00:00:00 ◼ ► I feel like we should do some snowpocalypse follow-up. I was talking last week about how Richmond was due for like 30 inches of snow.
00:00:10 ◼ ► Yeah, I saw your picture of your driveway. You've got barely enough to cover the ground.
00:00:13 ◼ ► It was a little more than that, perhaps not by Boston standards, I will allow. But by local standards, it was somewhat significant. It was like three or four inches. I'm not going to do that computation for centimeters. It was a handful of centimeters.
00:00:25 ◼ ► You've got to stop doing unit conversions. We need a moratorium on unit conversions, especially since you can't do them in your head and you're always just guessing.
00:00:32 ◼ ► If people are interested in doing the unit conversion, lots of ways that is possible after the fact. But I feel like what we should instead be doing is slowly acclimating people to our weird units.
00:00:46 ◼ ► They do, but there are units and we talk about them and that's, you know, by listening to the show, people will become familiar with them.
00:00:52 ◼ ► I'm pretty sure that people outside of the U.S. who consume U.S. media have plenty of other cases of other shows and things, you know, just using our units and making them figure it out.
00:01:03 ◼ ► I don't think they need us to add to the pile. That being said, I also don't think it's our responsibility to keep converting everything.
00:01:11 ◼ ► All right. Well, let the record show I tried. Anyways, we got a small amount of snow, but on top of the snow, we got a pile of ice and that ice during the day will, when it's sunny, which it has been the last couple of days, it will melt a little bit at the top and then refreeze and refreeze and refreeze and refreeze.
00:01:35 ◼ ► Which is not good. And the county, because remember, in Virginia, everything is by counties.
00:01:40 ◼ ► The county has done an actually extraordinary job of keeping interstates clear, of keeping major, the bigger side roads, not side roads, the bigger, like, non-interstate roads clear.
00:01:52 ◼ ► You know, for example, my neighborhood dumps into one of the larger roads where we are, and that's bone dry.
00:02:00 ◼ ► It's been dry, basically, this whole time. But when it comes to the neighborhoods, they justifiably didn't get to them in time to, like, really clear them when it was workable.
00:02:11 ◼ ► And now we've got, like, two to three to four inches of ice on all of these neighborhood roads, and the county has basically said, it'll melt one day, I guess.
00:02:22 ◼ ► And so, the kids, it's currently Wednesday as we record this, and at about noon today, the school system said, ah, screw it, we're out for the week.
00:02:33 ◼ ► And then, this coming weekend, we might get anywhere between two and 30 inches more snow.
00:02:38 ◼ ► Although, I think they've pumped the brakes on the 30 inches side of things, and I think it's going to be closer to, like, two to four.
00:02:46 ◼ ► We have been below freezing for a week, almost, and we're not supposed to get above freezing until this coming Monday.
00:02:52 ◼ ► So, you know, anything that hasn't been fairly well cleared, like, you know, Aaron and I and the kids went out and cleared about half of our driveway in order to make sure we could get out.
00:03:06 ◼ ► And then we might put a couple to 30 inches of snow on top of it, which is going to be super fun.
00:03:35 ◼ ► We get every possible combination of snow you can imagine, including heavy, slushy, icy, everything.
00:03:43 ◼ ► I'm not talking about slushy, icy snow. I'm talking about literal ice. We had to take a shovel to get through it.
00:03:52 ◼ ► I'm familiar with ice, Casey. And by the way, if you were familiar with winter, you would know that the correct time to shovel when it's less work is when the snow or ice or whatever is fresh-ish.
00:04:10 ◼ ► Yeah. Well, we don't have a sidewalk in the sense that you're expecting, but the walk from the driveway to the front door is shoveled enough for UPS to get there.
00:04:18 ◼ ► Anyway, next time do the whole driveway. Can your kids play ice hockey on the street now?
00:04:22 ◼ ► Oh, God, yes. People, if they are skating, like there are people skating around the neighborhood roads of Richmond on ice skates. Absolutely.
00:04:30 ◼ ► And, yeah, it's a mess. And we don't have an ice scraper, which means we had to use, like, shovel, like yard shovels.
00:04:39 ◼ ► No. You know what I'm talking about? It's like a hoe, but instead of a 90-degree angle at the end, it's just a straight shot, and so you can get under the ice and...
00:04:47 ◼ ► I know what you're talking about, but, like, you shouldn't be using that on a driveway. Anyhow, you're going to mess it up.
00:04:51 ◼ ► Oh, what are my choices? I mean, I'm using a freaking shovel right now, John. What are you going to do?
00:05:00 ◼ ► I left the Northeast, so I didn't have to deal with your bulls**t winters, and yet here I am.
00:05:08 ◼ ► No, because Dad had a snowblower, like a ridiculously overpowered snowblower, and he loved going out there.
00:05:13 ◼ ► I have a ridiculously overpowered snowblower, and it's wonderful, you know, three times a year that I need it, but even then, like, you have to go out while the snow is, like, fresh, before it has a chance to get packed down or have anybody walk on it and pack down more.
00:05:35 ◼ ► Because that will help keep it, you know, that'll finish the job of any, like, little remnants left behind, and then that will prevent it from getting ice covered all over it when everything starts to melt.
00:05:44 ◼ ► If you do a good enough job shoveling, you won't have to worry about ice, because the sun will be able to reach the darker pavement, and it will either evaporate or sublimate off the ice, and you'll get fresh, clean asphalt or pavers or whatever is underneath there that will slowly be exposed to the sun, and even if it's five degrees, as it has been here, it will clear off the remnants of the snow.
00:06:14 ◼ ► It's interesting in Erin's car, because her car is rear-wheel drive when under electricity, and then it will turn on the gas motor to be all-wheel drive when necessary, so that's kind of fun.
00:06:25 ◼ ► And I took my car out briefly to make a food run, and I didn't have the time or good spot to do any hooliganism, which was disappointing, but at this rate, I'll have plenty of times and perhaps can find a spot to do donuts and other, you know,
00:06:42 ◼ ► But nevertheless, think happy thoughts for Virginia this coming weekend, because it could get worse.
00:06:57 ◼ ► I think it was last episode, I said that I had added passkey, not I had added passkey support, Claude Code had added passkey support to our website.
00:07:12 ◼ ► But since the show was released, I got some feedback from users about how they expected it to work.
00:07:26 ◼ ► And I forget what they sent, but they sent a bunch of websites, some of which I already had an account on.
00:07:29 ◼ ► And like, basically, the sort of best practice way to do this is to not even wait for the person to enter anything.
00:07:36 ◼ ► But if they have a passkey to essentially offer to log them in with their passkey, of course, they could just say cancel and just, you know, manually log in.
00:07:47 ◼ ► You can log in with the magic email link, you can log in with a password, and you can log in with a passkey.
00:07:52 ◼ ► But if you have a passkey and you land on the login page now, you won't even have to do anything.
00:08:16 ◼ ► With regard to private AI compute in Google, this was an announcement from November 11th of 2025.
00:08:23 ◼ ► Google writes that private AI compute in the cloud is our next step in AI processing technology.
00:08:28 ◼ ► It builds off the industry-leading security and privacy safeguards that we embed to keep you in control of your experiences and your data safe,
00:08:40 ◼ ► Private AI compute is a secure, fortified space for processing your data that keeps your data isolated and private to you.
00:08:45 ◼ ► It processes the same type of sensitive information you might expect to be processed on device.
00:08:49 ◼ ► Within its trusted boundary, your personal information, unique insights, and how you use them are protected by an extra layer of security and privacy in addition to our existing AI safeguards.
00:08:58 ◼ ► Remote attestation and encryption are used to connect your device to hardware-secured, sealed cloud environments,
00:09:04 ◼ ► allowing Gemini models to securely process your data within a specialized, protected space.
00:09:09 ◼ ► This ensures sensitive data processed by private AI compute remains accessible only to you and no one else, not even Google.
00:09:15 ◼ ► Yeah, I think I had this in the notes ages ago, but this is essentially Google's answer to private cloud compute.
00:09:19 ◼ ► Now, the tricky bits are always like how Apple did a bunch of stuff where they bend over backwards to say,
00:09:27 ◼ ► and we'll give you this binary image of the thing, and this is the way that you can prove to yourself mathematically that when you connect to our servers,
00:09:35 ◼ ► what you're actually connecting to is the binary thing that we gave you, so we know we're not just giving you one thing and using a different thing on our servers.
00:09:42 ◼ ► And lots of people looked at that and they said, it's great and this is very helpful, but in the end, you do kind of sort of have to trust Apple to some degree.
00:09:53 ◼ ► You trust that Google has correctly and honestly implemented the thing that they said they implemented, which I'm sure they have because, again, you know, they want to do this for Apple.
00:10:04 ◼ ► Being able to privately process stuff that is too expensive to do on devices, a useful service to offer, and this is their offering that they announced in November.
00:10:18 ◼ ► I don't think we're going to cover them in this show or maybe we mentioned last time, but like the bifurcation of the Apple's rollout of their LLM tech where like 26.4 will have some stuff,
00:10:26 ◼ ► but then like the chatbot thing will come later and the rumors about Apple using Google's TPUs and their data centers was about the later chatbots and not the 26.4 thing.
00:10:38 ◼ ► Maybe there'll be another weird joint statement sometime around the next WWDC to say, oh, and Apple is going to be using Google's private cloud computer.
00:10:50 ◼ ► I think Marco was alluding to that last episode, like maybe they'll just keep saying private cloud compute and when you, the little asterisk will say either in Apple's data centers using our thing or in Google's data centers using their thing, which is basically the same thing.
00:11:00 ◼ ► Oh, no, I was saying that it was very likely to just kind of be memory hold, like to just kind of just never be talked, like AirPower, just kind of never be talked about again.
00:11:20 ◼ ► Advertising their commitment to privacy, but the specifics of how that's achieved, I think will become a little bit less specific because they have to, because I, again, I think the outcome here is Apple's private cloud computer infrastructure is probably not going to be their long-term solution.
00:11:38 ◼ ► I think ultimately they are going to most likely move to Google's large models exclusively for all their large model needs.
00:11:49 ◼ ► But I think that's going to be running on Google's infrastructure probably for the foreseeable future.
00:12:03 ◼ ► It's just like they're not running Google is, but it's the same idea that even Google doesn't have access to it and that you can prove that you're running on the hardware that they say you're running on.
00:12:15 ◼ ► You know, there's a lot of examples throughout, you know, recent tech history where Apple either, you know, designs their own complete thing, their own complete standard for something that doesn't yet have a standard.
00:12:28 ◼ ► And then everyone else kind of copies it and kind of makes it the standard, you know, see things like, like Chi 2 and Chi with magnets like that, like MagSafe kind of became Chi 2, like, and that clearly influenced it.
00:12:42 ◼ ► You know, Apple kind of steered that, or, you know, in some cases, Apple participates in the design of a standard very heavily, like USB-C, where, like, you know, Apple takes a big role because they want it done a certain way, and it's kind of done the Apple way.
00:13:00 ◼ ► But I think private cloud compute set a framework in, you know, in motion and a set of standards in motion that effectively Google looked at that and was like, oh, yeah, that's probably a good idea.
00:13:14 ◼ ► And maybe that was in part because they were already talking to Apple about possibly hosting this stuff at that point whenever they decided to do this.
00:13:22 ◼ ► But whatever it is, I think without Apple having announced private cloud compute and made a big, you know, put that stake in the ground the way it was back then, I think if that hadn't happened, Google would not have done their thing.
00:13:34 ◼ ► However the actions came to be that Google did their thing that seems very similar, I think that is a direct result of Apple having announced private cloud compute the way they did.
00:13:44 ◼ ► So even if Apple's version of this is kind of a temporary, you know, flash in the pan and isn't really a long-term thing, it was good that Apple did that because that caused Google, I think, to do their basically copy of it.
00:14:01 ◼ ► And I don't think that's the kind of thing Google would have come up with on their own.
00:14:08 ◼ ► So I think overall this was a very beneficial outcome, you know, even if we never hear about Apple's version of it again.
00:14:16 ◼ ► I wonder if Apple spent more money and time on private cloud compute or the supposed server chips that they made that are based on the M5.
00:14:24 ◼ ► Because we know they were using like the M2 Ultras before that, but the rumor is that they actually made a like chip for their own servers that is not a chip that will go into any other devices.
00:14:33 ◼ ► And if they just end up entirely on Google's data centers in like the next year or two, boy, that was a lot of money for those server chips that really, you know, went nowhere.
00:14:40 ◼ ► But, you know, they can just join the Mac Pro with products that Apple lost interest in.
00:14:53 ◼ ► I mean, obviously, I think Apple has a lot of things they could do with a large amount of their own processors in their own cloud.
00:15:03 ◼ ► Google, like Google wins on infrastructure so much in so many ways across the Internet.
00:15:09 ◼ ► Like Google for all of their for all of their faults in some of their weird privacy stuff sometimes and a lot of their, you know, kind of all over the place product design.
00:15:22 ◼ ► They can scale to Apple's scale and not a lot of other people can, including sometimes Apple itself.
00:15:28 ◼ ► So while Apple does run a lot of their services, it's generally on other people's cloud hardware.
00:15:38 ◼ ► I think there's some Apple data centers, but I don't I don't think that's where most of their stuff is running.
00:15:42 ◼ ► I think most of the stuff is running on like Google, Google Cloud, Azure, AWS, like that kind of infrastructure, Cloudflare or whatever.
00:15:54 ◼ ► So anyway, to run large scale, large volume AI models is so top of the line in infrastructure.
00:16:14 ◼ ► So I don't see a situation in which it makes any sense for Apple to use their own AI chips right now.
00:16:26 ◼ ► But right now it makes total sense to go all in on a company that really specializes in this.
00:16:33 ◼ ► And if you want a company that you already have a good relationship with and that has all the levels of the stack, that has first party flagship models and huge infrastructure, the only answer is Google.
00:16:51 ◼ ► And I think Apple made by far the best choice in choosing Google for this and investing in it like this, because I think they're going to be way ahead of where they would be if they were on their own.
00:17:01 ◼ ► And I can't imagine any other company having partnered with them that would give them a better outcome.
00:17:04 ◼ ► Speaking of Google and Apple, an anonymous ex-Googler wrote in and said Apple is or was one of Google Cloud's largest customers.
00:17:12 ◼ ► Google Cloud is the only public cloud with enough network bandwidth to serve iCloud Drive and backup, which was wholly on Google Cloud.
00:17:29 ◼ ► But I mean, having used these services in a professional capacity, I can say that Azure was, let's say, maybe not up to the standards of AWS and Google Cloud.
00:17:53 ◼ ► Like when you have that kind of service, usually like the server provider is usually not your problem.
00:18:02 ◼ ► It's basically like how easy is it to build a resilient system using these cloud services.
00:18:07 ◼ ► And obviously, AWS is the biggest entrant in this market and is sort of number one for a reason.
00:18:13 ◼ ► Google Cloud is slightly different in that Google's main expertise was building things for itself.
00:18:29 ◼ ► And then continuing from the ex-Googler, the other main Apple product that runs on Google Cloud is Shazam, which is running on Google Kubernetes engine.
00:18:37 ◼ ► So I wonder if they just left it where it was originally running when it was an independent company.
00:18:42 ◼ ► We should talk with regard to using Alfred to remove the attribution stuff that was copied in text from macOS from the news app.
00:18:50 ◼ ► And John, you apparently made a snarky comment, only on the Mac can you do these sorts of things, which at the time I agreed with.
00:18:58 ◼ ► But Rowley writes in to say, you can also remove the attribution crudge from copied text on iOS.
00:19:03 ◼ ► I made a clean URL shortcut that removes the attribution text and also changes x.com links to xcanceled.com links.
00:19:11 ◼ ► I don't know if Alfred does this, but the idea of like when you copy would run automatically and clean the thing out versus having to manually run a shortcut.
00:19:47 ◼ ► The idea is that the screen would display details useful to know while overclocking your memory.
00:20:00 ◼ ► Because it's a terrible idea and you don't want to put something heat producing on top of your RAM.
00:20:17 ◼ ► Like when we all came up with computers, screens were expensive and memory was expensive.
00:20:25 ◼ ► What a wonderful world that we live in that an OLED screen, like not even a crappy type of screen, an OLED screen is so cheap that they're shoving it in battery chargers and RAM sticks.
00:20:43 ◼ ► That's, as a computer nerd, look, I know there's a lot of bad stuff going on in the world and we'll get to it.
00:20:51 ◼ ► And what an amazing world it is that we have created technology so good that we can waste screens on stupid crap that doesn't need them.
00:21:01 ◼ ► Screens in places where, honestly, you shouldn't ever be able to see them because it's inside your computer.
00:21:11 ◼ ► Remember that rumor from ages ago that we talked about on the show of like the Mac Pro case made of glass?
00:21:35 ◼ ► Asus has introduced new macOS Focus features for its ProArt displays aimed at improving color-critical workflows for photography and video professionals using MacBook, Mac Mini, and Mac Studio systems.
00:21:45 ◼ ► Key updates include support for the Asus Display Widget Center on macOS, enabling software-based monitor control and MacBook keyboard brightness adjustment,
00:21:53 ◼ ► as well as new M Model P3 color mode, designed to align ProArt displays with MacBook screens for consistent color reproduction.
00:22:01 ◼ ► Yeah, I find it hilarious that that is like, and all the companies that market like their, you know, sort of formerly PC monitors to Macs, they all seem to use the same phrasing or like the same scenario.
00:22:26 ◼ ► And they're just like, I think they just say like, if you have your laptop open on your desk, our monitor will match it and it will look right.
00:22:31 ◼ ► But it's like, there's more to, you know, like you never see Apple say, our, if you buy our monitors, they'll exactly match our laptops.
00:22:36 ◼ ► They're always talking about the accuracy as measured objectively against some like color checker type thing.
00:22:45 ◼ ► Anyway, all this to say that, that more of these companies are aiming at Mac users with their monitors, you know, these, these sort of ProArt ones and other, other product lines that are not gamery are more likely to, for example, work with the keyboard brightness controls on your Mac.
00:23:01 ◼ ► You know, having to run a third party driver, how long will that be supported, yada, yada.
00:23:05 ◼ ► But like, there's a, there's sort of a, it seems to be developing a gradient from Apple monitors, which you plug in and will work in theory with everything having to do with Mac OS that'll work with the keyboard things that, you know, they don't even have a power button.
00:23:20 ◼ ► And at the other end is just a gaming monitor that you plug in that the Mac has no idea what the hell it is.
00:23:27 ◼ ► Of course, these are a little bit more expensive and they tend not to have the, all the fanciest features because those are still on kind of the gaming monitors first.
00:23:35 ◼ ► So many LED backlights, super high refresh, you know, fancy OLEDs with fancy pixel structures.
00:23:42 ◼ ► So more of these will come out, but I'm glad to see some of these monitor makers realizing that there is a market here to cater to Mac users.
00:23:49 ◼ ► And also that Mac users are probably willing to pay what seem like astronomical prices because it's still cheaper than Apple's monitors.
00:23:56 ◼ ► And speaking, speaking of, we live in this amazing age when screens are cheap, not Apple screens.
00:24:04 ◼ ► I know, I'm just, I'm just saying like they're, they're a step in the, uh, going against the tide.
00:24:09 ◼ ► And then we talked in last week's overtime about the Fender Mix modular headphones and Graham Dobie writes, there's a Danish company called AI, AI, AI, all caps.
00:24:26 ◼ ► I actually, I actually tried one of their pairs of headphones back when I was reviewing headphones during that brief time in my life before there were way too many of them.
00:24:41 ◼ ► I mean, like the company, if you look at it, like this is, this does seem like a company that's really focused on this type of, you know, durable, rugged, no nonsense, modular, you know, they're not aiming for the super duper audio files.
00:24:59 ◼ ► I'd never heard of this company, but, uh, these products look like they, if the, if the fender mix appeal to you, these might appeal to you as well.
00:25:07 ◼ ► I mean, the, one of the ways that these, that things like this have been modular in the past has basically been like, you can clip on a cover, like a plastic cover of a different color where you want it.
00:25:26 ◼ ► Um, I don't know if that's still what they're, what they're doing now, but there was a brief phase, like in like the mid 2010s where like every headphone brand had some kind of like quote modular design like that, where they would, they would sell you like, you can get any of these five different translucent plastic things.
00:25:52 ◼ ► So the thing's just going to, the little clips are going to break off and it's just going to fall off.
00:26:02 ◼ ► So that, that's, that kind of thing nobody's really asking for, but serviceability and modularity in, you know, where wearable parts.
00:26:10 ◼ ► Like, you know, the important thing with, um, the Fender headphones, you know, things like replaceable batteries.
00:26:15 ◼ ► Because when you're looking at, you know, modern, modern headphones, like back when headphones were wired, there were two ways your headphones would die.
00:26:23 ◼ ► One was the ear pads would rot out and you could replace those for, you know, 20, 30 bucks.
00:26:28 ◼ ► The other was the cord would wear out where it meets the headphones usually, like at that joint, um, or maybe at the, at the plug side, but usually at the part where it meets the headphones.
00:26:57 ◼ ► With wireless headphones, like once everything moves to Bluetooth, you still have the ear pads being possible to wear out over time.
00:27:05 ◼ ► As we know, with any, any rechargeable battery based device, those batteries have a certain lifetime.
00:27:13 ◼ ► And if you're using a lithium ion battery in some kind of device, like regularly every day or a few times a week, you're going to get a few years out of it maybe.
00:27:25 ◼ ► you're probably not going to have a lot of battery life left and headphones, like the rest of headphones, the, like the actual speaker drivers, the enclosure is like most of that stuff can last way longer than four or five years if it's not abused.
00:27:37 ◼ ► Uh, but to have then the battery, which is the most, you know, easily worn out component to have that be replaceable is great for extending the lifetime of headphones in the same way that what John was just saying in the same way that like when wired headphones switched to having socketed on both ends cables that made those headphones last for longer.
00:27:57 ◼ ► Like the headphones, like the headphones, like most, most wired headphones I have that I use in regular use, they're at least 10 years old.
00:28:11 ◼ ► And so like when you have, when you have, see also monitors, when you have really good components that don't really go out of date, just kind of wear out.
00:28:19 ◼ ► It's really good for longevity, uh, if you can, if you can replace easily the parts that will wear out.
00:28:28 ◼ ► It was, this is a long way of saying this is all good in the world of headphones to have replaceable batteries in wireless headphones because that is by far the earliest part to wear out.
00:28:36 ◼ ► And the headphone can be useful a lot longer than, than that if you can replace with batteries.
00:28:41 ◼ ► One of the things they're showing on this III website is that, uh, I'm thinking of another thing that breaks on headphones is like, um, the, the plug for wired headphones, the wire that goes into your headphones connects to one of the ear cups.
00:28:54 ◼ ► Uh, if you're lucky and don't have those ones that connect to both, but if it kicks in one of your ear cups, that means there's a wire.
00:28:58 ◼ ► It's somehow that takes the sound signal from that one ear cup over to the other ear cup.
00:29:05 ◼ ► And sometimes that, that wire that brings the signal from one ear to the other can be small and can wear out, especially since the headband is stretchy.
00:29:12 ◼ ► And this, this video they're showing on their website for their TMA 2DJ $200, uh, headphones shows that their entire, the first they're showing how tough their band is because they're twisting it around and stuff.
00:29:28 ◼ ► So the band is replaceable and if that breaks or that wire wears out or something else happens to it, you chuck that away, you buy another band and you plug the band into each of your ear cups and problem solve.
00:29:45 ◼ ► Also the, the other ways that headphones most often break is they can crack right in the middle of the headband.
00:29:52 ◼ ► If you, if you, if it's like a, a reasonably inflexible plastic headband, um, which, you know, most of like the big over ear noise canceling ones, they have a mostly plastic construction, which is again, largely good for like weight, which is important for comfort.
00:30:06 ◼ ► Um, but over time, the, the stressing of that plastic where it bends on the headband that can sometimes crack and, and they've gotten better over time.
00:30:13 ◼ ► Like most of the models out there today have, have evolved their designs enough that that doesn't happen that often, but it used to happen a lot more.
00:30:20 ◼ ► All right. And then Tyler H writes, I tried the Fender mix at CES. They're not heavy and sound decent.
00:30:25 ◼ ► I think the draw should be the high res audio, but customization is neat and battery replacement is fine.
00:30:29 ◼ ► I've also used the Fairphone modular earbuds and I hated them. They sound bad and are bigger. So why would you want to keep them around any longer?
00:30:53 ◼ ► You don't need like 24 bit, 96 kilohertz. You don't need that. You just need less compression.
00:31:00 ◼ ► So people who, who are being sold like high res audio, like it sounds better because that's 24, 192 or whatever.
00:31:07 ◼ ► No, it doesn't. It sounds better because they're using less compression and they can use less compression on 1644.
00:31:12 ◼ ► And it'll sound just as good and you won't notice any difference whatsoever, especially in your not incredibly advanced Bluetooth headphone drivers.
00:31:24 ◼ ► All right. And then, uh, way back in episode 672 in Ask ATP, uh, we were asked about the difference between minimizing, hiding, zooming, et cetera.
00:31:33 ◼ ► And Ben writes, here are two incredible free open source Mac apps and Mac OS apps that fix the, where did my window go problem in my life?
00:31:41 ◼ ► The first is flash space, a blazingly fast spaces replacement to find workspaces, switch instantly via hotkeys or gestures and use floating apps across workspaces, work spaces.
00:31:55 ◼ ► Thumbnails that show the individual, individual window contents, separate keyboard shortcuts to show all windows versus current desktop versus current app.
00:32:01 ◼ ► Quick access to quick close, minimize full screen, extremely customizable and a drop in replacement for the Mac app switcher.
00:32:07 ◼ ► And these two apps pair absurdly well flash space, nails content switching, the right set of apps.
00:32:19 ◼ ► And these apps are, um, kind of right in the sweet spot of things that are possible without too much effort on the Mac.
00:32:28 ◼ ► Uh, there, as far as I know, they're all using the existing, uh, very old, uh, very creaky, very difficult to use accessibility APIs.
00:32:37 ◼ ► Um, and I believe they also both need like screen recording permission and you got to jump through all these hoops.
00:32:42 ◼ ► They can't be sold in the Mac app store because nothing that uses the accessibility APIs can be sold in the Mac app store.
00:32:51 ◼ ► It is just like use the accessibility APIs, use screen recording permission, because once you have screen recording permission,
00:33:01 ◼ ► You can make them appear and disappear, bring them to the front, bring them to the back.
00:33:06 ◼ ► You can't do very easily the kind of things that like stage manager does, but that's not what this does.
00:33:12 ◼ ► Flash space and alt tab essentially like say, okay, so you're telling me I can make windows appear and disappear.
00:33:19 ◼ ► And I know where they all are and I know what they will look like and I know what apps they belong to.
00:33:25 ◼ ► It's like you build up sets of app just like spaces, but instead of, you know, with actual spaces, you're like swiping from side to side.
00:33:32 ◼ ► And I don't know how it's implemented on the covers, but this is, think of it this way.
00:33:35 ◼ ► It's like simulating spaces by just controlling what is visible at any given time on your one and only space as far as macOS is concerned.
00:33:43 ◼ ► And they do it without animations and so it seems really fast because, hey, hide these seven windows, show these four windows, right?
00:33:49 ◼ ► And having a floating thing of like, oh, okay, these, these, these windows are seen in all of the flash spaces, but this context is just these windows and this context is just these windows.
00:33:58 ◼ ► And it is very configurable and you could set up these little contexts and if that's the way you want to work and you're sick of waiting for spaces to switch around, this is the thing for you.
00:34:15 ◼ ► If you want, if you want to do windows style alt tabbing instead of the Mac style, uh, where you have like, where it's a hierarchy where you do command tab through apps and then command like tilde to do the windows within the app.
00:34:25 ◼ ► This will bring you through all your windows and it'll show you thumbnails so you can identify them and like, that's the way you want to work.
00:34:34 ◼ ► Uh, this is not the way I work with windows at all, but I'm glad these apps exist for people who want them.
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00:36:46 ◼ ► We have been waiting for this for months, some perhaps more than others, but Apple has announced new air tags.
00:37:06 ◼ ► For the first time, users can use precision finding on Apple Watch Series 9 or later or Apple Watch Ultra 2 or later to find their air tag.
00:37:28 ◼ ► I mean, I don't know if they did that on purpose or it's just a side effect of the louder chimey thing that they use to be louder.
00:37:36 ◼ ► But you will be able to tell the difference between the old ones and the new one as they chirp.
00:37:40 ◼ ► I was waiting for these because we have a couple of air tags that are just like, for whatever reason, just don't hold the charge anymore.
00:37:49 ◼ ► And like this one air tag, like every time we put a coin battery in there, it just eats it.
00:38:05 ◼ ► As much as as much as I, you know, I appreciate the utility of air tags, it's one of those products like the instant it was released, there were obvious problems with it.
00:38:18 ◼ ► And after now, you know what, five years, is it they've solved none of them like the most obvious problem with it was there was absolutely no reasonable way to attach it to anything or attach anything to it.
00:38:34 ◼ ► So the only way that people use air tags is either showing them loose somewhere where they bounce around and fall out or putting them in some kind of accessory.
00:38:49 ◼ ► But even the most tight, like the most simple thing, like a loop in it, something like some kind of accommodation to recognize people are going to be using these in lots of different physical situations.
00:39:01 ◼ ► Let's design it so it accommodates anything because what instead what happens is suppose you want to put it somewhere, something on something small, like, you know, like on a key chain or in a wallet or something.
00:39:14 ◼ ► What has to happen is you have to have something that wraps all the way around all of its side just to keep it secure, which makes that whole thing bigger and bulkier than it otherwise would need to be.
00:39:31 ◼ ► The instant it was released, see also the Vision Pro and the AirPods Max, similar pattern.
00:39:38 ◼ ► Like, Apple puts these out there, there's obvious problems from day one, and then years later they release a new version that addresses none of them.
00:39:54 ◼ ► They probably make more money from the accessories that they sell for air tags than they do on the air tags.
00:40:09 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, there's a million cheap things you can buy on, you know, everywhere for them.
00:40:13 ◼ ► And speaking of that, we have an air tag on one set of our keys, and we bought whatever the, like, you know, $2 little air tag holder that lets you put it on a keychain from, like, Amazon or something many years ago.
00:40:26 ◼ ► And it's made of, like, that rubberized plastic that, like, gets, like, sticky and tacky as it gets old.
00:40:43 ◼ ► The problem with the Apple ones is they're bigger and bulkier than, like, the cheap third-party ones.
00:40:55 ◼ ► Like, you know, there's DIY ways to do this that I don't recommend this, but it's a thing you can do.
00:41:01 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, so the other thing is, like, I guess we will learn once we disassemble them.
00:41:06 ◼ ► There were – so, obviously, like, as soon as air tags were launched, the other major problem with them is stuff like stalking.
00:41:12 ◼ ► And Apple has done various mitigations over the years to try to make that less of a problem.
00:41:17 ◼ ► It's still a problem, but it's – but, you know, they – this entire product category enables a level of stalking and surveillance that is, you know, very problematic in a lot of cases.
00:41:28 ◼ ► And so for this product to exist at all, I think Apple does a pretty good job with mitigating that if it's going to exist at all.
00:41:37 ◼ ► That being said, I mean, back when it was released, we actually had conversations on the show about how, like, you know, maybe this is too much trouble to even be worth Apple having this product.
00:41:46 ◼ ► But anyway, some of the rumors about this update before it came out were that maybe they might be making things like disabling the speaker more difficult.
00:41:55 ◼ ► I guess we'll find out, like, as people get these and start, you know, taking them apart and stuff, I guess we'll find out if that actually came to pass.
00:42:13 ◼ ► If someone has physical access to your AirTag, I mean, you can just put hot glue on the thing that moves to make the noise.
00:42:20 ◼ ► Like, there's no stopping someone from, it's not like, you know, like, oh, is it possible to make it turn the camera on without making the green LED come on on your, like, MacBook Pro screen?
00:42:32 ◼ ► But, like, I'll give you physical access to this AirTag, but I'll make it so you can't disable the speaker.
00:42:39 ◼ ► Like, it'll be very, very difficult to make it so someone with physical access couldn't disable the speaker.
00:42:45 ◼ ► But, yeah, you know, Apple does what it can, and they're always refining the software approach to do it.
00:42:50 ◼ ► And the thing is, it's a security convenience thing because, you know, we're using it within our family, and we're not stalking each other.
00:42:57 ◼ ► But we are constantly running into annoyances that are caused by the stalker mitigation, right?
00:43:03 ◼ ► So, like, in anything like this, trying to deal with the worst possible actors makes everybody's life more difficult.
00:43:20 ◼ ► With regard to the environment, 85% recycled plastic in the enclosure, 100% recycled rare earth elements in all magnets, 100% recycled gold platy in all Apple-designed printed circuit boards.
00:43:31 ◼ ► The paper packaging is 100% fiber-based and can be easily recycled, and it's maintaining the same form factor as the original, with this new AirTag being compatible with all existing AirTag accessories.
00:43:46 ◼ ► Yeah, well, and to be clear, like, in the bed they created for themselves, you can make an argument that, like, we shouldn't break accessory compatibility.
00:43:55 ◼ ► Like, that is a reasonable argument to make, and that does have, you know, a cost to it if you wanted to break it.
00:44:00 ◼ ► But, God, think of how, like, how much better the AirTag would be if it changed its shape to be a little bit more, to be at all accommodating of the physical reality of how this product was ever actually used.
00:44:13 ◼ ► Like, remember when the very, very first iPad, like, the iPad 1, did not have any accommodations for a case.
00:44:20 ◼ ► And so the case that went around it was this huge, thick rubber thing that had to go around all sides of the four sides of it just to hold on to it, and it added a huge amount of bulk.
00:44:32 ◼ ► And the amazing innovation of the iPad 2, in addition to, you know, shedding a bunch of the thickness and weight and everything, the iPad 2 added magnets to the side.
00:44:42 ◼ ► And they had that wonderful smart cover that gave you protection where most people needed it, the screen, without having to wrap around the entire iPad and bulk the whole thing up if you didn't want it to.
00:44:55 ◼ ► So that was a great example of Apple recognizing the physical realities of how these products need to be used in the real world and designing something to accommodate that in the product itself to make the cases and accessories better.
00:45:07 ◼ ► See also the Apple Pencil when it went from the weird, you know, excited to see you method to the magnets on the side of the iPad that hold it on there.
00:45:17 ◼ ► It's not perfect, but it is, it was so much more accommodating of the realities of using the product that like, okay, we have a pencil, we need to like store it somewhere where we're not using it.
00:45:26 ◼ ► Instead of having to like, have it like be loose in your bag or wherever, let's have a few magnets in the iPad that are designed to accommodate the reality of this and have the pencil stick to it when people use it.
00:45:41 ◼ ► It should be the naked robotic iPad and have no accommodations because what about the people who don't have a pencil?
00:45:56 ◼ ► But if it's a very common use case, the product should be designed with that in mind and to accommodate that as best as it can.
00:46:02 ◼ ► And that's why every iPad since the iPad 2 has had magnets to support cases because it makes them a lot better.
00:46:17 ◼ ► I would say the magnets inside the iPad are part of the naked robotic core thing because the idea is we don't put anything on it, but we provide places for you to put stuff on it.
00:46:27 ◼ ► Because the magnets don't stick out and they're in space that is otherwise unused inside it.
00:46:31 ◼ ► And by the way, I feel like they could have, if they really wanted to, probably at additional cost of the product, put a hole in these suckers.
00:46:56 ◼ ► And I feel like the next time, if, if they keep selling this product and they eventually revise it further,
00:47:02 ◼ ► the next time they'll, the only way that they can move forward is they have to move to a smaller size coin battery.
00:47:08 ◼ ► And that gives them a whole bunch of options because once you are, first of all, it would be smaller period.
00:47:12 ◼ ► And once you're moving to a smaller size with a smaller battery, you have more options for attachability instead of trying to put one very small hole with reinforcement around it on the very, very edge of the existing form factor.
00:47:25 ◼ ► It is available today for the same price as the AirTag One, $29 for a single AirTag and $99 for a four pack.
00:47:36 ◼ ► And you should, because you should engrave little emojis on them so you can call them by their names.
00:47:45 ◼ ► And I'm excited to tell you that we can't talk about new MacBook Pros because they haven't been announced yet.
00:47:52 ◼ ► But apparently there's an event going on for creators yesterday, today, and tomorrow in Los Angeles.
00:47:58 ◼ ► Apple has invited select creators for an Apple experience in Los Angeles scheduled for January 27th through 29th.
00:48:23 ◼ ► I mean, everyone thought, like, this would be a good time to announce the new M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros.
00:48:32 ◼ ► I think the embargo just lifted for that because I saw Jason Snell's review of creator studio.
00:48:43 ◼ ► But, yeah, we do feel like sometime early in this year we will see the M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros.
00:48:54 ◼ ► You know, Apple has a lot of smaller events where they try to promote something to some audience.
00:49:00 ◼ ► And it's not – they aren't always hardware releases, especially when they're doing, like, creator events.
00:49:06 ◼ ► It's usually to try to – you know, it's usually stuff that's less interesting to a podcast like ours.
00:49:13 ◼ ► It's like we're going to try to get a bunch of, like, YouTube creators to use our new version of Final Cut or whatever.
00:49:19 ◼ ► So, it would totally make sense now for this one, especially given the timing of the embargoes dropping today for the new creative suite or whatever it's called.
00:49:45 ◼ ► And, look, we might be getting M5 MacBook Pros tomorrow for all we know, but it's not related to this event.
00:49:52 ◼ ► Marco, you and I can, I think, buzz off for probably 30 to 45 minutes because, John, you have some stuff to tell us about.
00:50:16 ◼ ► Sony has announced plans to spin off its TV hardware business, shifting it to a new joint venture with TCL.
00:50:20 ◼ ► The two companies have signed a non-binding agreement for Sony's home entertainment business, with TCL set to hold a 51% stake in the new venture and Sony holding 49%.
00:50:29 ◼ ► Sony and TCL are aiming to finalize binding agreements by the end of March and start operating the new joint company in April 2027, subject to regulatory approvals and other partnership conditions.
00:50:39 ◼ ► The new company is expected to retain Sony and Bravia branding for its future products and will handle global operations from product development and design to manufacturing sales and logistics for TVs and home audio equipment.
00:50:48 ◼ ► Sony says that the partnership will leverage Sony's picture and audio tech, brand value, supply chain management, and other operational expertise.
00:50:54 ◼ ► So based on the headline, everyone's like, oh no, if you love Sony TVs, now they're dead.
00:51:08 ◼ ► But if you read, you know, two paragraphs into any of the announcements, you realize, oh, Sony's still going to be selling Sony TVs.
00:51:19 ◼ ► So TCL will technically be in control, but there'll still be Sony products with Sony's all existing Sony proprietary stuff going into them.
00:51:28 ◼ ► And the reasons behind why they might want this partnership are complex and have to do with manufacturing and stuff.
00:51:43 ◼ ► It just seems like a sort of a business reality for Sony and it's probably a good deal for them because TCL has lots of manufacturing capacity and some interesting new technology they're coming out with.
00:51:56 ◼ ► I mean, Sony has been contracting out an assembly of its televisions for a long time now.
00:52:04 ◼ ► I believe Sony's also part of this deal, like Sony's receivers and stuff are going to be part of this as well.
00:52:10 ◼ ► And the final thing I'll say before I do an aside on TV tech is that this is like a memorandum of understanding or whatever.
00:52:18 ◼ ► Like many things can go wrong that will make this deal not happen sometime between now and 2027 when they're supposed to start doing business.
00:52:32 ◼ ► This is not a thing that has happened yet, but this is just a thing that these two companies say that they want to happen.
00:52:39 ◼ ► And I think this is a good time to take a couple steps back and look at where we are in the television technology market to see how this deal might fit into it.
00:52:58 ◼ ► Most people buy inexpensive televisions and like the the sort of enthusiast level of the market does trickle down to that lower end of the market where the action is happening is on the high end.
00:53:14 ◼ ► And on the high end for the past many, many years, the the market has been focused on, you know, sort of competition between two different ways of making good TVs divided by whether or not you can turn on individual pixels.
00:53:31 ◼ ► Every time someone talks to me about TV online, I always say that I demand per pixel lighting control.
00:53:37 ◼ ► That is obviously the technically best way to form a nice picture, which is you can turn individual pixels on and off.
00:53:49 ◼ ► Well, lots of televisions and lots of monitors to make a single pixel turn on have to turn on a huge amount of light behind that single pixel.
00:54:03 ◼ ► If you just want one pixel to be turned on, all the other pixels are trying mightily to prevent the backlight from going through.
00:54:12 ◼ ► And if you make a black screen with a white pixel in the middle of it, the entire backlight is on.
00:54:25 ◼ ► And various technologies for stopping you from seeing that entire backlight have been tried over the years, but they can't stop all the light.
00:54:34 ◼ ► Which is why if you take the studio display, put it in a pitch black room and make the studio display show a black screen, it will light up your room because that's just the way it is.
00:54:43 ◼ ► And then as you go down the spectrum, OK, let's break up the backlight into a bunch of little pieces and then we'll just turn on the little pieces that are behind things.
00:54:50 ◼ ► So if we have a single white pixel in the middle of a black screen, we'll just turn on like a one inch by one inch square behind that pixel.
00:55:12 ◼ ► And anyway, that's one whole section of televisions, which is we cannot turn on individual pixels and make just the pixel emit its own light.
00:55:21 ◼ ► We always have to turn on some portion of the backlight behind the pixels that we want to show up.
00:55:31 ◼ ► Now there are thousands of backlight regions on like modern displays, not the studio display.
00:55:54 ◼ ► And the other side of things are the technologies that allow per-pixel lighting control.
00:56:01 ◼ ► Just like on your phone or on the new iPad Pro, OLED, you can turn on a single pixel because the pixels themselves emit their own light.
00:56:17 ◼ ► And there are trade-offs between them because OLEDs can't get as bright as those other ones because when you've got the big light behind everything, you can crank up the light real high.
00:56:26 ◼ ► More recently, the battle between these two different kinds of technologies has advanced to the point where it's not just brightness anymore.
00:56:34 ◼ ► It used to be, okay, well, OLED has the best picture, but LCD TVs with backlights can get brighter.
00:56:42 ◼ ► The competition is now in something called color volume, which is like, okay, how many colors can you show?
00:56:48 ◼ ► And it used to be that the fanciest OLEDs were winning that as well because the QD OLED, the quantum dot OLED that I've got on my TV, and that's in a lot of monitors now, had R, G, and B subpixels.
00:56:58 ◼ ► And you could turn the R, the G, and the B on to maximum brightness, and you could get a really pure white, or you could turn on the R to maximum brightness, get a really pure red, so on and so forth.
00:57:08 ◼ ► Whereas those other monitors that had a backlight, they had a backlight that they would shine through, and then they had to have something that would turn the backlight into other colors, some kind of color filter or quantum dots or whatever.
00:57:18 ◼ ► And on the OLED side, there were some OLEDs that had to add a white subpixel to increase the brightness, and of course, that would wash out all their colors.
00:57:26 ◼ ► Anyway, QD OLED was the champion in color volume as well because it didn't have a white subpixel.
00:57:39 ◼ ► All the Sony A95L, the Sony A95K, all the Sony monitors and the Samsung monitors with Samsung's QD OLED panels, they were the champions because they had perfect lighting control.
00:57:53 ◼ ► This is sort of an Empire Strikes Back-like situation where the televisions with the backlights are saying, okay, we've got a new idea.
00:58:02 ◼ ► But anyway, in the past few years, it's been like, instead of having a backlight that is just a white or blue light, most of them are blue because you can change the blue into all the other colors because it's the shortest wavelength.
00:58:11 ◼ ► How about we have a backlight broken up into little regions, but we'll make the backlight itself, like the little lights that are, you know, behind there, the little backlight regions, they will be RGB.
00:58:28 ◼ ► And it's really complicated to do that because if you think about it, I'm going to show you an image and you have, you know, 2000 backlight regions.
00:58:36 ◼ ► And you know what color every pixel is supposed to be, but for like the one inch by one inch region or the one centimeter by one centimeter region that's behind this particular set of pixels in this, like, you know, drawing of a landscape or something.
00:58:50 ◼ ► Because you just got one R, one G, and one B for that little tiny region of the backlight.
00:58:56 ◼ ► Well, if most of the pixels are blue, you can just make the backlight blue and then you get super duper blue and it'll be really bright with lots of color volume because you've got a blue backlight going through a blue filter.
00:59:05 ◼ ► But what if there's like tons of different colors in that little one centimeter region on your screen?
00:59:20 ◼ ► Instead of just having a blue backlight with color filters that are imperfect, now we can crank up the color volume with these RGB backlights.
00:59:30 ◼ ► They have RGB backlights and some of them add a yellow RGBY or a cyan RGBC backlight regions.
00:59:40 ◼ ► The, the war of words at CES was very hot because some people are like, well, if you do that, like then you, you have your RGB backlight region and you decided this backlight is going to be orange.
00:59:49 ◼ ► But now you have some pixels that didn't need any orange and then we're getting a little bit of orange bleed through.
00:59:53 ◼ ► So your colors are all muddied because you're not able to control the colors, the individual pixels.
01:00:00 ◼ ► Um, Sony is out there, uh, with its own sort of not particularly consistent, uh, idea of how to make a good TV because for a while they were selling essentially the best TV in the world for years and years.
01:00:15 ◼ ► But at a certain point, somebody decided this is not going to be our flagship TV, even though everyone keeps saying it's the best TV in the world.
01:00:23 ◼ ► Because we think it's better to have brighter TVs that are less expensive than there's less bright TV with the OLED stuff.
01:00:33 ◼ ► This is the reason the, the 895L, which was their flagship became the Bravi 8 too, which is not their flagship, even though it's still their best TV because they wanted to sell LCD TVs with backlight regions on them because they could get brighter and they were cheaper.
01:00:46 ◼ ► Uh, and this is complicated by the fact that the only company in the world, I believe that makes cutie OLED screens is Samsung.
01:00:53 ◼ ► And the other big company in the world that makes OLED screens that are not cutie OLED is LG.
01:01:04 ◼ ► I'm not sure if they make them at TV size, but the point is it's not like Silicon chips where it's just TSMC and like a few other companies or whatever, but it's the companies that can make TV size panels in any kind of volume are small in number.
01:01:28 ◼ ► So Sony partnering with them makes some sense because like, look, we weren't making our own panels anyway.
01:01:33 ◼ ► And we're not, we're not quite sure how to go forward in this business because just being at the high end is not giving us high enough volume.
01:01:51 ◼ ► It's still companies taking panels made by other companies who are probably their competitors and packaging them into TVs with their own processing and everything.
01:02:03 ◼ ► But still in areas like wide, why do Sony televisions still only have like two HDMI 2.1 ports, whereas LG and Samsung have four because Sony outsources the chip for handling that.
01:02:22 ◼ ► And I don't really blame Sony for doing what it's done, which is we need a manufacturing partner who can make huge amounts of TVs cheaply and who looks like they have a good technological roadmap.
01:02:32 ◼ ► And, uh, speaking of roadmap, it's time to wake Casey up and, uh, talk about this next one here.
01:02:39 ◼ ► So TCL has super quantum dot technology that is landed or been announced, I guess, at CES.
01:02:49 ◼ ► Then from TCL's official Reddit of all places, uh, TCL super quantum dot technology or SQD represents a major advance in color performance, delivering up to a 33% increase in color gamut and a 69% improvement in quantum dot accuracy compared to previous generation TVs.
01:03:04 ◼ ► RGB mini LED systems can also produce a vibrant color and cover a lot of BT 2020, which is a color space, I think.
01:03:15 ◼ ► Uh, but, but because they use separate red, green, and blue LEDs, the blending of light can sometimes cause color crosstalk or color bleed, where colors overlap and reduce accuracy and fine details.
01:03:26 ◼ ► We wanted to create a TV that could get this level of color without compromise, and TCL claims that their X11L TV covers 100% of BT 2020 color.
01:03:39 ◼ ► By generating color through quantum dot conversion rather than colored LEDs, SQD delivers cleaner color separation and higher color precision.
01:03:45 ◼ ► Even in complex or high contrast scenes, using a single chip pure white light source and SQD using more refined 5 nanometer filter particles down from the standard 60 nanometers to ensure each pixel renders color with extreme precision and no blooming or interference.
01:04:04 ◼ ► They're saying, okay, we don't have per-pixel lighting control, but everyone else is putting colored backlights behind their pixels.
01:04:14 ◼ ► We're going to stick with a single color backlight, like we always had, broken up into little regions, but now our quantum dots are better.
01:04:20 ◼ ► Quantum dots are the things that take, like, the blue backlight and change it into a red, green, and blue.
01:04:25 ◼ ► And their quantum dots do that conversion better, allowing more of the color through, which is how, I think this is the first I've ever seen of a quantum dot LCD TV that can do 100% of BT 2020.
01:04:36 ◼ ► Like, historically, I think the only TVs that have come close to that are the QD OLEDs, because they don't have the white subpixel.
01:04:43 ◼ ► And now maybe the tandem OLEDs from LG that don't have the white subpixel diluting your colors.
01:04:53 ◼ ► And the color spaces are always shown as, like, a 3D thing, because, like, you've got R, G, and B in the three different dimensions.
01:05:00 ◼ ► And BT 220 is very big, and inside that is P3, and way inside that is sRGB, or, no, Rec, uh, Rec 707, or whatever the T, the plain standard FTV one.
01:05:18 ◼ ► We don't have to do the processing to figure out what the hell color to make our RGB backlights.
01:05:23 ◼ ► We still do have the blooming thing, because, you know, we don't have perfect lighting control, but whatever.
01:05:28 ◼ ► And part of the reason this is a big announcement is that TCL is, I think, the only company in the industry that has decided to do this.
01:05:35 ◼ ► Not because it's, like, I don't think it's, like, exclusive tech to them, but, like, to do this, they basically had to either redo their existing factory or build a new one.
01:05:43 ◼ ► I'm not sure which they did, but, like, you have to change your entire LCD manufacturing line to do this.
01:05:53 ◼ ► But TCL decided to make the investment, and now I believe they are the only company for now that is going to be putting out these super quantum dot things.
01:06:06 ◼ ► People buy plain old LCD TVs because they're cheaper to manufacture and cheaper to buy.
01:06:21 ◼ ► It is, you know, in theory, it is as cheap to manufacture as LCD screens that they're putting on RAM, right?
01:06:33 ◼ ► In theory, they could have first dibs access to an LCD non-perpixel lighting control technology that nobody else has.
01:06:42 ◼ ► Meanwhile, just the year or two before this, Sony was like, we've got our own RGB backlight.
01:06:48 ◼ ► We have all the different colors here, and we have this cool processing to figure out what color to make all the little backlight regions.
01:06:52 ◼ ► And they did the thing I think I talked about on the show where they stripped off the layers of the TV so you would just see the backlight and say, look, you can kind of see what the picture is even just from the backlight.
01:07:20 ◼ ► All I care about is the high-end, and the high-end is LG Tandem OLED with no white subpixel and Samsung QD OLED with no white subpixel.
01:07:29 ◼ ► I will be sad if Sony stops making an OLED TV, but the rumors are not that they're going to do that.
01:07:36 ◼ ► The details of the OLEDs that they will build in that factory are as yet undetermined, but my fingers are crossed that they will not have a white subpixel, and Sony can finally stop buying all their panels from Samsung.
01:08:20 ◼ ► Not really, because OLED is kind of like a sandwich with a light-emitting layer and stuff.
01:08:27 ◼ ► Like, think of, like, an LED that you could buy for a little kit and shrink it real small.
01:08:38 ◼ ► There's an actual micro-LED where every individual pixel has a red, green, and blue light-up LED.
01:08:45 ◼ ► You see them in stadiums because it's really easy to make them big because if it's in a stadium, the red, green, and blue LEDs are huge.
01:08:59 ◼ ► Trying to get that down to a 4K, 55-inch TV, do the math on how small those LEDs have to be.
01:09:11 ◼ ► Like, I don't know if you can do the math on how many pixels there are on a 4K TV, but there's a lot.
01:09:15 ◼ ► And if you need to, like, place them individually and connect wires to them, that's not the way you do things.
01:09:22 ◼ ► That's why they're, like, Japanese companies have these printable OLEDs where you kind of use, like, an inkjet printer, kind of the same way they print the LCD stuff.
01:09:41 ◼ ► Like, I don't remember the acronyms off the top of my head, but there's a bunch of other ways to produce pixels that make light besides OLEDs.
01:09:47 ◼ ► They're just, like, in the experimental stage where they'll show, like, a postage stamp-sized little experimental thing in a back room at CES and say,
01:09:57 ◼ ► But if someone actually eventually does it and it becomes manufacturable, I'm sure you'll hear about it here from me.
01:10:07 ◼ ► That's what Apple's M6 MacBook Pros are going to use sometime later this year, rumors have it.
01:10:15 ◼ ► I'm excited about that because it's a really good technology, and those screens look great.
01:10:40 ◼ ► TV display because in TV displays, every single manufacturer has their own branded version of what the actual generic technology is called.
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01:12:53 ◼ ► John Ternus is taking over design at Apple, reading from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg Bloomberg.
01:13:03 ◼ ► Apple has expanded the job of hardware chief John Ternus to include design work, solidifying his status as a leading contender
01:13:16 ◼ ► People with knowledge of the move said that Cook himself was trying to expose Ternus to more parts of the company's operations.
01:13:29 ◼ ► Until his departure in 2019, Cook oversaw design from 2015 to 2017 when Ives temporarily stepped back from the position.
01:13:40 ◼ ► Ternus is now billed internally as the executive sponsor for all design on Cook's management team.
01:13:48 ◼ ► He represents the design organization in executive team gatherings and manages the group's leaders.
01:13:54 ◼ ► The heads of Apple's design teams continue to report directly to Cook in both internal organizational charts and the company's public disclosures.
01:14:00 ◼ ► Having Ternus oversee the design teams while they still technically report to Cook is a strange arrangement, according to Apple employees, but it's a sensitive situation.
01:14:08 ◼ ► Changing the reporting structure would affirm Ternus' status as a rising star at a time when the company is still keeping its succession planning under wraps.
01:14:25 ◼ ► It was just like that Cook is essentially parachuting him in and say, just check out the design stuff.
01:14:34 ◼ ► Like, this is German saying, like, you know, oh, well, it would affirm his rising star status, blah, blah, blah.
01:14:39 ◼ ► Like, that's just German guessing what the reasoning might be, but if it's true that the reporting structure has not changed, but instead he's sort of like being an executive sponsor or whatever, it does really seem like just kind of, again, I'm not sure if I believe that it's like Tim Cook thinks Ternus needs some experience dealing with design, but maybe he does.
01:14:55 ◼ ► But either way, as we'll see with some news later in this section, it does seem like that if Ternus is the leading contender for to be Cook's successor, that does, I don't know, maybe he's wishful thinking, that perhaps design is an area that he may want to turn his attention to and that even Tim Cook can possibly see that at this point.
01:15:19 ◼ ► Yeah, I think, I mean, look, first of all, like, yeah, this, you know, Apple is not doing a great job hiding the idea that John Ternus is seemingly most likely the next CEO candidate.
01:15:31 ◼ ► The reality is that I think Apple's design leadership under Tim Cook has been just kind of weak overall because, as discussed a million times, Tim Cook seems to equate all design together.
01:15:57 ◼ ► And all the reports we've heard so far about Jeff Williams' term, you know, kind of serving that role, basically make it seem like he was pretty hands-off.
01:16:06 ◼ ► But, you know, he was there, like he was at the meetings, but, like, sounds like he was pretty hands-off.
01:16:13 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, he's not expected to do that, but, like, at a certain point, as you go down the org chart, you have to get to someone who knows design.
01:16:22 ◼ ► But, like, eventually it's like, okay, but who in the company is in charge and also is a designer?
01:16:37 ◼ ► First, just in general, I think reinforcing the idea that John Ternus is the most likely CEO successor and that that process is starting, that I think overall is very promising for Apple's future.
01:16:52 ◼ ► Again, even though we don't know what kind of CEO Ternus would be, he seemed to do an extremely good job at his current role as being hardware chief.
01:16:59 ◼ ► And he seems very well-liked and he seems like he has, you know, pretty good, like, personality traits as far as we know.
01:17:05 ◼ ► We don't know that much about him, but, like, what we do know, it seems like he'd be a pretty good person for this role.
01:17:10 ◼ ► And it seems like he is a little bit more product-focused than Cook, who, you know, Cook is much more kind of high-level operations-focused.
01:17:19 ◼ ► Cook doesn't really have a good product sense at all, and he's shown that many times over the years.
01:17:23 ◼ ► So he kind of outsources that to people below him, but he's not very good at choosing those people sometimes.
01:17:48 ◼ ► Like, all the top executives and top people, including Alan Dye, probably have known about this transition for longer than we have.
01:17:58 ◼ ► And my guess is that part of why Dye left is that some part of Ternus and Dye wasn't going to work together.
01:18:09 ◼ ► I'm guessing these are actually related to each other and that once Dye, you know, saw like the tide shifting towards Ternus, somehow they realized this isn't going to work.
01:18:33 ◼ ► But also, having Ternus be the executive sponsor, and we have to kind of figure out what that means.
01:18:41 ◼ ► But like, that I think is promising because I'm guessing Ternus was involved in the selection of Stephen, I forgot his last name again.
01:18:58 ◼ ► I'm guessing Stephen LeMay being elevated to this position was also not unrelated to Ternus' taking over.
01:19:11 ◼ ► And if Ternus was involved in the selection of Stephen LeMay, and by the way, which I guess we'll jump to the gun slightly.
01:19:31 ◼ ► So, it looks like the tide has shifted substantially with the design leadership at Apple on the software side.
01:19:48 ◼ ► Even if he's not coming up to CEO, this kind of dynamic happens frequently in big organizations and is one of the skills
01:19:56 ◼ ► that is actually important to have when you're higher up and are like a CEO, which is recognizing, maybe too late, but whatever, better late than never.
01:20:03 ◼ ► Recognizing what parts of your company are having problems or potentially having problems.
01:20:17 ◼ ► And, sometimes, you know there are problems, but there's like, you know, I think, for example, with the keyboards and laptops with no ports or whatever, I think the company more or less knew there was a problem there.
01:20:28 ◼ ► But, solving it, you're not going to tell Johnny Ive you can't have his thin keyboard and then you're not going to tell the engineer organization that they need to stop trying to make the thin keyboard because they're not doing things.
01:20:38 ◼ ► It's like, you're kind of stuck where you're like, I don't want to make these people angry because I actually want Johnny to stay because I need him to build Apple Park or whatever the hell.
01:20:46 ◼ ► Like, it's a difficult situation, but, like, knowing that you have some weak area, what you do as a CEO or vice president or whatever is you look down the org chart and you find the person that you think, this person knows what they're doing.
01:21:16 ◼ ► And they'll tell that person, in addition to your current responsibilities, take some time and go over there and fix that part of the org.
01:21:28 ◼ ► But, again, even if Ternus wasn't going to become CEO, just simply having him say, like, you were in charge of this part of our company that's done great.
01:21:46 ◼ ► But, can you go over there and, like, just fix stuff and, like, just figure it out and just, like, make it better?
01:21:55 ◼ ► And, again, we don't have privy to, you know, we don't know what's going inside the company.
01:22:03 ◼ ► But, like, as Marco said, from the outside, it sure looks like we're having a lot of issues in design.
01:22:14 ◼ ► And the things we know about those names make us think that Apple will be making different decisions related to design in the future.
01:22:30 ◼ ► But it seems like things are changing in a direction that makes us out here who are dissatisfied with design happier.
01:22:37 ◼ ► And if that's the result of John Ternus parachuting in, even though the org chart hasn't changed and just being like, oh, I'm your executive sponsor or whatever.
01:22:58 ◼ ► Like, was he the one who said, there's a bunch of great designers out there who love our platform.
01:23:08 ◼ ► Like, it's like the AI problem, except for what was supposed to be Apple's core competency, right?
01:23:17 ◼ ► Everyone, you know, who's good, like, there's all these rumors of, like, just brain drain from Apple.
01:23:22 ◼ ► People either get rich and leave Apple and go do something else, or they build their skills at Apple and decide to go elsewhere, or they get more money somewhere.
01:23:29 ◼ ► Like, if ever Apple is going to overpay people to come back to the company to fix things, it would be, we're having problems.
01:23:40 ◼ ► And, you know, I mean, we have Steve LeMay, whose name we can't remember, and Sebastian DeWitt, whose name I can't pronounce.
01:23:51 ◼ ► It's two people that we know about, but, like, things seem to be moving in the right direction.
01:23:57 ◼ ► Obviously, we won't see the result of any of this stuff for a long time, so jury's still out, but this is encouraging news.
01:24:03 ◼ ► And, yes, Marco did hoist up the Halide developer hiring up to the top, but there's a little bit more to the story.
01:24:13 ◼ ► Even with hardware chief John Ternus now overseeing the operation, there's no single design decision-maker at Apple.
01:24:20 ◼ ► During the Steve Jobs era, the company co-founder was firmly in charge, but after his passing, the ultimate design arbiter was Johnny Ive.
01:24:28 ◼ ► Besides Ternus, software head Greg Federighi and marketing chief Greg Joswiak, and even services boss Eddie Q, to some extent, all have sway.
01:24:39 ◼ ► Federighi is the chief influence on the look and feel of software, and Joswiak is an important voice across the board.
01:24:44 ◼ ► Of course, the heads of Apple's design teams, Molly Anderson and now Steve LeMay, have their recommendations as well.
01:24:51 ◼ ► Under the new arrangement, they're now managed by Ternus, but continue to officially report to CEO Tim Cook.
01:24:56 ◼ ► Yeah, so that's an interesting breakdown of who that is not technically in charge of design has influence.
01:25:02 ◼ ► And it makes sense that Ternus, because he's the hardware guy, would be able to give his two cents on any hardware design stuff.
01:25:13 ◼ ► And then Joswiak, because he's marketing, would say, you know, I want everything to be teddy bears because people love teddy bears, right?
01:25:24 ◼ ► So, like, the old way this was, where the CEO was, you know, the entire company was run off the taste of the CEO.
01:25:33 ◼ ► Obviously, the minuses where you get stitched leather, but the presses was that Steve Jobs had a pretty good batting average.
01:25:44 ◼ ► Whether what he wanted was good or not, there was no dilly-dallying and no real committees.
01:25:50 ◼ ► I mean, I'm sure there was committees below him, but he got presented with stuff and he said yes or no.
01:25:54 ◼ ► The stories when he was like, had one foot out the door for seemingly years, was like, he'd just be hanging out at his place in San Francisco.
01:26:06 ◼ ► But this new system they're describing doesn't really reassure me, which is like a whole bunch of people who are not designers offering their opinions on designs offered to them by designers.
01:26:19 ◼ ► But, like, if it's Molly Anderson and Steve LeMay arguing with Eddie Q about design, I'm like, Eddie, just, like, I mean, in some respects, like, the designers should have the most sway here.
01:26:32 ◼ ► You can give your opinions and whatever, but, like, in the end, but unfortunately, org chart wise, everybody on that list is above Steve LeMay and Molly Anderson, who are the only actual designers.
01:26:43 ◼ ► And honestly, I don't want Greg Joswiak, Eddie Q, and Craig Federighi and Ternus overriding Steve LeMay and Molly Anderson.
01:26:52 ◼ ► On the other hand, when they delegated to Alan Dye and let him do what he want, he made bad decisions.
01:26:56 ◼ ► So, I'm not sure what to do about this org chart, but if German's reporting here is true, it is a very interesting sort of stew of people that makes it very difficult to know who to blame for things that Apple does that you don't like design-wise.
01:27:13 ◼ ► I think it's, you know, standard leadership is, like, the CEO and the top execs are not going to be specialists in all areas, and so you have to be able to identify and hire good people at every level below you.
01:27:25 ◼ ► Like, set things up in place that, like, you hire good execs, and they hire good VPs, and they hire good men.
01:27:31 ◼ ► You know, you hire good people because you're outsourcing that decision-making to them, and you can't do everything.
01:27:39 ◼ ► Well, right, but then also, you know, part of the process is, like, every part of that stack, as you go up the chain, you need to be able to trust the people who are experts.
01:27:51 ◼ ► So, like, you know, like, the CEO needs to be able to trust some of the decision-making to the level below them, and then they need to trust some of the decision-making to the level below them until you get to the actual experts that know what they're talking about.
01:28:06 ◼ ► So, like, Steve Jobs didn't know how to, you know, grind the corners down on a computer case to make it round, but he knew, like, you know, somebody at some point brought him the idea of a roundy computer case, and he's like, yes, that's great.
01:28:20 ◼ ► We're going to do that, and we're going to do it with, you know, my ideals and qualities and whatever.
01:28:29 ◼ ► You need to have people who can do it, and you need to trust them and serve as, like, an editor and a guiding voice.
01:28:34 ◼ ► And so, as long as the people at the top can do that, and as long as the people below them can work with that dynamic, that can produce great outcomes.
01:28:42 ◼ ► It's just a question of, you know, I think we've seen times where that dynamic wasn't working very well.
01:28:49 ◼ ► Like, one of the things that we've heard a lot about Tim Cook's leadership style is this repeated thing we've heard over and over again, which is, don't bring me problems.
01:29:14 ◼ ► Kind of like that kind of, like, very, like, cold, stern, like, strict and unwavering way.
01:29:21 ◼ ► Well, does the combination of that and don't bring me problems, does that sound like a kind of environment that creates good collaboration and decision-making when things aren't obvious what to do or in areas that he doesn't care that much about?
01:29:40 ◼ ► And so one of the things that we have also heard is that by pushing problems down in the stack, you create more dysfunction in other ways.
01:29:51 ◼ ► So by bringing problems up into the leadership roles, by letting the leaders, like, better engage with that kind of stuff, and by maybe having a new CEO coming that might have a different style of dealing with that kind of thing, could be better.
01:30:08 ◼ ► It could result in less weird infighting and divisional problems, you know, maybe the whole thing with Apple Intelligence and, like, you know, John Gianandrea's group versus Craig Federighi's group.
01:30:17 ◼ ► Like, maybe that wouldn't have happened that way if the CEO was less about don't bring me problems and more about, hey, let's look at this thing holistically and figure it out.
01:30:25 ◼ ► So I'm actually very excited about a lot of these changes coming up probably, including stuff like that that we will never even hear about, at least not for years, of just very basic differences in, like, how Ternus operates almost anything versus how Tim Cook operates almost anything.
01:30:44 ◼ ► And that's, again, this is part of why I'm excited about Cook's hopefully soon departure.
01:30:53 ◼ ► This could go a very different way because we don't yet know what kind of leader Ternus will be given that kind of escalation and responsibilities.
01:31:01 ◼ ► But I think we can look at a lot of the dynamics that we've seen in Apple during the Cook tenure, some of which have been great.
01:31:10 ◼ ► And some of which have been problematic or inefficient or have had, you know, other non-ideal outcomes.
01:31:21 ◼ ► Yeah, it's difficult to tell from the outside whether Steve LeMay, not Steve LeMay, Ternus was deployed.
01:31:31 ◼ ► Whether Ternus was deployed by Cook to solve a problem or whether Ternus was lobbying up the management chain and saying, we've got a design problem.
01:31:42 ◼ ► Because, you know, yes, part of being leadership is knowing how to hire and delegate or whatever.
01:31:50 ◼ ► And a lot of the times, especially even in Steve Jobs' case, like you said, it'll be like people are bringing things, presenting things to higher ups all the time.
01:31:59 ◼ ► Steve Jobs had a good ability to, when presented with the 75 things that people in his organization were doing, he would see one of them and Darth Vader style say, that's it.
01:32:12 ◼ ► He sees, you know, he sees the gumdrop computer in Johnny Ives' lab along with 8,000 other things that Johnny Ives showed him and said, this is it.
01:32:28 ◼ ► And because, you know, being able to detect whether it's like, this is a thing that I think people will like.
01:32:36 ◼ ► Like the whole big formula of like identifying that versus Cook, where I think Cook was like glasses, it's going to be the future.
01:32:59 ◼ ► The glasses that Tim seemed to be one of Tim Cook's babies, not currently possible in the way that Tim Cook wants to make them.
01:33:10 ◼ ► So with Ternus, it's like, okay, well, if Cook just sick Ternus on this to say, we've got a design problem, go solve it.
01:33:17 ◼ ► I would love it even more if Ternus was telling everybody who would listen to him, we've got a design problem.
01:33:23 ◼ ► And then the people said to him, oh, okay, well, if you think we have a design problem, you go fix it.
01:33:53 ◼ ► Yeah, but he's just saying he doesn't want to be a referee for a bunch of infighting below them.
01:33:57 ◼ ► And when they say, don't bring me problems, it's kind of like, look, it's your job to work this out.
01:34:00 ◼ ► Like, don't constantly run to daddy when you have any kind of conflict, because it's exhausting for me, and it's not you people doing your job.
01:34:11 ◼ ► But, like, that attitude is trying to discourage the anti-pattern, which is anytime there's any kind of issue and people can't agree, they immediately run up the org chart and say, well, fine, our boss will decide for both of us.
01:34:25 ◼ ► I don't know what you've heard about the don't bring me problems thing, but I feel like that is mostly a healthy dynamic within companies.
01:34:36 ◼ ► It's just saying part of being at this level of management is taking responsibility and working things out amongst yourself, which is, you know, why?
01:34:45 ◼ ► It's like, we can't have this thing where every time anything comes up, you two fight tooth and nail and immediately run to me and say, decide which one of us do you love more?
01:34:58 ◼ ► But, yeah, I hope Ternus is able to recognize problems before Tim Cook, which is not hard, but still.
01:35:06 ◼ ► And I hope he has been lobbying to, like, you know, I know I'm not in that part of the org, but, like, I hope, like, you know, we say Tim Cook reading the room or having his finger on the pulse.
01:35:15 ◼ ► Like, I really hope this is for the one thing I hope for Ternus is that he is better able to accurately assess at any given time, how is Apple doing?
01:35:24 ◼ ► That's really hard to do when you're high up in New York because it's kind of part of your job is to be like rah-rah Apple or whatever.
01:35:38 ◼ ► Tim Cook at various times seems to be distracted by his various money-making schemes and other things.
01:35:48 ◼ ► What about our, like, why do people buy our products and are we selling products that fulfill that promise?
01:35:53 ◼ ► And, you know, like, take his eye off the ball with the Mac for such a long time, take his eye off the ball on design.
01:35:58 ◼ ► Like, just not understanding how developers' attitude towards Apple, I think, to his grave, he will go to his grave, not understanding how much developers dislike Apple because of the decisions he's made for most of his tenure.
01:36:36 ◼ ► I hope instead he has been telling everyone who would listen to him that we need to do something about design.
01:36:44 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, I, I feel like this is slightly ham-fisted insofar as everyone knows what's going on here.
01:36:54 ◼ ► And I know it's not quite that simple because, you know, once they start really embracing it and really properly announcing who's next, that gets the SEC involved.
01:37:02 ◼ ► There's a lot more to it than even I'm aware of, but it is kind of funny, this like cloak and dagger thing that they're trying to pull off, even though everyone seems to know what direction the wind is blowing.
01:37:14 ◼ ► And like I said, just because he's being tapped to do this, it may just be, oh, he's, he's the most competent lieutenant being asked to do this.
01:37:20 ◼ ► But of course, we're going to ask this other person to be CEO, which it seems unlikely, but you never know.
01:37:29 ◼ ► And then with regard to Cook's departure, CEO, Apple told shareholders this month, writes Mark Gurman, that its current chairman, Art Levinson, would remain in his role past the company's February shareholder meeting, despite the fact that he's now 75, the usual retirement age for directors.
01:37:49 ◼ ► Hey, look, I'm just happy this is, you know, that there's, there's obvious signs that this is in motion.
01:37:55 ◼ ► Now, this, whether or not, you know, Art Levinson is there for another year or another six months, who knows?
01:38:06 ◼ ► All this, all this says is that he is not being forced to retire by their original rules, because again, like, you know, Apple makes the rules, you can change them whenever they want.
01:38:19 ◼ ► I still think the most likely outcome here is sometime soon, Tim Cook replaces Art Levinson as chairman of the board, and John Turner becomes CEO.
01:38:36 ◼ ► They are happy to wait what seems like an eternity to us to, to move on something or to resolve an issue, to issue an update to a product, you know, whatever it is.
01:38:49 ◼ ► They do things on their timeline, and they don't like having anyone else influence their timeline.
01:38:55 ◼ ► So whatever Cook's plan is for the succession, it's, he's going to take his time, and he's going to do it the way he wants to do it.
01:39:04 ◼ ► And given the gravity of the, of that situation, I think that's the right move that, you know, you know, I will not say good things about Tim Cook when they're not warranted.
01:39:13 ◼ ► But in this particular way, he is a very efficient leader or a very effective leader in terms of like, when he has a plan on his timeline, he will stick to it.
01:39:30 ◼ ► And I'm sure, and it seems like from everything so far, with the various executive retirements and different transitions and everything, it seems like he is executing on a plan that has been carefully considered, and it's going to be on his timeline.
01:39:44 ◼ ► And it didn't seem like he was going to leave like in January, the way the original rumors said about like, because of, because of the chairman of the board age requirement they had.
01:40:05 ◼ ► They don't need to wait until a one-year anniversary of this extension for Art Levinson or anything like that.
01:40:14 ◼ ► I still think it's, you know, this month was aggressive, but it could still be this year or next year.
01:40:22 ◼ ► Yeah, I think one of Tim Cook's strengths is the sort of bird's eye view of the sort of macroeconomic picture and where Apple fits into it, which is why he's been so successful in making money and all that other stuff.
01:40:33 ◼ ► And it's also part of his blind spots with China because it just makes so much sense in an economic sense.
01:40:43 ◼ ► But, like, this transition is all about, like, I'm sure he has in his own mind, you know, ideally, this is when the transition would happen in terms of stuff I probably don't understand in terms of, like, you know, commodity deals and the way the market is moving and how Apple is positioned.
01:41:01 ◼ ► And, like, minimizing the impact to the company's economics, because there's always going to be some hit during the transition because there's uncertainty and everything like that.
01:41:13 ◼ ► And it's something that he's probably one of the only people, maybe with Jeff Williams, in the world who even understands, who holds the entirety of Apple's economic engine in their mind and the whole world market and all the political stuff or whatever and deciding, when can we do this switcheroo?
01:41:37 ◼ ► He's certainly not going to rush it, but, like, kind of like the blind spot with China, it's like, yeah, everything's great.
01:41:45 ◼ ► But if you don't pay attention to the downsides, one day you're going to wake up and it's going to be a big deal.
01:41:50 ◼ ► And it's like, if he takes too long and is like, I just want it to be just right or whatever, it's like at a certain point, various crises the company might be having should take precedence over his desire to make a smooth transition.
01:42:02 ◼ ► Because, obviously, if there are any other crises that come up, as if, you know, Alan Dye leaving and the designed thing and Apple Intel, as if we don't have enough already.
01:42:10 ◼ ► But, like, anytime something like that happens, it's like, okay, I guess, well, the transition will have to wait a little bit because we have to sort this out.
01:42:17 ◼ ► And at a certain point, which I think we're long past, you staying is the biggest problem.
01:42:29 ◼ ► And he's like, whatever his deadline in his head is, and it's like, I'll try to find the perfect time.
01:42:33 ◼ ► But, honestly, it's definitely going to happen within the next, you know, X number of years or months.
01:42:38 ◼ ► And fingers crossed that he finds a time where he feels like it's the right time and he makes it happen because he needs to go.
01:42:45 ◼ ► I mean, if you would have asked me, you know, maybe six months ago before any of the rumors started, you know, when do I think Tim Cook might retire if it's going to be sometime soon?
01:43:06 ◼ ► I mean, that and that, you know, maybe he just doesn't want to do it that long because that's, you know, unfortunately, we still have probably three more years of that.
01:43:21 ◼ ► So I don't think that's the plan now because I don't think we'd be hearing all this all this shuffling around and all these moves if it was that far off.
01:43:31 ◼ ► But certainly if the, you know, the the the Apple defenders and the Tim Cook defenders with all this Trump stuff, they point to some kind of role that Tim Cook is like heroically taking the heat so that, you know, it shields the rest of the company or maybe, you know, he takes the heat and then he leaves, you know, at the right time or whatever.
01:43:51 ◼ ► If that is true, which I honestly don't think that's the whole story, if it's even any of the story, but if that is true, that timeline is too long for this, that that doesn't fit what's what seems to be happening here.
01:44:14 ◼ ► How can you how can you this day you sit in the CEO seat and say, OK, Tim, I'm going to do everything the opposite of you did.
01:44:22 ◼ ► Well, but, you know, in terms of politics, like I think Tim staying as chairman of the board for a few years, that could he maybe the plan is he stays on as chairman of the board.
01:44:45 ◼ ► So it's like the fact that he's no longer CEO is immaterial because Trump won't know or care about that.
01:44:50 ◼ ► And like and that, you know, from if if Cook wanted to isolate Apple from at more of that heat than it needs, maybe that's what he's thinking.
01:45:15 ◼ ► And so if his plan is to to be like the hate sink, so to speak, it's going to be it's going to have to at least include some of his time as chairman of the board.
01:45:37 ◼ ► One of the many perks of membership is ATP overtime, our weekly bonus topic, which tends to be approximately 21 minutes of bonus topics every week.
01:45:47 ◼ ► This week on overtime, it's going to be talking about the new ownership of TikTok in the US and all of that whole thing.
01:46:34 ◼ ► You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-G, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
01:46:52 ◼ ► Alright, I don't want to belabor this, but it would be remiss of us not to at least acknowledge that what's going on in Minnesota, and what's going on with ICE, and not the ICE I was dealing with,
01:47:21 ◼ ► but the national ICE, it's terrible, it's disgusting, all three of us absolutely stand in unison with the people of Minnesota, that we are disgusted by what our government has become.
01:47:35 ◼ ► Marco was tweeting a day or two ago about how it seems bananas that anyone would travel to our country these days, and I echo what Marco says.
01:47:45 ◼ ► It's awful. It's really, really bad, and Tim Cook is not making things a whole lot better.
01:47:51 ◼ ► Now, granted, he's not actually affecting things, as far as we can tell, but it's certainly really gross to go from the second or third shooting in as many weeks to,
01:48:09 ◼ ► It seems like, you know, there's a lot of Apple employees who don't like it either. We'll put a link about that in the show notes.
01:48:14 ◼ ► Tim wrote an extremely mealy-mouthed memo about it. We'll put a link to that in the show notes.
01:48:19 ◼ ► It's just, it's gross, especially when you compare to his letter after George Floyd was killed, which was much, much, much better.
01:48:27 ◼ ► It's all gross top to bottom. I'm going to stop talking and let Marco and John take a turn, but again, we're going to try to make this quick, not because it's not important, but because we're trying to not be total Debbie Downers over here.
01:48:38 ◼ ► We will have an actual after show on a cheerier topic, but it's hard not to talk about this, like U.S. citizens being murdered by the government and then the government refusing to even have an investigation, have an independent investigation of that, and smearing the victims, saying they're terrible.
01:48:54 ◼ ► It's just terrible things are happening here, and it's not a good situation, and it's affecting everybody, even if you're not where this is happening, because it could happen to you, and apparently there's no recourse if it does, and so we're all feeling kind of crappy about it.
01:49:07 ◼ ► And the Tim Cook-Molania thing, like, I'm sure he's loving this, because it's like, you know, how long has this movie premiere thing been scheduled, and then, like, the government's got to murder people just, like, exactly around.
01:49:22 ◼ ► It's part, it's, you know, Tim Cook's strategy about this has not changed, and it continues to be a terrible strategy and continues to make him and Apple look terrible, and, you know, this story from The Intercept about Apple employees being cranky about it, like, you know, it's not just people outside Apple.
01:49:37 ◼ ► People inside Apple feel that way, too, which is another reason that the sooner Tim Cook can leave, the better chance the next CEO has to, you know, keep these employees from leaving the company, right?
01:49:50 ◼ ► You don't want your employees being this angry at your CEO, because they'll leave, and you need them, because they do the work.
01:50:00 ◼ ► I will point you to two posts by John Gruber over the last day or so that were excellent about Tim Cook's ridiculous statement about being heartbroken, prayers and deepest sympathies.
01:50:32 ◼ ► I know—look, part of it is he's trying to protect Apple in the Trump era and this, and you kind of have to just suck up a lot to do that.
01:50:46 ◼ ► Apple has the government do things like block, you know, competition from, like, Huawei and stuff from being used.
01:50:51 ◼ ► Like, Apple has the Justice Department now kind of just disappearing things from being looked at.
01:50:57 ◼ ► Like, Apple benefits a lot from government stuff that is giving them advantages, unfair advantages or illegal advantages sometimes.
01:51:09 ◼ ► Tim Cook is getting a lot of favors from the government that help Apple continue doing things that are kind of despicable.
01:51:16 ◼ ► He's not this wonderful leader who's throwing himself under the bus out of his own—out of the grace of his heart.
01:51:22 ◼ ► He is a CEO who extracts advantages from the government by trading favors and gold trinkets and BS like that.
01:51:39 ◼ ► No, but I have a much cheerier actual tech-related after show that we should move on to.
01:52:11 ◼ ► Oh, you are—I think you and I wrestle for who is more frugal, and I think you usually win, but it's a toss-up.
01:52:20 ◼ ► But in terms of value for the money, there's a few things in the tech business that many of us agree are great values.
01:52:29 ◼ ► I think one of those is paying for the no ads thing on YouTube, whatever they call it this year.
01:52:36 ◼ ► And I think number two thing is whatever your AI of choice is, buy whatever their 20-ish bucks a month plan is that gets you access to the good models and removes restrictions and stuff.
01:53:12 ◼ ► And so I just—I scanned it, and I took a screenshot without any of, like, my account numbers, just, like, the middle of the paper that shows, like, you know, this table of values and headings and stuff.
01:53:23 ◼ ► And I pasted it into ChatGPT, and I said, can you explain this to me and tell me what this means for this year and what this number means over here?
01:53:29 ◼ ► Like, and it gave me this entire breakdown of what every single term means and how these numbers work out over time and what, you know, what the different aspects, pros and cons of different things are.
01:53:42 ◼ ► But, like, this—like, again, like, I know this is not—this is not about my experience with AI this week.
01:53:49 ◼ ► But my experiences with AI continue to be extremely positive, and I cannot tell you the difference it is making in my life.
01:54:19 ◼ ► I mean, look, no matter who I ask for information, like, I actually—I asked a financial advisor recently a couple of questions, and it turned out later that part of what he said was wrong.
01:54:41 ◼ ► Like, setting aside the real trick with all these things is obviously you need a way to tell, like, whether the answer is right.
01:54:48 ◼ ► Like, I think I talked about this—maybe it was on Rectivs about, you know, kind of like in the cryptography thing where it's like it's really hard to derive the answer, but it should be really fast to check it.
01:55:02 ◼ ► And that's why I always say, whether you're asking a person or asking a financial advisor or asking anybody, any kind of professional, like, or hiring somebody or whatever, if you hire someone to fix your fridge and they fix your fridge, you'll know real fast whether you fix it.
01:55:16 ◼ ► Now, there's varying degrees, like, maybe it breaks next year because they did something badly or whatever.
01:55:19 ◼ ► But at the very least, if you ask someone a question or hire someone to do a thing, you can tell whether they did it if it's the type of thing where it's like, this is broken and I need you to fix it.
01:55:32 ◼ ► With other stuff that's more abstract, it gets a little bit loosey-goosey because you're like, well, if I just believe everything you say and continue along that path for a year, maybe it will lead me down a path where we went astray two months ago and I didn't realize it because it's totally an area that I don't understand.
01:55:49 ◼ ► I'm glad that you're continuing to have your friend that you talk with that gives you plausible answers, Marco.
01:55:54 ◼ ► And a lot of the time, you can just immediately check whether it's right and that is helping you and I get that.
01:56:00 ◼ ► Like, as I'm using it to do stuff, like, the reason I paid more, I already had the $20 a month thing, but we were getting it for free as part of a past Claude Code sponsorship thing.
01:56:34 ◼ ► And that is the $100 gives you five times what you get for the $20 and the $200 gives you 10 times, I think.
01:58:08 ◼ ► It should be easy to do it in Node because that's like an actual implementation with like
01:58:18 ◼ ► And then I had to decide like, okay, well, how, how should an account system work on like
01:58:29 ◼ ► So first of all, you know, status board, its persistence layer is essentially, it's R2,
01:59:00 ◼ ► One of the, one of the many great things about pass keys is if there's like a data breach
01:59:15 ◼ ► I'm like, I have no problem putting, you know, public key, pass key stuff in a JSON file
01:59:30 ◼ ► Like if it's, if it's a website that doesn't let anybody in, but there's no accounts on it.
01:59:37 ◼ ► I'm like, well, I guess I need like a bootstrap mode where like when there's zero accounts,
01:59:41 ◼ ► you get an account creation screen, but as soon as there's non-zero number of accounts,
01:59:53 ◼ ► And then I was like, well, what if I wanted, like, what if other people in my family want
01:59:59 ◼ ► They can't make one because once I had the first account, they would just get a login screen.
02:00:07 ◼ ► It's not a public website because if there was a sign up thing that anybody could go there
02:00:11 ◼ ► But I just want the people who I want to allow to sign up and I could create the account for
02:00:23 ◼ ► You can make them an account and with a temporary password and tell them what the password is
02:00:34 ◼ ► So then I came up with this like token-based system where you can create a token with a
02:00:42 ◼ ► It's just a basically like a secure, you know, a secret URL, security through obscurity.
02:00:58 ◼ ► If I wanted to give you two accounts, I would make a token with two things, give the URL to
02:01:11 ◼ ► Because I'm like, well, maybe if you want a password, you can add one if you really want
02:01:17 ◼ ► It's like a little miniature account system that supports pass keys that's in front of my
02:01:25 ◼ ► And around while I was doing this, I'm like, I have another idea for a different project.
02:01:41 ◼ ► I'm probably going to want to use this whole pass key account system that I just made for
02:02:08 ◼ ► Because once, because if you're a programmer, once you have two things to use the same thing,
02:02:19 ◼ ► I've heard from a lot of people who are like, here is the tutelage that I put Claude Code
02:02:25 ◼ ► under and it felt like giant, giant, uh, essays that I write it about how to be a good programmer.
02:02:30 ◼ ► But I feel like in the training day, there should be something that says, you know what?
02:02:33 ◼ ► I don't want to open up a source code file and see that the same seven lines of code are
02:02:49 ◼ ► Apparently Claude Code has no problem updating the same seven lines of code in a thousand places
02:02:59 ◼ ► But anyway, like, I don't know what's making it do this, but the code it writes just makes
02:03:05 ◼ ► And I just like, I have to spend some quality time refactoring and saying, you're doing
02:03:13 ◼ ► Look, see, see how much eventually I just went and did a bunch of stuff by hand because
02:03:25 ◼ ► I'm kind of playing it like a video game where it's like, yeah, I could just do this myself.
02:03:51 ◼ ► Like there's no like, you know, I don't know if you remember MFC where like generate source
02:03:58 ◼ ► If a new version of MFC comes out and it generates different source code, that doesn't help
02:04:06 ◼ ► That's what a library is, you know, and with node packages and stuff, it was just like, oh,
02:04:14 ◼ ► Because if I go back into the framework and I change this character here, that's not reflected
02:04:35 ◼ ► And the second little app that I wanted to make, it was actually something that someone
02:04:41 ◼ ► suggested to me while I, after I had already made it, they said, hey, you know what you
02:04:59 ◼ ► Something to do with like membership tracking, but that's the, that's the status board thing.
02:05:11 ◼ ► Every time we do a tier list, I have to go like with the Chrome dev tools and like hide
02:05:17 ◼ ► I turn on my ad blocker and then I go in there and manually edit the dom to get all of the
02:05:28 ◼ ► So, so like, as we do the tier list thing, like the, like the stupid buttons and copyright
02:05:39 ◼ ► And then I come back and see Chrome has taken that tab out of memory and it reloads the page
02:05:52 ◼ ► And then I use the screen capture within the, you know, carefully drag out the outline and
02:05:57 ◼ ► And then make sure that after I drag all the little tiles up that the board looks clean and
02:06:05 ◼ ► But make sure you can see all the, you know, all the, the, the one is I fill the tiers.
02:06:14 ◼ ► And I made it look pretty much exactly like tier maker because tier maker is sort of the
02:06:19 ◼ ► And for historical continuity purposes purposes with ATP, but anyway, now I have a tier list
02:06:23 ◼ ► website that has configurable aspect ratios, auto zooming to make sure that all the tiles
02:06:51 ◼ ► And the iPad, which was a pain in the butt for Claude to do because yeah, that's another
02:06:56 ◼ ► thing with, with the, like, it saved me a lot of time on this too, because like to make
02:07:00 ◼ ► Like the person who sent in the thing that I made this status board, you can make it in
02:07:09 ◼ ► It's like, I was thinking when you program something yourself, like say you're doing drag
02:07:15 ◼ ► If you haven't done that recently, maybe you're not familiar with the modern APIs for doing
02:07:21 ◼ ► So if you were a human programmer doing it, you're like, okay, I'm going to start simple.
02:07:45 ◼ ► Now they need to move out of the way when they're like, you would build it up a piece at a time.
02:08:25 ◼ ► So I spent a long time with Cloud Code working on drag and drop and scrolling and hover effects
02:08:44 ◼ ► I needed a framework because once you got two apps, you need to factor it out into a framework.
02:08:56 ◼ ► And the next time we do a tier list as an ATP member special, which won't be next month because
02:09:07 ◼ ► And I will say the one thing I stopped myself from doing was, and I may be able to revisit
02:09:15 ◼ ► What if I did this as a multi-user thing where all three of you could be, you know, all three
02:09:20 ◼ ► of us could be on it at the same time and we could all be dragging things at the same time
02:09:30 ◼ ► Like we talk through the things, but I was like, I don't want to do that mostly because
02:09:34 ◼ ► I don't want to upgrade to a different thing, a storage thing and trying to do it with JSON
02:09:45 ◼ ► So that invalidates yours and you drop it and it goes back to its original position or goes
02:09:55 ◼ ► I, I, I held off because, because honestly, I feel like that the cloud code would do a good
02:10:08 ◼ ► I mean, I, I did basic mutual exclusion with the JSON thing because you can do, um, conditional
02:10:13 ◼ ► puts to basically say, uh, don't accept this put unless the content is exactly how it was
02:10:23 ◼ ► Uh, but I did, I, at the very least I did that, but this is a single user system with a single
02:10:29 ◼ ► I've been using the 91 car logos as my test case for it and, uh, it's shaping up pretty
02:10:39 ◼ ► Like it has done, it has helped me a little bit, but honestly, I'm thinking mostly like,
02:10:46 ◼ ► I mean, I guess it's for the show where I talk about it as well, but it is very much like
02:10:57 ◼ ► And it's kind of fun, especially if you're a programmer and you know how you would do it
02:11:10 ◼ ► Like it lowers the bar significantly for new programmers and for existing programmers looking
02:11:23 ◼ ► grunt work for a lot of these, these things, what it does is it makes it, it makes it worthwhile
02:11:48 ◼ ► So sitting here now, do you plan to fall back for, to either the $20 a month or free plan
02:11:58 ◼ ► Like, I think I've learned how to use it more efficiently and I don't have any other big
02:12:02 ◼ ► And honestly, like it's been a big learning curve for me of like when to say uncle and dive
02:12:09 ◼ ► in, like, for example, I spent literally hours today, I believe it was three hours fixing
02:12:17 ◼ ► this cloud code CSS because the CSS it made, oh my God, it's just like, like it's like brute
02:12:39 ◼ ► bazillion randomly named styles connected to a bazillion randomly named stuff, especially
02:12:47 ◼ ► I should have counted how many selectors it was, but like just pages and pages and pages
02:12:52 ◼ ► And I spent three hours manually consolidating them down into one sane CSS file that like,
02:13:06 ◼ ► And yes, you can keep the same color up to date in 500 places because you're a computer,
02:13:16 ◼ ► Because I've spent three hours editing, consolidating three CSS files into one CSS file on the framework
02:13:23 ◼ ► and carefully doing it and changing the markup so that the appearance stays exactly the same
02:13:27 ◼ ► because it made it look the way I would say, make this look like this, make this look like that.
02:13:34 ◼ ► I know I said to make that look like that and it does, but this is not, it's, it's, it's madness.
02:13:55 ◼ ► Oh, and by the way, one, remember I said that Claude erased my entire directory or I suspect
02:14:04 ◼ ► Well, I have something that I can conclusively blame on Claude, which is we were working together
02:14:08 ◼ ► And at a certain point, despite me literally never having said anything that even remotely
02:14:19 ◼ ► I'm like, I had, then I put, I put a sternly worded instruction and all the Claude.md files
02:14:27 ◼ ► I will do that manually, but it wasn't a big deal because it's a private website or whatever.
02:14:57 ◼ ► Um, it's, I've had it code a couple of minor things and what I've decided to do, this is
02:15:07 ◼ ► of working on the folder, the directory that I typically do my work in, you know, when I
02:15:16 ◼ ► the repo somewhere else so that it's off in its own little world and it's doing its own
02:15:22 ◼ ► And then I have it make whatever modifications it wants to make to the files in that folder.
02:15:27 ◼ ► And then I'll typically go and do a manual diff deliberately, you know, as a check to make
02:15:41 ◼ ► And I'm sure with time, as I get used to cloud code and get used to, you know, working with
02:15:46 ◼ ► my new little buddy, I'll, I'll get better at doing larger and offering it larger and bigger
02:15:54 ◼ ► Um, and, and I think I've been impressed enough that I would probably pony up for like Marco
02:16:01 ◼ ► Uh, I can't imagine ponying up for the a hundred dollar a month plan unless I'm doing something,
02:16:11 ◼ ► If you want to see what it looks like, it should look very familiar because I was basically
02:16:14 ◼ ► saying this has to look pixel for pixel, like tier maker.com because that is the canonical
02:16:29 ◼ ► I did that by the way, like I've had varying success with various AI things where you send
02:16:38 ◼ ► I carefully composed these screenshots and what it made look absolutely nothing like the screenshot.
02:16:53 ◼ ► I can turn on an outline that shows me exactly where I need to do the screenshot capture.
02:17:10 ◼ ► I mean that in a, you know, hey, this is something that we're all three of us going to use.
02:17:26 ◼ ► And I know John went through this a minute ago, but truly he goes through an immense amount of pain to get these tier lists to work.
02:17:38 ◼ ► And I'm so glad that hopefully, knock on wood, it will be, it will be a lot better now.
02:17:46 ◼ ► And now it'll be even more fun because I'll get to use my own app to do it and not that terrible app that's there.
02:17:55 ◼ ► But like, so I don't have to do a screenshot of, I can just export an image of the final tier list, which is what we want.
02:18:10 ◼ ► So we can, I can name the sessions after the episode and we'll always have the final state of the tier list saved in the thing.
02:18:20 ◼ ► So if I wanted to, if I wanted to share a tier list, but these are all, it's all private data.
02:18:25 ◼ ► You can't get this unless you're signed in, but I do probably want to make a way to have publicly accessible URLs.
02:18:30 ◼ ► It would be cool to deploy this, you know, under the ATP domain some way, somehow be that, you know, some subdomain or, you know,
02:18:54 ◼ ► Actually, I'm not trying to scope creepy here, despite what it sounds, but I could see it fun leaving, uh, leaving it possible to generate your own tier list.
02:19:03 ◼ ► So like, you know, if I'm a listener, I could take the same source material, generate my own, and then generate an image from that, that I could share, you know, on social media or something.
02:19:11 ◼ ► If I made this accessible and people could make accounts on it, anyone can make their own tier list and it would work fine, but I'm not doing that.
02:19:24 ◼ ► Like obviously their website is more than just this, but like if I replace these JSON files with a real database, like it's not hard to compete with a lot of these popular websites.
02:19:32 ◼ ► They're just popular because they got a good domain and they, and everybody knows about how to get there, but they're so junked up with ads and the functionality is so janky.
02:19:39 ◼ ► And like, you know, in two days I can make a thing that has more features than there, substantially more features than theirs, including ones that are specifically aimed towards a weird use case of doing screen recordings for a podcast, but no one's ever going to make that product.