got rid of them all.

00:48:06 ◼   ► That's good.

00:48:07 ◼   ► I know the mic heads are out there but.

00:48:10 ◼   ► Yeah they're out there baby.

00:48:11 ◼   ► You know.

00:48:12 ◼   ► Like our entire business is built on quality not quantity to a degree.

00:48:17 ◼   ► Yeah. Yeah. You're right. You're right. You're right.

00:48:19 ◼   ► So I don't know.

00:48:20 ◼   ► I think a lot of us are in the same boat right?

00:48:23 ◼   ► Like not even like fancy content creators but it's like Twitter was also around for 15 years so you picked up a lot of people over time right?

00:48:29 ◼   ► Who are you know then bounced or never came back or got hit by a bus or whatever so.

00:48:35 ◼   ► I guess maybe a better way to look at this is like how great it is that our audiences are our own.

00:48:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:48:45 ◼   ► Right? That like the people listening to this show, the people that listen to MacPow users, the people that listen to Cortex, the people that listen to App Stories, ReadMac stories you know like.

00:48:55 ◼   ► We have our own audiences that aren't controlled by.

00:48:59 ◼   ► Mhm.

00:49:00 ◼   ► By any company and like I guess that is like the silver line to take from it which is that you know I've always had larger audiences to podcasts than on any social media platform.

00:49:11 ◼   ► Same.

00:49:12 ◼   ► And so I guess you just we just got to keep talking to people in the way that we are.

00:49:16 ◼   ► But I just want to make sure that I'm like I'm being responsible as a person who creates for the internet but I think at this stage it's kind of losing. Oh I would like to happen.

00:49:30 ◼   ► It's just one of them to be really dominant.

00:49:32 ◼   ► Mhm.

00:49:33 ◼   ► Like you know what I'm like one of them is just dominant and then that's it.

00:49:36 ◼   ► And at the moment it's like Threads is that but it also isn't you know like Threads has the most users, the most monthly active users, the most daily active users but it doesn't seem to have like it has definitely not captured the minds and the hearts in the way that Twitter did.

00:49:55 ◼   ► Mhm.

00:49:56 ◼   ► Right?

00:49:57 ◼   ► Like it has not done that.

00:49:59 ◼   ► Like I don't I don't feel like you're seeing Threads posts reported about on the news.

00:50:06 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:50:07 ◼   ► And so.

00:50:08 ◼   ► Right.

00:50:09 ◼   ► Right?

00:50:10 ◼   ► And so like I don't it's hard to know what the future is right now.

00:50:12 ◼   ► All I know is I'm I'm I'm happy to try out Blue Sky.

00:50:16 ◼   ► I'm kind of disappointed that we have another one.

00:50:18 ◼   ► Like there's like why can't why can't just one of them have done it?

00:50:22 ◼   ► Maybe Blue Sky is the winner.

00:50:24 ◼   ► Like I guess I guess we'll see.

00:50:26 ◼   ► Mhm.

00:50:27 ◼   ► You know?

00:50:28 ◼   ► But like it's impossible at this stage to know what the future is like and I would just

00:50:34 ◼   ► like to fast forward to that point where that is settled.

00:50:38 ◼   ► You know?

00:50:40 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:50:41 ◼   ► Time will tell.

00:50:43 ◼   ► But I can't keep up with all three.

00:50:45 ◼   ► Like.

00:50:46 ◼   ► Just it's impossible.

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00:53:23 ◼   ► As we are recording this, the scuttlebutt is that the Department of Justice is planning

00:53:29 ◼   ► to require, ask, I'm not really sure how it works, Google, to sell off Chrome.

00:53:36 ◼   ► Now this is one of the results of the search monopoly case that the Department of Justice

00:53:42 ◼   ► has basically won over Google and is now a case of like the remedy stage.

00:53:48 ◼   ► So the Department of Justice is going to go to the judge and say, this is what we want

00:53:51 ◼   ► Google to do.

00:53:52 ◼   ► Other requirements are like, there's like a thing that is, people say is really important,

00:53:57 ◼   ► but I don't fully understand it about like Google might need to give away its search

00:54:01 ◼   ► engine data that other search engine providers could use.

00:54:05 ◼   ► I don't fully understand that part, but they also, there may be a requirement to remove

00:54:12 ◼   ► Google search and the Play Store as the defaults for Android, making users opt in or choose

00:54:16 ◼   ► something else.

00:54:17 ◼   ► They're not requiring Android itself to be sold, which I guess is a bit, I'm sure

00:54:21 ◼   ► they're very happy about that.

00:54:23 ◼   ► But I want to talk about Chrome specifically.

00:54:26 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:54:27 ◼   ► Because that is the one I can most easily get my head around.

00:54:30 ◼   ► So the expectation is that they will say that Google Chrome cannot even be owned by Google

00:54:36 ◼   ► anymore.

00:54:37 ◼   ► Like this isn't even a, oh, you have to make people choose which search engine they should,

00:54:43 ◼   ► you know, it's not like a search engine ballot.

00:54:45 ◼   ► The Department of Justice thinks that Google should not own a web browser.

00:54:49 ◼   ► And if this happens, the expectation is that Chrome could end up being valued at like 15

00:54:56 ◼   ► to $20 billion if someone has to buy it.

00:54:59 ◼   ► And I guess my question is, who's going to pay this?

00:55:03 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:55:04 ◼   ► That could and doesn't have a browser already.

00:55:09 ◼   ► And if somebody buys it, don't we just end up in the same situation again, where they're

00:55:15 ◼   ► going to use it for a benefit of their own?

00:55:18 ◼   ► Yeah, it's so complicated.

00:55:20 ◼   ► And like, if you're a Stratechery member, like Ben's post today was really good.

00:55:28 ◼   ► The subscriber update today was really good about this.

00:55:30 ◼   ► They talked about it on dithering as well.

00:55:32 ◼   ► As you'd imagine, Ben's thoughts on this are very well formed.

00:55:36 ◼   ► You can't separate easily Chrome from the rest of Google, right?

00:55:42 ◼   ► It came out of a company that is a search engine and a company that has an ad business.

00:55:49 ◼   ► And yes, that means they do have levers within the browser they can pull.

00:55:57 ◼   ► But the era of a standalone browser company is over.

00:56:02 ◼   ► Look no further than Firefox laying a bunch of people off two weeks ago.

00:56:06 ◼   ► And did you see that Arc is like pivoting?

00:56:09 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:56:10 ◼   ► Did you see that?

00:56:11 ◼   ► They talked about it on NPU because it's not working for them either.

00:56:15 ◼   ► And we now live in a world where a browser is just a component of the operating system.

00:56:23 ◼   ► And this is a lot of what Ben said, like this isn't all original to me, but it's different

00:56:28 ◼   ► than it was in the 90s.

00:56:31 ◼   ► And even when this was Microsoft in the hot seat, you know, God, almost 30 years ago with

00:56:39 ◼   ► the DOJ, even then separating Internet Explorer from Windows wasn't completely sensical top

00:56:50 ◼   ► to bottom.

00:56:51 ◼   ► And that's before you get into issues like right before we recorded that there was an

00:56:54 ◼   ► article about Google's concern over like, if this happens, what is it going to do to

00:57:00 ◼   ► the, you know, the thousands of people who work on Chrome?

00:57:02 ◼   ► Like people and that's part of their defense.

00:57:05 ◼   ► Like a lot of people have jobs working on this.

00:57:08 ◼   ► What, what, what do we do about that?

00:57:10 ◼   ► And it's all very messy and complicated, but I just don't think in 2024 you can have a

00:57:17 ◼   ► successful browser that's not part of your operating system.

00:57:20 ◼   ► And Google's OS, you know, is the Internet, right?

00:57:26 ◼   ► Like I'm not running Chrome OS, I'm running Mac OS, but Google's OS is the web really.

00:57:32 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean what happens to Chrome OS?

00:57:34 ◼   ► Like, oh yeah, unknown.

00:57:36 ◼   ► Right.

00:57:37 ◼   ► What happens there?

00:57:38 ◼   ► And what, you know, like I said, we're not really focusing on the Android things.

00:57:42 ◼   ► That seems unlikely that's what they're going to do, but it's kind of the same question.

00:57:46 ◼   ► Like an app store can't really exist successfully on its own apart from the platform vendor,

00:57:52 ◼   ► at least it hasn't happened yet, but we've tried.

00:57:55 ◼   ► We were in an era where browsers were independent companies and that has, that time has ended.

00:58:01 ◼   ► And if Google has to sell Chrome or spin it off, it will not be the success that it is.

00:58:08 ◼   ► I am sure Google spends a lot of money on Chrome.

00:58:11 ◼   ► You know where that money comes from?

00:58:13 ◼   ► Search ads, right?

00:58:15 ◼   ► Chrome is free.

00:58:17 ◼   ► You're not paying to use it.

00:58:19 ◼   ► It works because it's a function of a larger company.

00:58:22 ◼   ► It will not stand on its own.

00:58:24 ◼   ► And I think if this comes to pass, we're going to end up in a world where in a attempt to

00:58:32 ◼   ► have greater competition, the opposite may happen where like Chrome gets spun out and,

00:58:37 ◼   ► you know, does it fade away over time?

00:58:40 ◼   ► And then we have Safari and Edge, which by the way, is running on chromium, the engine

00:58:45 ◼   ► inside of Chrome.

00:58:46 ◼   ► Like what happens to chromium?

00:58:48 ◼   ► It's all very complicated.

00:58:50 ◼   ► And while I am generally in favor of governments working to protect the rights of citizens,

00:58:58 ◼   ► this doesn't seem very thought through, thought through very well.

00:59:04 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:59:05 ◼   ► I'm not really sure why not just the browse, like why not just a search ballot screen?

00:59:09 ◼   ► Why, I mean, look, I'm sure someone has a good thought about this, but like, yeah, maybe

00:59:15 ◼   ► there's a concern about data collection more than just what search engine you're using,

00:59:21 ◼   ► right?

00:59:22 ◼   ► Like if you use Google's browser, I'm sure that they get information, which is helpful

00:59:26 ◼   ► to them.

00:59:27 ◼   ► But it is a pretty significant thing to do.

00:59:32 ◼   ► And you're right.

00:59:33 ◼   ► Like I'm not sure that this is really the best thing for consumers because like what

00:59:40 ◼   ► happens?

00:59:41 ◼   ► And then like, does this not just make Apple more powerful?

00:59:45 ◼   ► Does this not just make Microsoft more powerful?

00:59:47 ◼   ► Like if Chrome goes away?

00:59:49 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:59:50 ◼   ► And I think I saw MG Siegler say like, maybe the company that's best placed to buy this

00:59:55 ◼   ► is OpenAI.

00:59:57 ◼   ► But so what the DOJ has done, if that happens, is make the number one player in AI way more

01:00:04 ◼   ► powerful.

01:00:06 ◼   ► Like you've shifted the monopoly from one type to another.

01:00:12 ◼   ► If any company buys Chrome, they inherently become more powerful anyway, right?

01:00:16 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:00:17 ◼   ► Like 60 something percent of desktop browsing.

01:00:20 ◼   ► It's like, yes, I think, yeah, I think 60.

01:00:23 ◼   ► I think I saw that number, which that was a surprise to me.

01:00:25 ◼   ► I never really considered it before.

01:00:27 ◼   ► I mean, and it also makes sense, but still it's just like, that's a huge number when

01:00:30 ◼   ► you consider how many other browsers there are, right?

01:00:33 ◼   ► And the iPhone, like you think about the iPhone, right?

01:00:35 ◼   ► And like still Chrome is 60% of browsing.

01:00:40 ◼   ► And like, I figure if you, this is, that's my assumption is that makes the most sense

01:00:48 ◼   ► of the companies that could buy Chrome that would want to buy Chrome.

01:00:54 ◼   ► OpenAI feels very top of the pile of like could do it and you could see benefit, right?

01:01:02 ◼   ► Sure.

01:01:03 ◼   ► If that, so I think Google having to let go of Chrome and having to do all this other

01:01:09 ◼   ► stuff is bad enough.

01:01:10 ◼   ► And if they, if OpenAI were to buy Chrome, I think Google's in trouble here.

01:01:16 ◼   ► I think so too.

01:01:18 ◼   ► And this like there's, I'm going to address a sidebar that I'm gonna come back.

01:01:24 ◼   ► So just bear with me for a second.

01:01:26 ◼   ► The other thing at play here is Google paying the likes of Apple and Firefox and others

01:01:33 ◼   ► for Google to be the default search engine, right?

01:01:37 ◼   ► It's 20 billion to Apple or something at some ungodly number that I think is my opinion

01:01:46 ◼   ► should be banned.

01:01:47 ◼   ► I think probably will be, I think that is going to go away.

01:01:54 ◼   ► And that makes it where Google search has to compete more directly with these other

01:02:01 ◼   ► things.

01:02:02 ◼   ► So like that's the other kind of part of this is like, again, it's hard to separate the

01:02:05 ◼   ► search in the browser, but if Google doesn't have a browser, they are at the whims of what

01:02:15 ◼   ► other people do in their browsers.

01:02:18 ◼   ► And their only cover ironically may be that, well, now OpenAI can't pay Apple to be the

01:02:24 ◼   ► default search engine.

01:02:26 ◼   ► Like we have to, it falls back to just competing on their core product.

01:02:30 ◼   ► And I think that's also ultimately bad for Google because they're losing the search wars

01:02:34 ◼   ► to companies like OpenAI, but it is, it is a monumental shift.

01:02:40 ◼   ► Like this is as big of a shift if this happens that we've seen in consumer technology, maybe

01:02:46 ◼   ► since Microsoft DOJ or maybe since sort of the resurgence of Apple 25 years ago.

01:02:54 ◼   ► Like I feel like, I mean, look, I'm trying to, I wasn't really a, as active, I wasn't

01:03:00 ◼   ► active in technology that I was too young, but like Internet Explorer did not seem like

01:03:04 ◼   ► the core of Microsoft's business, right?

01:03:07 ◼   ► Like it wasn't Windows was right.

01:03:09 ◼   ► And they used Windows, they used Windows to leverage IE and to market leadership.

01:03:14 ◼   ► That was the problem.

01:03:16 ◼   ► Where like what is being looked at here is the absolute core of Google's business.

01:03:24 ◼   ► It's search information, it's search data, it's advertising data and how it integrates

01:03:30 ◼   ► with the various parts of its multiple platforms.

01:03:34 ◼   ► Platforms only existing to make search more powerful.

01:03:39 ◼   ► And like they, Google screwed up like, cause as well, this is on Google, right?

01:03:46 ◼   ► Because like they got into a bunch of shady stuff and their case seems to have really

01:03:52 ◼   ► fallen apart based upon a lot of like, Hey, let's not talk about this.

01:03:57 ◼   ► Right?

01:03:58 ◼   ► There's like a lot of those kinds of messages.

01:04:00 ◼   ► And I think it enabled the DOJ to build a case, cause this is a jury case of like, clearly

01:04:06 ◼   ► you can't trust this company.

01:04:08 ◼   ► Which is true.

01:04:09 ◼   ► And the reason they were doing it is they didn't want it to be subpoena, subpoena.

01:04:13 ◼   ► So, but so, yep.

01:04:16 ◼   ► So like, this is like, it's bad there.

01:04:20 ◼   ► This is, this is, they're already Google.

01:04:22 ◼   ► You're right.

01:04:23 ◼   ► Google already facing trouble, right?

01:04:24 ◼   ► Because they are, they seem to be on the back foot right now, product wise.

01:04:31 ◼   ► And now maybe legislatively as well.

01:04:36 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:04:37 ◼   ► It's going to be fascinating to see how the next, I mean, let's be real, five to 10 years

01:04:42 ◼   ► of this unfolding will go because it's going to take this long if it's this kind of legislation,

01:04:47 ◼   ► but like, yeah.

01:04:48 ◼   ► And make no mistake about the timing of this.

01:04:54 ◼   ► We changed governments in two months and even if this happens now, like I think the Biden

01:05:05 ◼   ► administration is trying to get this done.

01:05:07 ◼   ► But one of the few things that unites both ends of our political spectrum in the U S

01:05:12 ◼   ► is a distrust of big tech.

01:05:15 ◼   ► And in the past, it would be easier to say, well, this may happen now, but there's going

01:05:22 ◼   ► to be a new administration in a couple of months and they'll get it overturned or they'll

01:05:26 ◼   ► fight it or, you know, something.

01:05:30 ◼   ► But I don't think that's the case this time around.

01:05:35 ◼   ► And I don't think Google can buy their time and just hope that the Trump administration

01:05:40 ◼   ► bails them out because they dislike them.

01:05:43 ◼   ► Like, like it's one of the few things they both agree on and that's a bit of their own

01:05:49 ◼   ► making to a degree.

01:05:50 ◼   ► I think some of the more extreme thoughts on big tech or not.

01:05:53 ◼   ► I just went to chat GPT to find out the answer to this question.

01:05:57 ◼   ► This investigation began under the Trump administration.

01:06:00 ◼   ► There you go.

01:06:01 ◼   ► See?

01:06:02 ◼   ► And now the Biden administration is trying to get over the finish line.

01:06:04 ◼   ► Like, yeah, because they have, they took it over and it was filed in October, 2020.

01:06:09 ◼   ► Okay.

01:06:10 ◼   ► So like, and then the Trump, it's been mostly under the Biden administration that a lot

01:06:14 ◼   ► of it's been done, but yeah, there are a lot of, there are a lot of things that people

01:06:20 ◼   ► were wondering, like, you know, is, is the Trump administration going to keep this going

01:06:24 ◼   ► or whatever?

01:06:25 ◼   ► I think this case against Google, the answer is yeah.

01:06:28 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:06:29 ◼   ► Right.

01:06:30 ◼   ► Because he does, he seems to really, really not like Google.

01:06:33 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:06:34 ◼   ► As much as he doesn't like Facebook.

01:06:36 ◼   ► He does like Twitter though.

01:06:38 ◼   ► He loves Twitter.

01:06:39 ◼   ► Buddy with the owners.

01:06:40 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:06:41 ◼   ► So it's, it's, if I were at Google, I would be, I would not be sleeping very well.

01:06:50 ◼   ► No.

01:06:51 ◼   ► This is existential for them.

01:06:54 ◼   ► And I think Chrome is more existential than Android would be.

01:06:58 ◼   ► Like if they went down that road of splitting Android or splitting the Play Store out of

01:07:02 ◼   ► Android, like that's bad.

01:07:05 ◼   ► But this, like you said, strikes at the heart of, of what they do.

01:07:08 ◼   ► And yeah, cause I guess even though Android is important, Chrome is on Android too, right?

01:07:13 ◼   ► So like, you know, and they don't make money.

01:07:16 ◼   ► I mean, they make money from Android, but they, they make their money from search, you

01:07:20 ◼   ► know, that's their, their big.

01:07:23 ◼   ► Their big income.

01:07:25 ◼   ► And so it is, it is fascinating.

01:07:27 ◼   ► I mean, I, I was thinking about this this morning.

01:07:31 ◼   ► I wish I had paid closer attention to this as it was unwinding over the last couple of

01:07:34 ◼   ► years, but now that it's here, like this is, this is the story I think in tech for a while.

01:07:41 ◼   ► Not Google, obviously the forefront of it, but what is happening to big tech companies

01:07:49 ◼   ► in the EU, increasingly in the US.

01:07:52 ◼   ► Like the way that these companies operate and have operated will continue to change

01:07:57 ◼   ► at the behest of governments.

01:08:01 ◼   ► Like that's the next decade in our industry is what is that?

01:08:04 ◼   ► How does that shake out?

01:08:05 ◼   ► Yeah, I think.

01:08:07 ◼   ► Hopefully they don't come for big podcasting.

01:08:09 ◼   ► Well, well, I mean, if they do, I think we'll be fine.

01:08:13 ◼   ► Look out, cereal.

01:08:16 ◼   ► Watch out Conan O'Brien, they're coming for you.

01:08:18 ◼   ► They're coming for Joe Rogan.

01:08:19 ◼   ► Nah, I'm just kidding.

01:08:20 ◼   ► They like that.

01:08:21 ◼   ► I mean, I guess this is, this is the result of greed, right?

01:08:24 ◼   ► Yeah, a lot of it.

01:08:27 ◼   ► Greed and there's an irony here.

01:08:31 ◼   ► A lot of these things generally are due to a failure in regulation to begin with.

01:08:40 ◼   ► Yes.

01:08:41 ◼   ► Because the government, I mean, I think the most, the example that comes to mind for me

01:08:46 ◼   ► most Mark Zuckerberg in front of Congress, how does Facebook make money?

01:08:51 ◼   ► Sir, we run ads like a fundamental lack of understanding on our, on the government's

01:08:58 ◼   ► part of how these companies work, how they make their money.

01:09:03 ◼   ► And in that lack of accountability, these companies have been able to run wild.

01:09:10 ◼   ► And now that the government is catching up, not necessarily understanding, but in just,

01:09:16 ◼   ► I mean, a lot of this started with like just an ax to grind from certain political parties,

01:09:21 ◼   ► but now it's at a point where the government's going to come down and because they don't

01:09:26 ◼   ► always have a full understanding of how these things work, they come down in weird ways,

01:09:31 ◼   ► right?

01:09:32 ◼   ► Some of the stuff in the EU with Apple, I agree with some of it.

01:09:35 ◼   ► I disagree with some of it, but some of it is hard to argue with.

01:09:38 ◼   ► Like if you understood this better, you would make a different decision that would maybe

01:09:42 ◼   ► be more impactful.

01:09:44 ◼   ► And with this, I can't decide, do they, do they understand the ramifications of this

01:09:51 ◼   ► for Google or do they exactly understand the ramifications and are going for what could

01:09:56 ◼   ► be a fatal blow?

01:09:58 ◼   ► Time will tell.

01:10:02 ◼   ► From the outside, it seems to me like it is very hard to make regulation in America.

01:10:11 ◼   ► It is.

01:10:12 ◼   ► It seems like maybe it might be too hard.

01:10:15 ◼   ► And so you end up in scenarios like this where like nothing is like, is like, regulateable.

01:10:22 ◼   ► So it's all tried to be worked out in courts.

01:10:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:10:25 ◼   ► And, and even then it becomes complicated because of like case law being the foundation

01:10:30 ◼   ► of the legal system.

01:10:33 ◼   ► It just seems like there should have just been a law.

01:10:37 ◼   ► It seems like it's very, very complicated for laws to get passed.

01:10:42 ◼   ► It is.

01:10:43 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:10:44 ◼   ► You're not, you're not wrong.

01:10:45 ◼   ► You're not wrong.

01:10:46 ◼   ► So someone should fix that.

01:10:48 ◼   ► I'll do what I can, you know, please.

01:10:53 ◼   ► Please do.

01:10:54 ◼   ► I didn't, I wasn't necessarily thinking you, but if you think you can do it, like I would

01:10:59 ◼   ► like you to try.

01:11:00 ◼   ► I had an uncle who was mayor.

01:11:01 ◼   ► I mean, you got some sway.

01:11:04 ◼   ► I got some sway.

01:11:05 ◼   ► Can you do anything about Google?

01:11:07 ◼   ► I'll see.

01:11:09 ◼   ► I'll look into it.

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01:12:19 ◼   ► Overcast got a nice update today.

01:12:21 ◼   ► Our friend Chance Miller over at 9to5Mac has it written up.

01:12:26 ◼   ► I think there's really three things to touch on.

01:12:28 ◼   ► The first is something that I had never really considered for a podcast client, but as soon

01:12:33 ◼   ► as I saw it, I was like, "Oh, this is really, I think, really smart."

01:12:38 ◼   ► Overcast now has a 48-hour history, and you can step back through that history and undo

01:12:43 ◼   ► anything at any point.

01:12:45 ◼   ► So in talking about this online, Marco talked about it as like, "Oh, did you fall asleep

01:12:51 ◼   ► and not set the sleep timer and then your podcast play?

01:12:54 ◼   ► You can go back, or did you accidentally delete an episode two days ago and now you can't

01:12:59 ◼   ► find it?

01:13:00 ◼   ► Well, you can just go back and get it."

01:13:01 ◼   ► I think this is amazing.

01:13:02 ◼   ► Once at WWDC, I accidentally, this was one of the years me and Federico were sharing

01:13:08 ◼   ► a room.

01:13:09 ◼   ► This is not important to the story, but that was the case.

01:13:12 ◼   ► Is that the year you stole his heart rate monitor?

01:13:14 ◼   ► No, I think it was the year after that.

01:13:17 ◼   ► And I put my phone down and accidentally pressed play on Overcast, but this volume was all

01:13:25 ◼   ► the way down.

01:13:26 ◼   ► And when I woke up, my entire queue would disappear.

01:13:29 ◼   ► Oh, and play through everything?

01:13:31 ◼   ► Play through everything.

01:13:33 ◼   ► And the problem with that is you don't know what's gone, right?

01:13:36 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:13:37 ◼   ► Because that's like a data loss problem.

01:13:38 ◼   ► So this would have been fantastic for me then, because then I could have just gone through

01:13:42 ◼   ► and brought all those episodes back.

01:13:44 ◼   ► Too bad Marco didn't invent time travel when he wrote this.

01:13:48 ◼   ► Well, he's kind of done it now, but like...

01:13:50 ◼   ► Yeah, too late.

01:13:51 ◼   ► Too late.

01:13:52 ◼   ► One star.

01:13:53 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:13:54 ◼   ► I haven't seen how far back it goes.

01:13:55 ◼   ► Maybe the history goes back four years.

01:13:58 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:13:59 ◼   ► It's 48 hours.

01:14:00 ◼   ► 48 hours.

01:14:01 ◼   ► Okay.

01:14:02 ◼   ► Yeah, I love this.

01:14:03 ◼   ► I think it's super, super smart.

01:14:05 ◼   ► And I suspect that this will become possible in other podcast players.

01:14:12 ◼   ► The second thing is the addition of listener stats.

01:14:16 ◼   ► So Apple Music and Spotify and others have features like this.

01:14:20 ◼   ► You can now, going back to 2023, you can see your top podcast by year, month, or day.

01:14:28 ◼   ► You can see it by how much time you listened to it or how long the episodes are.

01:14:33 ◼   ► And you can generate images of your top podcast to share on social media, which has been the

01:14:37 ◼   ► majority of my Mastodon timeline today is people sharing that, which I think is pretty

01:14:43 ◼   ► cool.

01:14:44 ◼   ► Yeah, I think it's a nice feature.

01:14:46 ◼   ► I hope to see more from it in the future than this.

01:14:51 ◼   ► I think this is a good start.

01:14:53 ◼   ► I don't know what data Marco collects in that way, like if wherever he could do more in

01:14:59 ◼   ► the future.

01:15:00 ◼   ► I would like some per show fun stats, like a Spotify wrapped does or whatever.

01:15:08 ◼   ► Maybe there's some fun, weird stuff, but those things are complicated, which I understand.

01:15:14 ◼   ► What I'm asking for is a complicated thing, but I think it would be interesting to see.

01:15:18 ◼   ► I think just the starting point, this is great.

01:15:21 ◼   ► This is something that people want, right?

01:15:24 ◼   ► So they can be like, "Oh, I've listened to X amount.

01:15:27 ◼   ► This is my most popular show."

01:15:28 ◼   ► It was fun for me to look through mine.

01:15:31 ◼   ► I didn't expect my answers to be the way that they were, so that was really fun for me.

01:15:36 ◼   ► So it was nice to look through.

01:15:37 ◼   ► One of my favorite things, it doesn't actually show in the screenshot, but in the app itself,

01:15:42 ◼   ► one of my most listened to podcasts, my overcast uploads, which is me listening back to all

01:15:50 ◼   ► of the Cortex episodes before I post them.

01:15:53 ◼   ► That's incredible.

01:15:54 ◼   ► One of my most listened to shows this year was my own show for editing purposes.

01:16:00 ◼   ► So I thought that was pretty funny.

01:16:01 ◼   ► But yeah, it is a very nice feature to have.

01:16:06 ◼   ► I know that Marco has been talking about this for years, about trying to do something like

01:16:10 ◼   ► this, and so I think this is cool.

01:16:13 ◼   ► Mm, me too.

01:16:15 ◼   ► I really like it.

01:16:17 ◼   ► The third thing is that the annual subscription for Evercast Premium will be increasing from

01:16:24 ◼   ► $10 to $15 a year, which I think is totally fair.

01:16:29 ◼   ► It's been 10 bucks the whole time.

01:16:31 ◼   ► I use Overcast every day.

01:16:33 ◼   ► I am fine with this.

01:16:35 ◼   ► I would pay $10 a month for Overcast and I wouldn't even care about it.

01:16:39 ◼   ► Because I would pay for any podcast app if I used it as my podcast app, I would pay for

01:16:45 ◼   ► it like that because podcasting is so important to me as a consumer.

01:16:49 ◼   ► I understand that there are so many people that just don't like any price change at all,

01:16:56 ◼   ► but I think $15 a year for Overcast is a very fair price.

01:17:00 ◼   ► Like I happily pay that.

01:17:02 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:17:03 ◼   ► So there you go.

01:17:06 ◼   ► It's percolating in the app store now.

01:17:09 ◼   ► So percolating?

01:17:10 ◼   ► That's not the right word.

01:17:11 ◼   ► Propagating.

01:17:12 ◼   ► No, I like percolating.

01:17:13 ◼   ► I mean, that kind of fits.

01:17:14 ◼   ► Like it's a coffee thing, right?

01:17:16 ◼   ► Marco likes coffee, so you can say it's percolating if you like.

01:17:19 ◼   ► I'm expecting he probably doesn't like percolating coffee, but I don't know.

01:17:23 ◼   ► Yeah, that's too pedestrian.

01:17:25 ◼   ► Well, it's more about like percolating coffee can sometimes burn the coffee depending on

01:17:31 ◼   ► how you've done it.

01:17:32 ◼   ► Nobody wants that.

01:17:33 ◼   ► Okay.

01:17:34 ◼   ► AI notification summaries.

01:17:37 ◼   ► We want to do a check in on this because this is now out, right?

01:17:41 ◼   ► iOS 18.1 is out to everybody.

01:17:44 ◼   ► 18.2 beta 4 dropped while we were recording.

01:17:47 ◼   ► I don't know if there's any word on what's new in there yet, but people have now been

01:17:51 ◼   ► using these notification summaries and a really easy way to get clout on social media is to

01:17:56 ◼   ► dunk on it.

01:17:57 ◼   ► And rightfully so because my word, sometimes weird things happen.

01:18:02 ◼   ► I think my personal favorite example is if you use ring like, like I do, uh, Apple intelligence

01:18:09 ◼   ► basically sums up how many people that your ring camera has seen.

01:18:15 ◼   ► So like if someone walks by my house, like a person has seen, and then two hours later,

01:18:19 ◼   ► the male person comes by a person has seen, and then three hours later, my family comes

01:18:24 ◼   ► home.

01:18:25 ◼   ► Four people are seen.

01:18:27 ◼   ► Apple intelligence will add them and say, six people are at your front door.

01:18:30 ◼   ► Like that's not true at all, but that's how that's it did the addition.

01:18:35 ◼   ► Uh, so that one is funny to me.

01:18:37 ◼   ► Uh, but some of them are obviously more or less funny and more upsetting or just wrong.

01:18:44 ◼   ► Uh, and I think that's where Joanna Stern comes in.

01:18:46 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:18:47 ◼   ► So, uh, Joanna, some of the Washington journal posted, uh, a screenshot and the contact name

01:18:54 ◼   ► is wife.

01:18:55 ◼   ► And the summary says, apologize for yelling at her husband, feeling bad about it.

01:19:00 ◼   ► Joanna's post says very intelligent, Apple intelligence context, the contact clearly

01:19:06 ◼   ► labeled here as my wife was talking about our son, no husband in this conversation or

01:19:10 ◼   ► in the last 10 years of our marriage.

01:19:13 ◼   ► Understand it'll be very well written because Joanna is a great writer.

01:19:16 ◼   ► But here's the thing.

01:19:18 ◼   ► This is like the way that I look at this, I'm sure with the content of the messages,

01:19:22 ◼   ► there is some way in which you could understand an AI mess this up.

01:19:26 ◼   ► But the problem here in my, in my opinion is the intelligence, right?

01:19:31 ◼   ► This is not intelligent because even the smallest amount of personal context about Joanna's

01:19:36 ◼   ► life would show that these assumptions should not have been made.

01:19:40 ◼   ► Right.

01:19:41 ◼   ► That like this system should not have made this assumption about her because of the fact

01:19:46 ◼   ► that she is married to a woman.

01:19:51 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:19:52 ◼   ► Right.

01:19:53 ◼   ► Like the phone has, I'm sure many ways in which it could work this information out,

01:19:58 ◼   ► but it's made an assumption based on something in the content of these messages.

01:20:03 ◼   ► But like, this is the issue even with calling these things intelligent, right?

01:20:08 ◼   ► Like I've posted one, I posted it on blue sky.

01:20:12 ◼   ► I had a, I had a, um, we had a reminder in my, in the reminders app.

01:20:18 ◼   ► Now I know this isn't Apple intelligence, but it's also just like an example of these

01:20:21 ◼   ► kinds of things.

01:20:22 ◼   ► We had a, uh, uh, of put up the Christmas tree.

01:20:26 ◼   ► Okay.

01:20:27 ◼   ► And I would date 25th of December.

01:20:30 ◼   ► Now it's probably a bit late putting up the Christmas tree.

01:20:34 ◼   ► I mean, I would prefer to do it this weekend, which is my plan, but like this is the issue.

01:20:41 ◼   ► Like those things are just like, Oh, that's so dumb.

01:20:43 ◼   ► But now we're calling these things intelligent systems.

01:20:46 ◼   ► And that is just, that is a dumb as rock system, right?

01:20:51 ◼   ► For Apple intelligence to say, uh, that Joanna Stern's wife has a husband.

01:20:58 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:20:59 ◼   ► It's, it's bad.

01:21:02 ◼   ► And as bad as these things are, like it is inevitable that one of these things becomes

01:21:12 ◼   ► accidentally dangerous or like acutely harmful.

01:21:17 ◼   ► Right.

01:21:18 ◼   ► And it's disappointing.

01:21:21 ◼   ► I think like I had wanted to believe that Apple was going to be better at this than

01:21:28 ◼   ► other companies.

01:21:30 ◼   ► And it's just not, just not like these are amateur mistakes.

01:21:36 ◼   ► And when you sell this, it's like, Oh, it's going to be based on what it knows about you.

01:21:43 ◼   ► Like clearly enjoying this case.

01:21:45 ◼   ► That's not true.

01:21:46 ◼   ► You know, clearly in your case, it just isn't using common sense.

01:21:49 ◼   ► Like it's frustrating.

01:21:51 ◼   ► I mean, technically, uh, the personal contact stuff is not in there yet.

01:21:57 ◼   ► Sure.

01:21:58 ◼   ► Technically.

01:21:59 ◼   ► Uh, I think this is part of, if we're to believe that that is going to work, that is part of

01:22:04 ◼   ► the problem of like, maybe you should have just waited, you know, um, rather than trying

01:22:08 ◼   ► to get this stuff out to drab.

01:22:10 ◼   ► I mean, it, that comes back to the thing of like, you know, which you've heard on every

01:22:15 ◼   ► podcast for three months span, which to this point has kind of been annoying, but it's

01:22:19 ◼   ► true of the fact of Apple's been selling these features about them actually being actually

01:22:23 ◼   ► shipping.

01:22:24 ◼   ► Like just as a context, you still not here, right?

01:22:29 ◼   ► It's not available in the UK unless you change your region settings.

01:22:32 ◼   ► So like there are ads still here talking about Apple intelligence, but it's not really going

01:22:38 ◼   ► to be available until December.

01:22:40 ◼   ► Because it isn't, especially what's in 18.1, I think is not worth doing.

01:22:46 ◼   ► I think 18.2 is a better release.

01:22:49 ◼   ► It has more in it.

01:22:50 ◼   ► Like just in general, iOS 18.2 is just a better version of iOS.

01:22:56 ◼   ► So the thing that I was wondering about this is like in our space, this stuff is everywhere.

01:23:03 ◼   ► Right?

01:23:04 ◼   ► My threads algorithm, by the way, love showing me these posts.

01:23:06 ◼   ► Oh yeah.

01:23:07 ◼   ► One of the things that my threads algorithm really likes to show me is these posts.

01:23:11 ◼   ► And it's because I do interact with them.

01:23:12 ◼   ► Right?

01:23:13 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:23:14 ◼   ► Oh dude.

01:23:15 ◼   ► Anytime I see one of these, like here's a favor for you and a favor for you, like let's

01:23:17 ◼   ► go.

01:23:18 ◼   ► So I get, I get all of these posts and I will say like, I know that I generally actually

01:23:22 ◼   ► do like this feature.

01:23:24 ◼   ► I find it to be useful, right?

01:23:26 ◼   ► Like currently the WhatsApp family thread is popping off.

01:23:29 ◼   ► There's like 20 messages in it and I can look at it and see like, oh, it's, it's about my

01:23:34 ◼   ► brother's birthday.

01:23:35 ◼   ► So like I can now like wait on that for a bit because well, it's not his, but it's not

01:23:39 ◼   ► his birthday today.

01:23:41 ◼   ► My brother's turning 40 this year.

01:23:43 ◼   ► And so there's like a whole, there's like a family event that is being planned.

01:23:46 ◼   ► So old.

01:23:47 ◼   ► Um, but like, I know, can you imagine?

01:23:50 ◼   ► Not for another 13 months.

01:23:52 ◼   ► Oh wow.

01:23:53 ◼   ► You had to hang on to those.

01:23:54 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:23:55 ◼   ► Um, but I find that to be useful, right?

01:23:58 ◼   ► Rather than just what the last message was because the last message in that thread, I'm

01:24:03 ◼   ► looking at it right now is thematically very different.

01:24:06 ◼   ► Someone's gone off on a tangent, which if I would have read that would have thought

01:24:10 ◼   ► that all 20 messages were about that thing, but they're not.

01:24:13 ◼   ► So like I do find the feature useful and it's easy to dunk on.

01:24:17 ◼   ► I could dunk on it if I wanted to.

01:24:19 ◼   ► I get things pop up, but by and large, I am able to use some common sense when I approach

01:24:26 ◼   ► these messages.

01:24:27 ◼   ► I think a lot of the ones that I see people posting, there is common sense that you can

01:24:31 ◼   ► apply to it.

01:24:32 ◼   ► Now, you can have these things that are offensive to you, frustrating to you.

01:24:37 ◼   ► I get that.

01:24:38 ◼   ► But like some of them, like I do believe that there is an animal common sense that you're

01:24:41 ◼   ► able to apply to it.

01:24:43 ◼   ► But then also if there, and I've said this before, if there are apps that you think don't

01:24:47 ◼   ► work, then you can turn them off individually.

01:24:49 ◼   ► Like I said this before, like I don't think it works very good for overcast.

01:24:52 ◼   ► So I just turned it off for overcast because smashing the descriptions of multiple podcasts

01:24:56 ◼   ► together doesn't necessarily get me what I'm looking for.

01:24:59 ◼   ► It is sometimes hilarious though.

01:25:02 ◼   ► Like all of this is happening and iOS 18 is only available to a small amount of people.

01:25:08 ◼   ► And I turn our attention to our mutual friend, underscore David Smith, who is like such a

01:25:13 ◼   ► great, with Widget Smith now, is like such a great wealth of information about how the

01:25:19 ◼   ► OS moves through people.

01:25:22 ◼   ► And so at the moment...

01:25:24 ◼   ► What a weird way to word that.

01:25:26 ◼   ► Is that a bad way to word it?

01:25:27 ◼   ► Are you an LLM?

01:25:29 ◼   ► Maybe.

01:25:30 ◼   ► I mean, aren't we all really?

01:25:32 ◼   ► Like if you think about it, I don't know what the next words that I'm going to say are.

01:25:35 ◼   ► They're just happening to me.

01:25:38 ◼   ► So underscore said that he posted on Mastodon about it being around this time last year

01:25:44 ◼   ► that Apple kind of turned on the switch to like push iOS 17 to people.

01:25:51 ◼   ► Like up until this point in the year, if you're updating to the new operating system, it's

01:25:56 ◼   ► a choice that you've made.

01:25:57 ◼   ► Like the phones aren't pushing it on you yet, which is wild to me.

01:26:00 ◼   ► I had no idea that this is even a thing, right?

01:26:02 ◼   ► But yeah, it takes months and months and months before Apple will be like, oh, we're good

01:26:07 ◼   ► now.

01:26:08 ◼   ► And it'll be like a point release.

01:26:09 ◼   ► And then they'll say like, hey, everybody upgrade.

01:26:11 ◼   ► So like at the moment, Widget Smith's user base is kind of, it looks like around 30 to

01:26:19 ◼   ► 40% installed of iOS 18.

01:26:23 ◼   ► And so at some point it's going to take off and I don't know, that there'll be like a

01:26:28 ◼   ► huge jump.

01:26:30 ◼   ► So all of this to say the amount of people that are even using any of these features

01:26:37 ◼   ► in point one or point two is really small compared to how many people will be in a couple

01:26:46 ◼   ► of months.

01:26:48 ◼   ► And then what happens?

01:26:49 ◼   ► That's what I'm really interested about.

01:26:52 ◼   ► And I would say the caveat there is that there's a bunch of phones that can run iOS 18 that

01:26:56 ◼   ► cannot run Apple intelligence.

01:26:58 ◼   ► So there's that.

01:26:59 ◼   ► Yeah, but there's a lot of phones though.

01:27:01 ◼   ► There's a lot of points.

01:27:02 ◼   ► Billions.

01:27:03 ◼   ► It's not just the new ones.

01:27:04 ◼   ► It's all the pro phones from last year, every iPad, every Mac with Apple Silicon, right?

01:27:09 ◼   ► Both of those with Apple Silicon can do it.

01:27:11 ◼   ► And then all of the iPhones sold this year, which are many millions and all the pro phones

01:27:15 ◼   ► sold last year, which are also many millions.

01:27:17 ◼   ► Who has all the money?

01:27:18 ◼   ► Apple.

01:27:19 ◼   ► Apple.

01:27:20 ◼   ► So there is still like a lot of people who have the opportunity to get access to this

01:27:26 ◼   ► that haven't seen it yet.

01:27:28 ◼   ► And I'm really intrigued as to what that is going to be like, if anything.

01:27:33 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:27:34 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:27:35 ◼   ► My personal experience with it has been different than yours.

01:27:37 ◼   ► There have been times where like, yeah, something's kind of popping off and it's like, oh, I can

01:27:41 ◼   ► just glance at it and see that, you know, the gist of it and know that it can wait.

01:27:46 ◼   ► But more often than not, my feeling is I have to read everything twice.

01:27:51 ◼   ► And there are different areas in which summarization takes place.

01:27:56 ◼   ► You have notifications, you have message like in the messages app, and then you have in

01:28:02 ◼   ► your inbox in mail.

01:28:05 ◼   ► And to a degree, I think about those things all slightly differently.

01:28:10 ◼   ► But at the end of the day, I feel like I'm reading a lot of stuff more than once.

01:28:14 ◼   ► So I've had this on for a while.

01:28:16 ◼   ► This morning, I went through and turned it off.

01:28:18 ◼   ► And I want to run it for a couple of weeks and see if I miss it and see if I like, oh,

01:28:22 ◼   ► gosh, actually, the notifications summaries were saving me time.

01:28:27 ◼   ► It's in settings, notifications and their summarized notifications, like you said, you

01:28:31 ◼   ► can go into it per app basis and turn them off, which I think is good.

01:28:37 ◼   ► And then setting apps, messages and then settings, apps and mail, you can turn off the summarization

01:28:43 ◼   ► in there.

01:28:44 ◼   ► And so I'm going to run without it for a while.

01:28:48 ◼   ► And see how it goes.

01:28:50 ◼   ► And I will report back in a couple of weeks, but we'll see.

01:28:55 ◼   ► Do you mind if I challenge you for a moment?

01:28:57 ◼   ► Like challenge something you said?

01:28:58 ◼   ► Challenge, please.

01:28:59 ◼   ► Challenge.

01:29:00 ◼   ► I'm intrigued to what you think of it.

01:29:02 ◼   ► So you mentioned that you're reading everything twice, right?

01:29:04 ◼   ► It feels that way.

01:29:06 ◼   ► It feels that way.

01:29:07 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:29:08 ◼   ► I'm assuming that you mean that like you get a message, well, you see a summary and then

01:29:14 ◼   ► you have to tap it and read, right?

01:29:16 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:29:17 ◼   ► So if you add like a stack of 10 messages, you always have to read multiple, like read

01:29:22 ◼   ► things multiple times, right?

01:29:23 ◼   ► Like you've read the most recent messages, the notification, and then you tap in and

01:29:27 ◼   ► read the other ones.

01:29:28 ◼   ► So like there's always an element of like rereading.

01:29:31 ◼   ► Yeah, but, but I'm reading like in that case, you, you were right.

01:29:35 ◼   ► Same thing with the inbox, right?

01:29:36 ◼   ► I, I see a mail message.

01:29:39 ◼   ► I see the first two lines, I tap it.

01:29:40 ◼   ► Those first two lines are in the email again, but it's the same words.

01:29:46 ◼   ► And I trust that what I read in part one of that step, it's the same as part two of that

01:29:53 ◼   ► step.

01:29:54 ◼   ► And that's not always true with AI notifications like we are summarizations.

01:30:00 ◼   ► Yep.

01:30:01 ◼   ► So you're, you're right.

01:30:02 ◼   ► It is the same action, but it feels different.

01:30:05 ◼   ► And I'm just, I want to explore that a little bit, a little bit more.

01:30:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:30:09 ◼   ► Cause if you don't trust it, it's kind of pointless, isn't it?

01:30:12 ◼   ► Right.

01:30:13 ◼   ► Cause then you're wasting your time.

01:30:14 ◼   ► You're wasting your time.

01:30:15 ◼   ► You're reading it and you don't trust what's there.

01:30:17 ◼   ► So what was the point of reading it?

01:30:19 ◼   ► And I had a couple of things early on.

01:30:21 ◼   ► I thought I'd taken screenshots of them, but I can't find them, but I had a couple of things

01:30:25 ◼   ► early on in the beta that it basically summarize it exactly wrong.

01:30:31 ◼   ► Like, and so that I feel like, and maybe it was just my experience, but I feel like off

01:30:37 ◼   ► the bat, I had a couple of bad interactions with it.

01:30:41 ◼   ► And that has kind of set me up not to trust it fully.

01:30:47 ◼   ► And that's something else I want to explore.

01:30:49 ◼   ► Like if I take some time away from, I turn it back on, is that feeling get reset in my

01:30:53 ◼   ► mind?

01:30:55 ◼   ► And now that I've been using it for a while, I can understand like, okay, some apps that

01:30:59 ◼   ► doesn't work well for, and it needs some fine tuning, like, like the things we've mentioned

01:31:04 ◼   ► and like maybe, maybe I ended up where the, yeah, maybe this is useful in mail, but not

01:31:08 ◼   ► useful in messages or, or whatever.

01:31:11 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:31:12 ◼   ► So I'm going to, I just want to explore it a little bit because I'm not real happy with

01:31:16 ◼   ► it all turned on right now.

01:31:19 ◼   ► Because there are like certain things that these systems, I just don't know how they

01:31:26 ◼   ► would ever work with like sarcasm.

01:31:29 ◼   ► Like I've, I've had that kind of thing where someone's saying something sarcastically and

01:31:34 ◼   ► what it results in is what they're saying is the exact opposite of the thing that they're

01:31:40 ◼   ► saying.

01:31:41 ◼   ► But I know they're being sarcastic when I read it.

01:31:44 ◼   ► You know, does that make sense?

01:31:47 ◼   ► And so like I've had these scenarios where like the summary says something and it's like

01:31:51 ◼   ► the message is the absolute opposite of that thing because the person was being sarcastic,

01:31:59 ◼   ► which I find that to be very funny.

01:32:02 ◼   ► Others are bad at that sort of thing and maybe LLMs can make them better, but I think so.

01:32:09 ◼   ► I do.

01:32:10 ◼   ► I do think so.

01:32:11 ◼   ► I think that there is an element of enough information can provide a different response

01:32:16 ◼   ► there.

01:32:17 ◼   ► Like I think I'm starting to realize that I just need to question the capability of

01:32:27 ◼   ► these systems less because every time I've done it up to this point, I have ultimately

01:32:32 ◼   ► been wrong.

01:32:33 ◼   ► Like, there's no way they can do this.

01:32:35 ◼   ► And then it sounds like I just have enough time.

01:32:37 ◼   ► They can.

01:32:38 ◼   ► And so like I'm kind of just remaining skeptical, but trying, I'm trying my best not to make

01:32:44 ◼   ► definitive statements about the capability of these systems.

01:32:47 ◼   ► Sure.

01:32:48 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:32:49 ◼   ► And that's, that's why I'm not just turning this off and walking away.

01:32:51 ◼   ► Like I want to compare it because I've been running the beta since it came out.

01:32:57 ◼   ► Right.

01:32:58 ◼   ► Especially this, especially in iOS 18, I've been, I've been in beta land way longer than

01:33:05 ◼   ► I normally am throughout the year.

01:33:07 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:33:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:33:09 ◼   ► I mean, I, I was barely on the 18 beta and now I've been on it since like all the time.

01:33:15 ◼   ► I've been on all of them.

01:33:17 ◼   ► My phone is rebooting with beta for right now.

01:33:20 ◼   ► Like, yeah, yeah.

01:33:21 ◼   ► I just did it.

01:33:22 ◼   ► I just did it.

01:33:23 ◼   ► So yeah.

01:33:24 ◼   ► So we'll see.

01:33:25 ◼   ► Oh, breaking news.

01:33:26 ◼   ► I turned off all Apple intelligence is gone.

01:33:27 ◼   ► Can you imagine?

01:33:28 ◼   ► Whoa, that was crazy.

01:33:30 ◼   ► That seems like you summarize something incorrectly.

01:33:32 ◼   ► No, I don't know, man.

01:33:34 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:33:35 ◼   ► And you know, there are some rising to other places, but like, I mean, I've been using

01:33:38 ◼   ► Safari for a while now with the Apple intelligence stuff in it and I never think to use it.

01:33:43 ◼   ► I never, it never crosses my mind.

01:33:46 ◼   ► Like, Oh, I'm reading a long thing on ours.

01:33:48 ◼   ► Technica let me let AI summarize it for me.

01:33:51 ◼   ► Like I just, I never think about it in Safari.

01:33:55 ◼   ► I've used it.

01:33:56 ◼   ► Like, I've used it on some like long articles to give me a sense of like, I actually did

01:34:01 ◼   ► it with one of the Google articles today.

01:34:03 ◼   ► Like I, I had a bunch of links and I wanted to know if the one that I was on was going

01:34:08 ◼   ► to give me the information that I thought I might need.

01:34:11 ◼   ► So I just did the quick summary and it did.

01:34:13 ◼   ► I was like, great.

01:34:14 ◼   ► So then I read the whole article cause I was trying to find some answers to some questions.

01:34:19 ◼   ► So well, there you go.

01:34:24 ◼   ► Anything else?

01:34:25 ◼   ► I don't think so.

01:34:26 ◼   ► I don't think so either.

01:34:28 ◼   ► We covered a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff happening.

01:34:32 ◼   ► A lot of topics.

01:34:35 ◼   ► If you want to find us online, how, how do you do that?

01:34:40 ◼   ► Just search for us on your social network of choice.

01:34:43 ◼   ► He is generally I Mike and I'm generally I some H 86 you'll find us somehow.

01:34:50 ◼   ► Sometimes find us somehow.

01:34:54 ◼   ► Another bet is just to find us where our work is on the actual internet.

01:34:58 ◼   ► You can find Mike on other shows here on relay and his excellent work at cortex brand.

01:35:04 ◼   ► It's a, it's the holidays season.

01:35:06 ◼   ► Mike, how are you feeling about cortex brand doing okay?

01:35:10 ◼   ► I have today been trying to understand commercial invoices for customs.

01:35:16 ◼   ► So that's how I am.

01:35:17 ◼   ► Oh, I am sorry.

01:35:19 ◼   ► I asked rough day over here.

01:35:22 ◼   ► We're dealing with boats and shipping and it's the whole thing.

01:35:24 ◼   ► It's no good.

01:35:26 ◼   ► It's the most terrible time of the year is right now before it becomes wonderful.

01:35:31 ◼   ► Like right now is a tough part.

01:35:33 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:35:34 ◼   ► Well, thank you for doing it.

01:35:35 ◼   ► I enjoy having your notebooks in my life.

01:35:38 ◼   ► You can follow Federico.

01:35:40 ◼   ► He's not here this week.

01:35:41 ◼   ► So here's what we need to do.

01:35:43 ◼   ► Okay.

01:35:44 ◼   ► Across Macedon or threads or blue sky, cause he's active on all three and you are running

01:35:53 ◼   ► iOS 18.2 or you have access to some other AI art generation tools.

01:35:58 ◼   ► Oh my God.

01:35:59 ◼   ► Send him a picture of a dog dressed as Santa.

01:36:02 ◼   ► Steven, I can't believe that you wouldn't ask all of our listeners to hire illustrators

01:36:07 ◼   ► to make this all work.

01:36:08 ◼   ► Jim cut that.

01:36:10 ◼   ► I'm very disappointed right now.

01:36:11 ◼   ► I'm very disappointed right now.

01:36:14 ◼   ► And he is Viti, V I T I C C I across whatever service you wish to find him on.

01:36:27 ◼   ► Do you think Federico is being into my space?

01:36:29 ◼   ► I bet he was.

01:36:30 ◼   ► Oh, he definitely was.

01:36:33 ◼   ► And he probably had my chemical romance playing on his profile.

01:36:36 ◼   ► Oh yes.

01:36:37 ◼   ► I wish he was here this week cause I wasn't gonna talk to him about Lincoln park.

01:36:40 ◼   ► I guess we'll do it next time.

01:36:42 ◼   ► Why?

01:36:43 ◼   ► Because he's been listening to it.

01:36:44 ◼   ► Oh, they got an album out?

01:36:46 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:36:47 ◼   ► I tell you I'm seeing them next fall.

01:36:48 ◼   ► No, I don't think so.

01:36:50 ◼   ► I got tickets.

01:36:51 ◼   ► I'm sorry for you.

01:36:52 ◼   ► Where?

01:36:53 ◼   ► St. Louis.

01:36:54 ◼   ► It's like five hours.

01:36:55 ◼   ► Oh blimey.

01:36:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:36:57 ◼   ► They're not coming to Memphis.

01:36:58 ◼   ► They're playing in Nashville, but on a day I can't make.

01:37:00 ◼   ► And so I got two tickets and Mary and I are going to go spend a weekend in St. Louis and

01:37:04 ◼   ► see Lincoln park.

01:37:05 ◼   ► It's going to be awesome.

01:37:06 ◼   ► Amazing.

01:37:07 ◼   ► I'm very excited.

01:37:08 ◼   ► What does St. Louis have?

01:37:09 ◼   ► The arch.

01:37:10 ◼   ► Other than that.

01:37:11 ◼   ► The arch.

01:37:12 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:37:13 ◼   ► I don't know what I guess.

01:37:14 ◼   ► Don't they have like a special kind of burger there or something?

01:37:16 ◼   ► The St. Louis burger?

01:37:18 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:37:19 ◼   ► Don't they have a whole thing?

01:37:20 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:37:23 ◼   ► Let us know.

01:37:25 ◼   ► Let us know on blue sky.

01:37:27 ◼   ► You can find me.

01:37:28 ◼   ► I said that.

01:37:29 ◼   ► Ice image 86.

01:37:30 ◼   ► I host smack power users here each on it.

01:37:34 ◼   ► Relay each and every Sunday.

01:37:36 ◼   ► We've been recording a little bit.

01:37:40 ◼   ► The blue sky has thrown him off.

01:37:42 ◼   ► He doesn't know how to outro shows anymore.

01:37:43 ◼   ► It's true.

01:37:44 ◼   ► Uh, we, so Sunday's episode of MPU is a special one.

01:37:48 ◼   ► It is part one of two of our like state of the platforms we do every year.

01:37:52 ◼   ► And I'm very happy with Sunday's episode of MPU.

01:37:55 ◼   ► I think it's a real banger.

01:37:56 ◼   ► So cool.

01:37:57 ◼   ► Go check that out.

01:37:58 ◼   ► I'd like to thank our sponsors this week, Vanta fit bot and net suite.

01:38:03 ◼   ► And until next time, Mike, say goodbye.

01:38:05 ◼   ► Bye bye.

01:38:06 ◼   ► Bye y'all.

01:38:06 ◼   ► [BLANK_AUDIO]