ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► A long time ago, I decided one of my pandemic projects was going to be to put fiber in the house.

00:00:08 ◼   ► And we talked about this, I think it was like 2020 or something like that.

00:00:10 ◼   ► I've been waiting for the fiber update.

00:00:12 ◼   ► We all have.

00:00:13 ◼   ► No, this is going to be his like Project Titan announcement.

00:00:16 ◼   ► He's like, you know, Project Fiber has been canceled.

00:00:18 ◼   ► Everyone is fired.

00:00:19 ◼   ► We've reassigned all the staff of this project.

00:00:22 ◼   ► We have spent $10 billion on it, but it turns out it's not going to happen.

00:00:25 ◼   ► Go home, everybody.

00:00:26 ◼   ► You're not far from the truth.

00:00:27 ◼   ► No, what happened was, you know, I found other pandemic projects that I wanted to do.

00:00:33 ◼   ► I replaced, we've talked about this many times.

00:00:36 ◼   ► I replaced all these switches in the house with, instead of the little nubbins that you grab,

00:00:40 ◼   ► Americans know what I'm talking about.

00:00:41 ◼   ► Europeans are like, what?

00:00:42 ◼   ► That's not how I would describe them.

00:00:44 ◼   ► But yes, I think I know what you mean.

00:00:45 ◼   ► So I think it's, I think the technical term is a toggle switch instead of a paddle switch,

00:00:50 ◼   ► I believe is what it's called.

00:00:51 ◼   ► You're talking about decor style switches?

00:00:53 ◼   ► Yes, yes, exactly.

00:00:54 ◼   ► We're saying the same thing.

00:00:55 ◼   ► I switched from, um, from the like old school, like 80s era, you know, like there's little

00:01:01 ◼   ► things sticking out of the wall to the thing that's like a flat paddle.

00:01:04 ◼   ► No, that you got it wrong, sir.

00:01:05 ◼   ► The 80s era things are the decor switches.

00:01:08 ◼   ► That's what you switched to.

00:01:09 ◼   ► You switched into the 80s.

00:01:10 ◼   ► You moved, you moved from the 50s and 60s and 70s.

00:01:13 ◼   ► You moved directly into the 80s.

00:01:15 ◼   ► All right.

00:01:15 ◼   ► Well, fair enough.

00:01:16 ◼   ► And I'm not here to argue about that one way or the other.

00:01:18 ◼   ► I'm not saying you're wrong, but whatever.

00:01:19 ◼   ► I just think the flatter ones look better.

00:01:21 ◼   ► Right.

00:01:21 ◼   ► So I did all the switches in the house like the 80s, uh, just like the 80s.

00:01:24 ◼   ► Yep.

00:01:24 ◼   ► So, uh, I also put on shoulder pads.

00:01:26 ◼   ► No, wait, that's not right.

00:01:27 ◼   ► Uh, so anyway, uh, that was one of my projects.

00:01:29 ◼   ► The garage door, you know, disaster was one of the projects.

00:01:33 ◼   ► I mean, it worked, but it was a Rube Goldberg machine to say the least.

00:01:36 ◼   ► That was one of my pandemic projects.

00:01:38 ◼   ► And I told you guys that I wanted one of my pandemic projects to be to wire the house for

00:01:43 ◼   ► ethernet.

00:01:44 ◼   ► And my thought was I would have the garage be the command center, which upon reflecting,

00:01:48 ◼   ► and I think you two both said this at the time, the, the temperature scenario in the garage

00:01:52 ◼   ► is not really conducive to it.

00:01:54 ◼   ► But at the time I thought, okay, the garage will be the command center.

00:01:56 ◼   ► I've got decommissioned HVAC plumbing, tubing, whatever you want to call it.

00:02:00 ◼   ► That isn't being used anymore.

00:02:02 ◼   ► That would get me from the garage to the attic.

00:02:04 ◼   ► Everything will be easy peasy, you know, lemon squeezy.

00:02:07 ◼   ► And then I got doing a bunch of other things and, you know, kids were getting older and

00:02:11 ◼   ► then the pandemic eventually mostly ended and it just got on the back burner.

00:02:15 ◼   ► So a couple of days ago, well, my birthday was on Monday and that's actually not the point,

00:02:20 ◼   ► but the point is, um, my friend Spencer, who you guys have met, uh, several times, you probably

00:02:25 ◼   ► know at this point, um, he and I will exchange, you know, small, like mostly gag birthday gifts

00:02:30 ◼   ► with each other when the time comes, uh, coincidentally, he shares your birthday, John.

00:02:34 ◼   ► And I got a message from Spencer on my actual birthday saying, oh, your gift isn't there.

00:02:39 ◼   ► It'll be there tomorrow.

00:02:40 ◼   ► And I was like, okay, I mean, whatever, that's fine.

00:02:42 ◼   ► Um, and then there were three different boxes on my doorstep.

00:02:46 ◼   ► You got Spencer gifts.

00:02:47 ◼   ► I got Spencer gifts.

00:02:49 ◼   ► Exactly right.

00:02:49 ◼   ► Uh, there were three Spencer gifts.

00:02:51 ◼   ► Uh, gosh, that, that store was such a disaster, but I loved it.

00:02:54 ◼   ► Um, I got three Spencer gifts or three boxes anyway, and I put in, in the slack, I'm not

00:03:00 ◼   ► going to be sharing this picture publicly because it's inside the house and it was

00:03:03 ◼   ► not very well done, but suffice to say, Spencer has sent me two, uh, 10 gigabit SFP

00:03:10 ◼   ► media converters, which basically goes from fiber to ethernet, uh, two SFP actual doodads

00:03:16 ◼   ► that you, that you plug into devices to get the, uh, to get onto fiber and literally

00:03:24 ◼   ► 100 meters of fiber.

00:03:26 ◼   ► And so the message from Spencer was, you have no more excuses, make it happen.

00:03:31 ◼   ► So now I've got a problem and now I've got to, now I've got to wire the house for fiber.

00:03:37 ◼   ► How did the rest of the family feel about this gift?

00:03:39 ◼   ► Uh, Aaron's, uh, eyes rolled pretty much right out of her head and the kids were like, why are

00:03:45 ◼   ► all these boxes on the kitchen table?

00:03:46 ◼   ► Which is where they found them.

00:03:47 ◼   ► They've since moved from the kitchen table, but that's where they were.

00:03:49 ◼   ► So I have no other updates beside that, but thanks to Spencer at some point, it's, I think

00:03:55 ◼   ► I'm actually going to have to put at least a little bit of fiber in the house.

00:03:58 ◼   ► And I get asked about this like once every month or two, some listener will email and be like,

00:04:03 ◼   ► Hey, what's going on with the fiber thing?

00:04:04 ◼   ► Or, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:04:06 ◼   ► P.S.

00:04:06 ◼   ► Why didn't Casey ever define her?

00:04:08 ◼   ► So, um, so that's the deal.

00:04:11 ◼   ► Now, as soon as I received this, the first thing I did was I said, you know, thank you

00:04:14 ◼   ► so very much, Spencer, because this was not a gag gift.

00:04:16 ◼   ► This was probably quite a bit of money.

00:04:18 ◼   ► Um, and that was a very unnecessary, very kind.

00:04:21 ◼   ► But the second thing I did was say to Stephen Hackett, when are you coming so we can install

00:04:26 ◼   ► this?

00:04:26 ◼   ► I thought you would have done is write the date on all these boxes.

00:04:30 ◼   ► Why?

00:04:30 ◼   ► So in case there's an expiration date.

00:04:33 ◼   ► So it's six years from now, you're like, have you opened those boxes yet, Casey?

00:04:36 ◼   ► Like, I'll get to it eventually.

00:04:37 ◼   ► And I'll be like, well, check the dates, check the dates.

00:04:39 ◼   ► They might've expired.

00:04:40 ◼   ► It's not milk, John.

00:04:41 ◼   ► It'll be fine.

00:04:42 ◼   ► Uh, so anyway, so yeah, so that's the thing.

00:04:45 ◼   ► And, uh, I don't know.

00:04:46 ◼   ► I'm trying to convince Stephen to come up and make a project of it with me and, you know,

00:04:50 ◼   ► wire the house for Ethernet and fiber to a degree.

00:04:53 ◼   ► He's already doing his own, uh, wiring stuff, but he's got his own stuff going on.

00:04:58 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:04:59 ◼   ► Well, there will hopefully come a time that he doesn't, and maybe we can have a little adventure

00:05:02 ◼   ► together.

00:05:02 ◼   ► Plus I can show him what good barbecue is.

00:05:04 ◼   ► Shots fired.

00:05:06 ◼   ► Uh, anyway, so that's, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

00:05:09 ◼   ► But, uh, yeah, thank you.

00:05:10 ◼   ► And also no, thank you, Spencer.

00:05:11 ◼   ► I, I told Aaron, this is both an extremely kind and also extremely trolly gift.

00:05:18 ◼   ► And I think it's both of those things at the same time.

00:05:20 ◼   ► He's calling your bluff.

00:05:21 ◼   ► He is.

00:05:22 ◼   ► He really, really is.

00:05:23 ◼   ► I mean, does this work for other projects?

00:05:25 ◼   ► Like, can I just like mail you other things to do?

00:05:27 ◼   ► Only if he's declared that he's, uh, looking into doing them in his house and you have to

00:05:31 ◼   ► wait a few years.

00:05:34 ◼   ► Hey, all right.

00:05:35 ◼   ► So, uh, speaking of forcing other people to do things, uh, Marco, I've compelled you

00:05:40 ◼   ► to watch the 30 minute, uh, vision pro Metallica immersive special.

00:05:44 ◼   ► Um, I, let me quickly set the stage.

00:05:47 ◼   ► We talked about this last week.

00:05:48 ◼   ► Apple announced like a week and a half ago, something like that, that they're going to

00:05:50 ◼   ► have this roughly, like I said, 30 minute, uh, Metallica special.

00:05:53 ◼   ► It was pitched as basically a concert film, but only three songs.

00:05:57 ◼   ► I believe it was whiplash one and enter Sandman, if I'm not mistaken.

00:06:00 ◼   ► Um, so one way or another, uh, that air that was released this past Friday.

00:06:07 ◼   ► I've now watched it twice.

00:06:09 ◼   ► Uh, I have plenty of thoughts, but Marco, would you, would you prefer to start?

00:06:13 ◼   ► Would you like me to start?

00:06:14 ◼   ► How would you like to do this?

00:06:15 ◼   ► Um, I'll, I'll start cause I, I, uh, I think I'll be quick and I think I'll probably be

00:06:19 ◼   ► a little more critical than you.

00:06:20 ◼   ► Um, so, you know, I'll, I'll go into this by saying that like, I'm not like a massive Metallica

00:06:25 ◼   ► fan.

00:06:26 ◼   ► I respect their music.

00:06:27 ◼   ► I'm just not really like a metal person.

00:06:28 ◼   ► Um, but I respect, you know, they are talented at what they do.

00:06:32 ◼   ► Um, you know, I went through an SM phase like everyone else, but that was a very good

00:06:38 ◼   ► album.

00:06:38 ◼   ► Uh, but anyway, so I did watch the whole thing in one go.

00:06:42 ◼   ► Um, I did it without AirPods.

00:06:44 ◼   ► I used the built in like speaker sticks on the ears.

00:06:47 ◼   ► That was a mistake.

00:06:48 ◼   ► It was, but I understand it.

00:06:49 ◼   ► I understand it, but it was a mistake.

00:06:51 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:06:51 ◼   ► The, mainly because, um, you know, this is obviously a band that has a lot of bass and the, there

00:06:57 ◼   ► is just no bass in the ear pod things like that are on the sticks of the vision pro.

00:07:02 ◼   ► And there's also like one thing that I immediately felt for a concert video, you really need easy

00:07:09 ◼   ► volume control.

00:07:10 ◼   ► Yes.

00:07:11 ◼   ► And division pro doesn't have that.

00:07:12 ◼   ► That's fair.

00:07:13 ◼   ► Well, do you, don't forget that you can do the look at your hand and then flip your hand

00:07:19 ◼   ► over.

00:07:19 ◼   ► Do you know, do you remember what I'm talking about?

00:07:20 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:07:21 ◼   ► I, you know, I was, I was, I tried that and I was playing, eventually I got it.

00:07:25 ◼   ► Um, but like the vision pro, like if one of the main features of this device that makes

00:07:30 ◼   ► it, you know, possibly compelling is, you know, audio and video, like video experiences, it

00:07:37 ◼   ► needs a hardware volume control.

00:07:38 ◼   ► And they had the foresight to put a knob on it.

00:07:41 ◼   ► Like Apple does.

00:07:42 ◼   ► They, they have all these digital crowns lying around.

00:07:44 ◼   ► They're like, we got to shove these everywhere.

00:07:45 ◼   ► Um, but they, they use the digital crown for something else.

00:07:48 ◼   ► They use it for like the, the, the pass through versus, you know, virtualized world, uh, toggle.

00:07:55 ◼   ► So there is no volume control.

00:07:57 ◼   ► There's no hardware volume control in the vision pro.

00:07:59 ◼   ► It really needs one.

00:08:00 ◼   ► Like that's sorry.

00:08:02 ◼   ► You know, it really needs one anyway.

00:08:04 ◼   ► So once I got past the, you know, the physical setup there, um, the actual Metallica video,

00:08:10 ◼   ► I'm glad they did it because this is the kind of direction they need to start going in.

00:08:18 ◼   ► Uh, but I think they made some poor choices and stylistic choices in doing this.

00:08:24 ◼   ► So what I've been saying for a while, and, and, and actually I was surprised to hear Ben

00:08:29 ◼   ► Thompson on Stratechery also really chimed in about this, you know, saying very similar

00:08:33 ◼   ► things this past week.

00:08:35 ◼   ► what I've been wanting for a while is just give me like a fixed camera so I can experience

00:08:41 ◼   ► the concert as if I was there experiencing a live event as if you are there is something

00:08:48 ◼   ► the vision pro can deliver that other video screens can't.

00:08:52 ◼   ► And so I think that really would benefit from basically just a fixed camera in a really

00:08:56 ◼   ► good seat.

00:08:56 ◼   ► That's not what this was.

00:08:58 ◼   ► It also, like I was saying last week, like why did they do a concert and only do three songs?

00:09:04 ◼   ► Yes.

00:09:05 ◼   ► Having seen it, I think they should have done two songs because I was bored because what

00:09:10 ◼   ► they created was sort of a documentary, sort of a concert film hybrid.

00:09:16 ◼   ► And the style of it, they had, you know, occasional like interludes between songs of, you know,

00:09:22 ◼   ► showing like these slow panning shots of one of the members of the band and saying something

00:09:28 ◼   ► pithy in the background as the narration, the spotlight goes across the dude's face.

00:09:32 ◼   ► And it's like, it looks, you know, they're trying to be dramatic and everything, but I

00:09:35 ◼   ► just, I'm just kind of just like, can we get to the songs please?

00:09:37 ◼   ► So, you know, it goes through all that, whatever.

00:09:40 ◼   ► And then when they were in the songs, they were just constant cuts, tons of cuts.

00:09:48 ◼   ► There was a cut like every couple of seconds.

00:09:50 ◼   ► It was shot like it was a music documentary or a music video.

00:09:57 ◼   ► It was not shot like a concert.

00:10:00 ◼   ► What they chose to do was a lot of really intense close-up shots, both with the band

00:10:07 ◼   ► members as they played and with the fans around it.

00:10:10 ◼   ► So, you know, we got to see a lot of Lars Ulrich sticking his tongue out.

00:10:13 ◼   ► Yup.

00:10:14 ◼   ► It's okay.

00:10:15 ◼   ► One shot of that, but like literally every shot with Lars in it, he's sticking his tongue

00:10:19 ◼   ► out of the camera.

00:10:19 ◼   ► I mean, I guess he thinks he's cool.

00:10:22 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:10:22 ◼   ► Maybe that's a metal thing.

00:10:23 ◼   ► I don't understand.

00:10:24 ◼   ► Whatever.

00:10:24 ◼   ► But so, you know, we saw a lot of Lars Ulrich's tongue, but we also like, they kept cutting

00:10:29 ◼   ► to shots of like the fans going, you know, into the camera.

00:10:33 ◼   ► And we were, again, like, like all the other Vision Pro immersive content, we were so close

00:10:39 ◼   ► to everyone.

00:10:40 ◼   ► It was like a bunch of fans were sticking their tongue in my eye as I'm trying to watch this.

00:10:46 ◼   ► And I'm like, is this pleasant to anybody?

00:10:49 ◼   ► Like, I, you know, when, when 3D movies first became possible to show to the public, what

00:10:56 ◼   ► was largely shown on them was gimmicky stuff where like a shark comes out of the screen and

00:11:00 ◼   ► comes at you.

00:11:01 ◼   ► You're like, whoa, like it almost seems like the Vision Pro, like the, whatever the immersive

00:11:06 ◼   ► video production team is, you know, whatever that studio is or whatever.

00:11:09 ◼   ► It almost seems like they're trying to like, wow us with the 3Dness by having a bunch of

00:11:15 ◼   ► stuff come really close to us.

00:11:17 ◼   ► And I think that's a mistake for a bunch of reasons.

00:11:20 ◼   ► Number one, it feels weird as a viewer.

00:11:22 ◼   ► Number two, the Vision Pro and the content being streamed to it is not that high resolution.

00:11:26 ◼   ► So when things are shown very close to you, you see the limits of the resolution.

00:11:32 ◼   ► You see the limits of those screens.

00:11:33 ◼   ► You see the limits of the codec and the video that's being shown to you.

00:11:36 ◼   ► So it actually doesn't look very good.

00:11:38 ◼   ► Whereas when stuff is, is like when you're viewing things at a more moderate distance, you

00:11:43 ◼   ► really don't notice the pixelation or the blurriness or the lack of, you know,

00:11:47 ◼   ► proper convergence and focus and things like that.

00:11:49 ◼   ► So it is a mistake in lots of ways for them to be showing all these things that like get

00:11:55 ◼   ► in your face.

00:11:56 ◼   ► But it seems like the creative decision making of their video production keeps doing that.

00:12:01 ◼   ► Again, I think that's a mistake.

00:12:03 ◼   ► But anyway, so back to the concert.

00:12:05 ◼   ► It was this huge rock band in this venue.

00:12:09 ◼   ► I think it was like a 60,000 seat venue in this massive band, in this massive venue.

00:12:16 ◼   ► But the way they shot it, it felt small.

00:12:19 ◼   ► They were shooting it mostly with cameras that were like on the stage, looking right onto Lars Ulrich's

00:12:26 ◼   ► tongue.

00:12:26 ◼   ► Like you were so close.

00:12:28 ◼   ► You didn't get the spectacle.

00:12:30 ◼   ► Like we were too close to the performers.

00:12:34 ◼   ► And that's what made it feel small.

00:12:35 ◼   ► You know, when you're, when you're at a big concert in a big arena, they, you know, they have things

00:12:40 ◼   ► like the, the pyrotechnic firework blasts when they hit certain notes.

00:12:43 ◼   ► They have, you know, obviously use like a big lighting show.

00:12:46 ◼   ► There were a couple of times like they had those, those firework blasts, but you only knew the

00:12:51 ◼   ► fireworks blasted because the shot after they blasted, you could see the trails.

00:12:56 ◼   ► There was one moment in interest Sandman where I guess they dropped a bunch of beach balls

00:13:01 ◼   ► on the audience, like big giant beach balls.

00:13:03 ◼   ► And you didn't know because you didn't see them drop because they were zoomed in when it

00:13:09 ◼   ► happened.

00:13:09 ◼   ► And then on like a following shot, then you saw, oh, there's beach balls all over the

00:13:14 ◼   ► audience.

00:13:15 ◼   ► When did that happen?

00:13:16 ◼   ► Like they shot it so close that it made this huge spectacle in this huge arena of this huge

00:13:23 ◼   ► band feel really, really small.

00:13:26 ◼   ► And instead of being a cool spectacle, it looked like four old guys playing wireless

00:13:32 ◼   ► instruments and it really didn't convey the scale or the spectacle of a concert arena, which

00:13:39 ◼   ► is what it was.

00:13:40 ◼   ► So I think the idea of concerts in immersive video is a great idea, but I think it's almost

00:13:49 ◼   ► as if the people who were, who are filming or editing or making those creative decisions on

00:13:53 ◼   ► how to present this and how to shoot this, it almost feels like they've never used a

00:13:58 ◼   ► Vision Pro.

00:13:59 ◼   ► They overproduced.

00:14:01 ◼   ► They went too far and they succeeded yet again in making like a demo, a content snack.

00:14:07 ◼   ► Like I said last week, everything the Vision Pro has delivered so far is not content.

00:14:14 ◼   ► It's a demo of what content could be like on the Vision Pro.

00:14:16 ◼   ► It's like everything on the Vision Pro is a sample project.

00:14:19 ◼   ► Here's an example app that you might be able to do one day.

00:14:22 ◼   ► Here's some example video styles that we might be able to use.

00:14:25 ◼   ► Okay.

00:14:26 ◼   ► Well, it's been out for over a year.

00:14:28 ◼   ► When do we get to actually get the content?

00:14:31 ◼   ► Is this it?

00:14:31 ◼   ► I hope not.

00:14:33 ◼   ► This still feels like a demo and not a good one.

00:14:35 ◼   ► So I think it would be in Apple's best interest if they won't make the pedestrian version of

00:14:44 ◼   ► just fixed cameras in front of like live events of various types, concerts, sports, theater.

00:14:48 ◼   ► If Apple won't make that, open up the doors and let someone else do it.

00:14:53 ◼   ► Like, I don't know, get these cameras in the hands of more people.

00:14:55 ◼   ► I don't know what they have to do, but the Apple-directed studio, I think, is making the

00:15:01 ◼   ► wrong creative stylistic decisions on what kind of content to make and how to make it.

00:15:07 ◼   ► I hear everything you said, and particularly the specific quibbles, I largely agree with.

00:15:14 ◼   ► There was too much of Lars Ulrich's tongue.

00:15:17 ◼   ► There were too many cuts.

00:15:19 ◼   ► I do agree with that.

00:15:22 ◼   ► Overall, as someone who loves a concert film, a concert video, whatever you want to call

00:15:28 ◼   ► it, I freaking loved it.

00:15:30 ◼   ► I absolutely freaking loved it.

00:15:32 ◼   ► I find Ben Thompson to be frustratingly bright.

00:15:37 ◼   ► I feel like he is so much smarter than me in so many different ways.

00:15:42 ◼   ► It's almost off-putting how smart he is, and I cannot disagree with him more.

00:15:49 ◼   ► And now, by proxy you, who is also very smart, I cannot disagree with you two more that plunking

00:15:55 ◼   ► a camera down on stage is the better approach.

00:15:58 ◼   ► I totally...

00:15:59 ◼   ► Not on stage, to be clear.

00:16:01 ◼   ► Plunking a camera in a good audience seat.

00:16:04 ◼   ► I hear you, and I still disagree with you.

00:16:06 ◼   ► It is an important distinction, however, but I still disagree with you.

00:16:10 ◼   ► The thing of it is, there's a couple of problems here.

00:16:12 ◼   ► Number one, this stage was, the way it worked was there was a circle, the stage was circular.

00:16:17 ◼   ► In the center of that circle was a hole.

00:16:20 ◼   ► It was like a donut, right?

00:16:21 ◼   ► And so in the center, the donut hole, if you will, was, I believe it's called the snake pit

00:16:25 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:16:25 ◼   ► Now I'm showing both my age and my ignorance.

00:16:27 ◼   ► Oh, is that what they were talking about?

00:16:29 ◼   ► I believe so.

00:16:29 ◼   ► I saw that turn float by.

00:16:30 ◼   ► I'm like, what are they talking about?

00:16:31 ◼   ► Okay.

00:16:31 ◼   ► I think that's what that is.

00:16:33 ◼   ► And honestly, you don't need to correct us.

00:16:34 ◼   ► It's fine.

00:16:35 ◼   ► But basically, there were a bunch of people packed like sardines in the center there.

00:16:38 ◼   ► And then there were a bunch of people outside the donut, if you will.

00:16:41 ◼   ► To begin with, that sort of a concert where it's very dynamic and they're walking around

00:16:48 ◼   ► this donut, that would have been awful if you had a stationary camera.

00:16:53 ◼   ► Okay.

00:16:54 ◼   ► So maybe you have several stationary cameras around the entire venue.

00:16:57 ◼   ► Okay, I guess.

00:16:59 ◼   ► But what if Lars is soloing or something like that and the nearest camera to him is 40 feet

00:17:07 ◼   ► away or for whatever reason, the director has chosen a different camera.

00:17:11 ◼   ► I still don't think that makes this that much better.

00:17:13 ◼   ► Now, again, I want to reiterate, there are too many cuts.

00:17:16 ◼   ► Absolutely, unequivocally too many cuts.

00:17:18 ◼   ► It got better as the concert got further through the three, can I even call it a concert if it's

00:17:24 ◼   ► three songs?

00:17:25 ◼   ► But as the concert went on, it did get better.

00:17:28 ◼   ► And I feel like they kind of pulled back a little bit on that, but could not agree more.

00:17:32 ◼   ► Still too many cuts.

00:17:33 ◼   ► For the love of all that is good and holy, Apple Century, LLC, whatever the thing is that

00:17:39 ◼   ► produces these videos that they show at the end, let your directors hang onto a shot.

00:17:44 ◼   ► I beg of you, hang onto the shot.

00:17:47 ◼   ► And the way you know this is better is, I believe it was during One, which is the middle

00:17:52 ◼   ► song, which is, I'm not a Metallica super fan by any means, but I enjoy Metallica.

00:17:57 ◼   ► I also went through my S&M The Album phase, and it's an incredible album.

00:18:02 ◼   ► I generally enjoy their work, even though I don't seek it out very often.

00:18:05 ◼   ► One is one of my favorite songs of theirs, which is not a very hot take at all.

00:18:09 ◼   ► That's about the coldest take in the world.

00:18:11 ◼   ► Yeah, I also agree.

00:18:12 ◼   ► I think that's their best song, in my opinion.

00:18:14 ◼   ► During the performance of One, we were fairly close to James, and actually, let me interrupt

00:18:19 ◼   ► myself.

00:18:19 ◼   ► The extreme close-ups of human faces, too much.

00:18:24 ◼   ► It's too freaking much, Apple.

00:18:26 ◼   ► It's too much.

00:18:27 ◼   ► It's in every video.

00:18:29 ◼   ► Every video.

00:18:30 ◼   ► That's what I'm saying.

00:18:31 ◼   ► Like, who wants this?

00:18:32 ◼   ► It's really weird.

00:18:33 ◼   ► It's funny.

00:18:36 ◼   ► It's funny because it's so, it's every video.

00:18:38 ◼   ► Like you just said, it's every freaking video.

00:18:40 ◼   ► It's too much, Apple.

00:18:41 ◼   ► Anyways, we were not in extreme close-up mode at this point, but we were very, very close.

00:18:45 ◼   ► We were two Jameses, the lead singer's left-hand side.

00:18:48 ◼   ► And he's kneeling at the edge of the stage, and he's soloing to a degree.

00:18:53 ◼   ► And the fans are right in front of him, like inches away from him.

00:18:57 ◼   ► And there's one fan in particular who's got the horns up with his hands, and he's rocking

00:19:01 ◼   ► out or whatever, and James is way off mic because, you know, he turns out he's very tall, which

00:19:07 ◼   ► we'll come back to in a second.

00:19:08 ◼   ► But he's way off mic.

00:19:09 ◼   ► He's kneeling down.

00:19:10 ◼   ► And he, like, yells in an excited, happy way, like right in this guy's face.

00:19:15 ◼   ► Not in an angry, you know, mean way.

00:19:16 ◼   ► In a happy, like, we're in the moment together, this freaking rules way.

00:19:20 ◼   ► And he yells in this guy's face.

00:19:21 ◼   ► And he then immediately gets up and does the cool kid, like, walk away thing.

00:19:25 ◼   ► Again, not in a mean way, not in a bad way.

00:19:27 ◼   ► He's just moving on to the next moment of the concert.

00:19:29 ◼   ► But the key is the camera stayed.

00:19:31 ◼   ► Yes.

00:19:32 ◼   ► The camera stayed.

00:19:34 ◼   ► I loved this shot.

00:19:35 ◼   ► And you could watch, you could watch this man lose his shit in a perfect, beautiful way.

00:19:42 ◼   ► And I know that seems kind of stupid for me to say beautiful, but really and truly, what

00:19:48 ◼   ► I love so much about live music, even as someone who doesn't go to very many live music concerts

00:19:52 ◼   ► because I'm old and value my hearing and have children.

00:19:56 ◼   ► But as someone who loves live music, even recorded live music like this, it's that moment that

00:20:03 ◼   ► is just truly a beautiful, beautiful moment because he loses it.

00:20:08 ◼   ► You can see him, like, throw his head back in, like, ecstasy and then, like, kind of almost

00:20:14 ◼   ► peel over because he's like, what just happened to me?

00:20:16 ◼   ► How did this just happen?

00:20:17 ◼   ► It is truly a beautiful moment.

00:20:19 ◼   ► And the key to this, the key to this is that they let it air.

00:20:24 ◼   ► They let the shot air.

00:20:27 ◼   ► And this is what you've been saying.

00:20:29 ◼   ► This is what I've been saying.

00:20:30 ◼   ► This is what everyone has been saying.

00:20:31 ◼   ► I violently disagree with you that you need to plunk one camera and then walk away.

00:20:36 ◼   ► And part of the reason why I don't agree with you there is the absolutely incredible version

00:20:42 ◼   ► of the talk show where there was the immersive camera right up front.

00:20:46 ◼   ► Or it wasn't, well, maybe it wasn't immersive.

00:20:48 ◼   ► Maybe it was just that.

00:20:49 ◼   ► It wasn't like Apple's official immersive format because I don't think they at that time had

00:20:54 ◼   ► released any cameras or anything to do that to the public yet.

00:20:57 ◼   ► But it was basically what I'm talking about.

00:20:59 ◼   ► It was very close to what I'm talking about.

00:21:01 ◼   ► And that was great.

00:21:03 ◼   ► I'm not trying to take away from that.

00:21:04 ◼   ► It was great.

00:21:05 ◼   ► But honestly, the immersive thing, like, it wasn't, it didn't add that much.

00:21:10 ◼   ► There's depth, which is neat, but there's nothing happening.

00:21:14 ◼   ► Like, you're just watching some dudes talk.

00:21:16 ◼   ► And I don't think that watching some people play music is that different.

00:21:20 ◼   ► So I disagree that having a completely immobile camera is better.

00:21:25 ◼   ► But I, as violently as I disagree with both you and Ben in that regard, I violently agree

00:21:30 ◼   ► with you, if that's possible, that you need to let the shots air out.

00:21:35 ◼   ► They need to let the shots air out.

00:21:38 ◼   ► There's so many times that it's just rapid fire, rapid fire, rapid fire.

00:21:42 ◼   ► And it's not helpful.

00:21:44 ◼   ► Let it breathe.

00:21:45 ◼   ► Even if you're not watching the soloist, which is frustrating in and of itself, just let it

00:21:50 ◼   ► breathe for a minute, man.

00:21:52 ◼   ► I could deal with less letting it breathe on Laura's tongue.

00:21:54 ◼   ► But nevertheless, let it breathe.

00:21:56 ◼   ► Now, to back up quite a bit, the film starts, and it is like a documentary slash concert film,

00:22:02 ◼   ► like you had said.

00:22:02 ◼   ► It starts by watching James Hetfield, the lead singer, walk out.

00:22:05 ◼   ► And well, I'm sorry.

00:22:06 ◼   ► It starts by the four of them kind of, you know, grouping and getting ready for the show.

00:22:10 ◼   ► And then they follow James.

00:22:11 ◼   ► And later, they follow the rest of them, walk out.

00:22:13 ◼   ► And they walk out from backstage through the crowd.

00:22:17 ◼   ► Like there's a pathway, but through the crowd.

00:22:19 ◼   ► And presumably, they end up on the stage, but you don't actually see that part.

00:22:22 ◼   ► And it's those moments that I think are what makes this so unique.

00:22:27 ◼   ► Because unlike anything I've ever seen, when there's depth to it, when you can pitch your

00:22:32 ◼   ► head and look around, it is real in a way that nothing else I have experienced is real.

00:22:38 ◼   ► I'm not saying that Vision Pro is the only way to accomplish this.

00:22:41 ◼   ► Presumably, you know, there's equivalent things for the MetaQuest, whatever you call it.

00:22:44 ◼   ► But it is, for me, unlike anything I've experienced.

00:22:48 ◼   ► And my mom has said for my entire life, like, she doesn't believe in reincarnation.

00:22:54 ◼   ► I'm sure I've told this story.

00:22:55 ◼   ► She doesn't believe in reincarnation.

00:22:56 ◼   ► But if she could reincarnate as someone, she would want to be like an actor or a musician

00:23:01 ◼   ► where they walk on stage and they hear everyone cheering for them.

00:23:05 ◼   ► And you're walking right behind James, and you're watching him high-five all these people.

00:23:10 ◼   ► And it's as close as I've been, other than when we've done a live show.

00:23:14 ◼   ► I was going to say, you've had that experience.

00:23:16 ◼   ► Which is a mind screw in a bunch of different ways, in a bunch of happy ways.

00:23:20 ◼   ► But other than, like, that's not 60,000 people, right?

00:23:23 ◼   ► That's several thousand.

00:23:24 ◼   ► I think it's a thousand at best.

00:23:26 ◼   ► And so I am overjoyed that I've ever had that experience once,

00:23:31 ◼   ► let alone been lucky enough to have it many times.

00:23:33 ◼   ► But this is a whole different level, right?

00:23:35 ◼   ► And to see these people just losing their minds to touch this man's hand,

00:23:40 ◼   ► it's very, very, very cool.

00:23:41 ◼   ► The other thing I really liked about it was that they were no longer very precious

00:23:47 ◼   ► about the cameras being visible.

00:23:49 ◼   ► If you look at the concert for one for Raya or whatever her name is,

00:23:52 ◼   ► she's incredibly talented, forgive me.

00:23:53 ◼   ► I always butcher her name.

00:23:54 ◼   ► Ray, Raya, I forget.

00:23:56 ◼   ► They basically had one camera.

00:23:58 ◼   ► Like you're describing, they occasionally cut to other ones,

00:24:00 ◼   ► but it was mostly one camera.

00:24:01 ◼   ► And you could never see that there were other immersive cameras there.

00:24:04 ◼   ► And similarly, the concert for one with Alicia Keys,

00:24:06 ◼   ► they put the cameras in like these monolith things.

00:24:10 ◼   ► So you couldn't really tell that.

00:24:12 ◼   ► I mean, if you thought about it, you could tell, oh, that's where the camera is.

00:24:14 ◼   ► But you couldn't really see them.

00:24:15 ◼   ► In this, you could see the cameras.

00:24:17 ◼   ► You could see the one behind Lars.

00:24:19 ◼   ► You could see the ones floating around on cabling.

00:24:21 ◼   ► You could see the cameras.

00:24:22 ◼   ► And it didn't take away from it at all.

00:24:24 ◼   ► It was fine.

00:24:25 ◼   ► And I'm glad they weren't precious about it.

00:24:27 ◼   ► The fireworks thing was another thing I took note of.

00:24:30 ◼   ► It's funny what you said about not really seeing them because I didn't either.

00:24:33 ◼   ► But because I had my AirPods in, I heard it.

00:24:36 ◼   ► I heard it in the left channel.

00:24:38 ◼   ► And what did I do?

00:24:39 ◼   ► I turned my head.

00:24:40 ◼   ► And look at that.

00:24:41 ◼   ► Over there, there's fireworks.

00:24:43 ◼   ► You probably didn't get this because you were open air, which is totally reasonable.

00:24:46 ◼   ► It's totally fine.

00:24:47 ◼   ► But I think had you had your AirPods in, it would have had not a deeper meaning.

00:24:52 ◼   ► That's a bit dramatic.

00:24:53 ◼   ► But you would have caught it better, right?

00:24:55 ◼   ► And you would have understood it better because you'd hear it pounding in your left ear.

00:24:58 ◼   ► And you would have turned your head to the left and you would have seen it.

00:25:01 ◼   ► So much of this was so incredible and so cool.

00:25:06 ◼   ► And I don't, other than saying, you know, just stick a camera somewhere and walk away,

00:25:10 ◼   ► I don't particularly disagree with anything you said.

00:25:13 ◼   ► I think it is too short.

00:25:15 ◼   ► It was weirdly dancing on the line between documentary and concert film, which is fine,

00:25:21 ◼   ► but it was a little weird.

00:25:22 ◼   ► The extreme close-ups, too much.

00:25:24 ◼   ► We've already talked about it, too much.

00:25:25 ◼   ► Let the shots breathe.

00:25:26 ◼   ► Obviously, we talked about that.

00:25:27 ◼   ► Just let them breathe.

00:25:28 ◼   ► But ultimately, this was, to me, extremely cool.

00:25:33 ◼   ► And I'm so glad they did it.

00:25:35 ◼   ► I'm so glad they're starting to walk down this road.

00:25:37 ◼   ► I'm so glad that they're giving people the opportunity to watch at least some of this at

00:25:41 ◼   ► the Apple Store.

00:25:42 ◼   ► John, I should have made you do this.

00:25:43 ◼   ► I regret not having done so in retrospect.

00:25:45 ◼   ► I know you never leave your house, but...

00:25:47 ◼   ► You're talking about I never leave my house.

00:25:48 ◼   ► I leave my house the same amount you are.

00:25:49 ◼   ► But anyways, one way or another, I should have had you do this.

00:25:53 ◼   ► And if you have the chance in the future, I strongly encourage you to do so.

00:25:57 ◼   ► It is incredible.

00:25:58 ◼   ► The one final note I'd like to add, because I've already gone on too long, is for the love

00:26:04 ◼   ► of all that is good and holy, can we please take a screenshot of this?

00:26:08 ◼   ► Can we make a GIF of this somehow?

00:26:09 ◼   ► It's Apple's own stuff.

00:26:12 ◼   ► You own the rights!

00:26:13 ◼   ► You're trying to steal from Metallica again, aren't you?

00:26:15 ◼   ► Oh yeah, that's what I'm doing.

00:26:16 ◼   ► I just, like, I can't, I cannot, I can't, oh, that was a Napster reference.

00:26:21 ◼   ► It blew right over my head and then I brought it back.

00:26:23 ◼   ► Well done, John.

00:26:23 ◼   ► I did not give you the credit you deserved.

00:26:25 ◼   ► I'm sorry.

00:26:26 ◼   ► Anyway, I just want to be able to take a screenshot of James screaming in this fan's face.

00:26:32 ◼   ► And it's just, again, it's such a beautiful moment.

00:26:34 ◼   ► It's what makes music so powerful and so amazing.

00:26:36 ◼   ► And I want to take a screenshot of it just so I can have some sort of visual aid to help

00:26:42 ◼   ► people see what I see.

00:26:44 ◼   ► And admittedly, I didn't try it.

00:26:46 ◼   ► So maybe I'm going to be made a fool when people say, no, you can do that, you moron.

00:26:49 ◼   ► But I didn't even bother trying because I'm sure it'll just be a black damn box.

00:26:52 ◼   ► And please, Apple, for your own stuff, can I please take a screenshot?

00:26:56 ◼   ► Pretty, pretty, please.

00:26:57 ◼   ► Anyway, this was extremely cool.

00:26:59 ◼   ► I appreciate you indulging me.

00:27:00 ◼   ► I'm glad you tried it.

00:27:01 ◼   ► And I hope, I beg of you, Apple, please, more of this.

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00:29:10 ◼   ► All right, let's talk about colorful Macs.

00:29:13 ◼   ► George Tharp writes,

00:29:14 ◼   ► My sister is a very talented video editor.

00:29:16 ◼   ► Many years ago, when she was graduating from high school, she asked me which Mac she should

00:29:19 ◼   ► get for video editing.

00:29:20 ◼   ► Naturally, I told her to get a MacBook Pro.

00:29:22 ◼   ► However, the MacBook Adorable, i.e. the 12-inch one USB port MacBook, i.e. Casey's favorite,

00:29:28 ◼   ► had just been released with a pink color option.

00:29:32 ◼   ► Despite my best efforts to convince my sister otherwise, she decided to get the pink MacBook

00:29:36 ◼   ► Adorable, knowing full well this would be underpowered for her needs.

00:29:39 ◼   ► The next two years were filled with phone calls to me asking why the computer was constantly

00:29:45 ◼   ► beachballing, yep, as well as complaints that she couldn't charge her computer while uploading

00:29:49 ◼   ► videos from the camera, yep, since the computer only had one port.

00:29:52 ◼   ► Having said all that, she loved being one of the only students with a pink MacBook computer,

00:29:59 ◼   ► so much that years later, she will still buy the pink iPhone if one is available, regardless

00:30:04 ◼   ► of how much better the non-pink iPhone Pro might be for all the videos that she shoots.

00:30:08 ◼   ► Anyway, all that is to say, I'm sure my sister's not alone, and there are countless other people

00:30:12 ◼   ► that will buy a product solely for the color and not the actual performance and functionality

00:30:16 ◼   ► of the device.

00:30:17 ◼   ► So two things about this.

00:30:18 ◼   ► One, this is another case where Apple's shooting themselves in the foot because people are color

00:30:22 ◼   ► motivated, and by confining the colors to the cheaper ones, A, Apple's missing out on

00:30:26 ◼   ► money because she would have bought the more expensive one with, you know, higher profit margins,

00:30:30 ◼   ► and she didn't, and B, it's giving worse experiences with your products.

00:30:34 ◼   ► Like, she basically bought the wrong computer for her because she loved the pink that much,

00:30:38 ◼   ► and that's not on her so much.

00:30:39 ◼   ► It's really kind of on Apple for just confining the colors to the computers that are inappropriate

00:30:44 ◼   ► to her.

00:30:45 ◼   ► And then the second thing is, one way this is manifested in my, at least my daughter's life

00:30:51 ◼   ► anyway, is that she was the first one to introduce the idea, probably because she saw her, you

00:30:55 ◼   ► know, peers doing it at school, of getting a case for your laptop.

00:30:58 ◼   ► And I don't mean a case that you put it into when it's inside your backpack, because I got

00:31:01 ◼   ► one of those as well.

00:31:02 ◼   ► I mean a case like a phone case that is stuck to your laptop all the time.

00:31:05 ◼   ► And guess what that opens the door for?

00:31:07 ◼   ► Her laptop has basically been purple for all of high school, but Apple doesn't sell a purple

00:31:10 ◼   ► laptop, but hers was purple because it's got these little thin, hard plastic shells snapped

00:31:14 ◼   ► onto it.

00:31:16 ◼   ► And so you can get a silver one or whatever, and you can make it pink by putting a case

00:31:20 ◼   ► on it.

00:31:20 ◼   ► Naked robotic laptop.

00:31:23 ◼   ► Then, conflictingly, Andrew Cohn writes, while I would love a colorful Mac as well, the fact

00:31:29 ◼   ► is most people don't.

00:31:31 ◼   ► They may think they do, but they really don't.

00:31:33 ◼   ► Let me explain.

00:31:33 ◼   ► In a previous job of mine, we would often survey our customers and find out what kind of pizza

00:31:37 ◼   ► they would be interested in buying.

00:31:38 ◼   ► Overwhelmingly, the customers said they wanted a healthier version, something with more vegetables,

00:31:42 ◼   ► better protein, healthier meats, et cetera.

00:31:44 ◼   ► And every time we would introduce one of those, it would be our worst-selling product

00:31:47 ◼   ► ever.

00:31:48 ◼   ► But when we introduced a pizza with three different kinds of pepperoni on it, it ended up being

00:31:51 ◼   ► our best-selling product by a landslide.

00:31:52 ◼   ► I think the same is true here.

00:31:54 ◼   ► Everybody will say they want colors, but then go look at the cars that drive down the street.

00:31:59 ◼   ► They're all shades of gray, ranging from white to black.

00:32:01 ◼   ► Rarely do we see a car with real color, although I admit that trend is slowly changing.

00:32:05 ◼   ► I think this is the same phenomenon.

00:32:07 ◼   ► Our desires do not match where we are actually willing to spend money.

00:32:10 ◼   ► I have no facts to back this up, but I strongly disagree with this.

00:32:14 ◼   ► We kind of talked about this exact thing last week.

00:32:16 ◼   ► I think maybe I've forgotten that this was upcoming in the next week's follow-up, but

00:32:21 ◼   ► the main thing I'll add here, aside from I like the pizza example, is that the difference

00:32:27 ◼   ► is that the thing that people do, like the sort of guilty pleasure, give me the one with

00:32:31 ◼   ► three different kinds of pepperoni instead of the healthy one, that's colors.

00:32:35 ◼   ► Colors is the three pepperonis.

00:32:36 ◼   ► It is the guilty pleasure.

00:32:37 ◼   ► You know you shouldn't buy the pink one.

00:32:39 ◼   ► You shouldn't buy the pink laptop because it's not appropriate for your video editing

00:32:42 ◼   ► needs, but you just love pink so much.

00:32:44 ◼   ► You just love pepperoni so much.

00:32:46 ◼   ► That's the difference.

00:32:47 ◼   ► So that's why I think this example is not apt.

00:32:49 ◼   ► Even if it was apt, see last week's episode discussion of you got to make the colorful ones

00:32:53 ◼   ► just to get people excited.

00:32:54 ◼   ► Even if most people are going to buy the gray and they will mostly buy the gray.

00:32:57 ◼   ► But anyway, I think the colors of the pepperoni here.

00:33:00 ◼   ► People want to indulge in some fun with their laptops and if you put that in front of them,

00:33:07 ◼   ► they will take it, even if it's the wrong computer for them just because they like it so much.

00:33:10 ◼   ► Yeah, because look, there's nothing wrong with like buying or choosing something because you

00:33:16 ◼   ► love it.

00:33:16 ◼   ► When somebody makes the decision of like, I'm going to buy this pink one because I love it

00:33:21 ◼   ► and want it, even though it is in certain technical aspects worse for my needs, that's

00:33:28 ◼   ► not necessarily them making a mistake.

00:33:30 ◼   ► They could very well know, yes, this other one would be faster, but I don't love it.

00:33:36 ◼   ► And that can be enough.

00:33:38 ◼   ► Like if when you look at an item that you have and you're like, damn, I love that thing.

00:33:42 ◼   ► Sometimes that's more important than, you know, to you or to your to that situation than like,

00:33:48 ◼   ► well, it would complete this task 20% faster.

00:33:51 ◼   ► Like that's, and it's a factor that, you know, nerds like us often don't fully consider

00:33:55 ◼   ► or, or, you know, we might forget about it or ignore it or, or minimize it.

00:33:58 ◼   ► But when people make that kind of choice, they're not necessarily always just doing it out of

00:34:04 ◼   ► ignorance of the technical specs.

00:34:06 ◼   ► They're making a decision that, you know what?

00:34:07 ◼   ► I care more about the feeling I get when I look at this thing or like, it makes me happier.

00:34:12 ◼   ► Like this one makes me happier than this other one that would better fit for my needs.

00:34:16 ◼   ► I mean, look, I can personally speak to this on a, on a slightly different level that like,

00:34:20 ◼   ► my travel laptop that I, you know, use constantly on the train, on the ferry is a MacBook Air.

00:34:30 ◼   ► For my needs.

00:34:31 ◼   ► I've said on the show, the screen not being very bright and not having nanotexture actually really hurts its usability for me.

00:34:39 ◼   ► What also hurts its usability for me is the ports only being on one side.

00:34:43 ◼   ► And often I run into needing an SD card slot.

00:34:47 ◼   ► The MacBook Air doesn't have those.

00:34:48 ◼   ► I really probably should use a 14 inch MacBook Pro for that role instead.

00:34:53 ◼   ► It has nanotexture.

00:34:55 ◼   ► It has the brighter, better screen.

00:34:58 ◼   ► It has better speakers.

00:34:59 ◼   ► When I use those, I also use it for like FaceTime workouts.

00:35:01 ◼   ► So I use the speakers all the time.

00:35:03 ◼   ► Like it has the ports on both sides.

00:35:05 ◼   ► It has the SD card reader.

00:35:06 ◼   ► It even has better battery life.

00:35:08 ◼   ► And by all accounts, I should be using a 14 inch MacBook Pro, but I still choose the Air.

00:35:14 ◼   ► Why?

00:35:16 ◼   ► Because I love the way it feels when I pick it up.

00:35:19 ◼   ► That's it.

00:35:20 ◼   ► That's the reason the MacBook Air feels better in my hands.

00:35:24 ◼   ► I'm physically strong enough to lift the extra, you know, whatever half pound is the difference.

00:35:30 ◼   ► Like between that and the 14 inch.

00:35:32 ◼   ► I can pick up the 14 inch just fine.

00:35:34 ◼   ► It's fine.

00:35:35 ◼   ► But I choose the Air, even though it is technically substantially worse for my actual needs for that computer.

00:35:43 ◼   ► Because when I pick up a 14 inch MacBook Pro, I don't love it.

00:35:47 ◼   ► And when I pick up the Air, I love it.

00:35:49 ◼   ► So these kind of factors matter.

00:35:51 ◼   ► Like that's why, like the same thing applied to the 12 inch.

00:35:55 ◼   ► Like people love that thing, including Casey.

00:35:57 ◼   ► Like we loved it and we hated it because it felt amazing to pick it up.

00:36:02 ◼   ► And it looked, it was so small and it was so crappy in so many other ways, but people loved it.

00:36:08 ◼   ► And part of it was because it was pink and part of it was because it was super small and thin and it felt great in the hand.

00:36:13 ◼   ► Like that.

00:36:13 ◼   ► And that's, those factors matter a lot.

00:36:16 ◼   ► So for Apple to continue to, you know, do very well in one area, like the thin and light stuff mattering, they do great in that area.

00:36:22 ◼   ► For them to continue to under deliver or underserve the color market, I think is a missed opportunity because people love colors.

00:36:31 ◼   ► They love computers that have colors and all of that love that people have, you know, for their computer that could be there from it being a fun color.

00:36:39 ◼   ► Apple's just leaving that on the table and not serving it.

00:36:41 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:36:42 ◼   ► And again, getting back to this analogy, the logical thing of like, you know, you should get the 14 inch because it has the specs that you need.

00:36:47 ◼   ► You know what the logical choice is?

00:36:48 ◼   ► I should get the food that's healthier for me.

00:36:50 ◼   ► I shouldn't eat so much saturated fat.

00:36:51 ◼   ► You know, I should get more vegetables on my pizza.

00:36:54 ◼   ► The vegetable healthy pizza is the laptop that has the right specs for you, but the one you love is the one with pepperoni.

00:37:00 ◼   ► This is slightly complicated by the fact that, you know, it actually does affect your health badly to get the pizza that you love.

00:37:05 ◼   ► Whereas getting a laptop that you love probably won't affect your health, but it's the best I can do with this analogy.

00:37:08 ◼   ► Anyway, I think it's basically flipped.

00:37:12 ◼   ► We got a couple of anonymous people that wrote into us with regard to Hydra, H-I-D-R-A, kind of combining their feedback.

00:37:20 ◼   ► All Apple SOCs are named after systems on a chip, are named after islands.

00:37:25 ◼   ► There's occasionally a subtle reference in the choice of the island, but that's not guaranteed.

00:37:29 ◼   ► The processor core names are more varied, although the power and efficiency cores of the same generation often have names that work together.

00:37:35 ◼   ► So some examples.

00:37:36 ◼   ► The A14 was Sicily and the M1 was Tonga.

00:37:40 ◼   ► The A15 was Ellis, the M2 was Staten, and M2 Pro Max Ultra were Rhodes.

00:37:45 ◼   ► A16 was Crete, the M3 was Ibita, and the M3 Pro was Lobos, and the M3 Max Ultra was Palma.

00:37:52 ◼   ► When the Pro variant has the same codename as the Max and Ultra variants, the codename gets the CHOP suffix.

00:37:58 ◼   ► The Max and Ultra variants get the C-Dye and 2C-Dye suffix, but we've already talked about that in past shows.

00:38:04 ◼   ► Yeah, we'll put a link in the show notes to the Wikipedia page of Apple Codenames.

00:38:07 ◼   ► They have a section in the Wikipedia page for the SOCs, so you can see it.

00:38:10 ◼   ► And we'll, again, put a link that we had in last week as well to that island off the coast of Norway called H-I-D-R-A, which I still think sounds like Hydra, but Casey says Hydra.

00:38:20 ◼   ► Well, no, no, no.

00:38:21 ◼   ► You may be right.

00:38:22 ◼   ► Now that I know it was unequivocally based on that island, I don't have the faintest idea how to pronounce that word.

00:38:27 ◼   ► We don't know this unequivocally, it's just almost certainly.

00:38:29 ◼   ► I mean, okay, maybe not unequivocally, but it's based off that island, and so I don't know how that island's name is pronounced.

00:38:36 ◼   ► When I was giving you stick about it a couple of weeks ago, it was because I thought it was just an alternate spelling of the mythical beast.

00:38:43 ◼   ► I didn't realize that there was also the island.

00:38:45 ◼   ► So, either way, yeah, it sounds like this is, well, I can't say unequivocally, but it's almost certainly.

00:38:51 ◼   ► Almost certainly.

00:38:52 ◼   ► Based on the island.

00:38:54 ◼   ► And then in front of the show, Jonathan Dietz Jr. writes with regard to the M3 and M4 Max and interposers.

00:39:00 ◼   ► John, do you want to handle this?

00:39:02 ◼   ► Do you want me to read this?

00:39:02 ◼   ► How do you want to approach it?

00:39:03 ◼   ► I can do it.

00:39:04 ◼   ► So, he, as usual, provided a giant email, which we cannot include in the show because it's too much information.

00:39:08 ◼   ► He provided a bunch of links, most of which are either paywalled or in Japanese, so that kind of hampers our ability to link you to them.

00:39:15 ◼   ► We'll put a couple of Japanese ones in there.

00:39:17 ◼   ► I tried Google translating on that word.

00:39:18 ◼   ► But anyway, I'm relying on Jonathan Dietz, a long time contributor to the show, to parse these out.

00:39:23 ◼   ► So, here are the takeaways.

00:39:25 ◼   ► First, and a couple of people wrote about this.

00:39:27 ◼   ► A little bit more precision in terms.

00:39:29 ◼   ► John wants us to know that the interposer is the piece of silicon that sits between the logic dyes and the organic substrate, hence the name.

00:39:36 ◼   ► It is not the name of the interface on the logic dyes themselves, which is a dye-to-dye interface or D numeral 2D, D2D for short.

00:39:44 ◼   ► I get that.

00:39:45 ◼   ► The reason I always say interposer is just kind of shorthand because it's the thing that the interposer connects to or whatever.

00:39:53 ◼   ► But, yes, it is more technically accurate to say what we're looking for on these dye shots is show me the D2D interface.

00:39:59 ◼   ► Show me the place where the interposer is supposed to connect to this chip.

00:40:03 ◼   ► Because if there isn't one, that means this chip isn't wired to connect to an interposer and another chip through it.

00:40:08 ◼   ► So, that's what we've been looking for.

00:40:10 ◼   ► So, terminology, I'll probably just keep calling the interposer.

00:40:12 ◼   ► But, and maybe I'll be able to switch to D2D.

00:40:14 ◼   ► We'll see how we go.

00:40:15 ◼   ► I'll try to during this feedback here.

00:40:16 ◼   ► Anyway, the next item.

00:40:18 ◼   ► The M3 Max does not have a D2D interface.

00:40:21 ◼   ► I'll put some links for this.

00:40:23 ◼   ► This is Jonathan's interpretation of these links that I either can't see because they're paywalled by an expensive thing that I'm not going to pay for or they're in Japanese.

00:40:31 ◼   ► In one of the links, John says, all these images show no D2D interface on the M3 Max dye, yet clearly the M3 Ultra exists.

00:40:37 ◼   ► The most likely explanation is that Apple made two mask sets, one with D2D and one without.

00:40:41 ◼   ► Considering how many fewer Ultras they sell, Ultras they sell their Maxes, this probably makes sense financially.

00:40:48 ◼   ► Especially considering they committed to volume production on the M3 Max very early in the M3, I'm assuming he means M3B, ramp up.

00:40:54 ◼   ► So that's the idea, those rumors were true, the M3 Max really didn't have a place for an interposer to connect, the images weren't just cropped, and yet that didn't mean that the M3 Ultra wasn't coming because in fact it did arrive, although the M3 Ultra is actually different in some substantial ways.

00:41:11 ◼   ► Second item, the M4 Max does not have a D2D interface.

00:41:17 ◼   ► Again, supported by these articles in Japanese that I can't read, but I believe it.

00:41:21 ◼   ► Now, does that mean there'll never be an M4 Ultra?

00:41:25 ◼   ► Didn't mean that for the M3, but then again, Apple said probably every generation will not have an Ultra, so that's why we're saying no M4 Ultra.

00:41:31 ◼   ► But anyway, I guess the practice of looking at the Max chip to see if the D2D interface is on the dye is not useful.

00:41:40 ◼   ► So, oh well.

00:41:42 ◼   ► And then finally, regarding the reticle limit, which is how big a single chip can you make, given the current process technology, Jonathan said, until TSMC starts using the high NAEUV, there's room for about a 75% area increase beyond the size of the M3 Max.

00:41:59 ◼   ► So, on the current process, or on the 3 nanometer process at TSMC, we do have a little more room to grow.

00:42:04 ◼   ► So, keep hope alive for those two chips that are bigger than a Max stuck together in the M3 or 4 Extreme at WWDC.

00:42:13 ◼   ► And then, also, John has a spreadsheet that he keeps up to date on Google Sheets if you want to see some facts and figures about Apple Silicon stuff.

00:42:22 ◼   ► Then, with regard to Apple's multi-OS redesign, John Tatum writes,

00:42:26 ◼   ► iOS 7 is a decade old.

00:42:28 ◼   ► Oof, gosh, I can't, I can't.

00:42:31 ◼   ► Anyway, how long should a theme last on an OS?

00:42:33 ◼   ► I'm looking forward to the new look.

00:42:35 ◼   ► We can't expect the operating system to be static from a visual standpoint.

00:42:38 ◼   ► Also, isn't this a pitch for subscription software?

00:42:40 ◼   ► I thought that's why I supported apps in this way, so that they could be updated regularly with features, but also with system changes.

00:42:48 ◼   ► Well, so that is part of the reason you need recurring revenue, because there is a certain amount of minimum amount of work you need to do to keep up with the OS upgrade cycle.

00:42:55 ◼   ► But it's a question of where you want those resources allocated.

00:42:57 ◼   ► You say, I want features, but also want you to keep up with system changes.

00:43:00 ◼   ► Well, if a system change is big enough, that could swamp all the features you were going to get.

00:43:05 ◼   ► And you may be okay with that, but what usually happens is users think, I subscribe to this, so I expect it to be maintained to the level I expect.

00:43:13 ◼   ► And then, also, when there's a system update, that should just come for free.

00:43:16 ◼   ► As in, I still expect the exact same features I always expect, because from the outside, it doesn't look like updating for the new OS look should be that much work, but it actually is.

00:43:25 ◼   ► So, it just adds an additional burden, and practically speaking, it can make it, especially for independent developers with small staffs or a single person, make it so you have to halt all feature work and just spend all your time on the system updates before you can resume feature work again.

00:43:39 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think also, you know, first of all, I would disagree with the characterization that the theme that we have now is that much like iOS 7, because I think it's pretty different.

00:43:48 ◼   ► You know, certainly, some of the broad strokes are still there, so I see why people say this, but many, if not most, of the details are very, very different.

00:43:57 ◼   ► That being said, okay, sometimes, yes, you should redesign things sometimes to keep them fresh, but redesigning the OS, as I mentioned last episode, is just incredibly expensive, not only on Apple, but on the entire ecosystem.

00:44:12 ◼   ► So, you have to enter that very carefully, and you have to do it from a position of strength, both within Apple and into a strong ecosystem.

00:44:21 ◼   ► And, you know, as we're going to maybe talk about, do we all think Apple has so little else to improve about their software that they can tackle this right now?

00:44:32 ◼   ► And do we trust Apple to do a good job of this right now?

00:44:35 ◼   ► I don't know how confident I would be in saying yes to those.

00:44:38 ◼   ► And then, finally, how do we feel about Apple's position with their developer ecosystem and the ecosystem of iOS apps?

00:44:45 ◼   ► When there's a big system redesign, many apps will fall behind.

00:44:49 ◼   ► Many apps will take a long time to implement it.

00:44:52 ◼   ► And it certainly puts a big burden on those apps, as John was saying, because it is so much work, usually, to adopt a new system design that whatever features you were hoping that those apps would add this year, they probably won't be able to.

00:45:06 ◼   ► Are we doing this at a time when the ecosystem is healthy and robust enough to absorb that burden?

00:45:13 ◼   ► And, again, I don't know if I'd confidently say yes to that either.

00:45:17 ◼   ► So what we have is this rumored, like, giant redesign from a company that probably should be doing other things with its software engineering resources right now into an ecosystem of developers that are not in the healthiest state, nor is their relationship with Apple in the healthiest state.

00:45:34 ◼   ► And the people who would implement such a design at Apple, I'm not sure we have a lot of trust in their taste or abilities to do so, especially on platforms like macOS.

00:45:46 ◼   ► That's where the hesitation is coming from here.

00:45:48 ◼   ► It's not that we want to hold on to a certain design forever.

00:45:51 ◼   ► It's, you know, changing a design is incredibly expensive and burdensome and risky.

00:45:58 ◼   ► And do we trust today's Apple with their priorities and resources to do a good job of this and implement it this year?

00:46:06 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:46:08 ◼   ► Yeah, it's tough.

00:46:10 ◼   ► And, obviously, what with the developer whole sphere being none too happy with Apple right now, it's a tough time.

00:46:21 ◼   ► And I don't know.

00:46:21 ◼   ► I don't know how it's going to work out.

00:46:22 ◼   ► But I will use this opportunity to plug your podcast with underscore David Smith, where you just had a really good episode about choosing optimism over pessimism, which certainly hit home for me.

00:46:35 ◼   ► Something that I don't think I do a good job with, and I think that I need to take Dave's advice to heart for sure.

00:46:42 ◼   ► Me too.

00:46:43 ◼   ► I was going to say, we know which one of the two hosts of that show that sentiment is coming from.

00:46:48 ◼   ► Yeah, and, you know, the reality is, like, you know, we're all in this.

00:46:55 ◼   ► Like, we're all in the Apple ecosystem.

00:46:57 ◼   ► For most of what most of us do, that is still the overall best choice.

00:47:02 ◼   ► In many cases, it's the only choice.

00:47:05 ◼   ► So, like, we're in this no matter what.

00:47:07 ◼   ► So, I hope that this all works out great.

00:47:10 ◼   ► I don't want to have to be complaining on our show for the next three years about how the new design broke Mac OS.

00:47:15 ◼   ► Like, I don't want to be doing that.

00:47:17 ◼   ► I want it to be awesome.

00:47:18 ◼   ► And I'm rooting for it to be awesome.

00:47:20 ◼   ► I'm just concerned that it might not be.

00:47:22 ◼   ► And here we are.

00:47:24 ◼   ► Like, we're in this no matter what.

00:47:25 ◼   ► So, I hope it works out.

00:47:27 ◼   ► All right.

00:47:27 ◼   ► As a final follow-up item, Mac OS Sequoia 15.4 is now, or will have Mac set up via iPhone.

00:47:36 ◼   ► John, you caught this.

00:47:38 ◼   ► I think you're the first person I see to catch this.

00:47:40 ◼   ► But an excerpt from Apple's press release for the new MacBook Air and also on the Mac Studio.

00:47:45 ◼   ► It reads as follows.

00:47:47 ◼   ► Next month, Mac OS Sequoia 15.4 will make it easier than ever to set up the new MacBook Air with iPhone.

00:47:52 ◼   ► I hate that it's not the iPhone.

00:47:54 ◼   ► But I don't need to open that can of worms again.

00:47:55 ◼   ► Anyway, by simply bringing iPhone close to the Mac.

00:47:59 ◼   ► Oh, it's close to Mac.

00:48:01 ◼   ► God, I hate this so much.

00:48:02 ◼   ► Oh, my God.

00:48:03 ◼   ► Just bring it close to your friend Mac.

00:48:04 ◼   ► Right?

00:48:05 ◼   ► Users could quickly and conveniently sign into their Apple account to get their files, photos, messages, passwords, and more onto their new MacBook Air.

00:48:11 ◼   ► Asterisk requires iOS 18.4 and Mac OS, excuse me, iPad OS 18.4 or later.

00:48:17 ◼   ► Yeah, that's an interesting choice.

00:48:19 ◼   ► I mean, like, so many aspects of the phone setup process are still better than the Mac setup process.

00:48:26 ◼   ► And this is kind of like, well, we can kind of help you there.

00:48:29 ◼   ► Like, don't you hate typing in your password?

00:48:30 ◼   ► You used to just be able to, you know, use your phone to sign into things.

00:48:33 ◼   ► We can do that.

00:48:34 ◼   ► And we kind of need if you could bring your old Mac close to your new Mac and do it.

00:48:37 ◼   ► But anyway, baby steps here.

00:48:39 ◼   ► I think this will actually improve things a little bit.

00:48:41 ◼   ► I wish it was kind of like you would just set up your Mac and it would show you a menu of all your Mac iCloud backups.

00:48:47 ◼   ► But, oh, that doesn't exist.

00:48:48 ◼   ► So, you know, we'll get there someday.

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00:50:58 ◼   ► There's been a lot of news this last week, and it all started with a post on Daring Fireball, and John Gruber, I guess, exclusively got a statement from Apple with regard to upcoming personalized in Siri Apple intelligence features.

00:51:15 ◼   ► And so that post reads, or their comment reads as follows.

00:51:19 ◼   ► Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly.

00:51:23 ◼   ► And in the past six months, we've made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri and product knowledge, and added an integration with chat GPT.

00:51:31 ◼   ► We've also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps.

00:51:40 ◼   ► It's going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features, and we anticipate them rolling them out in the coming year.

00:51:49 ◼   ► So what this means is all of the stuff that they promised – well, I shouldn't say all – a lot of the stuff they promised at WWDC isn't going to land perhaps this calendar year?

00:51:58 ◼   ► What does in the coming year mean?

00:52:01 ◼   ► What is year?

00:52:02 ◼   ► You want to take bets right now?

00:52:03 ◼   ► Ever?

00:52:06 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:52:07 ◼   ► I mean, the thing about their announcement of Apple intelligence and all of the features that are involved and how they're rolling out in the coming year and stuff like that, that they've done that for the past many years with the features.

00:52:16 ◼   ► And it's just – it's real easy to just lose track of which feature that they announced is coming out and which release.

00:52:23 ◼   ► Was that supposed to be in the 0.1 or that one's coming in the 0.4 or, like, it's just so hard to keep track of that and you just start to kind of just start to forget about it.

00:52:31 ◼   ► Like, I think they could actually get away with for a while just, like, disappearing features.

00:52:36 ◼   ► Like, we announced this, but we're never going to speak of it again and you'll just forget about it.

00:52:40 ◼   ► And that would probably work for a lot of this stuff.

00:52:42 ◼   ► But unfortunately, the main one that they're talking about here in this announcement is, like, we're going to be later than we thought, which is a time that we're not going to define for you, but just assume that you – whatever you were thinking it was going to be, whatever vague thing that we said before, whatever you had in your mind about when you were going to get this one flagship feature, it's going to be later than that.

00:53:02 ◼   ► And what is that one flagship feature?

00:53:03 ◼   ► Make Siri better.

00:53:05 ◼   ► That's the one they talk about.

00:53:07 ◼   ► Like, there are other things here.

00:53:09 ◼   ► There are other things that they promised that are going to be coming later as well, I'm sure, but it's, like, the new, more personalized Siri with context awareness that does it, like, the cool Siri, the better Siri, the improved Siri, the Siri that should have been bundled with the new appearance but wasn't, right?

00:53:23 ◼   ► So, again, we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year, lots of room there for – well, we didn't say they were coming out in the coming year.

00:53:37 ◼   ► We anticipate rolling them out, and rolling them out doesn't mean releasing them.

00:53:41 ◼   ► It maybe means, like, rolling them out a piece at a time, and the coming year could mean 365 days from the time you got this announcement, or it could mean the end of calendar year, or it could be the fiscal year.

00:53:51 ◼   ► It could be the lunar year.

00:53:52 ◼   ► Anyway, the upshot is things are taking longer than they thought on Apple AI, and that announcement and that release of statement to Gruber triggered a crisis of faith in our friend John Gruber, and he had a lot to say about that on his website.

00:54:13 ◼   ► He did.

00:54:14 ◼   ► The whole post, it is a little bit on the longer side for Gruber, but it is worth it.

00:54:19 ◼   ► Every word was really, really good.

00:54:21 ◼   ► I mean, Gruber, man, when he is on, he is so freaking on.

00:54:26 ◼   ► But, anyways, John pulled a couple of quotes from this, one of which I went to pull and then realized that John beat me to it.

00:54:33 ◼   ► This is Syracuse, that is.

00:54:34 ◼   ► But, anyways, reading from John Gruber,

00:54:37 ◼   ► In the two decades I've been in this racket, I've never been angrier at myself for missing a story than I am about Apple's announcement on Friday that the more personalized Siri features of Apple intelligence scheduled to appear between now and WWDC would be delayed until the coming year.

00:54:51 ◼   ► I should have my head examined.

00:54:53 ◼   ► This announcement dropped as a surprise and certainly took me by surprise to some extent, but it was all there from the start.

00:55:00 ◼   ► I should have been pointing out red flags starting back at WWDC last year, and I am embarrassed and sorry that I didn't see it.

00:55:07 ◼   ► What should have been very clear to me from the start.

00:55:09 ◼   ► How I missed this is twofold.

00:55:11 ◼   ► First, I'd been lulled into complacency by Apple's track record of consistently shipping pre-announced products and features.

00:55:16 ◼   ► Second, I was foolishly distracted by the Apple intelligence brand umbrella.

00:55:20 ◼   ► Apple intelligence doesn't exist as a single thing or project.

00:55:23 ◼   ► It's a marketing term for a collection of features, apps, and services.

00:55:27 ◼   ► Then, later on in the same post,

00:55:30 ◼   ► It's easy to imagine someone in the executive ranks arguing we need to show something that only Apple can do at WWDC last year.

00:55:36 ◼   ► But it turns out they announced something that Apple couldn't do.

00:55:39 ◼   ► Sick burn.

00:55:40 ◼   ► And now they look so far, so out of their depth, so in over their heads,

00:55:46 ◼   ► that not only are they years behind the state of the art in AI,

00:55:48 ◼   ► but they don't even know what they can ship or when.

00:55:53 ◼   ► Their headline features from nine months ago not only haven't shipped,

00:55:57 ◼   ► but still haven't even been demonstrated,

00:55:59 ◼   ► which I, for one, now presume means they can't be demonstrated because they don't work.

00:56:04 ◼   ► Yeah, so this big post, which has gotten a lot of attention,

00:56:07 ◼   ► it is framed, like the first passage you read, I believe, is the very start of the post.

00:56:13 ◼   ► It is framed as, and I think substantially is,

00:56:15 ◼   ► mostly a post about John Gruber's personal disillusionment

00:56:20 ◼   ► and kicking himself for missing the signs that were there that he should have expected that they weren't going to deliver what they were said were going to deliver based on everything that he had seen about them.

00:56:33 ◼   ► And as he said, like, how did he miss it?

00:56:35 ◼   ► He was just like, well, they always say they're going to do stuff in the coming year, and they always do.

00:56:39 ◼   ► So why wouldn't they do it this time?

00:56:41 ◼   ► And then, like I said before, Apple Intelligence, well, they just amount so much stuff,

00:56:45 ◼   ► and, like, some stuff shipped with the .0, and then some stuff was coming later,

00:56:48 ◼   ► and eventually you just kind of lose track of, like, which things were supposed to be coming when,

00:56:51 ◼   ► and are they late or are they early, and which things do they demonstrate for real?

00:56:54 ◼   ► He does a lot of things in the post about talking about things that they demo,

00:56:57 ◼   ► things that are in the video, things that they demo,

00:57:00 ◼   ► where an Apple person holds a device and shows someone from the press,

00:57:03 ◼   ► and then things where the press gets to touch it, and then things where the public gets to touch it,

00:57:06 ◼   ► like the different levels of, like, doneness when the software is released.

00:57:09 ◼   ► So I think the post was worth reading to get an idea of kind of the nuts and bolts of how things are judged in this way.

00:57:15 ◼   ► Now, I did read it thinking a lot that this post really was a lot more about Gruber than it was, say,

00:57:21 ◼   ► about the three of us or a lot of other people who are, I think,

00:57:25 ◼   ► constitutionally more skeptical and grumpy about Apple than Gruber is, let's say.

00:57:29 ◼   ► I mean, if you are an ATP listener, you probably heard lots of skepticism about all things AI,

00:57:34 ◼   ► including Apple intelligence, and maybe less so if you have been reading Daring Fireball,

00:57:39 ◼   ► because he seemed to believe that these were coming, they're more likely to be coming.

00:57:43 ◼   ► But there's one angle on this that I haven't heard mentioned that I'm kind of glad no one brought up.

00:57:48 ◼   ► So now, since this was what put out, like, last week sometime, now it's time to talk about an ATP.

00:57:54 ◼   ► And that's this. It's another one of my hobby horses, so you might not be surprised to hear me talk about it.

00:57:59 ◼   ► But lots of times, Apple will announce a feature, and then, like, sometimes it's not in the first beta.

00:58:08 ◼   ► Back before they got into the habit of saying this will be released in the coming year.

00:58:11 ◼   ► Remember when just the features weren't in the first WWDC build?

00:58:14 ◼   ► Like, there were many years of that where it's like, huh, weird.

00:58:16 ◼   ► Like, the feature they demonstrated, it's not actually in this build.

00:58:19 ◼   ► But they tell me in a future build it'll be in it.

00:58:21 ◼   ► So you're at WWDC, you're doing stuff, you're like, I'd really love to use that feature.

00:58:25 ◼   ► But I guess it's not in this build, but it'll, you know, when we all go home, the next build, it'll have the feature.

00:58:29 ◼   ► And then we entered, it was a couple of years where that happened.

00:58:32 ◼   ► Then we entered a couple of years where it was like, this will be coming out in the coming years.

00:58:36 ◼   ► It's not even going to be in the 0.0.

00:58:37 ◼   ► And then, of course, this thing where it's like, it's not going to be, it's just not going to make the year, period.

00:58:43 ◼   ► But I think there's a specific difference between Apple intelligence and all of the past things.

00:58:49 ◼   ► And it doesn't have to do with something being rotten in Cupertino and, like, the whole thing of, like, who inside Apple said that we should announce this and other people said we shouldn't, it's not ready.

00:59:00 ◼   ► And someone insisted on it and stuff like that, because I think, again, I don't know for sure, but I think from the outside that, I don't know, multiple decades at Apple, they have had someone in a position of power saying, we're going to announce this even though it's not ready.

00:59:17 ◼   ► And things have been just super not ready.

00:59:20 ◼   ► Just, you know, some of them didn't exist at all.

00:59:23 ◼   ► Some of them barely existed.

00:59:24 ◼   ► Just, like, that is not a new phenomenon.

00:59:28 ◼   ► It is not as if suddenly Apple of today has done something that it has never done before.

00:59:34 ◼   ► They used to be so good about making sure that they wouldn't announce a product unless they sure it was going to ship in the software realm.

00:59:41 ◼   ► And I don't think that's the case.

00:59:42 ◼   ► I think this is the case, that they would always do that.

00:59:44 ◼   ► They would always aggressively announce things that absolutely were not ready, but they were saved by the fact that most of the time, you could, you know, burn out your employees and work them real hard and get it to the point where you could ship something.

01:00:02 ◼   ► And very often that something, it would ship super broken, but they would fix it afterwards.

01:00:06 ◼   ► That happened a lot where a feature would be announced and we didn't, unbeknownst to us, it was just so massively far behind inside Apple.

01:00:13 ◼   ► And we would kind of get a feel of that because you're like, wow, this is super broken in the beta.

01:00:16 ◼   ► Did you notice this doesn't work at all in the beta?

01:00:18 ◼   ► Like, I mean, whatever, maybe, you know, obviously the beta is we get are behind what Apple does.

01:00:23 ◼   ► So it's probably better inside there, but it turns out, no, it was a disaster inside Apple too.

01:00:26 ◼   ► And even though our beta was older, their current ones inside the company were still broken and they'd be broken right up to 0.0 release day.

01:00:33 ◼   ► And sometimes they'd be broken in 0.0 and then it would get fixed and we would just forget about it and all goes fine.

01:00:37 ◼   ► But that only works.

01:00:38 ◼   ► This is the difference.

01:00:39 ◼   ► That only works.

01:00:40 ◼   ► If you're working on a piece of software that you can fix by having programmers find and fix bugs in it.

01:00:48 ◼   ► Let me just think of like, what is the one that Marco regrets putting on his thing when they had a notification center for like iOS 5 or something?

01:00:53 ◼   ► Yep.

01:00:53 ◼   ► Me too.

01:00:54 ◼   ► How super broken that was?

01:00:55 ◼   ► iOS 5 beta 1.

01:00:57 ◼   ► I'll never live it down.

01:00:59 ◼   ► Nope.

01:00:59 ◼   ► It was a mess.

01:01:00 ◼   ► There have been Mac OS 10 releases where like the release of WWDC was just super broken in lots of different ways.

01:01:05 ◼   ► Back in the Mac OS 10 days, even in Mac OS days, right?

01:01:08 ◼   ► The difference, all those is you can imagine a team just going heads down and being like, all right, it's broken.

01:01:14 ◼   ► But, you know, SMOP, simple matter of programming by putting in too long hours and working ourselves too hard and regretting all of our poor planning and regretting the aggressive deadline set, impossible deadline set to us.

01:01:27 ◼   ► Set for us by our bosses, especially back in the Steve Jobs day when he'd be like, just do it.

01:01:30 ◼   ► It's got to be ready for WWDC, right?

01:01:32 ◼   ► They would make it happen.

01:01:33 ◼   ► Apple Intelligence, here's the difference.

01:01:36 ◼   ► They can't do that with LLM type stuff.

01:01:41 ◼   ► This is what I was saying snarkily when, and I'm surprised more people didn't call me on it because technically you can think that it's not entirely accurate if interpreted in a certain way.

01:01:49 ◼   ► Remember when I said when they got the bad notification summaries?

01:01:52 ◼   ► I was like, well, why don't they just fix it?

01:01:53 ◼   ► Because their announcement was like, oh, we'll disable it or whatever and we'll work on this.

01:01:57 ◼   ► Why don't they just fix it?

01:01:58 ◼   ► It's a bug.

01:01:58 ◼   ► Why don't you fix it?

01:01:59 ◼   ► Because they can't fix it.

01:02:00 ◼   ► And I didn't mean they can't as in it will never be better or it's impossible to fix.

01:02:03 ◼   ► I meant they can't fix that as in you can't have the team come in and work over the weekend and get, you know, notification summaries to stop making mistakes.

01:02:13 ◼   ► In the same way, you can't tell everybody, well, just work harder on it and make the LLM not make mistakes anymore because nobody knows how to do that.

01:02:23 ◼   ► And it's like the LLM is a bucket of numbers and it takes time and energy to train it and your iteration cycle is long and it takes huge amounts of money and they're using other people's foundation models or they're using their foundation models that were made a long time ago.

01:02:34 ◼   ► It's not a simple matter of programming.

01:02:37 ◼   ► You can't just go find the bugs, fix the bugs, you know, trim off the features that you're not going to you can't treat it like regular software.

01:02:45 ◼   ► LLM powered systems is like trying to introduce, you know, a dragon, so use more dragon analogies into your tech stack.

01:02:53 ◼   ► It's like, well, you can't really tell it what to do and it's hard to understand and there's lots of weird stuff going on inside there, but it's super important and powerful.

01:02:59 ◼   ► That's why I think they missed on Apple intelligence.

01:03:04 ◼   ► It's not because they made a judgment call that was worse than previous ones they had made.

01:03:09 ◼   ► It was a bad judgment call, but they've made bad ones before.

01:03:12 ◼   ► It's because they did not have the ability to recover from or rise to the challenge of a typical aggressive timeline because that's not how development with LLMs work.

01:03:24 ◼   ► Like, think if you were on that team and they told you, well, the LLM keeps making mistakes, fix it.

01:03:28 ◼   ► And you're like, but like I'm on the team that makes the UI for Siri and or like, I just, I don't, I can't, the LLM does what, do we have, should we train a new model?

01:03:40 ◼   ► Like, has, does anyone else have an error rate that we would find acceptable?

01:03:43 ◼   ► Like there's an article about this.

01:03:44 ◼   ► It says like, uh, the, the, uh, what do you call it?

01:03:48 ◼   ► The pep talk that they were giving to the Siri team and everything.

01:03:50 ◼   ► And the rumors that the error rate was like, it was getting 80% things correct and 20% wrong.

01:03:54 ◼   ► It's like, well, just, you know, just come in on weekends and fix that 20%.

01:03:57 ◼   ► No one knows how to do that.

01:03:59 ◼   ► It's, you cannot program your way out of this hole.

01:04:02 ◼   ► And that, that I think is at the, the foundation of the whole LLM powered product scenario and how it has just slammed head on into Apple's need to ship something that they think is satisfactory combined with their typical decades long habit of setting incredibly aggressive goals.

01:04:19 ◼   ► And then trying to rise to meet them in this case, they simply could not and cannot for a technical reason.

01:04:24 ◼   ► So what, what do they do about it?

01:04:26 ◼   ► Do they just bail entirely?

01:04:27 ◼   ► Do they just delay, delay, delay?

01:04:28 ◼   ► What do you suggest they do?

01:04:29 ◼   ► I think if you, if any, if there was kind of a strategic error here is not recognizing that this difference exists thinking like just in the same way that we just set aggressive goals in the notification center and people come in on weekends and they fix it.

01:04:39 ◼   ► We'll just do that again, not realizing that nobody has figured out how to make the thing you want to make to the level that you want to make it.

01:04:48 ◼   ► You want Siri to be smarter and do all this stuff, but you also want it to not tell people to put glue on their pizza and not make mistakes and do this and do that.

01:04:55 ◼   ► And it's like, okay, well, has anyone else done that?

01:04:57 ◼   ► And the answer is no.

01:04:58 ◼   ► The people, other people ship products where that is acceptable or like an expectation.

01:05:03 ◼   ► When you talk to chat GPT, you know, it's going to have BS information.

01:05:06 ◼   ► You know, it's going to be wrong or whatever.

01:05:07 ◼   ► But Apple's like, we're going to use it to enhance our voice assistant and it'll be able to do all these amazing things and control your apps.

01:05:15 ◼   ► And nowhere in there, they say, oh, and don't worry, 20% of the time they'll do the wrong thing with your app, but I'm sure it'll be fine.

01:05:20 ◼   ► Like, they're just like, when we do it, it will be better somehow.

01:05:24 ◼   ► But they didn't have a way to do it.

01:05:25 ◼   ► So they should have recognized that.

01:05:27 ◼   ► How do they, you know, what could they have done differently?

01:05:30 ◼   ► They should have said, like this technology, LLM based technology, we have to deploy it in ways where its current capabilities are fit for the need.

01:05:39 ◼   ► And there are ones, like we said, I've always said this, you can enhance Siri a lot with existing LLM capabilities.

01:05:45 ◼   ► The example I always give back in the day when we were talking about this is have the LLM figure out what the heck the user is trying to say and have it translated into the stilted, fixed, limited syntax.

01:05:57 ◼   ► That Siri requires behind the scenes.

01:05:59 ◼   ► So to the very least, you can do simple things like the one I just saw fly by before we started recording is, uh, hey, dingus, what month is it?

01:06:06 ◼   ► And Siri blows this so bad.

01:06:07 ◼   ► Like you can phrase it seven different ways and it just doesn't know.

01:06:11 ◼   ► There's probably a right way to ask it.

01:06:13 ◼   ► Have the LLM sit in front, figure out when people are asking what month it is, translate it into Siri speak and how, you know, like there are ways you can use the technology to enhance your products.

01:06:22 ◼   ► I think they use it, they use the LLM type stuff, uh, what they then called a transformer models for, to improve autocomplete and granted people still have complaints about how it works, but it was way worse before they added the transformer model.

01:06:33 ◼   ► They need, they needed to like everyone else in the industry needed to deploy this new technology.

01:06:40 ◼   ► According to what it can do, not what people say they think it might someday be able to do, like have a clear eyed view of what can this actually do in particular, have a clear eyed view of given its capabilities.

01:06:50 ◼   ► If you, if it makes mistakes or you want to improve it, what does it take to do that?

01:06:54 ◼   ► Do you have to spend a hundred million dollars to retrain a model?

01:06:56 ◼   ► Are you going, are you trying to, are you telling your people, your, your understaffed team to do something that literally no one else in the entire world has ever been able to do, which is make an LLM that doesn't make mistakes.

01:07:06 ◼   ► So I think they were kind of set up for failure here.

01:07:09 ◼   ► And in, you know, in the end it is on leadership, like the team can't help with this or whatever, but that's, that's why I think they missed this.

01:07:15 ◼   ► It makes Gruber feel any better.

01:07:16 ◼   ► I would say it's the same mistake leadership always makes with respect of setting two aggressive deadlines.

01:07:20 ◼   ► The mistake they made was industry wide.

01:07:23 ◼   ► I think everyone in the industry just looks at LLMs and, and just like closes their eye to the limitations and just says, la, la, la, I'm not listening.

01:07:32 ◼   ► LLM it'll do like they, they, they take the, uh, what is it?

01:07:36 ◼   ► Like a Instagram is other people's highlight reel, right.

01:07:38 ◼   ► And you're comparing it to your whole life.

01:07:40 ◼   ► Lots of people are comparing their product ambitions to LLMs highlight reel.

01:07:45 ◼   ► The highlight reel for LMs is real great, but that's not the whole story.

01:07:48 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:07:48 ◼   ► It's, it's tough.

01:07:51 ◼   ► I mean, I, I feel, I feel especially for the rank and file.

01:07:55 ◼   ► Cause obviously I think it's pretty clear they're doing everything they can.

01:07:59 ◼   ► They're trying their hardest and, you know, everyone, including the three of us,

01:08:02 ◼   ► is kind of pooping all over it, but it's bad.

01:08:05 ◼   ► It's not good.

01:08:06 ◼   ► I mean, Siri has been not good for a long time.

01:08:08 ◼   ► And I feel like we've given the benefit of the doubt to Siri to a degree for what?

01:08:13 ◼   ► 10, 12 years.

01:08:14 ◼   ► When was it?

01:08:15 ◼   ► Was it the iPhone four or something like that?

01:08:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:08:18 ◼   ► I mean, it's longer than, longer than Declan's been alive.

01:08:21 ◼   ► I mean, it's, it's been a long time and Siri should have gotten better by now.

01:08:25 ◼   ► And it just hasn't.

01:08:27 ◼   ► Oh, and I want to, I talked about it as an upgrade too, but it's worth re-mentioning

01:08:31 ◼   ► here.

01:08:31 ◼   ► Cause I just think I just saw someone mentioned in the chat, they were complaining about a

01:08:34 ◼   ► Gruber's conclusion.

01:08:34 ◼   ► Let me just scroll and to make sure they're complaining about the thing they think they're

01:08:37 ◼   ► complaining about.

01:08:38 ◼   ► Um, yeah.

01:08:41 ◼   ► So this, I, I, you know, Jason and I talked about this, the, the, the leak of the meeting

01:08:47 ◼   ► with the Siri team.

01:08:48 ◼   ► It was like one of the, one of the managers of the Siri team, not the big wigs or whatever.

01:08:51 ◼   ► One of the people talking to the team and trying to reassure them and say, we've done some great

01:08:55 ◼   ► things.

01:08:55 ◼   ► We work real hard.

01:08:56 ◼   ► It's a shame that has to be delayed.

01:08:57 ◼   ► Yada, yada.

01:08:57 ◼   ► And I grew up, brought up the same thing that I think I bought, brought up a couple of weeks

01:09:01 ◼   ► ago, just because we have the same set of experiences and cliches in our head about

01:09:05 ◼   ► Apple.

01:09:05 ◼   ► I think it was in the context of Siri.

01:09:07 ◼   ► Maybe you too.

01:09:08 ◼   ► Well, I'm asking, why am I asking Casey?

01:09:09 ◼   ► Uh, when I brought up the mobile me thing, wasn't it like two or three shows ago where

01:09:12 ◼   ► I was like, you remember the mobile me meeting where Steve jobs asks, like, what is mobile

01:09:16 ◼   ► be supposed to do?

01:09:17 ◼   ► And then the person answers and he says, why the F doesn't it do this?

01:09:19 ◼   ► Um, Gruber is all for like, he, he was upset that there was this meeting, this all hands

01:09:24 ◼   ► meeting where they were trying to console the team and tell them we've done amazing things.

01:09:27 ◼   ► We just need to work harder, blah, blah, blah.

01:09:29 ◼   ► He feels like that what should have happened in that meeting is you should have had a Steve

01:09:32 ◼   ► jobs, like figure up there saying, you know, the, why the F doesn't Siri do what

01:09:36 ◼   ► it's supposed to do.

01:09:37 ◼   ► Like you, that they, you know, it wasn't appropriate to try to puff up or encourage

01:09:42 ◼   ► the Siri team.

01:09:43 ◼   ► They need to be yelled at.

01:09:44 ◼   ► Uh, and Jason and I both agreed having worked in large companies much more than Gruber has

01:09:49 ◼   ► that.

01:09:49 ◼   ► That's not how you, that's not how you lead a team.

01:09:51 ◼   ► Uh, you don't want to go in there and yell at people.

01:09:53 ◼   ► Steve jobs is a jerk.

01:09:53 ◼   ► That is not the best way to lead people.

01:09:55 ◼   ► It's not to say that you should like tell them that everything's great and say, you

01:09:59 ◼   ► did a great job and everyone is wrong to say things are bad.

01:10:02 ◼   ► You have to be clear eyed and say, we all know we are not, not working up the potential.

01:10:06 ◼   ► We know we have not met our own standards for excellence here, but you don't yell at them.

01:10:12 ◼   ► You don't say why the F doesn't it do that?

01:10:14 ◼   ► You're a bunch of losers.

01:10:15 ◼   ► You should be ashamed of yourself and you should.

01:10:16 ◼   ► They already feel bad.

01:10:17 ◼   ► Believe me, everyone on the Siri teams already feels bad.

01:10:19 ◼   ► Like they know what's out there and they know that what Siri is like.

01:10:23 ◼   ► There is a balance to be struck between being honest and clear eyed with your employees and

01:10:29 ◼   ► just yelling at them.

01:10:29 ◼   ► I think in an upgrade, I compared it to, uh, when a puppy makes a poop in the house and

01:10:34 ◼   ► you shove the dog's nose in it.

01:10:36 ◼   ► That is a bad way to treat a dog.

01:10:38 ◼   ► That is a bad way to train a dog.

01:10:39 ◼   ► And that's a bad way to treat a human.

01:10:41 ◼   ► And that's not leadership.

01:10:42 ◼   ► Uh, so I also disagree with that final paragraph.

01:10:45 ◼   ► It may be from the outside, it may be cathartic for us to imagine the people who are screwing

01:10:49 ◼   ► up the technology that we care about get yelled at or something, but that's not, that's not

01:10:52 ◼   ► the way to treat people.

01:10:53 ◼   ► And that's not, that's not even the best way to lead.

01:10:55 ◼   ► It's not like we should do it because it would be mean to them.

01:10:56 ◼   ► It produces subpar results.

01:10:58 ◼   ► It's better to be a leader and to rally them to do better next time while being honest about

01:11:05 ◼   ► how far they are behind, right?

01:11:06 ◼   ► Don't sugarcoat it, but don't be mean.

01:11:08 ◼   ► I mean, yeah.

01:11:10 ◼   ► And I think that's, there is kind of a cultural challenge there sometimes where like you can

01:11:16 ◼   ► give honest feedback to people.

01:11:19 ◼   ► You can say like, hey, this isn't, this isn't working.

01:11:21 ◼   ► This isn't good enough.

01:11:22 ◼   ► Like you can say that without being a jerk and without yelling at them, without berating

01:11:26 ◼   ► them.

01:11:26 ◼   ► And you can make drastic changes too.

01:11:27 ◼   ► Like don't just say, oh, it's business as usual.

01:11:29 ◼   ► By all means, fire people who are in charge, change the structure of the organization, do

01:11:34 ◼   ► something radically different.

01:11:35 ◼   ► We're not saying just keep doing what you're doing.

01:11:36 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

01:11:37 ◼   ► And, and I think it is very important.

01:11:40 ◼   ► You know, we, we have seen over the last, I don't know, at least five years, we've seen

01:11:48 ◼   ► very much a kind of like support the troops attitude coming out of Apple.

01:11:52 ◼   ► What that results in is Apple excusing itself for things being really hard or the team having

01:12:00 ◼   ► worked really hard on something and then, and using that as, as an excuse that we should

01:12:06 ◼   ► not talk about.

01:12:07 ◼   ► It's not good enough.

01:12:09 ◼   ► And I think that's a BS excuse that is like, and I think you can, you can see that as

01:12:16 ◼   ► being BS while also not wanting to yell at people and berate them and be a jerk to them.

01:12:22 ◼   ► I think those are different things.

01:12:23 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:12:24 ◼   ► Like that was one of the good things that Steve Jobs was good at in that this is the thing

01:12:27 ◼   ► you won't see modern Apple do.

01:12:28 ◼   ► And I think it was a good manifestation of his jerkiness.

01:12:31 ◼   ► And I think it was brought up in the same article here.

01:12:33 ◼   ► It was like, he shouldn't be in there yelling at people and being mean to them.

01:12:37 ◼   ► Right.

01:12:37 ◼   ► But he also, when he, like, for example, when he rolled out iCloud, what he said on stage

01:12:42 ◼   ► is like, iCloud, you're saying this is from the team that brought us mobile me.

01:12:46 ◼   ► Why should I trust them?

01:12:47 ◼   ► Like, why should I trust there's, these are the losers who brought us mobile me and modern

01:12:50 ◼   ► Apple would never denigrate one of its past things.

01:12:53 ◼   ► Even if everybody in the world knows it was sucky.

01:12:57 ◼   ► That, despite that it's still coming from a position of Steve Jobs being mean, being honest

01:13:03 ◼   ► about your own past failings to the public is also an important part of building trust

01:13:09 ◼   ► and leadership.

01:13:10 ◼   ► Because Apple is so allergic to ever implying that anything they have ever done in the past

01:13:15 ◼   ► is less than wonderful.

01:13:16 ◼   ► They'll always say the new thing.

01:13:17 ◼   ► We love the new thing, but they'll never, they'll never even just admit like, it's like

01:13:21 ◼   ► everybody knows Siri sucks.

01:13:22 ◼   ► You not saying that to us and not acknowledging it to us in public, acknowledging that, you

01:13:28 ◼   ► know, that we know that you're behind on this.

01:13:30 ◼   ► You don't have to do it in a mean way, but by not doing it all, it really gives the impression

01:13:34 ◼   ► like you said that it was just like, nope, everything's fine.

01:13:36 ◼   ► Right.

01:13:36 ◼   ► And we don't know what goes on inside the company.

01:13:38 ◼   ► I'm sure the people are yelling at each other in big boardrooms and stuff.

01:13:41 ◼   ► Right.

01:13:41 ◼   ► Cause that's just the way it is in any company, but the inability to be honest with your public

01:13:47 ◼   ► about your past mistakes does not build trust.

01:13:49 ◼   ► Like it's that, that is the, the take, it's taking press, uh, you know, uh, public relations

01:13:54 ◼   ► too far to say, we just need to be disciplined.

01:13:57 ◼   ► We never need to denigrate our best products or whatever.

01:13:58 ◼   ► Sometimes you have to admit, yeah, old Siri sucked.

01:14:01 ◼   ► Uh, and we think the new one is great and here it is.

01:14:04 ◼   ► Well, and I think it's hard for us to trust recently.

01:14:09 ◼   ► First of all, that Apple stuff will work the way they say it will because of things like

01:14:15 ◼   ► this.

01:14:15 ◼   ► Like, look, how many things have they demoed in a keynote in the last five years that looked

01:14:20 ◼   ► really cool and look, it was going to really solve a problem people.

01:14:23 ◼   ► And then you get the real thing and you're like, well, never really, never really panned

01:14:27 ◼   ► out all the way, or it's not as useful as they said, or it doesn't work as well as they

01:14:30 ◼   ► said it would.

01:14:31 ◼   ► Um, you know, this is not the first example.

01:14:34 ◼   ► This is, this is just probably the biggest and most egregious one, but we can look at recent

01:14:38 ◼   ► and, and I don't mean just this past year, like, you know, the last 10 years, look at

01:14:42 ◼   ► Apple over, you know, a recent period.

01:14:44 ◼   ► They do seem to be able to fix things very, very, very slowly.

01:14:51 ◼   ► And it seems like the feedback loop for whatever reason, between Apple putting something out

01:14:57 ◼   ► there that is broken or doesn't land well, or is poorly received and them fixing it is

01:15:05 ◼   ► very long.

01:15:06 ◼   ► It's like retraining an LLM.

01:15:07 ◼   ► Maybe Apple's one giant LLM.

01:15:09 ◼   ► They can never get it exactly right, but they will eventually improve things.

01:15:13 ◼   ► It just takes so long to retrain and hundreds of millions of dollars of us buying iPhones.

01:15:16 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:15:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:15:17 ◼   ► And like, they do have substantial cultural problems.

01:15:24 ◼   ► We can, we can see just the surface level of like, there is a culture in this company of

01:15:30 ◼   ► such arrogance and such hubris that they not only misread the room a lot and with increasing

01:15:38 ◼   ► frequency, and I put that right on Tim Cook, they misread the room constantly.

01:15:43 ◼   ► But then when they do ship something that is not very good or is poorly received or doesn't

01:15:49 ◼   ► work, it seems to take a very long time to fix that.

01:15:53 ◼   ► That is a problem.

01:15:55 ◼   ► And so I think this is kind of, this, you know, the Siri delay is kind of a culmination of like,

01:16:01 ◼   ► you know, an example of that.

01:16:03 ◼   ► In terms of like, what it will look like in the public, you know, how much will it damage

01:16:07 ◼   ► Apple?

01:16:07 ◼   ► I think it's not going to, you know, it's not going to like end the company or anything.

01:16:11 ◼   ► However, I do think they have a false advertising class action lawsuit probably coming their way.

01:16:17 ◼   ► Yeah, that was another thing that we didn't mention is like that the Apple pulled the ads.

01:16:20 ◼   ► They had ads advertising features that they now know are going to ship even later than they thought.

01:16:24 ◼   ► So first of all, they ran the ads before the features were released.

01:16:27 ◼   ► That has also happened in the past, but usually when Apple thinks those things are imminent.

01:16:31 ◼   ► So that was another bad call on their part.

01:16:33 ◼   ► But just like Gruber, I think inside Apple, they were like, yeah, but this always happens.

01:16:37 ◼   ► It's always, it's always a shambles and we always just work real hard and it comes out.

01:16:41 ◼   ► So run the ads.

01:16:43 ◼   ► And again, they think the mistake here was this time you can't just go in there and fix the bugs and it will work.

01:16:49 ◼   ► You're, you don't have a path to your destination.

01:16:53 ◼   ► You don't know how to get there.

01:16:54 ◼   ► You can't just have people work harder on it.

01:16:56 ◼   ► And that came back.

01:16:57 ◼   ► So they literally pulled the ads.

01:16:59 ◼   ► They ran the ads for what?

01:17:00 ◼   ► How long?

01:17:00 ◼   ► How many months?

01:17:01 ◼   ► Months.

01:17:01 ◼   ► We've been seeing these ads about Apple intelligence features that don't exist and haven't been released.

01:17:06 ◼   ► And instead of saying, well, we'll just keep running the ads till it release now, they just stop running the ads.

01:17:10 ◼   ► And yeah, if someone complains, hey, I bought an iPhone because of X, Y, Z, they'll probably just say, oh, there was a fine print at the ad that says features not yet released, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:17:17 ◼   ► Professional driver, close course.

01:17:19 ◼   ► But like literally even that, that is false advertising.

01:17:23 ◼   ► If you advertise, you know, this is what the iPhone 16 can do.

01:17:27 ◼   ► Go buy one.

01:17:28 ◼   ► And then you go buy one and it doesn't do that.

01:17:30 ◼   ► That's false advertising.

01:17:32 ◼   ► Coming soon to the iPhone 16, maybe.

01:17:34 ◼   ► Yeah, it depends on the.

01:17:36 ◼   ► Well, I'm sure someone will file it.

01:17:38 ◼   ► So Apple is never at a loss for class action lawsuits.

01:17:41 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:17:41 ◼   ► And I mean, this.

01:17:42 ◼   ► I mean, look, they get a lot of class actions that are BS.

01:17:45 ◼   ► I don't think this would be BS.

01:17:47 ◼   ► I think this would be warranted.

01:17:49 ◼   ► That we are going to get like $31 checks, like with the keyboards.

01:17:51 ◼   ► That ad should never have aired.

01:17:54 ◼   ► There's multiple.

01:17:55 ◼   ► It wasn't just one ad.

01:17:56 ◼   ► It's more than one.

01:17:56 ◼   ► The entire ad campaign for the iPhone 16 line has been all about Apple intelligence,

01:18:01 ◼   ► mostly about features that aren't really there.

01:18:04 ◼   ► This is a big problem for them.

01:18:06 ◼   ► Why is it that they chose to run these ads that are pretty false advertising?

01:18:12 ◼   ► I think they thought they would be done.

01:18:14 ◼   ► It would be a little late, but they'd work hard and they'd come out.

01:18:16 ◼   ► But then why?

01:18:18 ◼   ► How did that?

01:18:19 ◼   ► It is inexcusable.

01:18:20 ◼   ► As I'm saying, like this is the one time that like they're didn't realize they were dealing

01:18:24 ◼   ► with a different beast, that it is not just a bunch of Objective-C and Swift code that controls

01:18:28 ◼   ► UI and so on and so forth.

01:18:29 ◼   ► That's not what it is.

01:18:30 ◼   ► It's a fundamental technological problem that literally no one in the world has solved, which

01:18:33 ◼   ► is how can we make this LLM stop being stupid?

01:18:35 ◼   ► Yeah, but.

01:18:36 ◼   ► And that no amount of extra weekends would fix it.

01:18:39 ◼   ► And that's the problem.

01:18:41 ◼   ► Like certainly like somewhere there was a series of massive failures inside the company for that

01:18:48 ◼   ► to not be communicated or heard by the top people.

01:18:52 ◼   ► Or realize that's what I think a lot of people really, I mean, maybe not the at the rank and

01:18:57 ◼   ► file, but as you go up the levels, I think a lot of people, a lot of people in this whole

01:19:00 ◼   ► industry really believe in their guts that, yeah, LLMs make some mistakes, but hand wave,

01:19:05 ◼   ► hand wave.

01:19:05 ◼   ► It's probably mostly fine, right?

01:19:07 ◼   ► Like I see it all the time where people will talk about them as if these are not problems

01:19:11 ◼   ► or as if the problems are so trivial that surely they'll be solved by tomorrow and tomorrow

01:19:15 ◼   ► keeps coming and coming and coming and they're not solving, people keep talking about them

01:19:18 ◼   ► like these problems don't exist.

01:19:19 ◼   ► And I bet a lot of levels inside the company have gotten that, picked up that, that sort

01:19:25 ◼   ► of overall like consensus within the industry that LLMs are always on the verge of not having

01:19:32 ◼   ► these silly problems.

01:19:32 ◼   ► Of course, we'll solve this problem real soon.

01:19:34 ◼   ► Glue on pizza.

01:19:35 ◼   ► Ha ha.

01:19:35 ◼   ► That was last year, but we don't have that problem anymore.

01:19:37 ◼   ► You still do.

01:19:38 ◼   ► Yeah, but there seems to be a bigger problem than that.

01:19:41 ◼   ► Like, I think you're right.

01:19:43 ◼   ► That is a problem with LLMs that like we, I think the entire industry is still battling

01:19:48 ◼   ► with.

01:19:48 ◼   ► However, what was the problem inside of Apple that led them to advertise, to demo a feature

01:19:57 ◼   ► that seems like it was probably a totally fake demo, to advertise a whole new iPhone line

01:20:03 ◼   ► based on this feature, to run TV commercials based on a feature that seems like it probably

01:20:08 ◼   ► doesn't exist or at least is nowhere near shippable and might never be shippable.

01:20:14 ◼   ► Like, it seems like this is the result of so many cultural problems of the company in

01:20:21 ◼   ► this era.

01:20:21 ◼   ► And look, I don't know if it's a Tim Cook thing specifically, but it's the Tim Cook era

01:20:25 ◼   ► of Apple.

01:20:25 ◼   ► This is an era of huge growth of the company, lots of levels of management and bigger, you

01:20:30 ◼   ► know, expansion and big departments and everything.

01:20:32 ◼   ► There is a problem there.

01:20:34 ◼   ► There is a significant cultural problem there that the people at the top seem to not have

01:20:40 ◼   ► a good feedback mechanism for when things are ready, for what will be ready, for how things

01:20:46 ◼   ► are advertised, how things are shown, and setting expectations to the public and even maybe to

01:20:51 ◼   ► themselves.

01:20:51 ◼   ► It seems like the deepest problem here is that the people at the top of Apple today don't

01:20:57 ◼   ► seem, and this goes right back to Siri, they don't seem to have a good idea of what sucks

01:21:04 ◼   ► about what they ship or about what they are doing.

01:21:07 ◼   ► Which is very common in all big companies and used to be less common in Apple.

01:21:12 ◼   ► They were an anomaly in that regard.

01:21:13 ◼   ► The quote I was trying to remember on Upgrade, which I just looked up now, is the Upton Sinclair

01:21:17 ◼   ► quote.

01:21:17 ◼   ► It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not

01:21:21 ◼   ► understanding.

01:21:21 ◼   ► Slightly gendered there, but anyway.

01:21:24 ◼   ► The idea that if you're in charge of the software group or whatever, it behooves you to

01:21:31 ◼   ► sort of manage upward and make sure that the people above you think that everything is

01:21:35 ◼   ► going okay in the group that you manage.

01:21:37 ◼   ► Because if things aren't going okay, well, then you're not doing a good job.

01:21:40 ◼   ► And just repeat that for every single level in an org chart.

01:21:43 ◼   ► And it takes a lot of effort to combat that, to be honest, to be willing to say ASAP, you

01:21:52 ◼   ► know, this is not working.

01:21:53 ◼   ► And, you know, we've had, you know, since 2011, the entire pre-LLM series and evidence

01:21:58 ◼   ► of like, this is not working, but that information was not getting up to the highest level to

01:22:01 ◼   ► reprioritize it.

01:22:03 ◼   ► And we talked about that last week, but with LLMs in particular, like the other factor

01:22:06 ◼   ► that I bet people have already sent us feedback about if they're listening to this now, you

01:22:09 ◼   ► should always wait till you hear the end of the episode, is that LLMs and the AI revolution

01:22:14 ◼   ► put an extra amount of pressure on Apple.

01:22:17 ◼   ► Like, like we said last week with like the, you know, is this the time to do an OS redesign

01:22:21 ◼   ► when there's this AI disaster, but like Apple felt the heat.

01:22:24 ◼   ► Oh, AI stuff is happening and it's kind of happening without us.

01:22:29 ◼   ► And whatever, three years ago that Craig Fittery, to his credit, noted that it was happening and

01:22:35 ◼   ► got Apple to scramble, you know, the best time to figure that out, Craig was, you know, three

01:22:39 ◼   ► years earlier than you did.

01:22:40 ◼   ► But the second best time was then.

01:22:42 ◼   ► I've kind of mangled that one.

01:22:43 ◼   ► But anyway, he figured it out late, but he did say, oh, we got to get on top of this.

01:22:47 ◼   ► And he pivoted, everybody, the whole company pivoted to AI everything.

01:22:51 ◼   ► And they did it late, but that added extra pressure.

01:22:54 ◼   ► And that is another contributing factor.

01:22:55 ◼   ► It's like, why run these ads?

01:22:56 ◼   ► Why do this thing?

01:22:57 ◼   ► Why did you feel like you had to do this?

01:22:58 ◼   ► Like I said, I don't think it's that far out of bounds.

01:23:01 ◼   ► They do that all the time.

01:23:02 ◼   ► But also, why did you feel the extra pressure to do it?

01:23:04 ◼   ► So maybe the feedback did come up that was like, you know, this actually is different.

01:23:07 ◼   ► It's not the same as just whipping together some widgets and some buttons and making it

01:23:11 ◼   ► work.

01:23:11 ◼   ► This is actually different by nature.

01:23:13 ◼   ► And the countervailing force was, yeah, but, but AI, like it's, we're going to look like

01:23:19 ◼   ► we're, we're behind the times if we don't make a big splash in WWC 2024 with Apple intelligence.

01:23:25 ◼   ► And so all those factors combined to make it so that they were highly motivated to announce

01:23:31 ◼   ► things that weren't ready, which again, they've done many times in the past, but also against

01:23:36 ◼   ► the advice of people who I'm sure said from below, this is different this time, not only

01:23:40 ◼   ► is it not ready, it's not going to be ready next week or next month, or actually we have

01:23:43 ◼   ► no idea how to do this.

01:23:44 ◼   ► And they said, ship it anyway.

01:23:46 ◼   ► And yeah, that's, that's part of the problem of leadership.

01:23:49 ◼   ► And it is one of the weaknesses of Tim Cook as somebody who necessarily, and I think wisely

01:23:55 ◼   ► given his skillset, delegates a lot of this stuff to his subordinates.

01:23:58 ◼   ► In the Steve Jobs thing, he always considered himself the arbiter of like, look, I'll tell you

01:24:02 ◼   ► when it's good or it's bad, right?

01:24:04 ◼   ► I'll, you know, he'll look at it.

01:24:06 ◼   ► Let me, let me see the stuff that we were supposed to be announcing a few months before.

01:24:09 ◼   ► Nope, that's no good.

01:24:10 ◼   ► Go back to the drawing board.

01:24:11 ◼   ► Like he had no problem being decisive when, when he fixed his gaze upon something to decide,

01:24:18 ◼   ► is this up to Apple quality or not?

01:24:19 ◼   ► Tim Cook should not do that because he can't do that because that's not where his skills lie.

01:24:24 ◼   ► So he has wisely delegated that to his subordinates, but unfortunately his subordinates are motivated

01:24:27 ◼   ► to make it look like they're not screwing up.

01:24:29 ◼   ► So, which is a big problem.

01:24:32 ◼   ► I mean, it's true of every company.

01:24:34 ◼   ► Like they understand this.

01:24:35 ◼   ► I'm saying it's like, oh, they don't know how to, like everybody in every company knows

01:24:38 ◼   ► this.

01:24:38 ◼   ► It's just, it's just so hard to fight against it.

01:24:41 ◼   ► And Apple does probably one of the best jobs of any large company in fighting against this.

01:24:45 ◼   ► But sometimes it's just not enough.

01:24:47 ◼   ► Like you're, you're, you're battling the tide here.

01:24:49 ◼   ► Like, you know, you don't want to make it seem like you're not doing a good job at your

01:24:53 ◼   ► job, but part of your job is also being honest.

01:24:55 ◼   ► But like, and because Tim Cook is never going to and shouldn't like override his subordinates

01:25:00 ◼   ► and say, uh, uh, you think that you've told me this is good enough, but I disagree.

01:25:04 ◼   ► Like I, maybe he does that occasionally when it's really clear, but I think you'd be mad

01:25:07 ◼   ► at that subordinate.

01:25:08 ◼   ► Like it's not where his skills lie.

01:25:10 ◼   ► So at least he knows enough to not be, to not be like the pretendee Steve jobs and be

01:25:15 ◼   ► making product decisions at every level of the org chart has reached Steve jobs, just reach

01:25:19 ◼   ► down to the lowest level of the org chart and tell someone to change a button or whatever.

01:25:22 ◼   ► Cause that's what he could do all the way up to the highest level of this is no good.

01:25:25 ◼   ► Like, uh, I think when Gruber was talking about this on one of his shows, like that, uh, that

01:25:29 ◼   ► mobile me was terrible and Steve jobs maybe just didn't even pay attention to it because

01:25:32 ◼   ► he thought like, this will be fine.

01:25:33 ◼   ► But as soon as it was released and it was bad, suddenly he paid attention to it.

01:25:37 ◼   ► It got better real fast because he would say, this is not good enough and we're going to

01:25:41 ◼   ► do better.

01:25:42 ◼   ► And the next thing we release is not going to be released until I say it's good enough.

01:25:44 ◼   ► Um, unfortunately he was dying at that point, but you know, even then, uh, anyway, I it's,

01:25:51 ◼   ► it's a difficult situation.

01:25:52 ◼   ► Like this, all these things, everything that has happened in the past, let's say three or

01:25:56 ◼   ► four years has really slowly swayed me to the opinion that, uh, certain features, certain

01:26:05 ◼   ► features of the leadership of Apple have probably like been there too long and we need some fresh

01:26:09 ◼   ► blood in here because a lot of the decisions that just seem unchangeable that seem to not

01:26:13 ◼   ► be moving over time.

01:26:14 ◼   ► You just got to get some new opinions in there at the highest level.

01:26:17 ◼   ► Cause I feel like the, the same old team, they have the same old strengths they always

01:26:20 ◼   ► did, but they also have the same old weaknesses.

01:26:22 ◼   ► And I would like to, I'd like to see some turnover there.

01:26:25 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:26:26 ◼   ► I think, I think we have gotten all the value we're going to get out of a lot of the upper

01:26:33 ◼   ► leadership and it's time for a generational turnover.

01:26:35 ◼   ► Like, yeah.

01:26:36 ◼   ► And they're all, they're all so wealthy.

01:26:37 ◼   ► Go on vacation, like retire.

01:26:39 ◼   ► Like you can, you have, you can live.

01:26:40 ◼   ► I know it's hard.

01:26:41 ◼   ► Like when you are an important person at an important company doing work that you love,

01:26:44 ◼   ► like, I'm not saying like, you should just retire and just do nothing at a beach all the

01:26:47 ◼   ► time.

01:26:47 ◼   ► Cause they love their jobs.

01:26:48 ◼   ► Like I get that.

01:26:48 ◼   ► Um, but yeah, sometimes, sometimes you just need some fresh ideas.

01:26:55 ◼   ► Like there's a reason why when a company is in trouble, they bring in new people.

01:27:00 ◼   ► They don't just ask the existing people to do different things.

01:27:03 ◼   ► And if you really want to see something really different, like a different attitude towards

01:27:06 ◼   ► developers, a different attitude toward third-party integration, a different attitude towards

01:27:09 ◼   ► regulations in the EU.

01:27:10 ◼   ► I'm sorry if you're expecting us to talk about this stuff, but we'll probably get to it next

01:27:13 ◼   ► week or something.

01:27:14 ◼   ► Um, or a different, you know, being on top of industry trends, trends, instead of following

01:27:19 ◼   ► them or knowing what to do with AI, sometimes you need a fresh set of eyes.

01:27:23 ◼   ► It doesn't mean everybody needs to leave or people need to be fired or whatever, but it

01:27:26 ◼   ► does mean you need people, new people need to have a seat at the table.

01:27:30 ◼   ► I want to slightly disagree with something you had said earlier.

01:27:34 ◼   ► I think that the Siri team knows full well that Siri's a pile of garbage.

01:27:39 ◼   ► I really do.

01:27:39 ◼   ► There's a lot of stuff that, I thought you said that they were not.

01:27:44 ◼   ► I'm not so convinced, but.

01:27:46 ◼   ► No, I said, I said the Siri teams knows, knows it sucks.

01:27:48 ◼   ► But anyway, continue.

01:27:49 ◼   ► I agree with you.

01:27:49 ◼   ► Do you think the leadership knows it sucks?

01:27:51 ◼   ► Honest question.

01:27:52 ◼   ► Cause like, it's like, I mean, look, I'm sure a huge part of this is just marketing.

01:27:57 ◼   ► You know, Apple's never going to say their products aren't very good.

01:27:59 ◼   ► So when Apple talks about, and when Apple executives talk about how amazing Siri is, like, they seem

01:28:05 ◼   ► like they might believe it, but do you think, like, do they know how bad it is?

01:28:09 ◼   ► I think they've, I think it's like, they, obviously they know it's worse than they say

01:28:13 ◼   ► in public because that's their job.

01:28:15 ◼   ► Do they?

01:28:15 ◼   ► I'm not sure they know that.

01:28:17 ◼   ► Right.

01:28:17 ◼   ► I, I'm pretty sure that's the case.

01:28:19 ◼   ► Like, cause who has private conversations with them about only people inside Apple.

01:28:23 ◼   ► So they know it's worse than they say in public.

01:28:24 ◼   ► But I also think that the pressure of putting a brave face on things has slowly convinced

01:28:30 ◼   ► them that it's actually not as bad as it really is.

01:28:32 ◼   ► So it's like in between, like it's, it's, that's what I think.

01:28:34 ◼   ► I think like if you ask Craig Federighi about the quality of Siri, he said he would say it's

01:28:39 ◼   ► not as good as it should be.

01:28:40 ◼   ► But he doesn't have full grasp of exactly how bad it is.

01:28:43 ◼   ► I disagree.

01:28:44 ◼   ► And see, I disagree with you there.

01:28:46 ◼   ► And part of the reason I disagree with you is that Siri freaking sucks.

01:28:50 ◼   ► Like there's, you, I can imagine a scenario like Apple maps, which to me is the quintessential,

01:28:58 ◼   ► the only place in the world that matters is Silicon Valley and Apple maps works great in

01:29:02 ◼   ► Silicon Valley.

01:29:03 ◼   ► So it must work great everywhere.

01:29:04 ◼   ► And they knew it sucked.

01:29:05 ◼   ► Uh, I'm not so sure they knew it sucked.

01:29:07 ◼   ► Steve Jobs made a forestall sign an apology for a little bit, but I feel like,

01:29:16 ◼   ► uh, even in casual conversation with people that I know inside Apple, and this is not like

01:29:20 ◼   ► me digging for information or anything like that, but early on in maps, maybe not the first

01:29:24 ◼   ► year when I think everyone knew it sucked, but like after the first year or two, it started

01:29:28 ◼   ► to be real good in Silicon Valley, but it was still trash everywhere else.

01:29:32 ◼   ► And Apple, I feel Silicon Valley broadly and Apple particularly are real bad about like,

01:29:38 ◼   ► Oh, well it works in my backyard.

01:29:39 ◼   ► So it must be the same way everywhere.

01:29:41 ◼   ► Right.

01:29:41 ◼   ► And it's not.

01:29:43 ◼   ► And so it, so maps got good in Silicon Valley and then they just assumed it was great everywhere.

01:29:48 ◼   ► And it's not, or it wasn't.

01:29:50 ◼   ► That was, that was part of the story then.

01:29:52 ◼   ► Like the, the, the story was, Hey, maps used to not be good, but we're, we've improved it

01:29:56 ◼   ► and now it's getting better.

01:29:57 ◼   ► And what they wanted this, what Apple PR wanted the story to be was Apple maps is now good

01:30:01 ◼   ► enough or Apple maps is now as good as Google maps.

01:30:04 ◼   ► Like they were pushing that story for years and years afterwards, well before it was true

01:30:07 ◼   ► because that's what they wanted the story to be to write.

01:30:10 ◼   ► Finally, Apple max, you know, do you remember the spate of stories?

01:30:13 ◼   ► It was like, Hey, you may have dismissed Apple maps because it always sucked, but have you

01:30:17 ◼   ► looked at it lately?

01:30:17 ◼   ► Actually I looked at Apple maps and it's actually almost as good as Google maps.

01:30:21 ◼   ► And in fact, it's better in these ways.

01:30:22 ◼   ► Do you remember those stories?

01:30:23 ◼   ► Oh, absolutely.

01:30:24 ◼   ► That is, that is a product of good PR, right?

01:30:26 ◼   ► And, but they were trying to push those stories and they were pushing them well before it

01:30:30 ◼   ► was true.

01:30:30 ◼   ► And that's what you're getting at Casey.

01:30:31 ◼   ► You'd be like, why do I hear from all these Apple people that actually Apple maps is as good

01:30:35 ◼   ► as Google maps now?

01:30:36 ◼   ► It's not, don't they know it's not.

01:30:38 ◼   ► And some of them didn't because the story gets pushed so hard both internally and externally

01:30:42 ◼   ► that we were going to reach this goal.

01:30:44 ◼   ► We're going, we know we're bad now.

01:30:45 ◼   ► We're going to make it better.

01:30:46 ◼   ► And that is one of the sort of those useful fictions that motivates people.

01:30:49 ◼   ► I think that's part of what helped Apple improve maps by having the people working on

01:30:54 ◼   ► it think they were always sort of asymptotically approaching

01:30:56 ◼   ► being as good as Google maps.

01:30:58 ◼   ► And it took them like, you know, a decade or whatever.

01:31:01 ◼   ► And I would say they're getting close now.

01:31:03 ◼   ► But yeah, like exactly how clear eyed is everybody in the stack about how good things are.

01:31:10 ◼   ► In some ways, it doesn't really, it's not, doesn't matter how good or bad the rank and

01:31:14 ◼   ► file think it is.

01:31:14 ◼   ► If they think it's better than it is or worse than it is or whatever, it's the decision

01:31:18 ◼   ► makers that matter.

01:31:19 ◼   ► And the decision makers, I think, like I stand by what I said before.

01:31:21 ◼   ► Like I think decision makers are always going to put a braver face on it in public.

01:31:25 ◼   ► What they, what they think internally is closer to the truth, but there, there still is like

01:31:32 ◼   ► the sort of the, the repetition and optimism that is required by their position can't help

01:31:36 ◼   ► but influence in their heart of hearts to skew their perception of it to be slightly less

01:31:41 ◼   ► accurate.

01:31:42 ◼   ► Like that it's not, they don't realize the full extent of how bad it is, but they're closer

01:31:46 ◼   ► to it than they would ever seem in their public statements.

01:31:49 ◼   ► And I, I, I've, I broadly agree with you, but I, I never quite finished my thesis here,

01:31:53 ◼   ► which is with Apple maps, you could be in a bubble where it works great.

01:31:57 ◼   ► And Silicon Valley loves to think they're the only bubble that matters and that every, you

01:32:01 ◼   ► know, if it works here, it works everywhere.

01:32:02 ◼   ► And that's just not true.

01:32:03 ◼   ► But when you're in Silicon Valley and you're using Apple maps and everything's working great,

01:32:07 ◼   ► you can convince yourself easily that Apple maps is great.

01:32:10 ◼   ► The difference between that and Siri is that Siri freaking sucks and it sucks everywhere.

01:32:14 ◼   ► Maybe it works great in Silicon Valley.

01:32:16 ◼   ► No way.

01:32:17 ◼   ► I know you're being silly, but no, I, I, I can't even acknowledge it.

01:32:23 ◼   ► It knows what month it is there.

01:32:24 ◼   ► Well, and actually, you know, to use a term of art recently, Siri sucks multimodally.

01:32:28 ◼   ► Like there, it actually sucks in many different ways.

01:32:31 ◼   ► Like it, it sucks in.

01:32:32 ◼   ► Does it suck in agentic ways?

01:32:33 ◼   ► It's agentic sucking.

01:32:35 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:32:36 ◼   ► It really, it figures out new ways to suck all the time.

01:32:39 ◼   ► I mean, what, what month is it is a new one for me.

01:32:42 ◼   ► I hadn't heard that one before.

01:32:42 ◼   ► It's real bad.

01:32:44 ◼   ► You know, it, it sucks in, you know, first of all, just outright.

01:32:47 ◼   ► Right.

01:32:47 ◼   ► Performance.

01:32:48 ◼   ► Like it, it sucks in speed.

01:32:50 ◼   ► It sucks in reliability.

01:32:52 ◼   ► It sucks in consistency.

01:32:53 ◼   ► It sucks in intelligence.

01:32:55 ◼   ► Let me, let me jump in real quick.

01:32:56 ◼   ► Apologies for interrupting, but something I've been meaning to whine about on the show for

01:32:59 ◼   ► at least a couple months.

01:33:01 ◼   ► Now I use Siri a lot in the car because I use CarPlay.

01:33:05 ◼   ► I'm not even in the car that much, but I feel like almost always when I'm in the car, I'm

01:33:10 ◼   ► interacting with Siri.

01:33:10 ◼   ► I don't know exactly when this started.

01:33:14 ◼   ► I want to say it was definitely during iOS 18, but it might've been a point release.

01:33:17 ◼   ► But when I'm using CarPlay, I will be looking at a list of messages or the, you know, people

01:33:22 ◼   ► who have sent me messages and I'll tap on one of those names.

01:33:24 ◼   ► Let's say Aaron.

01:33:25 ◼   ► And so I'll tap on Aaron's name and then the animation comes up.

01:33:30 ◼   ► Aaron said, it's, what is taking so long?

01:33:35 ◼   ► It takes an eternity.

01:33:37 ◼   ► And this is what I'm talking about.

01:33:38 ◼   ► If you ever interact with Siri, if you ever interact with Siri, you know, it's a pile

01:33:44 ◼   ► of sheep.

01:33:44 ◼   ► It's, I'm sorry.

01:33:45 ◼   ► It's just, it's awful.

01:33:47 ◼   ► You can't even read a text message on the device without a five to 10 second delay.

01:33:53 ◼   ► It's awful.

01:33:54 ◼   ► And that's the difference between Apple Maps and Siri is Apple Maps on occasion as well.

01:33:58 ◼   ► I, I, I'm making it sound like I don't like Apple Maps.

01:34:01 ◼   ► I actually think it's really excellent and I almost never use a Google Maps or Waze or anything

01:34:06 ◼   ► like that, but in the early days, there was a place where Apple Maps was great in certain

01:34:12 ◼   ► pockets and it was trash everywhere else.

01:34:14 ◼   ► Siri is trash everywhere.

01:34:16 ◼   ► How could you possibly convince yourself that that's not true?

01:34:20 ◼   ► I'd also like to say that Siri is now listening to me and it said, serious trash everywhere.

01:34:24 ◼   ► How could you possibly blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:34:26 ◼   ► So anyway, my phone was in front of me and decided to start listening.

01:34:30 ◼   ► It's, it's, it's garbage.

01:34:32 ◼   ► And when I start sent dictating text messages to people, you know, thankfully it says, you

01:34:37 ◼   ► know, sent with Siri or whatever on the receiving end, but then I'll go back after I'm not driving

01:34:41 ◼   ► and look at these messages and they're fricking unintelligible.

01:34:44 ◼   ► And some of that is on me because I don't have the best diction and I don't pronounce everything

01:34:48 ◼   ► exactly perfectly.

01:34:49 ◼   ► But a lot of that is Siri just coming out of left field with things that just aren't even

01:34:55 ◼   ► close to what I said.

01:34:56 ◼   ► And I just, I, I cannot fathom anyone who ever interacts with Siri thinking it's anything

01:35:03 ◼   ► other than a pile of trash.

01:35:03 ◼   ► It isn't a pile of trash in simple ways.

01:35:06 ◼   ► It's a pile of trash in ever, ever growing new and developing ways.

01:35:09 ◼   ► Mm-hmm.

01:35:10 ◼   ► Mm-hmm.

01:35:10 ◼   ► And, and it really, like, I don't know how much Apple realizes, maybe they do now, but

01:35:15 ◼   ► how much they realize, like, first of all, how much it holds back their products.

01:35:19 ◼   ► And then second of all, the reputation they have squandered by using the term Apple intelligence

01:35:25 ◼   ► when and how they did, you know, so first of all, Siri holding back their products.

01:35:31 ◼   ► This is like the entire HomePod.

01:35:34 ◼   ► Okay.

01:35:35 ◼   ► That was a hobby, whatever.

01:35:36 ◼   ► Maybe they didn't sell that many of them.

01:35:38 ◼   ► Oh, well.

01:35:38 ◼   ► How about the Vision Pro?

01:35:40 ◼   ► They didn't sell many of those either, but the Vision Pro could be a lot easier to navigate

01:35:45 ◼   ► if Siri was better.

01:35:46 ◼   ► Did you try changing the volume using, using Siri, by the way, when you were watching the

01:35:50 ◼   ► Metallica thing?

01:35:50 ◼   ► Honestly, I never even considered that.

01:35:52 ◼   ► They didn't get to turn the volume up 10%.

01:35:54 ◼   ► Does that work?

01:35:55 ◼   ► It would have been faster than what I was trying to do with my hand.

01:35:57 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:35:57 ◼   ► I was just wondering, like, it didn't even occur to you to try it.

01:35:59 ◼   ► Right.

01:35:59 ◼   ► Well, because I have learned over and over and over again, don't trust Siri.

01:36:05 ◼   ► Like, because, and here's the thing, I use Siri every single day for something.

01:36:09 ◼   ► Like, I use it all the time.

01:36:10 ◼   ► It's not like I'm, I tried it once and never again.

01:36:13 ◼   ► I use it all the time.

01:36:15 ◼   ► That's part of why it fails for me all the time.

01:36:17 ◼   ► Because it fails a large percentage of the time.

01:36:20 ◼   ► And I use it all the time.

01:36:21 ◼   ► I mostly use it for, like, reminders.

01:36:22 ◼   ► But it fails so much.

01:36:25 ◼   ► And it fails in ever-changing ways.

01:36:27 ◼   ► And this just, this holds back the products.

01:36:30 ◼   ► And Apple has a very locked-down ecosystem everywhere so that no one else can make voice

01:36:35 ◼   ► assistants that plug into their platforms.

01:36:37 ◼   ► But if somebody could, I think it would be better for everyone.

01:36:42 ◼   ► I think if there was an API for a voice assistant like ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever else to just plug in and take over as your assistant, it would do a better job.

01:36:53 ◼   ► And it would be more consistent.

01:36:54 ◼   ► And it would be faster.

01:36:55 ◼   ► It would develop faster.

01:36:56 ◼   ► This is not Apple's strength.

01:36:59 ◼   ► And they have shown over and over again that they don't have either the will or the talent to make it their strength.

01:37:08 ◼   ► So that's a pretty big problem.

01:37:09 ◼   ► Now, the Apple intelligence marketing and name, this was their chance to start over, to say, you know what, we're in a new era now, an LLM-powered era.

01:37:21 ◼   ► We have all these great assistants coming out now and great LLM capabilities coming out all across the industry, as we can see from the other ones.

01:37:29 ◼   ► And Apple used the term Apple intelligence.

01:37:33 ◼   ► Now, I said last summer when they unveiled that, it's a bit of a marketing risk because they have this great term.

01:37:41 ◼   ► They're putting their name right on it.

01:37:42 ◼   ► And the last thing they want, like I was saying, it better be good because the last thing they should want is for the term Apple intelligence to come to mean something bad, to have a negative connotation.

01:37:57 ◼   ► Because that just looks so bad for them to use the name Apple intelligence and then for it to suck.

01:38:03 ◼   ► Well, guess where we are right now.

01:38:05 ◼   ► I think right now that the Apple intelligence is associated with a image playground and Genmoji features that people use once and thought it was dumb.

01:38:13 ◼   ► And the text summarization features with most people don't use, but work OK.

01:38:16 ◼   ► Like, oh, I disagree very strongly.

01:38:19 ◼   ► I don't think this.

01:38:20 ◼   ► Here's the thing.

01:38:20 ◼   ► By not releasing the better Siri, I think they have staved off the whole Apple intelligence is dumb.

01:38:26 ◼   ► Right now, people are just saying Siri is dumb, but they've been saying that for ages.

01:38:29 ◼   ► I don't like I don't think Apple intelligence has made that much of an impact, despite Apple trying to claim that it drives sales in the places where it's available and blah, blah, blah.

01:38:40 ◼   ► Just because the features that have actually shipped to customers' hands are so slight and don't really make a difference in people's lives.

01:38:47 ◼   ► Like, like my kids, I have Apple intelligence.

01:38:51 ◼   ► My kids have Apple intelligence.

01:38:52 ◼   ► My wife does.

01:38:52 ◼   ► I've never seen any of them use any of the features.

01:38:56 ◼   ► So as far as they're aware, it doesn't exist.

01:38:59 ◼   ► But I really think that what most people associate with Apple intelligence now is just the iPhone 16 with the new Siri animation and the summarized notifications that suck.

01:39:11 ◼   ► That is what most people see.

01:39:13 ◼   ► Some people like the summarized.

01:39:14 ◼   ► Gruber likes the summarized.

01:39:15 ◼   ► I do.

01:39:15 ◼   ► I like them.

01:39:16 ◼   ► Gruber likes the summarized notifications.

01:39:17 ◼   ► I like them sometimes, but not like a lot.

01:39:20 ◼   ► They do screw up a lot.

01:39:21 ◼   ► I agree that it has not buffed the brand.

01:39:24 ◼   ► It has not been like, oh, Apple intelligence is a thing that everybody loves.

01:39:27 ◼   ► I think it is slightly negative, slightly on the negative side of neutral, but it is not as disastrous as it would have been if they had rolled out an LM Siri that was touted as the new smart Siri but was even dumber.

01:39:40 ◼   ► And the thing is, Siri is in such a hole, it's going to be difficult to roll out something that is actually worse.

01:39:45 ◼   ► But really, like I think because – look, if people – they see the ads that have been spreading the term Apple intelligence for months.

01:39:52 ◼   ► They go – they have a new iPhone.

01:39:55 ◼   ► They get an iPhone 16.

01:39:57 ◼   ► They see the new Siri animation, which is not new Siri, but they see a new Siri animation, and this phone has Apple intelligence allegedly, and they see summarized notifications.

01:40:06 ◼   ► So to them, that looks like, okay, this is it.

01:40:08 ◼   ► This is Apple intelligence.

01:40:09 ◼   ► It's just not impressive to them.

01:40:11 ◼   ► They're like, eh, it seems about the same.

01:40:13 ◼   ► And they're right.

01:40:13 ◼   ► It is about the same.

01:40:14 ◼   ► That's – and Apple blew it.

01:40:16 ◼   ► They blew that marketing term.

01:40:17 ◼   ► They're blowing their credibility even more.

01:40:20 ◼   ► Like, it's – this is such a flub.

01:40:22 ◼   ► Like, how did this happen?

01:40:24 ◼   ► Like I said, they had the pressure to announce something, say they weren't falling behind in AI, yada, yada.

01:40:29 ◼   ► Like, it's just – it's a confluence of events.

01:40:31 ◼   ► But, yeah, if something good has come of this, it has perhaps made Gruber more skeptical going forward about Apple's claims and not just assume they will continue to execute because they always have.

01:40:43 ◼   ► Past performance is not an indicator of future results, blah, blah, blah.

01:40:47 ◼   ► All right, let's do at least a little bit of Ask ATP, and Aaron Bushnell writes, when you place your phone on a surface, is it face-up or face-down?

01:40:55 ◼   ► I typically place mine face-down because the edges of the case lifts the screen away from the surface, and I'm worried going face-up doesn't lift the camera lens as far enough off to prevent scratches.

01:41:04 ◼   ► What do you all do?

01:41:06 ◼   ► Typically, I go face-down.

01:41:08 ◼   ► This year for this phone – I'm sure we talked about this when it was new – I still haven't found a case that I love for it, and I mostly stopped looking.

01:41:15 ◼   ► And so I have gone caseless, casey-less for this phone and haven't yet shattered it, knock on wood.

01:41:22 ◼   ► And so I did this year – and I'm pretty sure we did talk about this – get a – I think it was a Belkin screen protector.

01:41:31 ◼   ► I got one that Apple applied, and it slightly shattered damn near instantly.

01:41:36 ◼   ► I'm sure it was my fault, but I don't know what I did to it.

01:41:38 ◼   ► I got a replacement for free, had Apple apply the replacement.

01:41:42 ◼   ► That slightly shattered damn near instantly.

01:41:45 ◼   ► What do you do – have you ever broken a screen that way, though?

01:41:48 ◼   ► No, right?

01:41:49 ◼   ► You have really tight jeans.

01:41:50 ◼   ► Super tight.

01:41:51 ◼   ► No, I have no idea how I'm doing it.

01:41:53 ◼   ► Again, I'm sure it's my fault.

01:41:54 ◼   ► I'm not trying to say it's not my fault, but there was no clear instance where I was like, oh, yep, that was why.

01:42:00 ◼   ► But then the third time – I'm now on my third screen protector – Belkin was sold out of the ones that Apple applies, and I guess there's a slight difference either in the screen protector itself or whether or not they include the application frame thing that you stick your phone in to apply it.

01:42:16 ◼   ► But they didn't have one for the third screen protector, and they said, look, you can either wait a couple of months or we can give you the one you apply yourself.

01:42:25 ◼   ► So I was like, all right, fine, I'll take the one I apply myself.

01:42:27 ◼   ► And the application process was fairly easy.

01:42:30 ◼   ► It took a little while to get bubbles out from under it.

01:42:33 ◼   ► Like, that was kind of a pain in the butt.

01:42:34 ◼   ► But that being said, this one has lasted – again, knocking on wood – this one has lasted for a couple of months now, which the other ones were like a month apiece, I feel like, or maybe two tops.

01:42:44 ◼   ► So I've been actually fairly happy with that.

01:42:47 ◼   ► Also, the edge of this one is a little bit rounded as compared to the ones that Apple applied because I think I did talk about how it was like a cliff on the edge of my phone, which I hated every time I swiped up.

01:42:59 ◼   ► But all that's to say that even though I don't have a case, I do have a screen protector.

01:43:03 ◼   ► And I personally think that the respectful thing to do is to put your phone face down, doubly so if you use the always-on display, but just in general.

01:43:10 ◼   ► Put your phone face down if you can get away with it.

01:43:12 ◼   ► So that's my opinion.

01:43:13 ◼   ► Marco.

01:43:14 ◼   ► Oh, my God.

01:43:15 ◼   ► You guys are monsters.

01:43:16 ◼   ► All right.

01:43:16 ◼   ► Here's – listen.

01:43:17 ◼   ► The camera lenses are made of sapphire.

01:43:20 ◼   ► The front glass of your phone is basically made of marshmallows.

01:43:25 ◼   ► Like, it scratches so easily.

01:43:27 ◼   ► That is true.

01:43:28 ◼   ► That is very true.

01:43:29 ◼   ► Sapphire does not scratch very easily at all.

01:43:32 ◼   ► So if you are worried about scratching, the screen will scratch way more easily than the camera lenses.

01:43:39 ◼   ► So, yes, maybe you have a case that has like a lip around it.

01:43:44 ◼   ► That offsets the screen if you put it face down.

01:43:46 ◼   ► But are you sure that every time you put it face down, there's going to be nothing on that surface that sticks up slightly?

01:43:53 ◼   ► That is a big risk that is a big risk that you're taking.

01:43:55 ◼   ► Whereas if you put the phone screen facing up whenever you put it down on a surface, you are merely resting a very small amount of surface area, possibly even just an edge if you're in an angle, of a sapphire camera lens or two or three on that surface.

01:44:12 ◼   ► You are so much less likely to cause a scratch on that camera lens in that context than you are to scratch the screen during the lifetime of your phone.

01:44:19 ◼   ► So the correct answer is when you put your phone on a surface, it is face up.

01:44:25 ◼   ► Now, I will also add that if possible, if your clothing or bag or jacket or whatever allows for it, when you sit down to a table where there's people with you, you should not put your phone face down or up on the table.

01:44:43 ◼   ► You should keep your phone stowed away safely because you should be there present for the people who are in front of you.

01:44:48 ◼   ► So if you're at your desk or whatever, fine, do whatever you want.

01:44:51 ◼   ► But if you're like going out to lunch or dinner with somebody or hanging out with people around a table or something, leave your phone in your pocket.

01:44:58 ◼   ► Be there with the people that you're with.

01:45:00 ◼   ► But if you are going to put your phone on the table, it should probably be face up.

01:45:03 ◼   ► John, this is actually one of the questions that we get asked frequently and I can't remember the last time we answered it, maybe more than three years ago.

01:45:11 ◼   ► So I don't actually remember if any of our answers have changed.

01:45:13 ◼   ► Do you two recall if you're doing the same thing now that you did the last time we answered this?

01:45:17 ◼   ► Definitely.

01:45:17 ◼   ► Pretty sure.

01:45:19 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm pretty sure I was pretty much always face down.

01:45:21 ◼   ► Just checking.

01:45:21 ◼   ► Anyway, yeah, I put mine with the screen facing up.

01:45:25 ◼   ► Part of the modification to that is I don't use the always on screen.

01:45:31 ◼   ► I tried it for a while.

01:45:33 ◼   ► I didn't like it back when they introduced it.

01:45:34 ◼   ► I just don't use the always on screen.

01:45:35 ◼   ► So when my phone is face up on the table, it's not as if it's blaring stuff in my face.

01:45:40 ◼   ► But most of the time this comes up at my desk.

01:45:42 ◼   ► Right now, my phone is sitting on my desk face up next to me.

01:45:45 ◼   ► That's the main place my phone sits.

01:45:46 ◼   ► I don't have like a dock or a charger or whatever.

01:45:49 ◼   ► I just put when I sit down in front of my computer, I put my phone on my desk with the screen facing up.

01:45:53 ◼   ► I tend not to put it on the table otherwise.

01:45:56 ◼   ► But if I ever do put it on the table, it's always screen facing up.

01:45:58 ◼   ► That's mostly so.

01:45:59 ◼   ► If I put it on the table, it's because I'm like watching for something.

01:46:03 ◼   ► I'm expecting a text message from a kid to pick up or something like that.

01:46:06 ◼   ► And I don't I've known from experience not to trust that I'm going to feel the vibration, especially if it's in like my winter coat pocket or something.

01:46:14 ◼   ► I just won't feel that.

01:46:16 ◼   ► So I need to have it on the table with the screen face up.

01:46:18 ◼   ► And because I don't use the always on screen, it's totally black until a notification comes in.

01:46:23 ◼   ► And then if my phone suddenly lights up, my eyes will be drawn to it and I'll see they have to go pick somebody up.

01:46:27 ◼   ► So, yeah, face up for me.

01:46:28 ◼   ► Joe O'Connor writes regarding software version numbering schemes, for example, call sheet 2025.2.

01:46:34 ◼   ► I see lots of patterns from the typical 15.3.1 to 2025.2 to V1000 or whatever versions Firefox and Chrome are currently on.

01:46:44 ◼   ► Why choose one scheme over another?

01:46:47 ◼   ► For me, and with 2025.2, that means it was the second release in 2025.

01:46:51 ◼   ► I pulled this, I think, from Marco.

01:46:54 ◼   ► And if I remember, Marco, you got this from Curtis of Slopes.

01:46:57 ◼   ► Is that right?

01:46:58 ◼   ► Or did I get some of that backwards?

01:46:59 ◼   ► It might have been Slopes.

01:47:01 ◼   ► I forget where I pulled it from.

01:47:02 ◼   ► I've been seeing a lot of people do it over the last few years.

01:47:04 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:47:04 ◼   ► So one way or another, it's basically year.release number.

01:47:08 ◼   ► And the theory there for me was that I feel like, and I think, again, I'm stealing this from both Marco and Curtis, that 1.0 versus 1.1 versus 1.1.1, I don't have a lot of interest in making those distinctions.

01:47:24 ◼   ► And a release is just a release.

01:47:25 ◼   ► And I don't really have a lot of, I don't hold a lot of value in keeping around or running old versions of most of my software, if not all of it.

01:47:33 ◼   ► So, you know, I don't want to imply by there being a 1.0 and a 2.0 that there's a lot of worth in the 1.0.

01:47:42 ◼   ► You know, once 2.0 ships, 1.0 is dead to me.

01:47:45 ◼   ► And so I think just having a date-based or date and release number-based thing, it fits my model of how my software should be treated better.

01:47:54 ◼   ► And that's why I stick with it.

01:47:55 ◼   ► I have nothing against semantic versioning, which is, you know, the x.y.z thing.

01:47:59 ◼   ► It's probably the writer answer, to be honest, and what John is probably going to say to me in a minute.

01:48:04 ◼   ► But for me, I kind of like year.release number, and it's been working pretty well for me.

01:48:10 ◼   ► Marco, thoughts?

01:48:11 ◼   ► Version numbers used to be more important to communicate marketing messages.

01:48:16 ◼   ► Yes.

01:48:17 ◼   ► You know, it used to be like you had like your beta period, 0.7, 0.8, whatever.

01:48:22 ◼   ► And then like you released your 1.0.

01:48:24 ◼   ► That was your big first non-beta release.

01:48:26 ◼   ► And then if you had like some, you know, kind of minor feature additions, 1.1.

01:48:32 ◼   ► Little bug fix, 1.0.1.

01:48:34 ◼   ► You know, like there's, you know, this kind of standard of semantic version numbers.

01:48:37 ◼   ► You know, if you had like a really big update, you would save up for your

01:48:41 ◼   ► 2.0 and then you would, and maybe you would charge an upgrade price for your 2.0 because

01:48:46 ◼   ► it's a, it's a new major version.

01:48:48 ◼   ► Well, in a lot of software today, it's being updated through app stores and stuff where no

01:48:54 ◼   ► one's ever even going to see the version number because it just auto updates in the background.

01:48:58 ◼   ► It is oftentimes, you know, kind of a continuous release cycle.

01:49:02 ◼   ► So you're not like saving stuff up forever and then pushing it all out at, you know, later

01:49:06 ◼   ► to try to get an upgrade price.

01:49:07 ◼   ► You are largely releasing things as you can, as they are done because you are subscription

01:49:13 ◼   ► based or ad based.

01:49:15 ◼   ► So that there are a lot of situations today where like your business and your pricing and

01:49:22 ◼   ► your marketing don't really need like a big, like, you know, 2.0, 3.0 kind of versioning.

01:49:28 ◼   ► It is a choice you can make to switch to one of these other schemes that doesn't have that

01:49:34 ◼   ► kind of baggage.

01:49:35 ◼   ► Now, you might want that baggage because if you, if you want to make big splashes with

01:49:42 ◼   ► your marketing or have like, have an upgrade price, you know, then you probably do want

01:49:47 ◼   ► 1.0, 2.0, that kind of thing.

01:49:49 ◼   ► Um, but if you are going for a more continuous update cycle, which most software these days

01:49:55 ◼   ► I think is, then you can just do one of these regular sequential numbers.

01:49:59 ◼   ► Now, as to which one you, which one you do, I switched to the, you know, year dot number,

01:50:06 ◼   ► you know, 2025 dot two, whatever.

01:50:08 ◼   ► Like I switched to that.

01:50:09 ◼   ► It is a question of whether that's a good idea.

01:50:12 ◼   ► Um, I have found, I kind of wish I didn't switch to that.

01:50:16 ◼   ► I kind of wish I just did like 1000, 1001, 1002, like that kind of thing.

01:50:22 ◼   ► Because when you date it, people start getting antsy when they see the date is like two or

01:50:30 ◼   ► three months ago or more.

01:50:31 ◼   ► Like that's when they start getting really antsy.

01:50:33 ◼   ► And yes, they can just go see like, you know, your version history to see the age of the app

01:50:37 ◼   ► or whatever.

01:50:37 ◼   ► But people like, it looks good when it's a high number.

01:50:40 ◼   ► It looks bad when it's a low number.

01:50:42 ◼   ► And then secondly, whatever the point after the year is 2025.2, does that mean February?

01:50:48 ◼   ► Or does that mean the second update in 2025?

01:50:50 ◼   ► Well, if it happens to be February, maybe people will assume it's just the February update.

01:50:57 ◼   ► If it happens to be April, maybe they'll assume it's a three month old version when you actually

01:51:02 ◼   ► just released it last week.

01:51:03 ◼   ► So it actually, like people's expectations about that second number are not consistent.

01:51:07 ◼   ► So it, you're kind of, so what I usually do, I, I will skip numbers.

01:51:13 ◼   ► Like I haven't done a release yet in the last couple of months, but when I do release an update

01:51:19 ◼   ► soon, it was, you know, suppose my update comes out in the month of April.

01:51:23 ◼   ► I'm going to call it 2025.4, even though there wasn't a 2025.3 or 0.2.

01:51:28 ◼   ► Because if I call it, if I release something in April called 2025.2, people are going to

01:51:33 ◼   ► think it's old.

01:51:34 ◼   ► So it's not a great, like even that is not a great scheme.

01:51:37 ◼   ► That scheme has problems.

01:51:38 ◼   ► Also, what if you release something in April and then a week later, while it's still April,

01:51:44 ◼   ► you want to release another version?

01:51:46 ◼   ► Is that 2025.4.1?

01:51:50 ◼   ► No, I just go to 2025.5, like, because I know like I'm probably going to skip a month

01:51:54 ◼   ► here or there.

01:51:55 ◼   ► So I know like, okay, that's, that'll be fine.

01:51:57 ◼   ► Even that is not a great scheme.

01:51:59 ◼   ► It has those, those kind of flaws.

01:52:02 ◼   ► Secondly, in Apple's, in App Store Connect, if you're using Apple's distribution, you, it,

01:52:08 ◼   ► once you have uploaded a version 2025.1, you can never again for that app upload something

01:52:16 ◼   ► that is like 15.3 because Apple enforces that whatever you upload has to be like version

01:52:24 ◼   ► compare greater than the last thing you uploaded.

01:52:27 ◼   ► So whatever is before the first decimal point has to be a larger number than what was before

01:52:34 ◼   ► the first decimal point for the last one or whatever.

01:52:35 ◼   ► Like, you know, however you compare it, you know, point, point, point, like you compare each

01:52:39 ◼   ► part separately, but like, once you have 2025.2, you can never have 16.1 because it's less

01:52:46 ◼   ► than 2025.

01:52:47 ◼   ► So for me, like now I just said, I would love to go to like, you know, 1000, 1001.

01:52:52 ◼   ► I can't.

01:52:53 ◼   ► I would have to go to like 10,000.

01:52:55 ◼   ► So I could have like version 1001, 10,125.

01:53:00 ◼   ► Like I could do that.