00:00:00 ◼ ► this is upgrade episode 610 today's show is brought to you by delete me squarespace steam clock and factor my name is mike hurley and i am joined and i'm happy to be joined by jason snow hi jason snow hi mike hurley it's good to be back on a normal episode of upgrade yeah i missed doing a dramatic
00:00:29 ◼ ► reading uh we'll talk about that a little bit more in a bit but i have a snell talk question for you who says
00:00:34 ◼ ► bris ben who says with jason's love of space and the artemis 2 launch what are some of jason's favorite
00:00:41 ◼ ► space blogs and reporters that people should be following and i also just wanted to put this in
00:00:46 ◼ ► here in case you wanted to just talk briefly about the artemis 2 oh yeah sure um very exciting they're
00:00:51 ◼ ► going to the moon as we record this they're going by the moon like today today is moon day they're going
00:00:55 ◼ ► to fly by the moon and then come back to earth um uh i used to do podcasts with steven hackett
00:01:00 ◼ ► called liftoff people sending in messages saying are you going to bring liftoff back and it's funny
00:01:04 ◼ ► because i you you witnessed me many times refuse to declare a liftoff retired and say that maybe we
00:01:11 ◼ ► would bring it back sometime and steven would you know check the box in the cms that said retired and
00:01:15 ◼ ► uncheck it yeah and i found a strange thing when this all was happening i i uh within me where i thought
00:01:21 ◼ ► within myself and i thought no actually i'm i'm also fine that it is retired okay sorry everybody
00:01:27 ◼ ► who liked it but i have i have i have let it go um we have moved on to other things however
00:01:33 ◼ ► um i do love space stuff i think it's great and i think it's inspirational and i really like seeing
00:01:42 ◼ ► a bunch of uh scientists and stuff in my social feeds who are who are not doing the thing which is
00:01:48 ◼ ► you know we really shouldn't do any crude exploration of anywhere and only sell some robots
00:01:52 ◼ ► and just be kind of debbie downers about the whole thing i think that i think that that some human
00:01:57 ◼ ► exploration is super important because it is inspirational and because it helps us understand
00:02:01 ◼ ► more about our universe and it makes the public understand more about our universe which i think
00:02:05 ◼ ► is important like people are much more interested i think in people flying to the moon than they are in
00:02:10 ◼ ► a robot digging up things on mars even though that's super important and interesting anyway
00:02:16 ◼ ► the reporters eric berger at ars technica there's a space section on ars technica that is the best
00:02:24 ◼ ► the best so highly recommend eric berger is the primary reporter there although they have another one
00:02:30 ◼ ► whose name escapes me now sorry to that guy um but eric berger is the best he's so good at this
00:02:36 ◼ ► um and lauren grush who used to be at the virgin is now at bloomberg is my other favorite space
00:02:42 ◼ ► reporter at the moment also the new york times does a bunch of good space coverage so that's another
00:02:46 ◼ ► place to go they've got a reporter on the space beat who's pretty good um whose name also escapes
00:02:50 ◼ ► me sorry to that guy but um it's the new york times guy i i subscribe to the new york times space feed
00:02:56 ◼ ► in my rss reader in fact and and get to see a bunch of their good stories about it so um oh and the other
00:03:03 ◼ ► apple related news or at least tech related news is that they've been sending pictures back
00:03:06 ◼ ► including a really beautiful picture of the entire globe which was taken with a nikon camera because
00:03:12 ◼ ► we've got like they're not shooting on a hasselblad with film anymore like they did an apollo 8
00:03:17 ◼ ► so they've got like really nice cameras that they're taking that are well i mean the hasselblad
00:03:21 ◼ ► was a nice camera but it was a film camera and then they came and they came back and like
00:03:25 ◼ ► developed the film and went oh my god it's earth rise it's the most beautiful picture humanity's ever
00:03:29 ◼ ► taken this time they're going to be able to take better pictures even than that and they can send
00:03:34 ◼ ► them straight back to us too yeah maybe not straight back they have to like straight ish as in we'd have
00:03:39 ◼ ► to wait for them to come home to get it yeah yeah or they may be able to downlink some of them but
00:03:44 ◼ ► it'll take a while but um i also wanted to mention though i think in the apple notability is that there
00:03:49 ◼ ► are iphones on this mission it's the first iphone mission uh since i think the last shuttle launch that i saw
00:03:55 ◼ ► um they're they have all the radios turned off they're in uh what i always called it on that shuttle
00:04:00 ◼ ► mission i called spaceship mode so they have uh they have these iphone 17 pro maxes and they are
00:04:05 ◼ ► shooting uh photos with them and the best ones are they actually are using the selfie cam to take
00:04:11 ◼ ► these selfies of themselves looking out the window at the at the disk of earth and presumably they'll do
00:04:15 ◼ ► this with the moon too um and those are those are iphone photos so uh there are the iphones are
00:04:20 ◼ ► also being used that's why the iphones are there is to take photos the crew let the crew take photos of
00:04:25 ◼ ► roommates and out the window and stuff um but they also do have a like a fancy nikon digital camera
00:04:31 ◼ ► so they're not they're not just using iphone photography to take vital pictures of the moon
00:04:37 ◼ ► flyby and stuff like that they've got a nikon t5 do you think those iphones are provided by apple do
00:04:42 ◼ ► you think apple worked with nasa or all with these iphones or do you think they're just iphones i saw a
00:04:47 ◼ ► story that said that apple didn't work with nasa on it i would be i would be surprised if there
00:04:52 ◼ ► weren't some unofficial conversation going on especially since they needed to qualify them
00:04:57 ◼ ► for use on a spacecraft um i'm sure apple would help if they were asked i'm not sure if they were asked
00:05:05 ◼ ► okay because you figure pretty good marketing right right right and i'm i'm told there are two fancy
00:05:11 ◼ ► nikons to suffice it to say they're fancy nikon cameras on yeah and they're also iphones taking
00:05:15 ◼ ► photos and video and stuff and that's cool too and there'll be some amazing shots that will come back
00:05:20 ◼ ► i predict there will be an amazing shot today because they're going to try to take that earth
00:05:23 ◼ ► rice photo and that will be amazing because the whole idea of seeing the entirety of the earth
00:05:27 ◼ ► which contains all of human history as a little blue dot rising over the uh the horizon of the moon
00:05:33 ◼ ► uh will be extremely impressive so just as it was on apollo 8 apollo 8 i was saying this to steven
00:05:40 ◼ ► um apollo 8 is like all-time underrated space mission because that was the first time they sent
00:05:47 ◼ ► people around the moon and they and they actually stopped and went into orbit for a while and then
00:05:51 ◼ ► came back um and that was and that's where they shot the earth rise photo and it was the end of 1968 which
00:05:58 ◼ ► uh the legend is you know because that was such a bad year that a lot of people felt like it was a a positive
00:06:04 ◼ ► note after a terrible year um which was it's a it's a it's an all-timer of space missions so
00:06:12 ◼ ► anyway that's uh that's my space corner mike since i don't have liftoff anymore you get space corner
00:06:17 ◼ ► if you would like to send in a question of your own please go to upgradefeedback.com and you can send in
00:06:24 ◼ ► a snow talk question for us to open a future episode of the show i'd like to do some follow-up and just
00:06:31 ◼ ► first off thanks to everyone who sent us in very kind feedback about our origins of apple episode
00:06:39 ◼ ► uh last week we're so pleased that people enjoyed it so much for sure when you ask for feedback sometimes
00:06:46 ◼ ► you you know you're gonna get what you're gonna get yep but we got it and it was nice like really
00:06:51 ◼ ► really really good feedback and i'm very thankful for it and we loved it um the episode was way bigger
00:06:57 ◼ ► and we thought it was gonna be and we moved to move a lot of stuff into today it was meant to just
00:07:02 ◼ ► be like a segment of the episode but we it was just so much fun to do we just made it the whole show
00:07:07 ◼ ► um and we really hope that you enjoyed it uh we loved making it yep uh on that note you published
00:07:14 ◼ ► something on six colors about some apple history books that you've been reading and so i wanted to
00:07:20 ◼ ► put this as a link in if people want to catch up on some stuff and i did want to make a recommendation
00:07:25 ◼ ► to you for a book called icon which i i mean i've read it multiple times many years ago i don't know
00:07:33 ◼ ► how it stands up now um but i know you had spoken about that book that's coming is it called in exile
00:07:39 ◼ ► jobs jobs in exile yeah yeah yeah icon focuses on some of that stuff too and it's a lot of pixar stuff
00:07:46 ◼ ► um in that book which i think is you know obviously a really interesting important part of his story as
00:07:51 ◼ ► well as some next stuff so it's about his return basically i have it and i should read it but i have
00:08:00 ◼ ► not read it and one of the reasons is it's literally the worst title of any apple book because yeah it's
00:08:06 ◼ ► not it's not at the moment when it was released because it's icon lowercase i of course like ipod
00:08:11 ◼ ► capital c o n and when it was released it's very clear that the publisher is like he he uh
00:08:18 ◼ ► it doesn't mean i i con people i'm a con man and it's like that is not the that is not the right title
00:08:25 ◼ ► for that book no i'm sorry that you you messed it up and you you know you you messed it up so it's a bad
00:08:31 ◼ ► uh it's bad it's a bad title uh good book and uh some people feel that the second coming of steve jobs
00:08:41 ◼ ► is a better book on the same subject but i haven't read that either so okay i've got it on my list i i as
00:08:48 ◼ ► a part of this whole uh you know apple at 50 and doing that episode of upgrade and i i have been
00:08:55 ◼ ► acquiring more of these apple books that i haven't read obviously because i came up with a list of 10
00:09:01 ◼ ► books uh but there are so many so i i i've been getting more of them um it it yeah but anyway people
00:09:09 ◼ ► can check that out on six colors and i i've got a stephen hacker recommendation in there and a
00:09:14 ◼ ► like a john syracuse a recommendation in there yeah yeah i do so um there's a there's a bunch there's a
00:09:20 ◼ ► bunch of good books about apple there there are a lot first off there are a lot of books about apple
00:09:24 ◼ ► but there are a smaller number that are good books about apple yeah but they are out there
00:09:29 ◼ ► uh unfortunately one of the ones that should have been the best was one of the worst um which is the
00:09:35 ◼ ► yeah i had somebody asked me on some podcast i think it was maybe leo laporte said uh so you don't have
00:09:39 ◼ ► steve jobs by uh isaacson on on your list i'm like well two reasons one is uh it's a list about apple
00:09:46 ◼ ► books and not steve jobs biographies and two um people have lots of issues with that book so
00:09:53 ◼ ► i i mean i it's got stuff in it because of the access with steve i i used it in my script for
00:10:00 ◼ ► some of the raw material last week right like because there are things that isaac he told isaacson
00:10:04 ◼ ► there's quotes yeah there's good quotes and stuff in there but but um the problem with is that walter
00:10:10 ◼ ► isaacson doesn't understand computers i think that's the bottom line is he doesn't understand he's a
00:10:14 ◼ ► biographer but he doesn't understand computers and if you are a computer person then you can see all the
00:10:19 ◼ ► things that he says that are just like that's not right that's not what happened and uh he's
00:10:25 ◼ ► obviously blind to it because he's not he doesn't care about that but that i found that i think we all
00:10:30 ◼ ► found that a little bit troubling that there were so many things in that book that didn't seem quite
00:10:34 ◼ ► right um given his level of access and that's why i i just i view that book rightly or wrongly as a
00:10:43 ◼ ► um as a source of a source of material but not as a definitive no resource it's it's more the book
00:10:52 ◼ ► that you use to say steve jobs told isaacson this and not the book where you say just read this book
00:10:59 ◼ ► like pog's book to me is one of the things that makes pog's book so good is that especially you know
00:11:06 ◼ ► from the beginning up to the you know through the iphone again sort of less after that because of
00:11:12 ◼ ► the issues with except access and people still working at apple but like it feels to me very
00:11:17 ◼ ► definitive like you could if somebody asked me what's a book about apple history i'd say just get
00:11:21 ◼ ► pog's book because like it is the definitive the only issue with pog's book i think other than that is
00:11:26 ◼ ► that it is kind of exhaustive it's very long um there may be more information about the apple too than
00:11:31 ◼ ► people modern readers really care about but it's in there and that makes it definitive in a way
00:11:36 ◼ ► whereas the isaacson book feels very much like not definitive but a good source of material given
00:11:41 ◼ ► his access which is it's not the same yeah it is it's interesting comparing the the the response
00:11:49 ◼ ► to the pog book and the isaacson book right where it's like the isaacson book as well as getting stuff
00:11:56 ◼ ► wrong it was criticized a lot for just retelling stories everybody knew yeah and pog is doing that but
00:12:02 ◼ ► he obviously is doing a better job because that's not a criticism that is being levied at a book just
00:12:06 ◼ ► the practicality of the situation i feel i agree i would also say that yeah i think pogue i think
00:12:12 ◼ ► pogue's approach is better and i think i think pogue pogue is also writing a biography of apple
00:12:18 ◼ ► and i think that's a better approach to those stories than a biography of steve jobs yeah
00:12:22 ◼ ► uh apple has released some security updates for ios 18 after previously withholding security
00:12:30 ◼ ► updates for ios 18 pushing people to upgrade to ios 26 i know we spoke about this a few months ago and you
00:12:35 ◼ ► were uh understandably quite upset about it yeah now they've done they've gone and done what they
00:12:40 ◼ ► should have done so this is this is a a really quirky story it happened on april 1st so it happened
00:12:46 ◼ ► last week amid all the 50s hoopla uh 50th hoopla but um the short version of this story is um there
00:12:54 ◼ ► were some serious security updates that were pushed out uh that were like like like back in december
00:12:59 ◼ ► that were like for for they were very they're for like nation state actors or other groups that are
00:13:09 ◼ ► contracted with nation states it's pretty much where they came from so it's not a security issue that
00:13:14 ◼ ► broad sectors of the public would face um but what happened is although apple seems to offer plenty of
00:13:20 ◼ ► security updates on other platforms uh for the people who are like once one os version back
00:13:26 ◼ ► on ios and this is not apparently a new policy on ios beyond a very short cutoff they stop releasing
00:13:34 ◼ ► security updates for anything but the latest os that you can run and it led to the very frustrating case
00:13:40 ◼ ► where there's there was a a bulletin that came out that said this is a security serious security issue
00:13:45 ◼ ► and there was an ios 18 update that supported it but it only ran on systems not capable of running
00:13:51 ◼ ► ios 26 for systems capable iphones capable of running ios 26 you needed to update to ios 26 to get the
00:14:00 ◼ ► security update which i said was kind of ridiculous because it clearly existed for ios 18 and they were
00:14:06 ◼ ► just withholding it because if you're running one of these more modern phones you should just run ios 26
00:14:13 ◼ ► yeah there are a lot of reasons people don't want to run ios 26 i would argue that most of them aren't
00:14:17 ◼ ► very good reasons but let people have their feelings right so i've gotten you know i've gotten to
00:14:23 ◼ ► understand a little bit more about what's going on here um at least that this was not a broad attack
00:14:29 ◼ ► it was more like a very targeted nation state attack and honestly if you are the kind of person
00:14:34 ◼ ► who is going to be attacked by a nation state you're going to need you're going to want to put all
00:14:38 ◼ ► those security features on and you're going to be want to want to be on the latest version of
00:14:41 ◼ ► ios at all times because you should use that lockdown mode right is that what it's called i think
00:14:45 ◼ ► yeah exactly so 1877 which came out last month and the and the latest 26 update both address these two
00:14:56 ◼ ► scary security breaches dark sword and karuna okay so the difference is there are some in between
00:15:06 ◼ ► one of the features of ios 26 over ios 18 is every os full os version that comes out apple is looking at
00:15:15 ◼ ► the security the security team looks at the security uh state of the world and knows what exploits have
00:15:22 ◼ ► been out there that and is making like systematic adjustments to the way the os runs in order to fight
00:15:31 ◼ ► them so 26 is fundamentally more secure than 18 and so when i say there was a 26 update and an 18 update
00:15:40 ◼ ► that both address dark sword and karuna my understanding is the 1877 update is a patch right it's patching
00:15:53 ◼ ► on a leakier foundation yes than the 26 update does because the 26 update comes with a bunch of other
00:16:01 ◼ ► security features that that make it fundamentally more secure and so the message is if you're some one of
00:16:09 ◼ ► these people who's really concerned about security like even if and we'll get back to the ios 1877 update
00:16:16 ◼ ► in a second even if you update to 1877 on your iphone you are not as secure as you are on the latest 26 you're
00:16:24 ◼ ► more secure but you're not as secure as on the latest because the latest has a whole fundamental set of
00:16:30 ◼ ► security updates that 18 did never got because it was it was part of the 26 fundamentals right it's it's not
00:16:38 ◼ ► a you can't backport that stuff you can patch but you can't backport that stuff yeah i got a notification
00:16:44 ◼ ► on my iphone a week or so ago that said like your phone has received a security update and and it seemed
00:16:52 ◼ ► detached from a software update and i don't recall ever seeing this notification before it's very
00:16:59 ◼ ► specifically called out security updates and i wonder if this is part of what you're talking about
00:17:05 ◼ ► that are doing i don't know things i mean so what so what happened here is um 1877 came out last month
00:17:13 ◼ ► but on wednesday the first apple pushed out 1877 to all devices running 18 so that's the change the
00:17:24 ◼ ► change is they finally did the thing i was complaining about which is if this is a very secure very big
00:17:30 ◼ ► security problem maybe what you should do is push your security updates for ios 18 to all phones
00:17:37 ◼ ► all phones running 18 not just the ones that are not capable of running 26 and and the side effect of
00:17:43 ◼ ► that that i think is super important is that major secure or major os updates need to be manually agreed to
00:17:52 ◼ ► by the user the user is asked would you like to go to ios 26 and you can say no you can say yes you know
00:18:00 ◼ ► yes by mistake and stuff like that but like they don't just silently overnight update you to ios 26 they
00:18:07 ◼ ► don't do that however point releases in the same os release can update automatically and what it means
00:18:17 ◼ ► is all those people who are holding back and saying i don't want to go to ios 26 even though i can
00:18:21 ◼ ► are getting a security update that will that will patch them against dark sword and karuna which is
00:18:28 ◼ ► important because some of that stuff is like on github where like everybody can see it which means
00:18:32 ◼ ► it's going to be a more broadly felt security exploit than it was when it was sort of limited to just
00:18:38 ◼ ► nation states so it's good that apple did this i'm a little again i don't understand this policy i
00:18:45 ◼ ► understand apple believing that well if you if you can run 26 you should it's so much more secure
00:18:52 ◼ ► than 18 even with patches i get that but like if you're making 18 available to the people who can't
00:19:02 ◼ ► run 26 just make it available like i'm not saying even forever but like maybe for one cycle just do it
00:19:11 ◼ ► right like just just let those people have their patches i think this is an unusual cycle because
00:19:16 ◼ ► people really are have gotten it in their heads that they're just refusing to run ios 26 so be it i'm
00:19:22 ◼ ► glad that apple finally did this um it's a yeah it's a weird story so i'm glad they did it i don't i mean
00:19:28 ◼ ► what took them so long the fact that 1877 came out last month but it was only on april 1st that they
00:19:33 ◼ ► decided to push it out to everybody else like what i don't know but obviously this was what i said in
00:19:40 ◼ ► the story is it was good news and bad news right it's good news they did this bad news is they had
00:19:44 ◼ ► a reason to do this which is these very bad security breaches but they did do it so i don't know i think
00:19:50 ◼ ► i think apple cares a lot about their user security but i think this is one of those areas where
00:19:54 ◼ ► certainly it gives the impression that they're withholding security updates in order to drive
00:20:02 ◼ ► os updates and i know that probably what's really happening is they they feel it doesn't make their
00:20:09 ◼ ► users more secure to make it easy for them to stay back aversion because of all the other stuff you get when
00:20:16 ◼ ► you update but i think i think that's uh probably a mistake and that more communication is probably
00:20:24 ◼ ► warranted here about security updates uh in you know 26 versus in 18 anyway so it's a it's a complicated
00:20:32 ◼ ► weird story the good news is and i'll say this now if you've still been saying no or you've turned
00:20:37 ◼ ► off all updates or whatever if you're where if you're using an iphone that's still on 18 update to 1877
00:20:43 ◼ ► you can all of you can no matter what model you're using and you should that's it so discord found um
00:20:51 ◼ ► the thing that i'm talking about is a new thing it's uh from 26.1 onwards called background security
00:20:58 ◼ ► improvements the quick patches that happen even faster so this is that thing that i saw so this
00:21:03 ◼ ► happened a couple of weeks ago where overnight i think it was march 17th was the the thing they can
00:21:09 ◼ ► between point updates can rework it says components such as safari webkit and other system libraries
00:21:16 ◼ ► that benefit from smaller ongoing security patches so i got a notification that one of those was done
00:21:21 ◼ ► i bet those were patches regarding these leaks right that has to do yeah there's the um the
00:21:27 ◼ ► what is it the eclectic light company uh blog that uh is all about uh paintings and apple security
00:21:35 ◼ ► seriously like paintings it's art and it's amazing um anyway is that called what is that website it's
00:21:42 ◼ ► a it's eclectic light uh the eclectic light company yeah yeah it's howard howard oakley is his name and
00:21:49 ◼ ► it and it's there is a back front page now wow that you can go to if you don't want to see the blog post
00:21:54 ◼ ► about paintings i love his blog post about paintings they're awesome anyway he he writes about this a lot and
00:21:59 ◼ ► um one of the things it's a great blog uh it's very technical uh but he he like a lot of these
00:22:06 ◼ ► security updates are doing things where like they don't need to update the whole os they update like
00:22:10 ◼ ► these little they're like little packages within the os that can be updated um and it allows apple to do
00:22:16 ◼ ► these kind of like more rapid response your mac has this ability too where they they'll send out
00:22:20 ◼ ► like rapid response updates of different kinds um because apple believe it or not apple has a big
00:22:24 ◼ ► security team that is working hard to fight this stuff um but yeah i don't love this policy
00:22:31 ◼ ► i think they should just say um we're going to do security updates one os back um and just do it that
00:22:39 ◼ ► way but they they don't for the iphone for some reason and i don't love it but at least they did in
00:22:43 ◼ ► this case because this was a bad enough issue that they flipped that switch this episode is brought
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00:24:30 ◼ ► apple confirmed to the new york times that its fitness head fitness head j blanick is retiring from the
00:24:38 ◼ ► company uh blanick had previously been accused of creating a toxic work culture the new york times
00:24:44 ◼ ► reported on this i think a couple years ago um and then after a reshuffle in the fitness org uh
00:24:50 ◼ ► blanick was going to be reporting to sambal desai dr sambal desai rather than directly to eddie q this
00:24:56 ◼ ► seemed uh from the outside to look like a demotion you know things were moved around and blanick was not in that
00:25:02 ◼ ► spot who was going to be reporting to the the chief uh of the division anymore and also there have been these
00:25:09 ◼ ► conversations about whether fitness plus was being uh reconsidered well all of that has resulted my my
00:25:16 ◼ ► assumption is in blanick uh taking leave for the company yeah he's he's officially retiring
00:25:22 ◼ ► and this feels to me like this is what happens when you have a senior executive who's been there a long
00:25:26 ◼ ► time who's uh been accused of things that are unacceptable uh what happens they get like a
00:25:34 ◼ ► golden parachute which is super unfair but this seems to be what happens so but he's out is the answer this
00:25:41 ◼ ► guy's out yeah this was one where apple uh they said you know we have no kind of uh we've investigated it
00:25:48 ◼ ► can't find any wrongdoing but who knows right like it it seems that maybe something may have gone on
00:25:56 ◼ ► here we can we can't tell yeah i i i don't know anything about this yeah but my read on it from the
00:26:03 ◼ ► outside is those statements are basically like we can't fire him for cause yeah we we are concerned
00:26:11 ◼ ► that if we fire him for cause he's going to take us to court and it's going to be really ugly so we've
00:26:17 ◼ ► negotiated a settlement yes i agree where he leaves and we move on but yeah that happened that i mean that's
00:26:25 ◼ ► one of the reasons why these mostly men who have bad behavior of various kinds uh get paid off to
00:26:32 ◼ ► leave is the company has just decided it's easier than having a lawsuit to to just pay them to go away
00:26:39 ◼ ► and is it gross that people who behave badly get paid to go away for because of their bad behavior yeah
00:26:46 ◼ ► yeah it's it's real bad but i will i will say it's not my money and that guy is out and that seems like
00:26:53 ◼ ► it's probably a good idea like this is the other way we've been talking a lot about employee turnover
00:26:58 ◼ ► and how it's good to have new people in new positions of authority because they can make
00:27:02 ◼ ► changes uh another advantage of of employee turnover is when you have people who are toxic and they leave
00:27:09 ◼ ► and having experienced that oh my god sometimes it is so freeing to have a toxic person out of your
00:27:17 ◼ ► organization and if you're in the organization like you're not the one who paid his severance or his
00:27:23 ◼ ► settlement but you know you don't have to deal with that guy anymore and that can be a huge deal
00:27:27 ◼ ► uh writing at nine to five max that call was reporting that delivery times for the max studio
00:27:33 ◼ ► are at least four to five months away if you do any ram configurations if you do not buy like one of the
00:27:39 ◼ ► stock uh configurations you're looking at a four to five monthly time uh steven hackett followed this
00:27:45 ◼ ► up with the same kind of information about the mac mini it seems like laptop delivery times are much better
00:27:52 ◼ ► even if you configure them so it would you could assume that apple is maybe prioritizing where it's
00:27:56 ◼ ► rams going i did some digging around this morning i can get an m5 max macbook pro of 128 gigabytes of
00:28:05 ◼ ► ram in two weeks an m4 pro mac mini with 64 gigabytes of ram will take 16 weeks uh so you know this is this
00:28:15 ◼ ► is i guess the way that apple is deciding to deal with the ram issues there's there's two issues going on here
00:28:20 ◼ ► though because also i would say those mac studio delays are lies is my guess that that's that's we
00:28:28 ◼ ► don't we aren't this is just my read on it i think my read on this is we are no longer building this the
00:28:35 ◼ ► m4 max studio so we can't make you a custom right because they're going to do an m5 max studio and
00:28:42 ◼ ► it's going to be out probably less than four to five months from now yeah so that's my guess is that
00:28:47 ◼ ► they they are stopping or have stopped making the mac studio m4 because they're going to make the m5 and
00:28:54 ◼ ► they've got the configurations that they built that they will sell you but they're not going to build
00:28:59 ◼ ► you a custom whatever because and this is how apple does that with with systems that are not going to
00:29:05 ◼ ► ship is they're like yeah yeah you can order a macbook air but now it's out four months and then two months
00:29:10 ◼ ► later the new macbook air comes out and they're like oh guess what you can have that one now or
00:29:16 ◼ ► whatever so i think that's what's going on here the mac mini is a more interesting story and i think
00:29:20 ◼ ► you're right i think that maybe there is some prioritization going on about where their ram
00:29:24 ◼ ► chips are going right now and that's to laptops because they've got all those new laptops that are
00:29:29 ◼ ► out there and the mac mini's been out there for a while yeah um and but some of this also is just that
00:29:34 ◼ ► that the mac studio like that that is we are at the end of the life of the m4 and m3 ultra i guess i
00:29:41 ◼ ► gotta say mac studio uh which you know it'll always be the mac studio that i wrote about by the pool in
00:29:47 ◼ ► hawaii on my vacation i can never take that away from you no they can never oh m3 ultra what a baffling
00:29:55 ◼ ► baffling thing you are uh so that that's gonna happen and so uh my my spider sense says that
00:30:02 ◼ ► there's they're not making the m4 studio anymore but the mac mini yeah it's really interesting um
00:30:06 ◼ ► so i guess get a stock model if you really need one i yeah i don't know maybe this is also a subtle
00:30:13 ◼ ► way of apple uh stopping people from buying like ram loaded up mac minis to do open claw and stuff
00:30:20 ◼ ► like you know there definitely was a run on the mac mini right that like could it could also be part of
00:30:26 ◼ ► this like apple could not have foreseen how many mac minis they were going to sell in certain locations
00:30:32 ◼ ► i don't know for a fact that they're doing this but like i could see a scenario where they're literally
00:30:37 ◼ ► looking at their spreadsheets and saying our margin on this ram is much higher in a macbook pro than it
00:30:44 ◼ ► is in a mac mini we we price the ram the way we did in the mac mini because it's a low volume product
00:30:51 ◼ ► and now it's higher volume that we want and we have a limited supply of ram and so let's put it in our
00:30:56 ◼ ► products that are most profitable and that's not the mac mini that is the macbook pro so it wouldn't
00:31:02 ◼ ► surprise me at all if if this was ultimately a uh a spreadsheet driven decision to just turn the dial
00:31:09 ◼ ► down on mac mini production uh and use those chips somewhere more profitable speaking of discontinuing
00:31:17 ◼ ► macintosh models uh yes a couple of weeks ago apple confirmed to nine to five mac that the mac pro is no
00:31:24 ◼ ► more uh they have no plans to offer future mac pro hardware uh this is the end of the mac pro we didn't
00:31:30 ◼ ► get to talk about it but we definitely should touch on it uh the mac pro is dead yeah it's dead it it
00:31:36 ◼ ► needed to die um look i our friend john siracusa i one of the things i love about him is that he
00:31:48 ◼ ► is an idealist yeah and and he like he he had a con i mean it's good he he he was saying he's been
00:31:59 ◼ ► saying for a while like why why why is this still here just kill it put it out as a misery it's very
00:32:03 ◼ ► much like you know you've i i've loved i've loved like when my my 19 year old cat was at the end it
00:32:09 ◼ ► was like this poor guy it's just time and it's like that with the mac pro it's like i love it but it's
00:32:14 ◼ ► got to go but like john john is it's got like i mean right it's just like it it nobody it's so it's sad
00:32:22 ◼ ► and and it's like put it out of its misery i mean this is i mean i'm making jokes but it's a true thing like
00:32:28 ◼ ► at the end i could bear my oh my poor cat right like and it was like we got to put him down now
00:32:32 ◼ ► because we love him we got to put him down the mac pro like john loves it but he even knew it's like
00:32:38 ◼ ► this is not this is not living this is terrible for all but his idealism is like but apple could do
00:32:45 ◼ ► a more powerful system and the and the mac studio is not gonna be able to it's like could could god make a
00:32:55 ◼ ► make an an m chip but in this case god is johnny sroogey uh so powerful that not even the mac studio
00:33:02 ◼ ► could cool it and you know my thought is i don't know the mac studio can cool a lot of things and
00:33:06 ◼ ► john's like no more powerful than that i'm like okay john but the truth is mac studio came out in
00:33:11 ◼ ► what 2020 like if if apple's looking at its chip roadmap and the most powerful chip it wants to make
00:33:17 ◼ ► in five years or four years is outside of the mac studios cooling footprint what will they do
00:33:23 ◼ ► they'll redesign the mac studio so that it does better cooling that's what they'll do right there's
00:33:27 ◼ ► not a like oh no what will we do we can't fit it in the mac studio anymore like they know what the chips
00:33:32 ◼ ► are going to be and they and and if they need to redesign the mac studio cooling for the next five
00:33:39 ◼ ► generations of chips or whatever they'll do that but again john being an idealist is like but no even more
00:33:45 ◼ ► than that like okay even so much that you need a giant tower to cool it which is like i mean i don't
00:33:52 ◼ ► i don't know it just i so that's true but i would say that given what where apple is like i understand
00:33:57 ◼ ► what john's saying and give them where apple is and what apple has tried and they did apparently
00:34:01 ◼ ► try to do like a quad chip and they're like this is either it didn't work or it didn't make any sense
00:34:07 ◼ ► um i i think the the beauty of apple's strategy is apple knows what their chips are going to be like
00:34:13 ◼ ► and they know what their computers are going to be and that whatever apple's vision is for what an m8
00:34:19 ◼ ► or 9 ultra chip looks like either it will be cooled by the mac studio or they will make a new version of
00:34:28 ◼ ► the mac studio that can cool it but that but i i i acknowledge that whatever bar they're going to set
00:34:36 ◼ ► for that m8 m9 ultra or whatever that john would say why do you why do you not aspire for more yes i
00:34:45 ◼ ► get it i just i don't think apple's interested in aspiring for more yeah i feel like that the
00:34:50 ◼ ► conversations that we have had on this show before in the past about like an m extreme chip you know
00:34:56 ◼ ► like if if they take essentially four chips and stick them together um i you know we were having
00:35:03 ◼ ► those at a time many years ago that potentially now would have been when that chip would exist
00:35:08 ◼ ► and i would say maybe we just don't need it like right now does anyone really feel like they need
00:35:16 ◼ ► like really genuinely need two to four times the performance they're currently getting from the
00:35:21 ◼ ► top of the line apple silicon chips like i'm just not oh i just don't think that that is a realistic
00:35:27 ◼ ► product that that has a lot of use right and also also i would say not only does the further up you go
00:35:34 ◼ ► the fewer people there are and that there maybe were more of them but a decade plus of neglect of
00:35:40 ◼ ► the mac pro has driven them all out of the market but i would also say the flip side is true which is
00:35:43 ◼ ► apple made a decision look when apple made the apple silicon on that decision that came to fruition in 2020
00:35:50 ◼ ► apple was saying you know what we want computers that are low power and uh and and are going to enable us
00:35:59 ◼ ► to build things ultimately like the macbook neo and we can scale them high enough up for us to get as
00:36:06 ◼ ► high as we need to go and they made that decision if you are above the high enough we need to go
00:36:12 ◼ ► all of these macbook airs and macbook neos and mac minis and everything else that we've sold in the m
00:36:21 ◼ ► series that's possible because of the m series is more important to us than you are yeah and that sucks
00:36:27 ◼ ► to hear it sucks to hear but but part of this story is i'm not going to deny that there are users of
00:36:35 ◼ ► computers who wish that apple would make more powerful whatever's up there what i'm saying is apple's not
00:36:40 ◼ ► interested in that market anymore period like they're good they'll go real high like make no mistake the
00:36:46 ◼ ► high-end max are very powerful but if you're somebody who's like yeah but i need more in this area i would
00:36:52 ◼ ► say first off there probably aren't that many of you and that's one of the reasons why apple's looking
00:36:57 ◼ ► at that and like that market saved apple back in the day because they were high margin customers and
00:37:01 ◼ ► they desperately needed them but today apple's a mass market company and apple's much more concerned about
00:37:06 ◼ ► selling macbook neos than they are selling mac pros that's why the mac pro died and like it it is always
00:37:12 ◼ ► hard to hear that apple has decided you are not a customer they're interested in but is it the right
00:37:17 ◼ ► business decision huh the right business decision was probably to kill the mac pro in 2013 yeah because
00:37:23 ◼ ► the mac pro used to be the power mac power mac was a mid-range system but every year with g5 and then the
00:37:30 ◼ ► mac pro it became more and more a high-end system and there were fewer and fewer people who could use
00:37:36 ◼ ► it where it made sense and and there is a mistake in thinking that a mac is like a pc they're not the
00:37:43 ◼ ► same anymore pcs do also how many people do we know you have a gaming pc that erico has a gaming pc so
00:37:50 ◼ ► many people who are not john siracusa have a gaming pc like it's a different device i have a i have a
00:37:57 ◼ ► console i don't have a gaming pc but i have a console i have a playstation i have you know i i have i have
00:38:02 ◼ ► i have a switch too and that doesn't make me a a less of a mac user right it's it's a different product
00:38:09 ◼ ► and apple has chosen what they've chosen i i think the mac pro irrelevance started so long ago
00:38:16 ◼ ► because it's just a niche high-end product and as much as apple promised like no we do love our
00:38:21 ◼ ► high-end users really when they said that and they made that new mac pro in the background they were
00:38:28 ◼ ► already building the mac studio and i i can guarantee you that they all thought this is the new mac pro
00:38:35 ◼ ► this is what our mac pro is going to be and the mac studio is amazing like and if you need more than
00:38:43 ◼ ► that apple is not going to help you because apple made their decision and you can say that it was a
00:38:48 ◼ ► deal with the devil if you want to if you're a very very high-end user and you're pooh-poohing the
00:38:54 ◼ ► macbook neo and the macbook air even as toys because you're a high-end user who needs more and i would
00:39:00 ◼ ► argue most of those people who say they need more they actually just like having more or want more they
00:39:05 ◼ ► don't actually need more there are also people who actually need more that's fair but i think there's
00:39:09 ◼ ► some delusion up there and some ego about like i want the most powerful system i think that's part of
00:39:13 ◼ ► the the dynamic too but like apple in order to get this enormous benefit of apple silicon had to draw a
00:39:18 ◼ ► line in terms of what their chips were going to be capable of or what they were willing to make them
00:39:22 ◼ ► capable of because also the other part of this sorry for this rant is um i think they looked at
00:39:29 ◼ ► that quad you know ultra mega chip and said why are we doing this yes like who's going to buy this
00:39:36 ◼ ► it's going to cost a fortune and like do we want apple silicon engineers working on chips
00:39:42 ◼ ► that are going to get bought by nobody we don't like 99 of the people don't want that and for the
00:39:49 ◼ ► one percent who do i would say i'm sorry other computers are available and i know that's a rough
00:39:54 ◼ ► thing to hear but like at the end of the day i i appreciate the idealism of somebody like john who's
00:39:59 ◼ ► like oh but they could and imagine if they did and it's like yes but they tap you know taps the
00:40:05 ◼ ► spreadsheet no they are not and and and it's not like they aren't making powerful computers it's
00:40:11 ◼ ► it's that they're making power computers powerful computers that fit their philosophy and no further
00:40:16 ◼ ► yeah i feel like i kind of had two thoughts on this like one is a continuation of the thing that
00:40:21 ◼ ► we've spoken about in the show so many times when considering the mac pro which is that the mistake of
00:40:27 ◼ ► the trash can was that it forced them to make another mac pro when clearly apple had decided
00:40:33 ◼ ► they were going to the imac pro as the pro mac pro and then you see you go mac pro to imac pro to mac
00:40:40 ◼ ► studio that should have been where we are now but instead we had this mac pro just like hanging around
00:40:47 ◼ ► for a few more years that mac pro apology like i know people think we all thought of it as a positive
00:40:52 ◼ ► because it was apple sort of like saying we do care about the mac but what they were really talking
00:40:56 ◼ ► about like we do care about our our traditional from 10 years ago high-end mac users in these
00:41:01 ◼ ► industries that we you know that used to be more relevant than maybe our plans are like in hindsight
00:41:07 ◼ ► though that mac pro roundtable i'm just gonna say it that was a big as big a mistake as the butterfly
00:41:11 ◼ ► keyboard it was it is emblematic of an era where apple had no idea what they wanted to do with the mac
00:41:17 ◼ ► or had decided what they wanted to do with the mac but couldn't tell anybody but like it it was
00:41:22 ◼ ► just what a disaster that whole era was like they i really believe they didn't they thought the mac was
00:41:28 ◼ ► just going to go out on a nice flow and be done and then they decided no we're going to bring the mac
00:41:33 ◼ ► up to spec uh with apple silicon in our iphones and ipads we're going to realign the os's at the base
00:41:40 ◼ ► level so that that we can bring over compatibility layers which have had varying degrees of success but
00:41:44 ◼ ► have made the the os is more similar and we're going to recommit to the mac and like that recommitment
00:41:50 ◼ ► killed the mac pro like there's no doubt about it but you're right because the trash can was such a flop
00:41:56 ◼ ► they they felt bad and they felt they needed to do this kind of recommitment ceremony it was like
00:42:02 ◼ ► we're going to renew our vows but like you're right the right the the imac pro was the answer that was
00:42:11 ◼ ► going to be the replacement for the mac pro and then that would get you to apple silicon
00:42:15 ◼ ► which was going to have the mac studio which is amazing so i don't know it's just i don't think
00:42:22 ◼ ► that the round table was it was a mistake i think in hindsight you can see that it made things more
00:42:27 ◼ ► complicated but it was absolutely needed at the time because people were so down on apple strategy with
00:42:35 ◼ ► them okay it was not a mistake in sending a signal that the mac that apple was committed to the mac
00:42:41 ◼ ► yeah the signal it sent was that apple was committed to the mac as a high-end desktop platform and that
00:42:46 ◼ ► was not the right signal yeah that that was not the right lesson to take from what was going on like
00:42:52 ◼ ► the mac the mac round table should have been about what they had done to their laptops not what they had done to
00:43:00 ◼ ► their their their tower pc but it gave a a shine on everything though right like yeah it made us feel
00:43:08 ◼ ► better it's like oh that oh they're opening the doors and telling us and the because they could
00:43:13 ◼ ► the thing they could tell us were the things that ultimately did not matter right like to to like
00:43:18 ◼ ► the state of the company so they were saying let us tell you about the next iphone like six months in
00:43:22 ◼ ► advance right and as steven hackett pointed out in in such a brilliant bit of observation
00:43:30 ◼ ► the the intel mac pro shipped like months before the apple silicon transition yeah and while john
00:43:36 ◼ ► sarcuso would say well yeah but that's a great system it's like the last great intel mac and i don't
00:43:42 ◼ ► dispute that in in many ways i think the that intel mac pro is an all-timer because it is the last
00:43:51 ◼ ► and greatest of that kind of mac but it's also like the end i mean literally the world changed after
00:44:01 ◼ ► that and it became essentially irrelevant after that so i don't know i i i think okay pulling back here
00:44:09 ◼ ► i think the real story of the mac pro is that we used to live in a world where tower computers were
00:44:17 ◼ ► relevant and three quarters of and three quarters of the max apple cells are laptops the mobile chip
00:44:24 ◼ ► strategy has worked really well for them but it's a longer trend even than that which is i always bought
00:44:31 ◼ ► towers i always bought power max i bought a power mac g4 i bought a power computing clone that was
00:44:37 ◼ ► essentially a power mac i had a power mac g5 and then and in 90 98 99 the imac was a toy it was
00:44:45 ◼ ► underpowered you would get the blue and white g3 or you get the g4 the imac was a toy by 2007 2005 the
00:44:53 ◼ ► imac was no longer a toy the imac appealed to people like me who used to buy towers and i'm just emblematic
00:45:00 ◼ ► of that whole transition that over time what used to be a mainstream computer because of laptops rising in
00:45:09 ◼ ► and because lots of computers had enough power to do computer stuff that the the idea of that tower mac just
00:45:18 ◼ ► it went from being a mainstream computer that we all used as our main thing that we did our jobs on
00:45:23 ◼ ► to being esoteric high-end and and increasingly expensive by the way like the power max used to be like
00:45:35 ◼ ► two grand and then suddenly there are five grand six grand right like it it all changed and that's
00:45:43 ◼ ► ultimately that with all of these detours all of these weird things that apple did that's the real story
00:45:49 ◼ ► here is that computer doesn't need to exist anymore for at least for apple's purposes because it's no
00:45:57 ◼ ► longer it was once a mainstream computer and is no longer and that's just the truth of it and the great
00:46:04 ◼ ► thing about it in my opinion of this time that we're in right now is it's for the vast majority
00:46:11 ◼ ► of people i mean they've moved away from it because they have so many options now it's not like they
00:46:16 ◼ ► get rid of the mac pro and they have nothing in the in like that was very that's very powerful to help you
00:46:21 ◼ ► out like there are so many options now that you could have instead uh even a mac mini you know like a
00:46:29 ◼ ► m like a pro mac mini that thing's a little i got a little beast sitting here right like that's why
00:46:34 ◼ ► yeah that's exactly why the we just don't live in that world anymore and and apple apple's decisions
00:46:42 ◼ ► to use apple silicon on the mac are informed by that knowledge that that because the whole premise is
00:46:48 ◼ ► our chips that we made to do phones are now so powerful and then they built scaled up versions
00:46:56 ◼ ► right the m1 was kind of like a follow-on from their experiments that they had on that on the iphone
00:47:02 ◼ ► where they had the those are on the ipad pro where they had like experimental like different versions
00:47:08 ◼ ► those are clearly like m0 and m minus one right they they're there they were setting the stage for
00:47:13 ◼ ► what would be the m1 like but all of those decisions they made were made knowing that like they could
00:47:20 ◼ ► make chips that did that covered 99 of the uses of the mac as a platform and so they so they go together
00:47:31 ◼ ► and and this is this is the result but yes the moment that they decided to go to apple silicon the mac pro
00:47:35 ◼ ► was doomed and uh it's weird this is the weird part right it's like why was it still here
00:47:40 ◼ ► and i can only think that they had some customers there's somebody in their enterprise sales division
00:47:46 ◼ ► who's like oh no but these guys might need another one for their whatever sound system they're doing
00:47:51 ◼ ► or whatever it's like okay so they kept they had enough on hand that they kept it on the price list
00:47:56 ◼ ► until they ran out and then they're like let's cut it now but i do hate that is one of my least
00:48:01 ◼ ► favorite things about modern apple's behavior is keeping old products around at their original
00:48:07 ◼ ► price point for years after they're irrelevant because it's embarrassing and they should either
00:48:12 ◼ ► like discount the heck out of those things or just uh just say goodbye but instead they just silently i
00:48:19 ◼ ► imagine that somebody at nine to five mac has a little a set of scripts that just check to see if pages
00:48:25 ◼ ► change on apple.com and then go see and they're like oh hey mac pro disappeared mac pro order page
00:48:31 ◼ ► disappeared what's that about but i'm glad it happened it needed to happen i just i don't know why
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00:50:15 ◼ ► of relay it's ruby roundup time jason snell yeah let's do it let's do it by the way i i uh i have a little
00:50:24 ◼ ► tidbit okay i'm going to share with you now okay which is you know i know mark german's editor right
00:50:30 ◼ ► yeah i do he was he was at my jeopardy watch party yeah and and i'm not gonna we talked i mean we talked
00:50:39 ◼ ► about it a little bit uh but the the thing that i wanted to say and i try to do the right thing here
00:50:46 ◼ ► even though we call this rumor roundup i just want to point out again because my friend who is mark german's
00:50:52 ◼ ► editor pointed out to me that mark doesn't really appreciate when his news reports that are multiple
00:50:57 ◼ ► sourced are referred to as rumors because he's not spreading rumors he's reporting he's a reporter
00:51:02 ◼ ► who's reporting so i just i i feel like i just want to make that clear again like i try to do this
00:51:07 ◼ ► like rumor has it is like it's okay for us to talk about this in general as rumors but like
00:51:13 ◼ ► i firmly believe like when mark german says something is going on it it's going on and he's
00:51:20 ◼ ► a journalist who's reporting it so we try mark german is reporting and all that i just wanted to say
00:51:25 ◼ ► that just because sometimes sometimes i see people not us i see people saying like oh those are just
00:51:30 ◼ ► rumors whatever you can't believe rumors oh right yeah well journalistic reports are not just rumors
00:51:35 ◼ ► they are more than that and and and if we ever uh suggest that they are i just want to say uh no i
00:51:41 ◼ ► believe that mark german is extremely good at his job and that when he is uh reporting this stuff it's
00:51:48 ◼ ► because it's true yes i agree with you which is why uh we basically talk about everything that mark
00:51:54 ◼ ► german says and we don't do that for everybody else because when mark says something it's as good as
00:51:58 ◼ ► true but yeah we look at lots of stuff and then some of that stuff it's like no but that would also
00:52:04 ◼ ► suggest that mark is right 100 of the time which he isn't and so that's why you kind of have to call
00:52:09 ◼ ► them rumors uh well no i again i don't think it's rumors in their blanket term because what happens
00:52:15 ◼ ► is uh just to just to be clear when mark german's wrong about something i don't believe it's because
00:52:20 ◼ ► he was wrong i believe it's because either his source was not up to date or things change that's part of the
00:52:27 ◼ ► danger in reporting about things two years out for some stuff yeah is plans do change and that doesn't
00:52:33 ◼ ► mean that the report was wrong it means that something happened afterward so but in general
00:52:37 ◼ ► i'm i think he's very good you live by the sword die by the sword though right you know it's like you
00:52:43 ◼ ► get that's just how it does sometimes nevertheless we talk about mark german's reports during rumor
00:52:48 ◼ ► roundup and that's why he's the sheriff he's exactly they're not all sheriffs but no so we've got a
00:52:55 ◼ ► a bunch of details for what mark is expecting to see as part of the 27 release os's as that we'll see
00:53:04 ◼ ► at wwdc and it's essentially all uh siri stuff and apple internet stuff so luckily i would say one of
00:53:12 ◼ ► the things that mark german is now expecting to be the case is that siri will get its own app in the 27
00:53:19 ◼ ► releases it won't just be the voice assistant that you press the button to and call and can never
00:53:23 ◼ ► ever ever find out any conversation you previously had it will be a more chatbot app like experience
00:53:30 ◼ ► where you can go in have conversations go back to previous conversations and continue them in both
00:53:36 ◼ ► text and voice so this is i think much needed and i think no matter what apple would have done with uh
00:53:43 ◼ ► with ios 27 i think if they wouldn't have had this it would have always felt like something was missing
00:53:49 ◼ ► yeah great great i this is this is people know how to use chatbots text interface i mean like they had
00:53:56 ◼ ► typed a siri and stuff like that i think i think it's a good thing to offer and having it be like
00:54:02 ◼ ► those other apps and have like a history and stuff i think is also really important so you can like
00:54:06 ◼ ► especially if there's going to be some context one of the things that i found with these chatbots that i
00:54:12 ◼ ► found didn't realize i would find valuable but i found valuable is it's not a person right it's a
00:54:19 ◼ ► it's a stack of contexts and so having like a chat history is really useful because you have different
00:54:26 ◼ ► chats with different contexts so like if i was asking a question and then a day later i need to ask a
00:54:31 ◼ ► follow-up i can go back to that context and then it knows what we talked about it doesn't have to like
00:54:37 ◼ ► guess it knows the whole conversation we had that led to that point and and that's a valuable thing
00:54:42 ◼ ► i i am still a firm believer that the solution to ai isn't just let everybody type in a window like i
00:54:48 ◼ ► just that is not it that is that is saying that the apple 2 had it right and that everything that's come
00:54:55 ◼ ► since that is a waste of time because just typing at a prompt is all you need and i don't believe that
00:55:00 ◼ ► but it is one of the ways we still do type it prompts a lot in lots of places and having a a
00:55:08 ◼ ► a chatbot like experience in general and having histories that you can look at which i assume is
00:55:14 ◼ ► going to be part of this like i think that's all all to the good and and weird isn't it i mean also
00:55:19 ◼ ► weird culturally that apple seems to be fighting against it but seems to have finally relented i think
00:55:24 ◼ ► that's also kind of funny like no we don't all right you can have it what all right fine i think i
00:55:29 ◼ ► heard it might have been on the verge class that they mentioned this it was definitely another
00:55:33 ◼ ► podcast that i listened to we're talking about maybe this is an app store downloadable app so
00:55:39 ◼ ► they can make more improvements to siri that are decoupled from os releases which could be more
00:55:45 ◼ ► important in a world of ai features most of series on the back end and they can make those changes
00:55:51 ◼ ► whenever they want i would think i i don't know but like ui stuff you know like oh now they do this so
00:55:56 ◼ ► so we should do this right like now gem and i can do x y and z so why don't we also do x y z maybe i
00:56:02 ◼ ► guess i i i i don't expect it to be that i expect it to just be a because siri is a system feature i
00:56:08 ◼ ► expect expected to be a system app uh there will be a uh an enforcement of a branding and a feature
00:56:15 ◼ ► called ask siri so apparently this label or button will be seen throughout the operating systems prompting
00:56:20 ◼ ► you to send content to siri for assistance like you could highlight text and say like you know go and
00:56:26 ◼ ► find out more about this for me uh mark says that the current ios 27 betas include personal context and
00:56:34 ◼ ► on-screen awareness and they are still hoping to ship them this year but now most likely as a part
00:56:39 ◼ ► of ios 27 so these were the two of the key features shown in 2024 uh app intense also apparently remains
00:56:49 ◼ ► in development as well and now 26.5 the beta is out there is nothing apple intelligence in beta one so i
00:56:58 ◼ ► think at this point it feels pretty safe to say that the first time we will see the re-emergence
00:57:04 ◼ ► of these features will probably be a wwc again when they didn't come in march it seemed like the writing
00:57:08 ◼ ► was on the wall but i think some people were still holding on to it and mark german i mean he said at
00:57:13 ◼ ► some point like they basically what was that report there was a report that the that the the the smart
00:57:19 ◼ ► home yeah uh screen had been moved on to the 27 yeah train we spoke about it like if there was ever
00:57:26 ◼ ► if there was ever a signal that they had just decided we're going to put this in for summer
00:57:31 ◼ ► it was it was that and that i think that's fine i honestly we i know we talked about this um
00:57:38 ◼ ► i don't understand why they were trying to get things in the spring like or to get some things
00:57:46 ◼ ► in the spring and then ship the rest like just don't just try to get it right this time try to have a
00:57:52 ◼ ► coherent story at wwdc don't ship like weird halfway features and then eclipse them two months like
00:57:58 ◼ ► just don't do it so i'm glad that they are not apparently doing that uh apple was apparently
00:58:04 ◼ ► considering a redesign of the glowing siri interface that was introduced in ios 18 uh moving the main
00:58:11 ◼ ► animation to the dynamic island i'm going to read from mark gomer's report here quote when processing
00:58:17 ◼ ► a request a pill-shaped indicator labeled searching appears alongside a glowing siri icon once results
00:58:23 ◼ ► are ready the interface expands into a larger translucent panel with apple liquid glass design
00:58:28 ◼ ► users can pull the menu down further to begin conversing back and forth interesting to do a
00:58:35 ◼ ► redesign so quickly but again it's like it wasn't right i didn't mind that animation but they should not
00:58:41 ◼ ► have put the animation out without features behind it yes also though like having it tied to the
00:58:47 ◼ ► dynamic island is not a bad idea like i'm a big fan of the dynamic island i think it's a good idea i think
00:58:53 ◼ ► it's so good that it should just exist everywhere in some form even if you don't have cutouts on your
00:58:59 ◼ ► screen just because it's a having having a little thing that pops open yeah animates open to show you
00:59:05 ◼ ► what's going on in a basically a background process uh while you're doing whatever you're doing i think
00:59:12 ◼ ► it's a really it was a really good kind of interface breakthrough on their part look at me saying
00:59:17 ◼ ► something nice about their interface team and and like yes go with that take that further
00:59:22 ◼ ► and so having uh siri stuff be a dynamic island thing that can expand and that you can pull it down
00:59:29 ◼ ► and that like great let's let's do it fun idea and siri is also expected to replace spotlight so
00:59:37 ◼ ► there will be a unified interface which will use personal context as well as everything else you can
00:59:43 ◼ ► do in spotlight so you can start typing stuff it's going to find things in your apps and know much
00:59:48 ◼ ► bunch more about you and it made me wonder jason do you think that maybe tahoe's spotlight revamp
00:59:54 ◼ ► was supposed to include a little bit more because it's interesting to do this and then the next year
01:00:00 ◼ ► be like ah we don't do that anymore it's now called the siri bar or something well i mean maybe i think so
01:00:07 ◼ ► so um joe rosenstiel back in march of last year wrote this piece for six colors and made the point
01:00:14 ◼ ► that i think it's a really good point which is apple has these two different text interfaces
01:00:23 ◼ ► that are siri and spotlight and they do not talk yes and it and and they apple expects you to type
01:00:30 ◼ ► things in different places and get different results and understand why you're getting it and joe's point
01:00:36 ◼ ► i think ultimately is what are you doing why is there why are there more than you know why is there more
01:00:43 ◼ ► than one thing to do this so this is great news i think because if if i'm opening spotlight and it's
01:00:52 ◼ ► got like right now it's like spotlight is in there but it's also got like web things that it's doing
01:00:56 ◼ ► and other things that it's doing and like but it's not siri because siri is somewhere else it's like
01:01:06 ◼ ► together and i'm not saying like you have to ask siri hey hey lady uh uh open my app for me right
01:01:13 ◼ ► it's not like you have to do command space and type please open this app like you would still
01:01:17 ◼ ► have a launcher or or pull down on an iphone or whatever like but they should be integrated right
01:01:24 ◼ ► intelligently integrated so that there aren't like you have to search for context clues about how to type
01:01:32 ◼ ► because in certain circumstances you're expected to type a sentence and in other circumstances you
01:01:37 ◼ ► can't type a sentence or it'll get confused like it just joe's joe's rant about it is great and he's
01:01:44 ◼ ► right this is a high level interface kind of thing like there shouldn't be two kinds of this in your
01:01:49 ◼ ► computers there should be one kind of place that you say or type things and expect a response and it
01:01:56 ◼ ► should do the right thing mark is also reporting that apple is developing the ability to have siri
01:02:04 ◼ ► take multiple actions from a single prompt the example that he gives in his article is you could
01:02:09 ◼ ► ask it to check the weather create a calendar event and send a message in one prompt and it will go ahead
01:02:14 ◼ ► and do each thing it is wild to me that this doesn't work right now right like like i know it doesn't
01:02:20 ◼ ► but also man it feels like it should be able to to do this stuff uh and so i guess it will be nice to
01:02:28 ◼ ► do that and it will be interesting to see how long it takes me to get used to the fact that i can ask
01:02:33 ◼ ► siri to do that right right now this is all i mean this is all stuff that makes sense and i i worry that
01:02:42 ◼ ► we're heaping so much expectation on siri that it's not going to be able to make it but like this is all of
01:02:47 ◼ ► the stuff that we feel like siri should have been able to do like five years ago or longer and it has
01:02:51 ◼ ► not done and and and maybe they maybe they will get there now with you know with gemini in the
01:02:57 ◼ ► background and with apple's models being able to be better at taking the incoming call or incoming uh
01:03:03 ◼ ► requests and i don't know i mean they're setting the bar pretty high here but this is but honestly this
01:03:09 ◼ ► is how it should be right like you said why why should you not be able to say do these two things
01:03:17 ◼ ► and then in a separate report mark is saying that apple is preparing to allow other companies to have
01:03:22 ◼ ► the ai access to ios that currently open ai is the only one in in america at least and other parts of
01:03:29 ◼ ► the world um so this is what chat gpt has now and they will offer the ability for other providers to
01:03:36 ◼ ► become the world knowledge partner for siri um which is something that is still a part of ios 27 so like
01:03:45 ◼ ► even though siri will be an apple intelligence powered by gemini there is still an expectation
01:03:53 ◼ ► that chat gpt will remain in the os as like going out and searching things for you be fascinating to
01:04:02 ◼ ► see in what scenarios that would still appear except in this case it will be whatever chat you know
01:04:07 ◼ ► provider you want yeah yeah i'm not entirely clear whether it will be chat gpt as the default world
01:04:15 ◼ ► knowledge but the point here is that they have an extension system where you can sign into your
01:04:20 ◼ ► favorite uh chatbot app and then because of this extension system that already exists but it's just
01:04:26 ◼ ► chat gpt you'll be able to say like i want to use whatever like i i have a claude subscription i want
01:04:32 ◼ ► you to use claude yeah and be like great i'll use claude so it's essentially allowing ai providers to
01:04:39 ◼ ► say we are capable of providing this information and users to say i want to use them and they that's how
01:04:48 ◼ ► it should work right like that that should be part of it is this should be modular if you're a you know
01:04:52 ◼ ► if you're paying for chat gpt or if you're paying for claude or whatever you should be you know i don't know
01:04:59 ◼ ► x ai meta ai whatever you should be able to say yeah i want to use that that's the one i want and
01:05:04 ◼ ► that makes sense to me and his power on newsletter mark said a cornerstone of apple strategy in the
01:05:10 ◼ ► upcoming ios 27 extensions feature which will let users install third-party ai chat bots beyond chat
01:05:16 ◼ ► gpt and run them inside siri this feature will have its own dedicated app store section effectively
01:05:21 ◼ ► creating an ai app store it will be a marketplace of sorts for third-party ai integrations this made me
01:05:28 ◼ ► wonder if you could maybe have multiple that you're plugging in to siri so like you could
01:05:36 ◼ ► have different types of questions that would be fulfilled by different types of apps like for
01:05:41 ◼ ► example i think of one of my favorite apps athletic right which is doing interpretations of health data
01:05:47 ◼ ► what if it could present itself as an ai extensions app to the system that if i was to ask about a health
01:05:53 ◼ ► thing maybe siri could grab information from there i don't know but like i wonder why would they
01:05:58 ◼ ► need to be part of the app store for this if it's only going to be like five apps total that could
01:06:13 ◼ ► that any any comer any in any market by the way so it allows uh china to certify companies in the
01:06:23 ◼ ► chinese app store and then they appear to people in china yeah um let's the eu say no not these but
01:06:30 ◼ ► these and whatever like i i think kicking it to the app store is kind of interesting in that way and like
01:06:34 ◼ ► i said my understanding is this is based on i mean the existing extensions that are used for chat gpt now so
01:06:39 ◼ ► they're basically saying we're opening this up to anybody who wants to do this um and i would also say
01:06:44 ◼ ► i feel like my gut feeling here is this is not like how we go beyond world knowledge in siri it's also
01:06:53 ◼ ► essentially how different ai providers can tie into the system in different ways and essentially it is your
01:07:01 ◼ ► your preferred ai system so if you if you you stock apple i think you're getting siri and then and then siri
01:07:09 ◼ ► you're repowered by gemini but if you want full-on gemini that maybe is doing very different things
01:07:15 ◼ ► because it's tuned by google and has access to things that apple's implementation doesn't or you're
01:07:21 ◼ ► like no no no i don't want that i want you i want open ai or no no no i want uh claude and anthropic
01:07:26 ◼ ► like you choose you you get to choose and that all the like system features that cascade out to ai
01:07:36 ◼ ► will use what you prefer that's how it's that's how it should be right that that is how it should
01:07:41 ◼ ► be is that apple should be providing a stock experience that's good which they're not currently
01:07:48 ◼ ► but maybe they will be and then say if you want more and have a choice have a you know a preference
01:07:56 ◼ ► just go to the app store and get your app that you already have and it'll already at you know you
01:08:04 ◼ ► in on ios and you'll say yes and then it'll just do it and that sounds like a really natural
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01:09:40 ◼ ► so we are still continuing our coverage of apple at 50 like it wasn't just last week we have things
01:09:46 ◼ ► that we're planning to do throughout all of april um and today i wanted us to kind of share a little
01:09:52 ◼ ► bit and you have definitely some stories we've told before but i think it's a good time to retell them
01:09:56 ◼ ► and there's some people that won't know them a little bit about our own origin stories of apple kind of like
01:10:02 ◼ ► how we found apple where we were in our lives and why finding the time that they that we did kind of
01:10:10 ◼ ► carried us through to where we are now to the point that we care so much about the company and its products
01:10:16 ◼ ► that we chose to make our living and have through multiple iterations at this point of work in our lives
01:10:24 ◼ ► continue to come back and talk about this company um would you like to go first or would you like me
01:10:30 ◼ ► to go first oh um i'll go first go for it i think chronologically it makes sense yeah i suppose that's
01:10:38 ◼ ► true so i mean i and i did write about this a little bit um it's a mac world or if you're a six colors
01:10:44 ◼ ► member you can just read it six colors i wrote about this last week because they wanted something about it
01:10:48 ◼ ► and i tried to tie it in with mac world my they wanted it sort of like also you their readers know
01:10:54 ◼ ► that i've been writing for mac world forever and so like tie that in there but you know my story starts
01:11:00 ◼ ► in sonora california where i grew up out in the middle of nowhere uh one stoplight town and as a result
01:11:10 ◼ ► we were probably not on the i mean i we were telling a story last week about being in silicon valley
01:11:14 ◼ ► and being in santa clara it's like yeah really exciting stuff happening there was not happening
01:11:19 ◼ ► up in the foothills until many years later but uh my best friend uh as an elementary school was a
01:11:27 ◼ ► kid named crispin holland and his dad chuck holland was um uh elementary school teacher and he was
01:11:38 ◼ ► into computers and i don't know chuck's whole background but like he his his classroom was where
01:11:45 ◼ ► the first computer in my school appeared and it was a commodore pet so it was it was a very early
01:11:53 ◼ ► primitive no graphics computer um and then at home a year maybe later chuck had and crispin
01:12:03 ◼ ► had an apple two plus and so i would go over to crispin's house and we would just mess around on
01:12:10 ◼ ► that we play games we would uh type in programs and it just we were obsessed with it and ultimately the
01:12:18 ◼ ► apple two uh there was at least one apple two in the school uh then there were more i have fond memories of
01:12:28 ◼ ► uh there were little hallways in between we at california school we had buildings that you just
01:12:32 ◼ ► entered from the outside but there was like a little hallway so we had like these these rooms uh the for
01:12:38 ◼ ► the fifth sixth seventh and eighth grade they were these buildings that were just squares with four
01:12:43 ◼ ► classrooms and in the middle between the four classrooms was a hallway and the hallway is often where the computer
01:12:52 ◼ ► was and so i just have memories throughout that period fifth sixth seventh eighth grade of going out in
01:12:59 ◼ ► the hallway like we in eighth grade we went out in the hallway at recess to play ultima three i think
01:13:06 ◼ ► on a computer instead of going outside and i think they had to clamp down on us after a while i i don't know
01:13:13 ◼ ► what i was doing in eighth grade other than playing video games this is what i remember um and
01:13:19 ◼ ► and about then i about then i got an apple two e at home um and that was a real sales job on my parents
01:13:30 ◼ ► and they were putting money away for me for college so i literally they were like okay we'll do it but it's
01:13:36 ◼ ► coming out of your college money and you're just gonna have to deal with that and i was like let's do it
01:13:39 ◼ ► it um and so like super that that started me on my way and i i was using that computer uh throughout
01:13:47 ◼ ► high school uh you know for everything i wrote papers on it i did um i did all the credits for
01:13:53 ◼ ► the movies we made in high school using the graphics on the apple two um which you know involved like
01:13:59 ◼ ► hooking it up to a vcr and then outputting the the the graphics files one by one uh they were in in big
01:14:06 ◼ ► with fonts and stuff i used an app called font tricks to do that um ran a computer bulletin board
01:14:14 ◼ ► you know on the my apple two like all of that stuff like i was super into it to the point where
01:14:18 ◼ ► even though i never took a computer class in high school they did a uh they there's only a slightly
01:14:24 ◼ ► self-aggrandizing story but they did a uh there's a there's a the first programming contest or something
01:14:31 ◼ ► that was going on for schools for high schools and uh i mean i don't want to overstate it but
01:14:38 ◼ ► it was a little bit like all the people came out of the computer lab and came to me somewhere and said
01:14:42 ◼ ► jason we hear you're good at computers join us in this contest it was like oh they they i apparently
01:14:49 ◼ ► was known as somebody who knew about computers yet did not hang out of the computer lab they wanted the
01:14:54 ◼ ► cool ringer to come in yeah well i wasn't as i mean i only knew applesoft basic so i wasn't the
01:14:58 ◼ ► other people in that competition knew like pascal and i was like well i i'm not i'm not out of my
01:15:03 ◼ ► element here but that was a fun so i was known as a computer person anyway so um went off to call
01:15:13 ◼ ► went off to college um and spent my first two years there with the apple 2 which is good because
01:15:21 ◼ ► it was out of the college money that that thing got bought when i was in eighth grade or whatever um
01:15:26 ◼ ► and in college i mean first thing like that you got that was when you got like internet access for
01:15:34 ◼ ► the first time in that era was like you know you here's a login to a shell prompt on a vax vms or unix
01:15:41 ◼ ► system um but then you could do email with your friends at other colleges who also had that computer
01:15:48 ◼ ► thing uh which was that was pretty funny um and uh and so i started doing that and i could use my modem
01:15:55 ◼ ► to dial into the unix systems from my apple 2 which was pretty awesome but the real cataclysmic moment
01:16:00 ◼ ► for me was um i i uh my sophomore year not my freshman year because i felt super intimidated my sophomore
01:16:06 ◼ ► year i saw that my college newspaper my campus-wide newspaper had uh was looking for people to work for
01:16:13 ◼ ► them they they had it turned out uh they had just converted to max from a more traditional
01:16:19 ◼ ► uh paste up kind of thing they had gone all computer they were laying out the pages and page maker
01:16:24 ◼ ► and a lot of the editors were struggling with it so i entered this environment as a typist
01:16:28 ◼ ► literally in those days man this really makes me feel old but i was super cool but everybody else was super
01:16:35 ◼ ► old um they people come with their art with their articles that they'd written for the newspaper
01:16:40 ◼ ► that they had typed on a typewriter right or maybe they they'd done it on like a a a computer and printed
01:16:49 ◼ ► it out but to get it on the max you had to retype it somebody could come in with a mac on a floppy disk
01:16:56 ◼ ► but otherwise you had to retype it into microsoft word so that was my first job because as is known
01:17:03 ◼ ► throughout the podcast sphere i am a fast i was always a fast typist so that was my first job
01:17:09 ◼ ► it's a very fast type of folks i can attest to it and very rapidly what would happen because i did work
01:17:13 ◼ ► on my high school newspaper and stuff is i i started kind of editing the articles as i typed them in because
01:17:18 ◼ ► i was fixing mistakes and stuff and i'm not sure they appreciated that the editors there but their
01:17:27 ◼ ► their their solution was to make me uh uh an assistant editor instead so i went from typist
01:17:32 ◼ ► to editor fairly quickly in the news department um and we did have some like mac se's in back rooms
01:17:39 ◼ ► where you could like if you're the writer you could literally go write your article on the mac back there
01:17:43 ◼ ► and then and turn your story in that way and people would do that too anyway so that was my
01:17:48 ◼ ► exposure to the mac for the first time and that was i was hooked literally by the end of that year
01:17:54 ◼ ► there was a sale of the already discounted mac se because it was about to be replaced by the mac
01:17:59 ◼ ► classic at my and education price back then was really much lower and then it was lower even still
01:18:06 ◼ ► still a lot of money uh and at that point i you know the money my parents had saved for me for
01:18:11 ◼ ► college was a bank account i had a checkbook for because i was paying the bills and i just
01:18:17 ◼ ► bought a computer just bought a mac se and that was the end of the apple too the apple too went home
01:18:21 ◼ ► with me and it never came back but the the mac se came home with me and then went back to school for
01:18:25 ◼ ► the last two years and that was when i fell in love with with a mac and um you know i i ran the cables so
01:18:33 ◼ ► that we could network our office so that we could all print to our fancy printer instead of what we had to
01:18:37 ◼ ► do before then which was put things on a floppy disk walk it over to the one computer that was
01:18:41 ◼ ► connected to the printer and the worst so um so yeah that and nothing would say my um would point my
01:18:49 ◼ ► career direction more than the fact that i was both the editor-in-chief of my college newspaper and the
01:18:53 ◼ ► person who was installing the file sharing software and and running the cables for the network so that we
01:18:59 ◼ ► could all have a better computing environment at so i was the it guy and the editor-in-chief at the same
01:19:05 ◼ ► time and it's like oh this guy is going to do journalism and computers right i feel like i feel
01:19:09 ◼ ► like the arrow forward was obvious i think other people i work with maybe and the people i went to
01:19:15 ◼ ► high school with when i went to my high school reunion a lot of them were like oh yeah we figured
01:19:20 ◼ ► you'd do something in computers i'm like really the my my two years of radio and three years of
01:19:26 ◼ ► newspaper and three years of video production didn't tell you that maybe i'd be in the media
01:19:30 ◼ ► and they're like oh did you do that like okay everybody has their own vision of themselves and
01:19:34 ◼ ► it doesn't always come into contact with reality um so anyway yeah so i went to grad school and um
01:19:43 ◼ ► sixteen thousand dollars a year as a journalist i was like oh god no let's find a better job and i did
01:19:50 ◼ ► because i met pam pifner who was a senior editor at mac user and that was that moment of like oh i could
01:19:56 ◼ ► i could do the magazines that i'm reading and it would be both media and about the subject area that i cared
01:20:03 ◼ ► so much about and that is literally it because i became an intern and then uh that went well because
01:20:13 ◼ ► they offered me a job and so i i started a job there when i was still finishing up my master's
01:20:20 ◼ ► degree and that takes me all the way to when they merged mac user and mac world and they said we we
01:20:29 ◼ ► would like you to move over to mac world and that takes me all the way to 2014 when i left mac world
01:20:34 ◼ ► which is why every time we give my daughter advice about applying for a job my wife points out that i have
01:20:42 ◼ ► uh i applied for a job one time um which is true although i will say i have hired a lot of people
01:20:50 ◼ ► i've seen job applications from the other side a lot but i only ever really i mean basically i became
01:20:57 ◼ ► i think i technically had to apply for the job after i was an intern but like it was my job it was made for
01:21:10 ◼ ► forever until until 2014 when i left so um so that's my story so basically fell in love with uh
01:21:19 ◼ ► apple 2 and then the mac and then found a way to make it part of what i did and found a way to make a job
01:21:25 ◼ ► out of that and found a way to make a career out of that and that you know takes me to now so that's
01:21:30 ◼ ► my story uh i have a story too but let's take a break and we'll do my story too all right this
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01:24:07 ◼ ► so my story is different uh than your story um and of course i think is is a different story i think
01:24:24 ◼ ► different apple computers as a kid my problem is i don't remember exactly what they were um my uncle
01:24:32 ◼ ► was and is a technologically minded person he is the person that i really have to owe my love of
01:24:41 ◼ ► technology he always had the latest gadgets um you know i remember there was it was a big hubbub when he
01:24:47 ◼ ► got like a uh a cd player that was an mp3 player right where you could like load all your cds onto
01:24:54 ◼ ► it and it would take them as mp3s and you could just choose from you like that was like a big deal
01:24:59 ◼ ► in my life when he got that it was an incredible thing to say but we had he had access through his
01:25:05 ◼ ► job he used to work for bt british telecom so like the um um was at a time it's kind of still is like our
01:25:14 ◼ ► main kind of telecoms provider uh in the uk for like especially if like landline uh calls and stuff
01:25:19 ◼ ► like that but also like then he he went to mobile phone stuff um i remember he had that like sony ericsson
01:25:27 ◼ ► like a palm pilot kind of thing that was an incredible thing uh in my life to see him use this kind of stuff
01:25:33 ◼ ► um he he once actually gave me uh this thing that bt was trialing that did not work out it was a wrist
01:25:40 ◼ ► watch that was a pager that was very fun but anyway he had various uh apple computers i believe he had an
01:25:49 ◼ ► apple 2 or some flavor that i played around with and i especially remember a pga tour golf game that i poured
01:25:56 ◼ ► many hours into whenever i'd visit him uh and i but i didn't really care about golf but it was a game he
01:26:02 ◼ ► had because he loved golf and so that was the video game that i played um and i know that he had various
01:26:09 ◼ ► powerbook laptops over time as well and some of this stuff would get handed down to me uh the first time i
01:26:15 ◼ ► ever saw a sad mac face was when you know there was no there wasn't the internet didn't exist for
01:26:21 ◼ ► me at the time so i would just dig through the file directories on this computer and i assume i deleted
01:26:28 ◼ ► something really important um and i also remember at one point seeing a floppy disk of a question mark on
01:26:33 ◼ ► it i don't know what i did to these computers but they they were at me downs and i kind of i learned a
01:26:37 ◼ ► love of computing by just digging around on this stuff but so this was like a thing and then we got a pc
01:26:44 ◼ ► at home and then we got the internet and i didn't think about it for many years until the ipod became
01:26:50 ◼ ► a thing um and so i was really intrigued about the ipod mini so i think this is what 2004 and i don't
01:27:01 ◼ ► know what it was maybe it was just the advertising that got to me but it's like i want one of these
01:27:06 ◼ ► i actually had had a minidisc player before then which i loved but then mp3 player sounded even better
01:27:12 ◼ ► yeah so cool minidisc i loved my i loved my sony minidisc player it was so great it was the blue
01:27:19 ◼ ► one like the classic blue one oh man i love that thing but then i was like no i don't want the discs
01:27:24 ◼ ► anymore i want an mp3 player and the only mp3 player that i want is an ipod and the ipod mini was very
01:27:30 ◼ ► exciting to me and i remember i went to uh an electronics store and the only one they had was the
01:27:35 ◼ ► pink one which wasn't necessarily what i wanted i wanted the green one but i wanted it so bad i was like i'm
01:27:41 ◼ ► just gonna get the pink one and i'm actually really happy i had the pink one because the pink
01:27:45 ◼ ► ipod mini was awesome and then over time i had all the accessories i had the belt clip you know which
01:27:50 ◼ ► is actually the belt clip was actually pretty cool uh i and i loved my ipod mini and this then got me
01:27:58 ◼ ► in i was in with the ipod mini i was like this you know i was plugging into a pc at the time but i this
01:28:04 ◼ ► was what i wanted and i would every week i would be on the itunes music store seeing what new music
01:28:10 ◼ ► there was and then i'll buy new albums and like i discovered so much music during this time just
01:28:15 ◼ ► because i had the ipod mini but it also threw me into the world of like ipod rumors and then just
01:28:22 ◼ ► general apple and then like it expanded my love of what was possible in computing because i came
01:28:30 ◼ ► through from the ipod so websites like obviously mac world but i lounge was a big one uh the unofficial
01:28:37 ◼ ► apple weblog like these were sites that i would start frequenting to read about rumors and and things like
01:28:42 ◼ ► that this then ended up you know through different you know i would then start looking at more ipods
01:28:51 ◼ ► and then another big one for me was the video ipod so what's that maybe fourth gen uh was the first
01:28:58 ◼ ► ipod with video um i remember something that this is very funny for me at the time i guess i was maybe
01:29:05 ◼ ► like 16 or 17 when this came out uh and i convinced my mom that she had to let me this is a christmas
01:29:13 ◼ ► gift and uh i had to i convinced her that i needed to have it for a few days uh this is my only christmas
01:29:20 ◼ ► gift that year so i could set it up because i said to her like it's useless to me as a gift as there's
01:29:25 ◼ ► nothing on it right which meant that i then spent a few days just playing with and watching i think
01:29:31 ◼ ► episodes of family guy uh under the covers at night um and and anything else i could find and
01:29:37 ◼ ► actually the video ipod is what led me to discover podcasts because there was a burgeoning field of
01:29:46 ◼ ► video podcasts at the time and that was like dignation was the first one that i watched and
01:29:50 ◼ ► then other stuff from revision three is how i found twit and then how i found mac break was all through
01:29:55 ◼ ► wanting to watch video podcasts on my ipod this all leads to 2006 so january 2006 was my 18th birthday
01:30:07 ◼ ► and through a combination of my birthday money that was coming and the part-time job i had at the time
01:30:24 ◼ ► imac announced at mac world in 2006 and i decided this was the one i was going to get that just so
01:30:33 ◼ ► happened to be the first intel mac that is what i ended up buying so my first mac of my own was the
01:30:41 ◼ ► first intel imac the white kind of plasticky bulbous one that was my first mac and i remember like i just
01:30:49 ◼ ► fell in love with this computer i loved it so much and would show all of my friends and we loved photo
01:30:56 ◼ ► booth everybody loved photo booth like that was like such a big deal at the time and i did you know
01:31:02 ◼ ► everything i could possibly do right i built websites of iweb um i was just in it spending all
01:31:10 ◼ ► my days on this computer and then that then just i fell in love with apple at that point later on down
01:31:17 ◼ ► the line i got a white macbook um this was i i bought my white macbook using my first paycheck my entire
01:31:28 ◼ ► first paycheck from my full-time job in banking i remember i was at a training course and um i i went to
01:31:38 ◼ ► the atm to check that it had been deposited it was i was on my way home from the training course i stopped
01:31:44 ◼ ► off at the apple store and i spent every penny on a white macbook so now i had two macs right i have
01:31:51 ◼ ► my laptop and i have my desktop and then like this is i don't remember what year this is but but like
01:31:58 ◼ ► like we're we're in it now and then i'm into the ipod touch and the iphone and like when i was reflecting
01:32:05 ◼ ► on this today that 2004 to say 2008 run unbelievable yeah right like who legendary would not have been
01:32:15 ◼ ► me at that moment and then not just be completely devoted to apple for the rest of their lives like
01:32:21 ◼ ► if you start in 2004 and then you end up with an ipod mini a video ipod an imac a macbook an ipod touch
01:32:31 ◼ ► and an iphone all in like a four to five year span like unbelievable like just like like a legendary run
01:32:39 ◼ ► for a company like i couldn't believe it when i was looking at this today yeah and then it was like now
01:32:43 ◼ ► we're off you know like yeah just just unbelievable and then in 2010 i decided i needed to start a
01:32:50 ◼ ► podcast of my own and this was in between the ipad being announced and being released um so i i started
01:32:58 ◼ ► podcasting in april of 2010 the ipad was released here in in july like it was a you know there was a
01:33:06 ◼ ► there was both the iphone the first iphone and the first ipad they they came internationally a little bit
01:33:11 ◼ ► later um and i remember just like the first few episodes of my first ever podcast was just me just
01:33:17 ◼ ► being increasingly frustrated about having to wait because apple i mean apple was a much smaller company
01:33:22 ◼ ► at this time they didn't even acknowledge that it would ship internationally like let alone talk about
01:33:30 ◼ ► when that might be it was like ah you know we're gonna be shipping in in april it's like yeah but only in
01:33:36 ◼ ► one place and then they eventually announced it and then yeah so this like when i was i was spending
01:33:42 ◼ ► time looking back at this over the last couple of days and i kind of think to myself well of course i'm
01:33:46 ◼ ► doing what i'm doing you know like i just i i can't see a scenario where i could care about anything
01:33:52 ◼ ► more you know like this this span of five years it gave me kind of everything i could ever imagine i was
01:34:00 ◼ ► still so young you know like i was a late teen into early 20s with this stuff and so it was it was just
01:34:07 ◼ ► so formative to me and it was also so cool at the time like i think that's the thing that is maybe if
01:34:16 ◼ ► you you're you're younger is hard to explain how cool apple was in the 2000s like because they were small but
01:34:26 ◼ ► their products were so amazing and everybody wanted them whether they had them or not it wasn't like a
01:34:32 ◼ ► given that you might that you would have one everyone wanted one everyone wanted an ipod especially the
01:34:39 ◼ ► ipod mini everybody wanted the macbook right the the the plastic macbooks either the white one or the black
01:34:45 ◼ ► one you know everybody wanted one of those computers then everybody wanted an iphone and it was it was such an
01:34:51 ◼ ► incredible time and i and i and i feel so lucky that this is kind of my uh my story with them yeah i i would
01:35:02 ◼ ► maybe even argue that you and i are representative of the two great influxes of people who uh started getting
01:35:12 ◼ ► into apple stuff yeah is that i was part of that group of kids who were exposed to the apple 2
01:35:18 ◼ ► generation and then just kind of went off and i i guess there's all the other group would be
01:35:23 ◼ ► bring it back to john syracuse i feel like the the people who just saw the mac original mac were blown
01:35:28 ◼ ► away but i was primed i was primed to see the mac and get it by my time with an apple 2 um and then the
01:35:36 ◼ ► the second wave is that is the ipod yeah uh ipod to iphone that early 2000s yeah i don't think many
01:35:43 ◼ ► people were getting that into it in the intervening time right like it it wasn't the right time it was
01:35:49 ◼ ► probably not the coolest time to be an apple fan of 1990 well when i started my job right when i was
01:35:55 ◼ ► dying but it does feel like it's like if it wasn't your time it was my time right like these are the times
01:36:00 ◼ ► that created the enthusiasts the fanboys whatever you would call them like this was the time in which
01:36:08 ◼ ► these things were happening um because they were doing such unbelievable things you know like the the
01:36:16 ◼ ► thing like like the iphone was just so incredible i don't remember if i mentioned this on the show last
01:36:23 ◼ ► week but uh in preparation for my um incredible impression of an impression of an impression uh i i
01:36:31 ◼ ► watched some of the iphone keynote like the steve jobs iphone keynote yeah one is the greatest product
01:36:38 ◼ ► demonstration ever and then there would be a better one uh but to just like the way in which people were
01:36:44 ◼ ► reacting to the things that were happening i've never heard before that like people were shocked to see
01:36:52 ◼ ► scrolling like that was on it's like whoa what's right like right just just the unlocking of the phone
01:36:59 ◼ ► was eliciting gasps you were there right i was there yeah i mean i know you obviously touched one afterwards
01:37:05 ◼ ► but you were obviously in the room when it was happening i i remember the moment that i got what he was doing
01:37:13 ◼ ► with the you know it's a breakthrough internet communicator it's a it's an ipod that plays video
01:37:19 ◼ ► it's a phone and and then and then i remember it spinning around again for him to repeat it and i
01:37:25 ◼ ► was like oh i i see i see what the bit is here yeah and i felt like it took a couple more for the
01:37:31 ◼ ► audience to start going and then saying are you getting it um but uh yeah it's a masterful legendary you
01:37:41 ◼ ► could it's possible that you could argue that there are other steve jobs keynotes that are more impressive
01:37:48 ◼ ► in terms of the showmanship but the combination of the showmanship and the uh and the product
01:37:54 ◼ ► that's being shown put those together and you can't match that one i think and i say that as somebody
01:38:00 ◼ ► who just scrubbed through the entirety of the ipod launch video which is a very different vibe like
01:38:06 ◼ ► there's a there's like a moment in it very early on like when he's just you know that they've he's
01:38:13 ◼ ► basically just shown the whole thing and he's like and here it is and he takes it out of his pocket and
01:38:17 ◼ ► he puts it away again and it's like oh that's such a flex it's like i'm not showing it to you yet i've
01:38:22 ◼ ► got it it's in my hands but not for you it's like wow wait for it so it's just it's so good so yeah
01:38:30 ◼ ► that is my origin story very nice let's uh let's knock out one ask upgrade question because okay we
01:38:38 ◼ ► don't really have time but i you know i feel bad when we don't single laser one single laser and
01:38:45 ◼ ► this question is going to come from logan logan says if apple introducing the macbook neo and
01:38:49 ◼ ► discontinuing the mac pro could there be a new naming scheme in the works neo air studio and ultra becoming
01:38:57 ◼ ► the tags while pro and pro max are retired or just used for chips could the macbook pro become
01:39:02 ◼ ► the macbook studio or the macbook ultra could other products be named the same way or is this
01:39:07 ◼ ► all just marketing jargon that never made sense in the first place i'm sorry to do this to you logan but
01:39:13 ◼ ► the answer is just no pro doesn't mean what you think it means yeah pro pro being used in the mac pro
01:39:19 ◼ ► is the worst example of using pro in apple's product lines i'm sure they're relieved that it's not
01:39:25 ◼ ► there anymore i will also say that the mac studio you know it could have been called the mac pro in
01:39:30 ◼ ► a different world but studio is pretty good name too so that that's fine i think that's a a nice way
01:39:36 ◼ ► to do it but like they're not going to change the name of the iphone 17 pro like pro max like no they're
01:39:44 ◼ ► not going to do any of that that's that pro means nice except for the mac pro which is now gone so it
01:39:50 ◼ ► just it makes apple's use of pro better and more consistent now so no it's not going anywhere yeah
01:39:56 ◼ ► there are people that i mean i've seen rumors about this that like the or people suggesting that the
01:40:01 ◼ ► touchscreen macbook pro will be called the macbook ultra and i just don't think that's going to be the
01:40:06 ◼ ► the case or that's going to be the macbook pro i don't see it i don't see it i think it's going to
01:40:10 ◼ ► be the high-end models of the macbook pro yeah and then they'll still keep the uh m6 around in the base
01:40:16 ◼ ► model that is not redesigned i think that's what's going to happen there so they can sell it at a low
01:40:22 ◼ ► price yeah i just this is overthinking it and and nobody nobody thinks of apple products with a pro
01:40:29 ◼ ► label and thinks about the mac pro because nobody thinks about the mac pro so no sorry i don't know
01:40:37 ◼ ► why mike picked this question just for me to kick it but there it is that's the one question we've got
01:40:42 ◼ ► because jason we have had so many questions about product naming we had to do it we had to we had to
01:40:49 ◼ ► do one of them so people will stop asking don't look at the discontinuation of the mac pro is literally
01:40:54 ◼ ► meaning anything about anything other than the mac pro well it all started with the neo so like
01:40:59 ◼ ► the neo started a tidal wave of product naming questions that oh boy i wanted i wanted to just
01:41:04 ◼ ► answer one of them so we could get it out there and i like logan's because logan admits it at the end
01:41:09 ◼ ► it's all just marketing jargon that never made sense that's right don't don't try to apply a lot
01:41:16 ◼ ► if you would like to send us in a question for us to answer in a future show where you have any
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01:41:39 ◼ ► week's episode one more time that is delete me squarespace steam clock and factor but most of all