00:00:00 ◼ ► Quinn, I don't know what I'm going to do in September because usually I go out to Cupertino and go to see the new iPhones that are coming out, but there's no point this year because it's been obviated. The Trump T1 phone came out.
00:00:20 ◼ ► I don't know. I want to talk about it with you, but without discouraging listeners from going to your channel to watch your video about it. Somehow you got 30 minutes out of it, and I wanted so much more.
00:00:34 ◼ ► Well, good. That's high praise. I was worried that we wouldn't be able to make anything super entertaining about it because ultimately it's just a rebranded HTC phone.
00:00:45 ◼ ► But the process of trying to get it, and then the way that it was packaged, and even as it came, everything was so absurd that, yeah, it just ended up being a content goldmine.
00:00:57 ◼ ► I should have written it down, and it's so great. It's early in the video, and you say that it is a phone that is held together with patriotism, and I forget the other thing.
00:01:12 ◼ ► Yeah, hopes and dreams. And if you have an opinion of the Trump family's actual patriotism that even vaguely matches mine, you'll realize that the phone isn't held together at all.
00:01:39 ◼ ► And who the hell knew what it was going to be anyway? Because they released like nine different renderings. Some of them were clearly done by AI. It wasn't even a device that existed.
00:01:49 ◼ ► Once they took an iPhone and made it gold, and they're like, yep, this is the Trump phone. Okay, yeah, good luck with that one.
00:01:55 ◼ ► And so by the time it finally shipped, there had been so much, I think, I don't want to say misreporting.
00:02:02 ◼ ► I think it was, there had been so little information that people were just surmising what the phone would be.
00:02:08 ◼ ► And I saw an overwhelming number of outlets report that it was some kind of rebranded $120 Chinese OEM device.
00:02:17 ◼ ► And I was looking at this phone compared to the Trump phone, or at least the renders that they had released.
00:02:29 ◼ ► And so that's probably what the phone is. And sure enough, I got it. And it was, that's what it is.
00:02:39 ◼ ► And so if you really wanted an HTC U24 Pro, and you wanted it in yellow, because the phone's not gold,
00:03:00 ◼ ► So like I said, it's not that it's an outright scam. It's probably a $50 premium over the HTC phone.
00:03:47 ◼ ► Part of the lashback that I got, of course, from the kind of MAGA side of things was this
00:04:04 ◼ ► And I even got people that were saying, yeah, well, you know, Eric and Don Jr., they were
00:04:21 ◼ ► I didn't end up fully reporting on it because I couldn't really with full confidence say
00:04:27 ◼ ► But my very heavy suspicions, and The Verge has kind of corroborated the same, is that Trump
00:04:33 ◼ ► Mobile is a licensed kind of sub-provider of another small carrier called Liberty Mobile.
00:04:46 ◼ ► And so you're running on T-Mobile's network, but I think Trump Mobile is almost a de facto
00:05:04 ◼ ► But the customer support representative that I talked to and the director of sales who called
00:05:12 ◼ ► me to see if I was going to buy the phone, I looked up his name and he appears to be the
00:05:19 ◼ ► And so I think it's probably something like Liberty Mobile and their whole value proposition
00:05:30 ◼ ► So I'm betting they're just savvy businessmen that went to the Trump org and was like, hey,
00:05:40 ◼ ► And then it all just spiraled out of control and it became the built in America bullcrap
00:05:46 ◼ ► that was spouted for months and months and months, even though everybody surely knew that
00:06:10 ◼ ► Well, there had been original reporting that it was a quarter of a million, but then there
00:06:23 ◼ ► And it turned out that there had been about 30,000 people that had put down $100 to buy the
00:06:49 ◼ ► But you would have to imagine that the minimum order quantities to do this amount of work to
00:07:35 ◼ ► But in my extended family, and again, I often say this, I have, throughout this course of
00:07:41 ◼ ► my career, very successfully stayed out of becoming the Apple IT guy for my extended family.
00:08:14 ◼ ► I have not steered my extended family towards Apple stuff because I'm John Gruber and this
00:08:54 ◼ ► I mean, if she did the same thing Trump did, she'd sell a lot more of these goddamn phones.
00:09:24 ◼ ► I'll just add this, too, before I forget, is while they were in that period at the beginning
00:09:38 ◼ ► The Verge was running a lovely one week, once a week, did the Trump phone come out column?
00:09:52 ◼ ► But when they started getting real and they started saying, well, here's a render of it.
00:10:05 ◼ ► When the one that is the actual T1 came out, I thought it might have been AI, too, because
00:10:15 ◼ ► The unveil video was 100% done with AI, because the camera buttons move, the sheen on the back
00:10:36 ◼ ► So that's what was even crazier, is they come out, you know, a year after they've been taking
00:10:55 ◼ ► So they actually took the phone with the case, and there's a Spigen logo at the very bottom,
00:11:02 ◼ ► And they didn't remove that, of course, from their crappy Photoshop job and just put Tron
00:11:15 ◼ ► Again, where I'm kind of confused, they're clearly targeting a very specific demographic
00:11:20 ◼ ► because I think anybody that's buying a kind of budget bargain Android phones, they're just
00:11:37 ◼ ► I'm on one, U.S. Mobile, because I'm able to be multi-network, and they have a plan that's
00:12:08 ◼ ► And I think you get like 10 gigs of priority data with the bunch being like limited to edge
00:12:22 ◼ ► And you have to bring your own device or buy a refurbished iPhone, which they also offer
00:12:35 ◼ ► Mine's just bigger picture, which is that Trump world is—and again, putting the left-right
00:12:58 ◼ ► to stupid Americans what JFK was to Catholic Americans and what Obama was to African Americans.
00:13:19 ◼ ► But a lot of people just assume that people who are stupid know that they're stupid and lack
00:13:44 ◼ ► I sure know a lot of really smart, confident—or really smart, competent people who are—I'm
00:13:54 ◼ ► And everybody knows the opposite, like their idiot uncle who thinks he knows everything.
00:13:59 ◼ ► And if you really realize, it's not your personal life and your circle of friends and family.
00:14:07 ◼ ► But that these really stupid people with no competence, competence, have all sort of found
00:14:17 ◼ ► And they just—part of their competence is thinking that everything in the world is easy.
00:15:03 ◼ ► The New York Times had an investigation where the crypto coin, they made like $1.8 billion
00:15:13 ◼ ► And the Times did the work and figured out that American citizens who bought his crypto, which
00:15:20 ◼ ► is now, and that what they bought it at is now underwater, have lost like a collective $2.8 billion.
00:15:33 ◼ ► And some unbelievable number of gullible, well-intentioned, believed in their president, Americans, lost $2.8 billion.
00:16:24 ◼ ► And then they ship a piece of crap that's kind of technically, I guess, what's partially what they promised it would be.
00:16:48 ◼ ► But it's just one of the many things the Trump org has always kind of done and put their name in front of to see if it sticks.
00:16:53 ◼ ► And the stuff that doesn't, like this, will probably just disappear in a couple of years.
00:16:58 ◼ ► It'll remain probably some weirdo kind of subsidiary of Liberty Mobile that is managed and operated by them.
00:17:21 ◼ ► And there are a lot of things in life in broad areas where maybe it's not as hard as everybody thinks it is or times change and technology changes and things that weren't hard.
00:17:33 ◼ ► I mean, effectively, what you and I do for a living is an answer to how hard can it be from the perspective of being a full-time media professional from, like, a generation ago.
00:17:50 ◼ ► You'd have to get on television, and getting on television meant somehow, depending on how far back in time, getting on a very limited number of networks, right?
00:18:00 ◼ ► Even at the biggest that cable ever got, compared to YouTube, the opportunities for people to make a living on television were infinitesimal.
00:18:14 ◼ ► And if you go back a little bit further to my childhood, they were incredibly rare because there were really only three real networks and maybe four if you count PBS.
00:18:26 ◼ ► But there's a big difference between crypto and cell phones because crypto, without going on a whole side rant about it, I mean, and it is kind of unique.
00:18:36 ◼ ► Like, maybe in the history, there's really very hard to say, oh, crypto is like, cryptocurrency is like X.
00:18:48 ◼ ► And there are cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin in particular, that has lasting value, apparently.
00:19:07 ◼ ► There are people who have, if you got in early enough on Bitcoin, probably there are people listening to this show who have made an awful lot of money by putting a relatively small amount into Bitcoin 10, 15 years ago or whatever.
00:19:20 ◼ ► There is real value, but also, because there is real value, it is the perfect, and you can make scam ones and rug pull type ones.
00:19:33 ◼ ► It is the, there's never been a way to make computers work better for running a scam than cryptocurrency.
00:19:40 ◼ ► Because there is a real there there, for some of them, and you can just make a new one, and like Trump currency, whatever the hell, Trump coin, whatever his was called, take people's money, take your end and convert it to actual dollars right away, and then see what happens.
00:19:58 ◼ ► And nobody would have been happier than if Trump coin had held its value or gone up in value.
00:20:04 ◼ ► Trump might have actually been angry if it did, because he'd be like, well, why don't, why aren't I making more money from this now that it's held its value?
00:20:12 ◼ ► But it's all just, it, what did somebody long ago, somebody's great description was like explaining crypto to their mom, and it was like, imagine if you could burn fossil fuels to solve Sudokos.
00:20:30 ◼ ► You're converting energy, and in the middle, there's a lot of GPUs, and at the end comes out, it's solved Sudokus.
00:20:54 ◼ ► And I think at the outset of this whole endeavor, there were people who were like, ah, how hard can it be?
00:21:07 ◼ ► And then I think what happened is shit got real around the new year, because the publicity around, hey, they took all this, these $100 deposits.
00:21:15 ◼ ► If you read the fine print, if you read the fine print, it actually says that they don't have to give these deposits back, right?
00:21:23 ◼ ► And so people really, and I thought, ah, I think they're going to ship some kind of phone eventually.
00:21:28 ◼ ► But I was like, would I be shocked if they just kept the $100 deposits in forever and said, whatever?
00:21:38 ◼ ► But I think somebody realized, and somewhere down the legal chain, there are people whose last names aren't Trump who were on the hook for this.
00:21:50 ◼ ► If you look at the box, the packaging, this was clearly something put together quickly.
00:22:27 ◼ ► I'll bet they're, like, breaking even at $500 overall, especially in the quantities they're talking about.
00:22:42 ◼ ► And so, you know, sell what's costing them probably $20 or $15 a month in service and make $30 a month from them on this.
00:22:53 ◼ ► And that's also why I think they are probably going with the HTC phone as opposed to one of these sketchier Chinese kind of reskins that they were rumored to is I honestly think it comes down to competence.
00:23:06 ◼ ► If they could have done it, they probably would have, but they needed something that was going to be pretty well put together and has a decent track record and they could get in the order quantities they needed.
00:23:17 ◼ ► And so they went to a real company that was accessible and has people that's worked with the West and they don't have to start from scratch.
00:23:26 ◼ ► They can be pretty highly confident that the phones that they are going to ship aren't going to have spyware on them.
00:23:33 ◼ ► There were all these people suggesting, oh, this thing's going to be totally loaded with spyware.
00:23:41 ◼ ► But because I wanted to see the bootloader came unlocked on this device and I ended up installing some software on it to do some packet sniffing and to see what network activity it was doing.
00:23:53 ◼ ► Which I suspected, but I also kind of suggested, had they gone with a cheaper Chinese device, that actually might have been a problem.
00:24:01 ◼ ► Not because the Trump organization or Trump Mobile wanted to spy on their customers, but as a consequence of incompetence.
00:24:07 ◼ ► Like, I think that a bad foreign actor might have actually tried to do it, but the Trump Mobile people, they wouldn't have even known.
00:24:16 ◼ ► And so they probably just said, yeah, let's go with someone who's reputable, who has a track record.
00:24:20 ◼ ► We can get this thing out the door and, yeah, we're not going to make money off of it, but we will on the backside on the plan.
00:24:24 ◼ ► And then if you believe their website, this is a temporary promotional pricing and that the phone price of the T1 won't go up over time.
00:24:38 ◼ ► And probably if it remains a going concern that the MVNO on an MVNO, they're just going to get away from their custom phones and just give people whatever phones, used iPhones or whatever.
00:24:53 ◼ ► It's actually one of the things that they have found out, and that I'm sure the person or persons who came in to fix this and make the real phone from HTC were like, you dumbasses, there's no money in phones.
00:25:20 ◼ ► I mean, that was the thing that was going to grab the headlines, the gold phone, made in America.
00:25:24 ◼ ► I mean, if they had come out and said, hey, the Trump family, we've got an MVNO, nobody would have cared.
00:25:29 ◼ ► The phone was what catapulted them into the front of the world, and I think they knew that, and that's why they did that.
00:25:36 ◼ ► And now that Trump Mobile is a thing, well, the phone exists as a byproduct of that kind of promotion, but it's not the focus, and it never has been.
00:25:45 ◼ ► It never will be, and frankly, it's probably, based on the people that I've talked to at Trump Mobile, in order to get the darn thing, I would suspect they have fewer than five people working there anyway.
00:25:55 ◼ ► And I think they all already work for Liberty Mobile, and so their overhead is effectively zero.
00:26:07 ◼ ► I would suggest that it's most likely the Liberty Mobile guys that are getting the sweetest end of the deal, and I think they might even be a little disappointed that it's not panicking.
00:26:17 ◼ ► Right, that they had maybe put competent people in charge of the T1 phone earlier to make it more of a thing.
00:26:23 ◼ ► You know, and it is maybe to his credit that his scams are sort of a shotgun approach, see what sticks.
00:26:38 ◼ ► Maybe they made more money on the Trump coins that they've sold, but by trying everything and seeing what sticks, they found the cryptocurrency one, which actually made them billions of dollars.
00:26:57 ◼ ► There was, I forget, there was somebody who bought the Trump mechanical watch that, you know, which is sort of like, of course, also gold toned and looks very Rolex.
00:27:08 ◼ ► It really looks just, you can just smell it, that it smells like the type of Rolex you buy from a guy with a card table in lower Manhattan.
00:27:25 ◼ ► It was some local, I'll make a note and see if I can find it for the show notes, but there was some local news somewhere who, and I love, sometimes local TV news can make the, get the best stories.
00:27:37 ◼ ► It's like, but some guy bought his wife a Trump phone or Trump watch for her birthday, and it was late, of course.
00:27:54 ◼ ► You know what that means, but they're like little, a T and an R and a U that are like glued onto the dial.
00:28:06 ◼ ► And it was rattling around in there, leaving the word rump, but it, maybe it was the P, I don't know.
00:28:11 ◼ ► But one of the letters fell off and was rattling around in there and it didn't, guess what?
00:28:43 ◼ ► And you know, we were late to the, that's kind of why I was a little worried is we were late
00:28:47 ◼ ► I had had the phone for almost three weeks before we finally published the video, but I wanted
00:28:57 ◼ ► But so when we put it up, I was like, oh man, this is not going to do as well as I hoped.
00:29:09 ◼ ► But I really do think that you put more work and time and a combined effort into your video
00:29:19 ◼ ► Even, even when they hit the reset button at the beginning of the year and were like, let's
00:29:46 ◼ ► It automatically captures meeting notes, instantly finds the exact content you need, drafts, detailed
00:29:56 ◼ ► Notion AI just became twice as powerful for teams, making it the best AI tool for work.
00:30:08 ◼ ► But I know that everybody out in the real world with real jobs, that meetings are a real thing
00:30:29 ◼ ► It captures every idea, every decision, every next step that is proposed in the meeting.
00:30:34 ◼ ► It's all captured in Notion, which is what your team is already using to collaborate and
00:30:43 ◼ ► So the shared meeting notes are right there in Notion, ready for your whole team to share,
00:30:49 ◼ ► And even the AI will even follow up at the end of the meeting with suggested action items
00:31:05 ◼ ► You can capture anything and turn it into organized, searchable notes, including regular
00:31:15 ◼ ► You can capture this episode of the talk show and get it summarized right there in Notion
00:31:20 ◼ ► It works on any meeting platform, Zoom, Google Meet, et cetera, or just with your computer
00:31:27 ◼ ► Like if you're in a room together, the old-fashioned way, having an actual meeting face-to-face,
00:31:37 ◼ ► Just type slash meet on any Notion page or on desktop or mobile and get started instantly.
00:32:41 ◼ ► But my friend Daniel Joukett of Red Sweater Software, the makers of Mars, had a good long-term
00:32:45 ◼ ► personal friend, but he had a tweet a couple of weeks ago, or maybe right before WWDC, that
00:32:51 ◼ ► was basically like, the AI enthusiasts are way too into AI, and the AI skeptics are way too
00:33:44 ◼ ► I've taken a great interest in the native Mac apps, I don't know if you've noticed, on Daring
00:34:00 ◼ ► There was the whole pre-announcement of the quote unquote super app, which is such a dumb
00:34:07 ◼ ► And I felt like, my God, is this predicting in advance that this is going to be a disastrous
00:34:20 ◼ ► So I kind of, and of course it was going to, you know, with a native app kit, Mac app for
00:34:27 ◼ ► ChatGPT and an Electron Codex app and the whole Atlas web browser that was a Chromium thing that
00:34:36 ◼ ► they had wasted so much time and money on, of course those things were going to serve as
00:34:50 ◼ ► And boy, oh boy, did they, I expected it to make me unhappy personally, but I did not expect
00:34:58 ◼ ► it to be maybe the least competent launch of a mass market app in the entire history of
00:35:15 ◼ ► And they have, I know the Mac app didn't have a billion users, but ChatGPT has a billion
00:35:27 ◼ ► I mean, their whole entire product is ChatGPT, but you wouldn't know that based on the fact
00:35:38 ◼ ► And the whole thing about these AI models anyways, is that you often don't have to provide their
00:35:53 ◼ ► other is so weird because with the previous app, you could just go into a chat session and
00:35:59 ◼ ► And I would say, hey, we really should, if we're working on files on our, on our Mac, we
00:36:21 ◼ ► I know it's a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, but it is hard to rename
00:36:30 ◼ ► And the list of things that you have to address are at a technical level are, it's long and
00:36:51 ◼ ► the name of an app that does X into the existing name of an app that does something almost entirely
00:37:08 ◼ ► It's chat GPT now, but it's actually kind of codex under the covers, but you use the new
00:37:12 ◼ ► chat GPT logo, but you can also use the old codex logo and you're like, what are we doing
00:37:18 ◼ ► And with your bit, the bit you wrote about that caught me is that when you download the
00:37:22 ◼ ► new version of the app and mount it as an image on, you open the thing up and rather than
00:37:27 ◼ ► be prompted to drag it to the applications folder, it just says double click this app here.
00:37:36 ◼ ► And at least as they shipped the 1.0 of this, I don't know what the version numbers are, but
00:37:46 ◼ ► And it has the had chat GPT itself, the actual chat tucked into a corner and they shipped
00:37:58 ◼ ► If you already were a user of chat GPT and codex apps on your Mac and you just double clicked
00:38:06 ◼ ► it, then it would update your codex to be chat GPT the name and it would replace your old
00:39:17 ◼ ► for a bit and then it disappeared and I went and looked in my applications folder and there's
00:39:36 ◼ ► I, the reason I saw them both in my doc is I'd left chat GPT running when I launched the
00:40:23 ◼ ► And again, this is a company with, it's privately held at the moment, but it's, their self-proclaimed
00:40:43 ◼ ► And on your point, the fact that it was designed for people that had both chat GPT and Codex
00:40:50 ◼ ► installed, they probably didn't even QA it with, I bet there's not a single person that works
00:41:10 ◼ ► They've kind of cleaned it up and they've done some work, some obvious work in the sidebar
00:41:19 ◼ ► They push it below all of your Codex projects, which is honestly pretty annoying, but they're
00:41:24 ◼ ► And yeah, that's the thing that's the most frustrating to me is that Codex and what do they call it?
00:41:39 ◼ ► I mean, I have a chat GPT worker setup that goes through my email inbox using the Spark CLI
00:41:51 ◼ ► But it is now kind of an equal priority to other apps that have been developed using Codex
00:41:59 ◼ ► And you're like, this is not even they're not even the same ballpark because one is coding
00:42:22 ◼ ► And I'm just devastated because you go back six months ago, and they had an amazing, native,
00:42:55 ◼ ► But if you are going to be using the other one anyway because you were using Codex already,
00:42:59 ◼ ► it does feel like, well, the last thing I need to do is give more of my precious RAM to running processes.
00:43:11 ◼ ► That is sort of the – it's not my biggest complaint about Electron, honestly, the RAM consumption.
00:43:28 ◼ ► And it does seem – again, I can't think of any comparison in the history of the computer world where they're responsible on both ends.
00:43:39 ◼ ► On the one end, it is the AI mania building out data centers that has consumed – they're outbidding everybody else for the limited supply of actual RAM,
00:44:11 ◼ ► And it used to be a lot more, and now you go to eBay, and people are trying to sell loaded-out Mac Studios with more RAM than you can get today for, like, the price of a BMW.
00:44:25 ◼ ► I don't know if people are buying them, but if you really need 512 gigabytes of RAM, you cannot get it from Apple.
00:44:43 ◼ ► But then on the user side, they are pushing apps that use way more RAM on your personal computer than they should for the functionality they provide locally.
00:44:55 ◼ ► So they're driving up demand for RAM on your personal device while they're the ones to blame for the price increase and shortage.
00:45:04 ◼ ► And I understand going with Electron as a framework, it's easy to use, it's more scalable, it's multi-platform agnostic.
00:45:27 ◼ ► And it gets to a point that you raised about, or that we talked about, about where on the spectrum of, oh, the whole world is different now because of AI, or AI is entirely a scam.
00:45:50 ◼ ► But to me, it is really, really interesting with both of these companies at this point, but at the Anthropic in particular, which is the one I wrote about first with their use of Electron, where if they're so good at coding, and one of the, you even mentioned it, one of the main reasons, and it is understandable that why organizations, big or small, for different reasons, would want to go with a write-once, run-everywhere solution.
00:46:18 ◼ ► This has been a recurring thing in computing all the way back to when writing programs was first.
00:46:29 ◼ ► But the idea of having the ANSI standard for C so that you could write your code to the ANSI standard and then move the same C program to a different version of Unix or a different platform than Unix and still have it compile because you wrote it to the standard, right?
00:46:55 ◼ ► But if AI is so good at writing programs, why in the world can't they make it existence proof of how good they are by using Claude to make a native Claude Mac app, right?
00:47:09 ◼ ► The argument is we don't want to spend all this time and all these resources on a platform just for the Mac, but it shouldn't, isn't the answer that your AI can do it?
00:47:24 ◼ ► I've written scripts, and I've written things with ChatGPT that are functional scripts.
00:47:43 ◼ ► And it might be useful and clever, but it's not, hey, here's an entire replacement for Claude for the Mac, and it was entirely written by Claude.
00:48:04 ◼ ► And I think that's a pretty sad condemnation, but I think that's probably the reality is even though it's possible, it's just not a priority,
00:48:12 ◼ ► and they know that people are going to use the product anyway, and so there's just whatever's easier for them to scale more quickly and rapidly.
00:48:18 ◼ ► And if they have to do less QA, and if you don't have multiple binaries, and you have to test multiple platforms,
00:48:25 ◼ ► But it is a bit ironic that one of the selling points of these tools is how easy it makes at taking code in one language
00:48:45 ◼ ► The people who are best able to make a great Mac app, whether it's an all-new app or just rewrite an existing app
00:49:07 ◼ ► And there are people who are not developers at all who are doing this, but they care, right?
00:49:12 ◼ ► I think Jason Snell, I forget the name of the, I think it's called Double Ender, is the name of the app.
00:49:17 ◼ ► It's a podcasting solution app where you and I right now are actually recording a Double Ender,
00:49:30 ◼ ► And he would like to align those two tracks, and it's a Mac app that does this in a very Mac-esque way,
00:49:39 ◼ ► And Jason is not a Mac developer, but he's a, he knows the, he cares about the idioms of being a Mac-esque Mac app,
00:49:53 ◼ ► And it probably would have been easier for him to make it a web app and just drag the files into a web interface,
00:50:00 ◼ ► And Glenn Fleischman wrote an app called Mr. Plimsoll, which I think that's the name of it,
00:50:15 ◼ ► Because maybe you have a drive where you store, like you might have a drive where you store video,
00:50:31 ◼ ► And Glenn is, again, he's a programmer, and he's written programs over time, but not a Mac developer.
00:50:37 ◼ ► But he cares, and he cares about the Mac-esque-ness of it, and therefore is able to do it.
00:50:52 ◼ ► And somebody at OpenAI cared enough a couple of years ago that they put a team together at OpenAI
00:51:03 ◼ ► I mean, and it's like I sing the praises of it because I'm comparing it to Claude and everything else that only runs in a browser.
00:51:12 ◼ ► Like, one of the things that, to me, just defines a Mac app is being able to open whatever the element of the app is.
00:51:25 ◼ ► You can go into Apple Notes, find a note, and double-click on the note, and it opens into a window on its own.
00:51:31 ◼ ► You can go to Apple Mail and find any mail message or a thread of them and double-click on it in the list of messages,
00:51:46 ◼ ► and when they announced that they were going to do that, I was like, uh, in other words,
00:51:58 ◼ ► And in actuality, the version that they shipped was actually a better Mac app than the one that it replaced,
00:52:14 ◼ ► I have a couple of scripts that run for a long period of time, and I want to know about the progress.
00:52:18 ◼ ► And then years ago, I just wrote a thing that just sends a text message to myself in messages while it's running,
00:52:25 ◼ ► and then I can walk away, and then my phone, like, every half hour gets a progress message from myself with the thing,
00:52:32 ◼ ► because AppleScript says send a message to my iMessage ID with this text and this status update.
00:52:56 ◼ ► because it's such a better app than anything else that does chat-style interaction with AI.
00:53:28 ◼ ► However, I used Codex and Cloud Code to create, you can't say write, to supervise the creation of-
00:53:56 ◼ ► And it took a little bit of troubleshooting and looking over, but it works really well.
00:54:06 ◼ ► There are bugs somewhere, I'm sure, but not that are user-facing and not that we've had issues with.
00:54:26 ◼ ► But, boy, I'll tell you, it took a lot of iteration from the initial output where I would say, are you-
00:54:34 ◼ ► And me having to be pretty explicit in kind of wireframing out the appearance and how the interaction behavior should be and how shortcuts and hotkeys should work and all of this stuff.
00:54:46 ◼ ► It just took time and care, which it seems they're unwilling to give, which is a real bummer.
00:54:56 ◼ ► And it's all, to me, evidence that a class of executive, and I think at OpenAI, we've sort of watched it happen almost publicly with the way that their executive shufflings have happened with public announcements.
00:55:14 ◼ ► But that the product-minded people have been replaced by people who just don't think product quality matters.
00:55:23 ◼ ► It's not just that they don't understand it themselves or have a bar, a thermometer of taste themselves where they can taste their own product and say, oh, yeah, that's good enough or that's right or that's wrong or, boy, that sure looks confusing.
00:55:51 ◼ ► And it doesn't mean it's the—I would argue that it is always the wrong thing to do, right?
00:55:57 ◼ ► And it certainly never hurts a product to be well-designed as opposed to poorly designed.
00:56:03 ◼ ► But it's just there's so many signs of it where it's just there's no way that this shipped with product-minded people in charge when they've got, like, at this point, Claude has in their settings, like, plugins, extensions, connectors, and something else that is, like, in the thesaurus as synonyms for those words.
00:56:28 ◼ ► And somebody else—I wrote this on Daring Fireball, and somebody wrote to me, hey, you don't even know the half of it because if you're, like, in an IT organization and you're the administrator, you get connectors for something else, and the word means a different thing.
00:56:51 ◼ ► But it is the sort of thing that when ChatGPT or Claude itself is making these things and nobody who knows better is there to say, no, that's not good enough, they're just like, ship it.
00:57:03 ◼ ► That's the other—on the valuation thing, that's one of the excuses that I've seen from people to say, oh, well, they're building quickly, and they're shipping all the time, and these are still new fledgling companies.
00:57:14 ◼ ► But if they have alleged effective market caps of a trillion dollars, that's their private valuation, that's bigger than Walmart.
00:57:24 ◼ ► So, oh, we didn't have time to make a native app doesn't really fly with me anymore at that point.
00:57:31 ◼ ► Right, these are not—they are, in some sense, because they're pre-IPO startups, but they're not startups like anything that we've ever seen before.
00:58:06 ◼ ► I would happily—like, my wife explained to me long ago, and it's like, oh, yeah, I see why it's like that.
00:58:21 ◼ ► And you come in, you have to be able to argue on the spot, because you might get called on in class, the client side of the contract, the vendor side of the contract, or some other side of the contract, like somebody who was caught in the middle.
00:58:38 ◼ ► And if you—we had, like, a debate, like, who's the best company that's ever existed in the 20—from the 20th century onward?
00:58:44 ◼ ► And I got dealt Berkshire Hathaway, I'd be like, oh, I might win this, because I can argue that this might be the best company that's ever existed.
00:58:56 ◼ ► They put them at the beginning of their annual report every year, where they compare their returns against the S&P 500.
00:59:03 ◼ ► Yeah, you could just have put money into Berkshire Hathaway in, like, 1978, and no matter how much you put in, you're pretty rich right now.
00:59:12 ◼ ► And these companies are more valuable than Berkshire Hathaway, and Berkshire Hathaway hasn't, like, suffered or declined.
00:59:27 ◼ ► But it is true, that's the other thing that is very evident, is in their list of priorities, moving fast is number one.
00:59:45 ◼ ► And to me, we can laugh and complain about the sloppiness of this rollout of the Mac ChatGPT codex renaming and rebranding or whatever.
00:59:58 ◼ ► And there are people who are putting very important decisions in the hands of their LLMs.
01:00:11 ◼ ► Like, hey, this, you know, and they're the ones who keep saying, this is transformative of all of society and culture.
01:00:41 ◼ ► If you use Factor, you've got something healthy in your fridge or your pantry and you can make it right now.
01:00:49 ◼ ► Factor is not a meal kit type thing where you get a whole bunch of ingredients in a box and then you have a recipe card and you put it all together quickly.
01:01:07 ◼ ► So just like meal kits, they come in a box that's got dry ice in it to keep the cold stuff or the refrigerated stuff cold.
01:01:17 ◼ ► But then when you're ready to eat it, you can just pop it in the microwave and heat it up and it is all made with really fresh ingredients.
01:01:41 ◼ ► They have over 100 rotating weekly meals, including globally inspired flavors like Mediterranean, Asian.
01:01:55 ◼ ► If you've got kids who do not want to eat quote-unquote weird food or something like that, there's some really kid-friendly stuff that is obviously kid-friendly.
01:02:02 ◼ ► They've got protein-heavy stuff if you're like into maximizing the amount of protein you're intaking.
01:02:08 ◼ ► Whatever – if you have specific dietary needs or vegetarian or anything like that, you can definitely find it.
01:02:14 ◼ ► They have plus selections every week, but it's not overwhelming because they're broken down into obvious categories that you can pick from.
01:02:26 ◼ ► But you're also never – every time I've ordered from them, I've never felt like, ugh, that's not enough to choose from.
01:02:33 ◼ ► It's a really, really good mix of choices, always fresh ingredients, and it really does come on time, and it's super easy to eat, and I really do like it.
01:02:42 ◼ ► I especially love the breakfast stuff with the eggs because that's when I am at my absolute laziest.
01:02:47 ◼ ► And I'll just admit it, I love having a little tiny steak for lunch, like a filet or mignon or something.
01:02:53 ◼ ► I feel like I feel like a king because ordinarily I never, ever eat something like a steak for lunch.
01:03:18 ◼ ► That gets you 50% off and free daily greens per box with a new subscription only while supplies last until September 27, 2026.
01:03:49 ◼ ► I'm running it on my iPad, on my iPhone, on one of the Macs that I'm using, not my main production Mac, but my laptop, it's on there.
01:04:03 ◼ ► And, you know, you asked that question of notion earlier in the show, like, what was it that you described the Trump phone as?
01:04:15 ◼ ► I've mentioned, I think on a previous episode, like a door code for a doctor, you've got to punch in a certain door code.
01:04:30 ◼ ► And I've done it with a couple of places with door codes where some, I've tried it both ways, where I've had it in an Apple note and I've had it in the contact, in the contacts app or Cardhop, which is what I use.
01:04:46 ◼ ► You can put it in like something in the notes field for a contact or something that's in a note in Apple notes.
01:04:53 ◼ ► You just ask these questions or the actual questions about like recent iMessages or mail messages.
01:05:01 ◼ ► But I ran into one the other day that it didn't work and it was actually like, I've gotten so used to it working that it didn't.
01:05:09 ◼ ► My son needed his social security number and I knew that I'd, and I had shared it with the, it's a shared Apple note with my wife and son with all of our social security numbers and our driver's license cards.
01:05:37 ◼ ► I don't, I don't worry about us having a shared note with our Apple, our driver's license numbers and social security numbers.
01:05:50 ◼ ► And then I think I could look it up, but it's like, I asked it, like, are you sure it's not an Apple notes?
01:06:15 ◼ ► Oh, 21, like you can kind of coax it, but I was actually, I'd gotten so used to it finding
01:06:21 ◼ ► little things like that, that when it got that one wrong, I was, I was actually surprised.
01:06:43 ◼ ► The main thing that's more concerning though, is that it doesn't say, Hey, I don't know what
01:06:54 ◼ ► And it's, it's going to be a huge thing that people will have to reframe if you're not running
01:06:58 ◼ ► the beta because it is a revelation once you do it, but it's so counter to how input has
01:07:07 ◼ ► And I think Apple in some ways did themselves a disservice by pseudo kind of launching Apple
01:07:14 ◼ ► Everybody knows if you take a screenshot, you can have the kind of ask or, you know, kind
01:07:19 ◼ ► of like Siri based prompts that have always been able to come up and they're still there.
01:07:36 ◼ ► And so I just held the side button on my phone and Siri popped up and I said, add this to
01:07:44 ◼ ► And it showed all the correct information and whatever, but it didn't look like the card
01:07:54 ◼ ► And then I noticed on the little family calendar we have running in our kitchen, it wasn't there
01:08:01 ◼ ► So I thought, huh, I go back in there and I try to find the conversation in the Siri app,
01:08:18 ◼ ► It's mostly stuff that's chat-based, which on one hand makes sense because you don't want
01:08:51 ◼ ► And I said, add this to the calendar family, because that's technically what the calendar
01:09:01 ◼ ► And so there's just some little weird stuff because it's an LLM or at least powered by LLM
01:09:06 ◼ ► tech, it very much is desirous to provide some sort of successful or satisfactory output.
01:09:41 ◼ ► Another example is because it supports app intents and app intents have been around forever.
01:09:53 ◼ ► You have a recipe pulled up on Safari and you say, add all of these ingredients to to-do list.
01:10:02 ◼ ► However, I think my microphone misunderstood me saying, add this to my grocery to-do list to add this to my grocery to-do list.
01:10:11 ◼ ► And it went into reminders and goes, oh, he doesn't have a list called groceries, so I better start one.
01:10:20 ◼ ► And I went to the store and opened up my to-do list app, and I'm like, where the heck is everything?
01:10:24 ◼ ► And then I realized, oh, it's in reminders in a new list that it created because I didn't see one there.
01:10:32 ◼ ► But on the flip side, if I don't ever use reminders and every single time I tell you to do something with a reminder involving to-do list, you probably ought to just assume I mean to-do list.
01:10:51 ◼ ► That you can kind of, they can just kind of push it there from where they already are, right?
01:11:01 ◼ ► I probably didn't enunciate well, but it's one of those things where when it does the thing that it's wrong or it's just to kind of crap your experience, and that's the risk I think they have.
01:11:28 ◼ ► And that's been learned behavior over years of trying stuff and going, okay, I can't do that, so I'm not going to try that again.
01:11:34 ◼ ► And I think retraining people to actually give it a shot is going to be hard for Apple to do.
01:11:40 ◼ ► And then on the flip side, I also think that they have to yield proper results so that people don't go, I tell it to do this, and it never really does it quite right.
01:11:50 ◼ ► It's such an interesting point, Quinn, because now that they're calling the new version, quote, unquote, Siri AI, it makes sense as the name.
01:11:58 ◼ ► And it's kind of a good, there's some cleverness built in where not calling it new Siri is good because eventually it's not going to be new, right?
01:12:15 ◼ ► And Siri AI, but there is a word to use for, hey, if you're still on iOS 26, you've got old Siri, which is just called Siri.
01:12:30 ◼ ► But I've been thinking ever since, certainly last year, but even before they announced Apple Intelligence two years ago at WWDC, I had been wondering whether they had burned the Siri brand to the ground.
01:12:45 ◼ ► Because so many people that I know in my personal life have just, they just, you say Siri, they hear a stupid thing that doesn't work, you know?
01:12:56 ◼ ► And it's to the point where some of the things that Apple had gotten right or much improved, like I think they're, it varies.
01:13:08 ◼ ► And some of the people out there listening are going to be like, are you out of your mind, John?
01:13:13 ◼ ► But I use, I've been using the dictate my voice to text and using the Siri, they branded under Siri, the little microphone button and messages for years now.
01:13:26 ◼ ► And yes, some, there are certain things that it's like, oh God, why did you capitalize that word or something?
01:13:39 ◼ ► I mean, and I, I speak well enough and dictate well enough that I have a semi-popular podcast, right?
01:14:11 ◼ ► That's why first there's so many adages about you never get a second chance to make a, well, I guess it's one adage, but it's so often cited that you only get one chance to make a first impression.
01:14:21 ◼ ► It goes back to Steve Jobs' obsession with product packaging in an industry where product packaging is notoriously bad because the people's first impression with a product is when they open the package, right?
01:14:36 ◼ ► And if you already, if the packaging is bad, if it's one of those hard to open bubble boxes that you kind of have to almost cut yourself to open, you've put a bad seed in the person's head and they haven't even used your thing yet.
01:14:55 ◼ ► And if you shipped a bad product for years, well, Siri overall has been out since 2010.
01:15:01 ◼ ► And most of that time, certainly the last 10 years, it has been something that people think is terrible.
01:15:07 ◼ ► So I think, I honestly think with no hyperbole that getting people to actually try the new Siri AI is the single biggest product marketing challenge Apple has had in a very long time, maybe ever.
01:15:27 ◼ ► I'm excited about them and even I will forget to ask Siri to do things because my brain, after years of training, just goes, I can't do that.
01:15:34 ◼ ► So I start doing something manually only to realize, wait a minute, I do it all the time.
01:15:39 ◼ ► Or I'll use, I'll go to ChatGPT because it's what I've been using for the last two years because of course, why would I ask?
01:15:48 ◼ ► And I think that's not just a hurdle because of all of the tech debt and the negative experience that people have had.
01:16:03 ◼ ► And all of the ways that 3D touch enabled you to use the iPhone more quickly and at a greater level of depth were, in my opinion, super impressive.
01:16:14 ◼ ► But it was one of those things where unless you knew something could be 3D touched, you wouldn't try to do it.
01:16:22 ◼ ► There were no clues that told you, hey, this button, you can push this a little physically harder and something will happen.
01:16:27 ◼ ► Now, haptic touch with being long hold, it's a learned enough behavior that I think now a lot of times you can prove.
01:16:33 ◼ ► But still, there are times where I'll hold something accidentally and go, oh, I didn't know this had a submenu there because I've never thought to try it.
01:16:40 ◼ ► And I think Siri is the same way where many of these new features are things that there's no visual prompt on screen that tells you, hey, did you know that these are ingredients and you can ask me to add these to your grocery list?
01:16:59 ◼ ► And maybe by the time they ship iOS 27, they'll have you go through some sort of walkthrough that tells you kind of what it can do.
01:17:15 ◼ ► But if there's no way to know or to be taught that that's how a thing works, I can imagine a lot of people just straight up won't use it because they won't even think to ask.
01:17:29 ◼ ► And so I really do think they need – I don't think they can solve it with a first run experience.
01:17:41 ◼ ► And it's sort of – I didn't mention it, but it is sort of why I had a couple of linked items in the last few weeks where I was linking to brands that have had sort of, hey, we used to suck and now we don't suck anymore ad campaigns.
01:17:59 ◼ ► And after I wrote about it, a bunch of people were like, you know, every once in a while, every time I go to my mother-in-law, she always gets Domino's.
01:18:12 ◼ ► And I think it was Carlsberg Beer or something where their slogan for like 100 years was like the world's best beer.
01:18:26 ◼ ► And it's certainly not recent Apple style to run self-deprecating ads, so it would be a challenge for JAWS and team.
01:18:39 ◼ ► And probably the best – one of the best ad campaigns any company has ever run, and it speaks to how much Apple liked it and how successful it was, was the – it's actually called Get a Mac, but everybody remembers it as I'm a Mac, you're a PC.
01:19:00 ◼ ► And it was – it was self – it was deprecating PCs and Windows, so that's a different challenge than a sort of, hey, we know Siri used to suck, but Siri is actually really awesome now.
01:19:20 ◼ ► And they could have – there's an opportunity for fun here to say, yes, Siri used to be stupid, and now it's really useful and smart, and you should try it again.
01:19:30 ◼ ► And it's hard – you know, the other challenge is they tend to – for obvious reasons, they tend to make ads for the phones, not for iOS in general, right?
01:19:50 ◼ ► I think that they should just run some Siri ads that are really like, hey, you should upgrade to the new iOS, or just say get a new iPhone.
01:19:57 ◼ ► Say that that's how – the easiest way to get it is to get a new iPhone and then leave it to everybody else to figure out that you just have it on your phone if you have iOS 27.
01:20:05 ◼ ► But just run ad campaigns in major sporting events and popular TV shows to tell people, seriously, try it.
01:20:19 ◼ ► They're never going to crack a joke at old Siri before they fixed it, but now they fixed it.
01:20:24 ◼ ► And however good you end up thinking out there that the new Siri AI is, it is not a joke.
01:20:31 ◼ ► No, I think – and I think that's part of the reason why the new Siri app exists, why it is an app, why it will be on the home screen is to signal, hey, this isn't just your average kind of thing.
01:20:42 ◼ ► But what I do think is a little lackluster is the app itself, respectively, a card tile and or list view of your past conversations.
01:20:50 ◼ ► But I think it should be better at helping you prompt what you want or giving you ideas of what to search for.
01:20:57 ◼ ► The photos app has done a fairly decent job at this in the last couple of years where it kind of says, hey, you can ask questions or say, hey, generate a video of my pictures from our San Francisco trip or whatever.
01:21:09 ◼ ► But that is still siloed inside of the photos app, which I've always found a bit confusing, still inside of messages where I think Siri AI is the most powerful because it has, again, contextual knowledge of your entire conversation history in iMessage, years worth of iCloud synced messages.
01:21:26 ◼ ► You go to the search field and it's still just doing a dumb bog standard keyword search and there's nothing that suggests to you, hey, you can ask Siri how to do this or this is a text field.
01:21:37 ◼ ► Why don't you enter a complete sentence and we can run a search query using an LLM rather than a basic keyword index lookup?
01:21:58 ◼ ► And Google search has actually been made worse by trying to accommodate sentence or conversation input rather than kind of keyword search for people that actually know how to search the web.
01:22:09 ◼ ► And it's gotten even worse, in my opinion, given the advent of LLMs where people just go to ChatGPT and say, my tummy feels funny.
01:22:21 ◼ ► When you pull down to Search Spotlight, when you click the search field in Messages, just run a rich LLM-based search and make that part of Siri AI and Apple Intelligence because that will help encourage people to kind of try to use it, even if it's not by holding the side button and saying, hey, Siri, do this thing.
01:22:39 ◼ ► I think it still seems kind of siloed inside of the Siri AI or UI, UX rather, where it need not be and can apply system-wide.
01:23:12 ◼ ► It would be shocking if I went through the whole summer without one of the betas being, oh, yeah, we kind of botched the battery consumption.
01:23:24 ◼ ► So anybody out there who's at least on the public beta, it's probably – it's got to be better.
01:23:29 ◼ ► And I – at this point, unless something horrible happens in August, I would say jump on – you could jump on iOS 27.0 when it comes out in September, and you're probably going to have a very good experience.
01:23:51 ◼ ► We kind of know searching for email and mail, Apple Mail, has sucked forever, like, bizarrely.
01:24:01 ◼ ► But the whole preface was that on my Mac where I've got Mac OS 27 installed, I don't even have all of my email.
01:24:12 ◼ ► But I asked Apple at WWDC, hey, you guys said – you've got Siri connected to the index of everything, the semantic index.
01:24:38 ◼ ► And again, it is – I don't know which one's worse, search and mail or search and messages.
01:24:47 ◼ ► If you – if I'm searching for the last time, Quinn, you and I, you had you on the talk show, which might be like a year ago, forget about it.
01:25:06 ◼ ► You can do this now, right now, on the device, running the beta – summer betas of these 27 OSs.
01:25:13 ◼ ► But if you just search in messages, which is what people do, you don't even get a hint that, hey – like a button, hey, do you want to run this same search and ask Siri to find them?
01:25:27 ◼ ► And that's the other thing that – I mean, you can do – and there are multimodal searches where you can still do a string search.
01:25:39 ◼ ► If there's no results or if the user starts to enter code to door or trying to kind of play around with the word salad to get stuff through, then just run it as an extended search or prompt the user.
01:26:02 ◼ ► But I saw her type – this was years ago, and I teased her about it, and now she's – we've learned.
01:26:17 ◼ ► Because she said, what will be the weather tomorrow in San Francisco, and should I bring a coat?
01:26:36 ◼ ► And so every search field that isn't conversational in return feels weird and feels dated and feels bad.
01:26:49 ◼ ► I'm excited to see how much further that goes because I still feel like typing provides you lesser, worse results than asking.
01:27:01 ◼ ► When I go into Spark, which is my email client that I use, and I'm not singing Spark's praises.
01:27:23 ◼ ► And I am shocked where I'm actually going into my email client and saying, hey, what was the promo code from that sponsor?
01:27:29 ◼ ► And it finds the answer almost immediately because it's not searching through my entire thing.
01:27:37 ◼ ► And it links me directly with evidence to the email thread so that I can double check to make sure it didn't hallucinate some garbage, which it's become increasingly less prone to do.
01:27:52 ◼ ► And I think that in this era of LLM and AI technology, just make anywhere where you can interact at all, just run that.
01:28:02 ◼ ► And I understand they have to accommodate battery limitations and certain devices will not be able to do it as extensively and or as capably as other devices.
01:28:10 ◼ ► And you don't want to have to go out to private cloud computer if you don't have to and do it on device.
01:28:18 ◼ ► But that's one of those areas where I'm like, I will say, have you noticed, I guess, are you using an iPhone 17 Pro?
01:28:33 ◼ ► When you run Siri for more than two or three messages back and forth, I think you could almost melt the surface of the sun with the back of the iPhone Air.
01:28:45 ◼ ► It is unreal to the point where the screen dims, the phone starts to lag, and it's only in Siri.
01:28:55 ◼ ► I've got the enhanced voice and all the crap that's limited to the Pro-Skew variants of the phone.
01:29:15 ◼ ► And I didn't notice it getting that hot, but I chalked it more up to it being the first developer beta because I hadn't used it side-by-side with it on the iPhone 17 Pro.
01:29:29 ◼ ► But on the 17, and I don't know how, I think that the Air is in an unusual spot where it's got most of the top-tier specs, right?
01:30:04 ◼ ► In more ways than not, and I think all of the knots are related to photography in particular, it is a 17 Pro-class phone.
01:30:19 ◼ ► It is, A, it's so much thinner that it's the entire premise of the device, and B, doesn't have the-
01:30:48 ◼ ► So I don't even know that it's a beta issue in as much as it is it's really making that SoC work when it's really trying to find stuff.
01:30:58 ◼ ► And so maybe that's why they're not doing it in as many areas of the OS yet is because it would just completely nerf the experience on a bunch of devices.
01:31:07 ◼ ► But if that's not a problem on the 17 Pro, then maybe as we see vapor chambers make their way down the line and they end up in the base iPhone, because they will eventually, then maybe it ends up not being such a big deal in a year or two for them to flip the switch on.
01:31:22 ◼ ► Within a couple of years, it'll be the base phone that runs whatever the base system is for most people will be much more capable.
01:31:32 ◼ ► And it's also easy to overlook based on the fact, and especially people in your audience and my audience, who know that nothing that Siri AI is doing is anywhere near the cutting edge of just chatbots and putting aside all the Igentic stuff.
01:31:52 ◼ ► But this is any kind of actual structured test that they run to benchmark new models or just an ad hoc tech test that we could run on the show or you could put in a video where, hey, let's just come up with 10 interesting questions to ask various chatbots.
01:32:43 ◼ ► And so it's easy for technically minded people who know that this is not cutting edge LLM frontier technology to just sort of say, well, it's not impressive.
01:32:52 ◼ ► But it really is impressive in terms of how many people out there have never used anything like this and that it's just right there, a side button press away from you asking a question or it evaluating what's on the screen right now at any moment.
01:33:13 ◼ ► And it's going to run on the least number of devices and have the most adverse effect on the iPhone air in particular or whatever other devices like smaller iPads or whatever that this might be pressing the limits of what it can do.
01:33:32 ◼ ► And that they have been they've known now they're they're now shipping products where the SOCs are meant to be running local models.
01:33:42 ◼ ► And maybe no, nobody ever has enough RAM and nobody's none of us are going to have enough RAM for years to come at this point.
01:33:51 ◼ ► But all of this stuff has been happening with SOCs that weren't really meant for local execution for a while now.
01:34:04 ◼ ► One of the other reasons that I'm kind of glad they did ultimately relent and decide to make in a way a chat bot.
01:34:14 ◼ ► You can chat with it and you can ask it questions that it sources information from either its trained index and or even from the web.
01:34:21 ◼ ► And I think it was wise of them to do that, even though I know they resisted for quite a long time, because ultimately that is what people do.
01:34:27 ◼ ► And if you can provide a field for people to type or speak text, it's only a matter of time before they start to ask the device and by consequence Siri to do things that it can do that they would never think to prompt on their own unless they had this conversational kind of established relationship.
01:34:48 ◼ ► And so if they hadn't changed anything else and they just said, yeah, you can search everything's indexed now and you can ask it to provide your photos and do all this stuff, people wouldn't really try it because it's still Siri.
01:34:59 ◼ ► But if it can be LLM powered and act and walk and talk like a chat bot, which it does, then I think a lot of people that have been using the free version of ChatGPT will be compelled to use the version of Siri.
01:35:13 ◼ ► And even me, I understand, like you mentioned, the limitations of the fact that it's not cutting edge LLM tech.
01:35:48 ◼ ► The more that I use it, the more that I see it, I think people will use it once they discover that it exists and it can do what it can do.
01:35:55 ◼ ► The problem is training users to understand what it's capable of with the preconceived notion that it can't do anything.
01:36:19 ◼ ► So me saying I don't speak French and don't know much about French, I'm going to prove it very shortly.
01:36:23 ◼ ► I was almost certain that a croquet monsieur is a ham and cheese sandwich where it's heated up and melted.
01:36:30 ◼ ► But I was like, well, that seems like a question, people, this put me into reviewer mindset.
01:36:38 ◼ ► And the answer, a croquet monsieur is a classic French hot sandwich made with ham and cheese, typically gruyere or a menthol between slices of bread is often topped with a creamy becamel.
01:37:02 ◼ ► First is then it added a second paragraph, which is, oh, and just a quick note, always verify important details.
01:37:13 ◼ ► And I know why I'm sure it's in the system prompt, but it doesn't do this on every one.
01:37:18 ◼ ► And it's got, it's like a, it's like maybe in Dungeons and Dragons terms, it rolls a D6.
01:37:46 ◼ ► But anyway, on the menu at the restaurant, what they had said, it was made with Comte, C-O-M-T-E cheese, which is not Gruyere or Amantel.
01:38:11 ◼ ► They just, the restaurant, because they use this specific kind of Gruyere cheese, that's what they put on the menu.
01:39:22 ◼ ► But sometimes the enunciation is totally wacky where it's said or finished some things where it will say like, you need to go to this door.
01:39:46 ◼ ► And every time I use with disdain my HomePod to trigger HomeKit automations, I am reminded how terrible the old Siri voice was that I had just kind of accepted as being Siri.
01:40:03 ◼ ► But the new ones are so good that, boy, they make that old one sound very robotic and terrible.
01:40:21 ◼ ► And then you go after a week or two, you go pick up an iPhone 3G without the retina screen.
01:40:34 ◼ ► But the old Siri had weird mispronunciations, too, for whatever reason, at least for us.
01:40:38 ◼ ► It drives my wife crazy where the old Siri always pronounces the word turnpike, tornpike.
01:40:54 ◼ ► And often those are the ones where we're using directions because it's not just a crosstown errand where we don't even need directions.
01:41:07 ◼ ► It's like the number one reason I could get her to upgrade is if I could tell her Siri no longer pronounces turnpike, she'll be like, okay, I'll take it.
01:41:19 ◼ ► That's one of the other things I noticed that was pretty cool is we named – I've got a – my first little girl, I've got a daughter who's 17 months old.
01:41:29 ◼ ► And we named her a very – the name sounds exactly the same as one of my very good friends who's in my phone as a contact.
01:41:37 ◼ ► And so every single time I would talk about my daughter, the name was misspelled because she doesn't have a contact card in my phone because she's a baby.
01:41:51 ◼ ► What I ended up telling Siri was, hey, when I'm messaging these people, I'm always talking about my daughter.
01:42:08 ◼ ► And I at first thought, oh, this is just an LLM thing where it's like, yeah, sure, okay.
01:42:14 ◼ ► No, it actionably changed the output where almost every single time I did dictation or sent messages or wherever else, it started using the daughter's spelling correctly.
01:42:23 ◼ ► And it somehow, surprisingly, even maintained the correct spelling of my friend when I was talking in a group chat with him and other people.
01:42:33 ◼ ► And so that was one of the things that I did not expect, and it has been literally flawless ever since beta 2 where I told it, hey, stop misspelling this name.
01:42:45 ◼ ► The other thing you can do that I've tried is when you know that the device is likely to spell something wrong, you can just spell it out.
01:42:54 ◼ ► So you can say, oh, Comte, C-O-M-T-E, and it'll spell it out exactly as you dictate it rather than writing out the letters
01:43:08 ◼ ► One thing I just remembered that it did end up screwing me a little bit, we had planned to go to lunch with family,
01:43:50 ◼ ► And what I realized was it wasn't that Siri had just hallucinated or made something up.
01:43:55 ◼ ► It's that it had depended on Yelp to determine when this – and Yelp is never right relative to the Google Maps information.
01:44:03 ◼ ► And so I do think that it is still going to struggle in as much as where is the data being sourced.
01:44:11 ◼ ► I think that it's pretty good, better than most LLMs at not hallucinating or not making stuff up if it doesn't know.
01:44:23 ◼ ► And I think that Siri's data sources have historically not been very great, and that's still going to be a problem.
01:44:29 ◼ ► It's still going to use Yelp data over Google Maps data, which – yeah, which is a bummer.
01:44:38 ◼ ► A couple nights ago, it was really late, and we hadn't eaten, and I said, I'll make mac and cheese.
01:44:59 ◼ ► My son has a dairy allergy, and I don't drink milk, and my wife doesn't even drink coffee.
01:45:06 ◼ ► And my dad was here for a couple days last week, and he takes milk in his coffee sometimes, but not always.
01:45:14 ◼ ► And I thought I bought milk, but it turned out I didn't because he was like, I'll just drink black coffee.
01:45:20 ◼ ► I'd already boiled the pasta, and I needed to go out to get milk, and it was 9.30 at night.
01:45:39 ◼ ► And spot B is more like six blocks away, six quick blocks, but – and in opposite directions.
01:46:08 ◼ ► So I was lucky because it was only 9.30, but they were definitely not open as late as Siri thought.
01:46:30 ◼ ► If I made an Apple note with my son's wrong social security number, and I ask what's my son's social security number, and it gives me the wrong answer that I put in the notes, well, it's not Siri's fault, right?
01:46:46 ◼ ► But I do think – I think with Maps in particular, that is going to – it's been – every time I sing the praises of Apple Maps, I get two responses.
01:46:56 ◼ ► One from people who live somewhere, often outside the U.S. or somewhere non-metro in the U.S., where they get shit directions from Apple Maps.
01:47:06 ◼ ► That seems to be happening less and less in the U.S., and it is more of an outside-the-U.S. thing.
01:47:11 ◼ ► I get great turn-by-turn directions here in the greater Philadelphia area from Apple Maps.
01:47:26 ◼ ► It is, to me, one of the least trustworthy sources of data that I ever, ever even look at.
01:47:37 ◼ ► I left the house thinking I'm almost certainly going to have to walk an entire two blocks out of my way, one block to see that it's closed, and then another block back where I'm going to be cursing it.
01:47:54 ◼ ► But it's going to – as bad as it's already been that Apple Maps has bad data about businesses.
01:48:25 ◼ ► But the data about businesses, it's already a problem for the way people were using Apple Maps.
01:48:38 ◼ ► And I don't think they're going to support – hey, by the way, Siri, the way you told it how to pronounce your daughter's name, you're not going to be able to say, get your business information from Google.
01:48:54 ◼ ► So I searched the same restaurant and said, what time does the restaurant open on Saturday?
01:49:12 ◼ ► So it probably went out to the restaurant's website and found the right time or whatever.
01:49:44 ◼ ► You're physically – my face got flushed hearing you tell the story because I've been there where it's my fault.
01:50:01 ◼ ► Nobody got hurt, but that's the sort of thing that will turn people away from using it again.
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01:53:10 ◼ ► You had a post recently about Mac Gaming and the Game Porting Toolkit and stuff like that.
01:53:22 ◼ ► It's pretty much – I've never heard John Syracuse – honest to God, I've been friends with the guy for 20-some years.
01:53:29 ◼ ► I have never once – and I've listened to collectively – I was going to say hundreds, but it really might be thousands, a thousand hours of podcasts with him.
01:54:01 ◼ ► He goes, I really care about Mac Gaming and I know nobody else does, but Quinn does, too.
01:54:23 ◼ ► I think that your points and calling out how Apple is doing really – I mean, you can jump in and take it from here.
01:54:39 ◼ ► And it's always been sort of technically impressive, but often practically ineffective because it results in three- or four-year-old games coming to the Mac in semi-playable shape.
01:54:55 ◼ ► Each generation, when Apple bumps the major version number, it is major improvements in frame rate and quality.
01:55:09 ◼ ► No, this year in particular, it's massively improved over version 3, which was improved from 2 and 1.
01:55:21 ◼ ► Games that were unplayable last year where you were getting maybe 5 to 10 frames per second will now run at the same resolution, 40 to 60 FPS, no problem.
01:55:34 ◼ ► And I've known for years that there's at least some reasonable team of passionate, talented people at Apple who really do want to see this happen.
01:55:54 ◼ ► But I got like a private email from somebody at Apple and, you know, nothing, just the sort of conversation they can't officially have with me if Apple knew.
01:56:03 ◼ ► But just basically saying, hey, it was a couple of years ago, but I was talking about the fact that my son had gotten a gaming PC is now on like gaming PC three, I think, or at least two.
01:56:14 ◼ ► But somebody said that, like, in a way that things I post on Daring Fireball sometimes catch the attention of people higher up within Apple, it was caught that, hey, even Gruber's son has a gaming PC.
01:56:41 ◼ ► I wasn't as much help helping him buy what to get as I usually am when he buys Apple products.
01:56:48 ◼ ► But I totally understood it, and I was of the perspective of, oh, when I was his age, I would have wanted a gaming PC, too.
01:56:59 ◼ ► I was like, what kind of an idiot would think it's odd that a teenage boy in 2018 or 2017, whatever year it was, would want a gaming PC?
01:57:08 ◼ ► I mean, I think you have a hard time finding a high schooler in 2017 or today who doesn't want a gaming PC of some sort.
01:57:29 ◼ ► Well, then I think it's because if you talk to Apple officially on the record, it's not for end consumers.
01:57:35 ◼ ► The idea is that it's designed for video game developers to take their existing titles and port them over to the Mac and or to take titles that are in development
01:57:43 ◼ ► and to do all the translations such that they can run on the Mac and it's low amount of work.
01:57:49 ◼ ► But developers are not doing this en masse because, as you've stated, there is no demand for gaming on the Mac because you don't game on the Mac.
01:58:00 ◼ ► I've talked to developers that have fairly popular games that have told me it's just not worth porting to the Mac because you inherit a support burden
01:58:09 ◼ ► and tax liabilities and all of this infrastructure that you're willing to accept if there's some level of expected sales volume, but nobody buys games on the Mac.
01:58:21 ◼ ► So it's not even worth doing if it takes five hours to do because that's just not worth it.
01:58:26 ◼ ► There's not that many people that will play games on the Mac because the idea that you're buying, that gamers are buying games through the Mac app store, it's just not a thing.
01:58:35 ◼ ► And you'll even see, and I mentioned this in the video, that Apple themselves are so desperate, in my opinion, to have games appear on the Mac
01:58:43 ◼ ► that they've walked out every major dev that has even considered putting games on the Mac in the last few years at WWDC and other keynotes.
01:58:55 ◼ ► I mean, maybe they've asked, but some of these games haven't even shipped on the Mac app store.
01:59:07 ◼ ► So I really think they want games to be happening on the Mac and will take them in any flavor that they can.
01:59:13 ◼ ► But they're not really happening because nobody plays games on the Mac because there is no infrastructure to support Mac gaming.
01:59:25 ◼ ► But where I feel like you and Syracuse go off the rails is suggesting that Apple make a product with this in mind.
01:59:32 ◼ ► I guess, again, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but to make something like a Switch or a Steam.
01:59:57 ◼ ► And run PC games on an Apple branded handheld player that you could connect like a Switch or if you want, you play it in a handheld thing.
02:00:26 ◼ ► What do you, would you be satisfied if they only, if that was only the next generation Apple TV and it was, so it had to be plugged into a TV.
02:00:38 ◼ ► And I think that the opportunity is ripe because if you look at the console market, they're, they do incredible volume, but they're just getting absolutely blasted as is everybody, but absolutely blasted by all the stuff that's going on right now with memory shortages.
02:00:53 ◼ ► And Sony and Microsoft have both historically sold their consoles in the first couple of years at a loss in anticipation that, hey, the people buying on day one or year one are the most, you know, devout gamers that are going to buy dozens of games over the course of the life of the console.
02:01:11 ◼ ► And we'll make up that amount of money on the back end, and the people who will only ever buy one or two games ever, they're going to wait until year three or year four, by which point we'll be making money on the hardware anyway.
02:01:22 ◼ ► So it doesn't matter, but we're in this weirdo situation where it costs more money to buy a six-year-old PlayStation five today than it did back in 2020 when it came out and not by a small margin either by a lot.
02:01:37 ◼ ► And Apple is in this really unique opportunity where I think they could sell a pretty comparable game console.
02:01:44 ◼ ► I mean, if you look at the really well-optimized ports that exist, their performance is slightly worse than a PlayStation five while consuming a fraction of the wattage.
02:01:55 ◼ ► And do I think that Apple could make an Apple TV style box with an M5 inside of it for less than $700?
02:02:06 ◼ ► So that's where I think the opportunity is ripe is there is this weird fraction in the market that won't exist forever.
02:02:12 ◼ ► And I'm not saying they would have to do it today or if the memory crisis suddenly disappeared that Apple would no longer have a leg to stand on.
02:02:20 ◼ ► But I think there is a unique opportunity to support gaming on a platform that is truly cross-platform because you buy a game on a PlayStation, you're stuck on the PlayStation.
02:02:31 ◼ ► You buy a game on Xbox, you're only playing it on an Xbox on a TV, kind of sometimes with Windows here and there.
02:02:42 ◼ ► And so you can play a game on the handheld and then when you want to go play it on your big boy PC and you're attached to a monitor, you can.
02:02:55 ◼ ► You can run a game on a Mac and play it on an M5 Max and get really excellent performance.
02:03:06 ◼ ► And it's not an iPhone that's bugging you while you're playing games about messages and running down your battery and all that stuff.
02:03:19 ◼ ► Because I think Syracuse on ATP was caught up on the Steam Deck idea, which is when you're saying, sure, they could do that or they could do it as a thing you hook up to your TV.
02:03:30 ◼ ► I think they could turn Apple TV as a no-screen device that you have to connect to a TV that they might try to do this.
02:03:41 ◼ ► The idea that they would do a Steam Deck-like thing that plays anything other than iPhone games is just incomprehensible in the Apple mindset.
02:03:51 ◼ ► And you and you in your video where you talk about how Apple has really maybe technically fixed Mac gaming without actually fixing it because they can't actually get the games there.
02:04:09 ◼ ► But it doesn't make Apple sense in terms of the way Apple views what they do in their platforms.
02:04:14 ◼ ► Whereas if it has a screen and it's roughly in between the size of a screen of an iPhone and an iPad, then it's an iPhone or an iPad and they already make those devices.
02:04:33 ◼ ► Do you realize, as Syracuse pointed out, that PC games are a big, and console games in particular, but, you know, AAA games, whatever you want to call them, are a much bigger market than all of Hollywood movies combined.
02:04:46 ◼ ► In terms of the dollars people spend and the time, the time they spend playing them, which makes sense that, that it makes more money, people spend more money and the time they spend on them is commensurate.
02:04:57 ◼ ► And all of those games, we're talking about playing those games on an Apple device and that you could have a services story by having a game store just for these type of games from Apple.
02:05:08 ◼ ► And you could take your precious 30% cut of them or whatever, all of that, but, but, but, but, but, but it's, it's just, forget it.
02:05:23 ◼ ► That's unfortunately what I think their issue has been for so many years, however, because for as much as I think we, I, I don't want to include you in this.
02:05:33 ◼ ► A lot of people think, well, Apple's not going to do that because there's just not the volume.
02:05:38 ◼ ► There's not the, if, if it's somewhat similar to something that they already sell, they're not going to do it.
02:05:47 ◼ ► But I think from a volume aspect, that's not necessarily true because look at the Vision Pro, look at the HomePod, look at the other home devices.
02:05:55 ◼ ► They're alleged to be working on, they're alleged to be working on a frigging doorbell, which to me is just insane.
02:06:01 ◼ ► Because sure, Apple could make a really nice doorbell that's better and more well-designed and runs better than a ring camera, but there's so many doorbells.
02:06:28 ◼ ► But I do think that they're always working on a bunch of stuff and not all of them see the light of day.
02:07:05 ◼ ► And it's a big, enormous market that continues to grow more and more and more every single year.
02:07:12 ◼ ► And the opportunity for Apple here, and this is where I was trying to appeal to Apple, the entity, is there, forget about the hardware.
02:07:26 ◼ ► Because I think Apple's historic problem with gaming is, I think they're very complacent with where they are in the gaming market.
02:07:34 ◼ ► They think, oh, well, we make 30% off of every App Store transaction that involves gaming, which is almost 50%.
02:07:50 ◼ ► But I'm not confident that that money is going to exist forever or in the same volume that it has historically.
02:08:00 ◼ ► And I think they have an opportunity to protect themselves from a services, I don't want to say rent-seeking revenue, but kind of in this historic app store services industry, if they were to release a gaming platform that by default supported translation.
02:08:18 ◼ ► You could log in with your Steam account, and you can download the games that you've already bought and purchased on PC.
02:08:30 ◼ ► Because it's not like they've invented this new thing where people are going to go, oh, I'm going to buy my first game console.
02:08:40 ◼ ► But if they allowed you to ingest your Steam library and you could bring your existing purchases, but then Apple had additional features that were provided to gamers and users by virtue of a new store that they supported.
02:08:54 ◼ ► And it wasn't the Mac App Store built on the old bones of iTunes, but was actually designed with community and DLC functionality and marketplace stuff like Steam does so well.
02:09:06 ◼ ► And if it supported cross-play and cross-saving and you could auto-resume, like one of the best features of the Steam Deck is even though it's a PC, you turn it on and it's in the exact same place it was when you turned it off a week ago.
02:09:26 ◼ ► If Apple did that, where you could play a game on your TV and then press pause, turn your TV off, and you open it up on your iPhone or on your Mac or on your newfangled game console, and it's in the exact same spot as where you left off, oh my goodness.
02:09:45 ◼ ► And one of the things that Marco said on the podcast was, I think gamers are just incompatible with Apple.
02:09:51 ◼ ► They hate Apple, and there's so much bad blood over so many decades that gamers wouldn't gravitate towards that.
02:10:07 ◼ ► And at the end of the day, I think most people who play video games want the best hardware for the least amount of money possible and with the lowest resistance.
02:10:15 ◼ ► And I think that Apple, from a technical hardware positioning standpoint, is at a better position than almost anybody to enter this market.
02:10:41 ◼ ► But I think where Marco overlooks is how a lot can change in five years if you ship something and stick with it.
02:11:23 ◼ ► And it's an audience of a certain personality type that is largely overlaps with gamers as sort of, and that was historically, quote unquote, hated Apple.
02:11:35 ◼ ► That these are the sort of exact, I mean, literally maybe, and the same sort of people who maybe bought a MacBook or still use a MacBook now 20 years later for their work and don't use it to bring it full circle.
02:12:17 ◼ ► But it was so weird to me as a BB edit user because so many aspects of TextMate weren't Mac-like at all.
02:12:53 ◼ ► And it's like, the reason that it didn't occur to the guy who made TextMate is I'm sure he didn't know you could, that's what the option key is for.
02:13:06 ◼ ► And they, it wasn't right away, but within a few years after Mac OS X shipped, it was like, give it half a decade.
02:13:15 ◼ ► And then a conference full of Ruby on Rails developers who weren't traditional Mac users and had very strong opinions about Apple and would have sworn up and down five years prior that they would never buy a Mac, let alone a Mac lap or Apple anything, let alone a Mac laptop for work.
02:13:39 ◼ ► And even in the last five to seven years, I don't know any professional developer who develops on a PC.
02:13:58 ◼ ► And the problem with where they're at now is it's a mature market where I think they could innovate.
02:14:05 ◼ ► I think they could offer something really hyper compelling, but there is already loyalty out of convenience to specific platforms.
02:14:15 ◼ ► And so Apple either has to work with bringing compatibility there or offer something so hyper compelling that you would forfeit your gaming PC with hundreds of games that you've purchased over the last 15 years.
02:14:31 ◼ ► There's a famous quote from Gabe Newell, who's the CEO of Valve and gamers in general adore Valve.
02:14:37 ◼ ► I think falsely, not to suggest that I think Valve is bad, but they are a business that is designed to make money and they are effectively a monopoly on PC gaming.
02:14:57 ◼ ► But one of the reasons Valve has had such incredible staying power is that their software is really good and that because they make 30% on every game transaction, they can do a bunch of kind of there's a meme good guy Valve that does all this stuff.
02:15:20 ◼ ► And they've made so many things so much better by virtue of it being altruistic, but it's not really altruistic.
02:15:28 ◼ ► And I think there is some, I don't want to say that it's all self-serving because I think there are reasons that they do it, but they can do it because they, just like Apple, are rent seekers.
02:15:44 ◼ ► They have no interest in leaving and they have famously worked with Apple a bunch over the last many, many years.
02:15:51 ◼ ► One of the, you might recall in 2017, when VR came to the Mac, if only through Final Cut Pro for 360 degree video editing, that was done with Valve.
02:16:09 ◼ ► And I did on an iMac Pro in an era where that was, I mean, at the peak of the Intel era where literally nobody was gaming on a Mac unless you were booting into Windows, which if you had any interest in gaming, you were because there was seriously zero games for a Mac OS, much less the five or 10 that we get now that are big games every year.
02:16:29 ◼ ► But Newell has a quote about Apple where he says, we have this pattern with Apple where we meet with them.
02:16:37 ◼ ► And a year later, a new group of people show up who apparently have no idea that the last group of people were even there.
02:16:42 ◼ ► I just don't think that they've ever taken gaming seriously and they probably never will.
02:16:53 ◼ ► But I think that's generally been the case where Apple is interested in gaming, but not enough to make an organizational commitment to it.
02:17:09 ◼ ► I mean, the App Store is enormous, but they could further cement their position as a major player in gaming.
02:17:15 ◼ ► If they did more, I just, I don't think, I think it's an organizational and a cultural mismatch that they'll probably never get over.
02:17:23 ◼ ► But it's a bummer because they have the best silicon in the industry and they now have a really amazing, technically incredible translation platform that allows you to run DirectX Windows games on Mac OS remarkably well.
02:17:39 ◼ ► Better than Valve's own Steam hardware can do because Apple has Apple Silicon and Valve is a low volume kind of producer of PC hardware that has to work with AMD on getting the best they can get for a low price.
02:18:11 ◼ ► Hoping they make a handheld device with a screen that does it, they're never going to do.
02:18:15 ◼ ► The problem is I think that they need to do both in order to bring people over in any big numbers.
02:18:22 ◼ ► I mean, I think if they did it on the Mac and if they did it on the Apple TV, it'd be like, oh, yeah, cool.
02:18:48 ◼ ► And I think slapping a jawbone controller to the back of your iPhone is not going to cut it.
02:18:54 ◼ ► It's not the same experience as a dedicated game handheld with an M-Series chip and a fan and everything else that PC gaming handhelds just have.
02:19:11 ◼ ► That was about to be the I'm going to kick myself for not bringing it up when Quinn was on the show.
02:19:18 ◼ ► Because Syracuse was like, you know, they invented these things called fans a long time ago.
02:19:59 ◼ ► But I almost want to shut up about this whole thing because I don't want to jinx the fact that they make any devices with fans at all.
02:20:14 ◼ ► But they even their antipathy towards fans is so much that they even invented a new terminology.
02:20:41 ◼ ► If you could overclock an A-series chip and slap a fan on there, you could probably get an extra 10, 15, 20% out of that than if you didn't.
02:21:01 ◼ ► But I would never know unless you hover your nose over the top of the vent and go, yeah, I think I feel something.
02:21:06 ◼ ► I would bet that if you could talk to Nintendo's hardware engineering teams that they have a very practical.
02:21:12 ◼ ► And they probably do lean towards not having a fan and that their devices, their consoles always, or at least, I don't know, you'd have to go back to like N64 to say that they had one that was a breakthrough, leading edge.
02:21:28 ◼ ► Certainly since in the PlayStation era, they have never been the one with the technical advantages on frame rate or resolution.
02:21:39 ◼ ► But, I mean, the Wii was, the original Wii, which really was the one that came that sort of, shoo, I was really worried Nintendo would still be around.
02:21:58 ◼ ► Right, had a fan, but only supported 480 resolution and was a blast, was probably the most fun I've ever had playing video games in my life at home.
02:22:09 ◼ ► But here's, I just want to mention this, but it does, and I'm like, ooh, and I remember thinking, when the price increases came out last, earlier this month, I guess, it's been a long month, or was it at the end of June, whatever.
02:22:22 ◼ ► But when the Apple's, all right, here they are, price increases across the board, except for the iPhone, which I think we're going to hear about in September.
02:22:38 ◼ ► I mean, I think, I don't know if you were on Twitter, or where, or I just, somewhere, you were just like, like, just cackling with laughter.
02:22:49 ◼ ► It's, the 64 gig one went from 130 to 200, and the 28 gigabyte one went from 150 to 250, a 67% increase.
02:22:59 ◼ ► And it's not just the storage, it's the fact that the bigger one is the one with thread networking.
02:23:06 ◼ ► There's Ethernet, and there's, I mean, the Ethernet, come on, just did not, nobody's talking about an Ethernet port shortage in today's world.
02:23:20 ◼ ► I think this one came out in 2022, and the A-series chip in it is two years older than that, or at least one year older than that, so it's like a 2020 or 2021 era A chip.
02:23:31 ◼ ► And I thought, well, this makes sense in some ways, because they're pricing, they're not pricing this Apple TV, which will be preposterously priced for June, July, August, and maybe September.
02:23:44 ◼ ► I mean, I'm hoping, given that they already raised the price, that they're not saving the new Apple TV for late October or November, that this will be at the September event, because if it's not, then that means September and October are also months where if you do need to buy an Apple TV, you're getting ripped off.
02:24:00 ◼ ► And I thought, well, maybe this is all about the next one, and maybe the next one's actually worth more money, because here's where I'm the sucker, and somebody should take me aside and say, calm down.
02:24:11 ◼ ► That maybe this is the one that actually is going to be much more of an actual useful computer that could play games, too, right?
02:24:21 ◼ ► But at this point, maybe $250, that's not really in the price range of what you're talking about, feasibly, right?
02:24:30 ◼ ► I mean, the cost differences between an M-series chip and an A-series chip definitely exist, but they're not as great as you think.
02:24:38 ◼ ► An M-series chip is estimated to be anywhere from about 50% to 70% more expensive to produce, which is non-zero.
02:24:54 ◼ ► And so if you're going to be selling the next Apple TV with a year-old A-series chip for $250, hell, just sell it with an M-series chip for $400.
02:25:02 ◼ ► I mean, it's $150, but the market for $250 streaming boxes is so tiny anyways that you might as well just go whole hog, and maybe you'll find greater adoption.
02:25:13 ◼ ► Especially with these price increases, it really does seem that Apple has put Apple TV into a no-man's land, that they were already sort of in with the pre-price range prices, where they are so much more expensive than the competing products that are just sticks from Amazon or Roku or the Roku box, which are all under $100 and maybe a lot under $100 if it's just a stick.
02:25:43 ◼ ► And $200 to $250 is more squarely in that land, where it's an even harder sell for anybody who's not already convinced that Apple TV is the best streaming device to watch on their TV, which I am.
02:25:57 ◼ ► But I also, again, I don't proselytize it to my family members because I don't want to be the same way that I don't want to be on the hook for their tech support.
02:26:05 ◼ ► It's not my job to sell somebody $150, but now $200 box to hook up to their TV, when their TV might have only cost $200.
02:26:14 ◼ ► And it's really big, and they're very impressed and blown away by what they got for $200.
02:26:19 ◼ ► And then to tell them that the thing that I'm telling them they should buy to connect to their TV to watch Netflix, which their TV says it already does, is $200?
02:26:28 ◼ ► And for as much as the TV software sucks, by virtue of the Apple TV existing, it has gotten better.
02:26:43 ◼ ► But is it bad enough that I'm like, oh, my gosh, I have to spend $250 to get an Apple TV?
02:26:52 ◼ ► I think that, too, we bought an outdoor Samsung TV for our deck, and I'm going to connect an Apple TV to it, but I'm waiting for a weatherproof box.
02:27:03 ◼ ► But in the meantime, it's just running the Samsung software, and I don't love it, but it's like, I don't really watch a lot of TV up there, so I don't really care.
02:27:31 ◼ ► Once you're in Netflix, once you're in, heck, the Apple TV app that's everywhere, it's kind of pretty much the same.
02:27:38 ◼ ► It's not technically, if you have a home theater set up, and there's slight codec differences, but for most people that are just using the internal speakers on their $500 TV they got on Black Friday, eh, who cares?
02:27:50 ◼ ► It's like going to a restaurant where the foyer has a bad smell, and the person who checks you in is rude and competent, and it's always a hassle, even though you made a reservation.
02:28:03 ◼ ► And it's like, ugh, you can hold your breath through the foyer, and it's like they do eventually give you a table, and then that was really only 90 seconds of a bad smell and a bad check-in experience.
02:28:21 ◼ ► But then once you get the show on that you wanted to watch, you watch the show, and it's the same.
02:28:37 ◼ ► I can't believe how they made this worse than just the dumbass just list of channels in a grid.
02:29:00 ◼ ► And I do think that's the other thing that's going to kill the idea that you have and that Syracuse endorses is how in the world can they sell a $700 thing that competes with the $200 thing from Apple TV?
02:29:15 ◼ ► If it's a PlayStation, that's how I think they have to do it is if they sell it as a console that also does all the TV stuff better than, I mean, because the consoles kind of technically do it, but not well.
02:29:28 ◼ ► It's the best streaming box, and it's the best game console, and everything's, oh, it could be so good.
02:29:35 ◼ ► Right, and yeah, and then maybe instead of having two Apple TVs where the difference is sort of you have to be a real nerd to, oh, it's got thread networking and Ethernet port.
02:29:45 ◼ ► And, like, try, I mean, how many people out there really know what an Ethernet port is?
02:29:54 ◼ ► It's always been in the air, and it's like, oh, but what if they had two Apple TVs, and it was regular Apple TV, and it's 200 bucks, and it's good, and there's only one size, and it has the thread networking and the Ethernet port, and there it is.
02:30:07 ◼ ► It's the new Apple TV, and it's 200 bucks, and then there's Apple TV Ultra, and it's a slightly bigger box, and it has an active cooling system, and it's 500 bucks or something, or 700, and it does, and then you could have games.
02:30:23 ◼ ► There's games that run on all Apple TV, and then there's games that are only for Apple TV Ultra.
02:30:30 ◼ ► I think the problem is it comes back to this idea of even if they did that, it's dead in the water if they don't have the store support ready to go from the beginning.
02:30:39 ◼ ► And they won't, because they're just going to have the app store, and they're going to say, we have this amazing hardware.
02:30:49 ◼ ► And that's what Valve did with Linux, is they're like, look, no matter how hard we try, nobody's going to freaking port their game to Linux.
02:30:54 ◼ ► So we've just got to support translation of these games such that they can run on Linux.
02:31:14 ◼ ► But there is a new CEO coming in, and we know that the old CEO, Tim Cook, had a religious devotion to the services revenue and the sort of, like, the Phil Schiller memo from 2011 that was like, when the app store first started, this came out, I think, in the Epic trial.
02:31:32 ◼ ► But it was discovered in one of the trials, probably the Epic one, but it was like, hey, the run rate on the app store is so exceeding what we, even our wildest dreams.
02:31:43 ◼ ► What if we cap it at a billion dollars, and once we start making a billion dollars, we just keep lowering the commission rate to keep our side at a billion, which is good money, and then we can just lower the commission.
02:31:57 ◼ ► And we don't, there was no email entered with Tim Cook's answer, but we know the answer, because we know what they did.
02:32:06 ◼ ► There's a great New Yorker cartoon where there's, like, a business guy on the phone, and he's making an appointment, and he's like, the caption is, how about never?
02:32:28 ◼ ► And what if we say we keep it at the exclusive way to load software, games, otherwise, whatever, right?
02:32:34 ◼ ► Because the obvious answer of, hey, you could just put the App Store on this new device and work out a deal with Valve and just do Valve.
02:32:58 ◼ ► And it would be there alongside the App Store, and all of the App Store games for Apple TV that you know and love would be there.
02:33:14 ◼ ► And if that's the type of gaming, I don't know, maybe more people play those games on Apple TV than I think.
02:33:23 ◼ ► Your Netflix and your Hulu and your Disney Plus would all come from the App Store, not the Steam Store.
02:33:33 ◼ ► And if you believe that your App Store monopoly is in jeopardy, which I think in a lot of ways they do, hey, this is a new way to re-up the service's revenue volume while still being able to say, no, we're competing honestly and fairly.
02:33:50 ◼ ► This device supports multiple game place marketplaces, and we're selling games via the App Store on Merit, and we think that buying games on the App Store is the best place to do it.
02:34:02 ◼ ► But if you have an existing library, if you want to buy it somewhere else, we're not going to put a buy the game on Steam button on the Apple TV.
02:34:19 ◼ ► And it's not because I think Tim Cook only picked John Ternus because he agrees with everything Tim Cook does.
02:34:25 ◼ ► I think we're going to – I don't know what they are because I don't think we know Ternus.
02:34:28 ◼ ► I think we're going to see noticeable changes, and we'll be like, oh, John Ternus has different opinions on X, Y, and Z than Tim Cook did.
02:34:38 ◼ ► And I think that's part of – I think that is why Tim Cook picked him, that he is looking for an independent-minded CEO with different ideas.
02:35:16 ◼ ► I've had an account for so long that you don't need to use the ad symbol on my channel.