632: The Uncertainty Is Gone
01:46:58 Share

Oh, we didn't talk about who has a pre-show. Did you guys all hear the secret plan? Oh, crap. Someone else is here listening. Hmm.

I can't make a good joke about it. It's just sad. Well, we have to wait for maybe like 25 more years so one of the Twitch generation of people gets in a position to do something terrible with national security and then they can live stream on Twitch their important secure meetings. Or Twitch equivalent, whatever the...

Twitch equivalent is at that time. Did you see that allegedly as of earlier today, there's going to be a 25% tariff on imported cars, and surely that's going to go exactly as they think it will. Will there or won't there be? Who knows? I'm so, so going to be in love with John deciding that he can't have a Honda because it's too damned expensive now. Holy crap. I just bought a new car. I'm not buying another one for like another...

Six to ten years. Yeah. What year is your car? I don't even remember now. 2014. Oh, gosh. You're due, man. I'm not. It's fine. Everything's fine. How many miles are on it? Not a lot. I think it's like 40K. Wow! What do you think comes first, car or Mac Pro? I mean, I'll get a new Mac before a new car for sure. But will it be a Mac Pro? Yeah. Who knows? That is tough to say. But I'm just...

very impatiently waiting for the day that John actually realizes that there are other car manufacturers in the world that also make decent cars. Unfortunately, they will all be way too expensive now, but that's okay. And yes, I'm aware that some, if not many, Hondas are made in the U.S., but it ruins my whole joke, so leave me alone. Including all of mine, I think. Is that true? Well, what's your VIN?

I don't know. Do you have them written down somewhere, man? Come on. I do. I was just actually just looking at it for, I was filling out the mileage for insurance stuff. Let me see. My VINs. Oh, is it not written on here? All right. I've got that here. Folly work. I'll do Casey's. There you go. I have actual paperwork here from the insurance company.

This is excellent Foley work. This is great. What am I looking for in the bins? I don't know how to tell. The first number. If it's a number, then it's American. It's not quite that simple, but... All three are Americans. Oh, that's right. I forgot you held the red Honda. That's right. I completely forgot about that. All right. Fair enough. Well, then I guess you can still buy Hondas forevermore. Hooray. All right.

I'll buy whatever car I think is best for me. John, there's never going to be a car that you think is best for you that doesn't have an H on the front. Give me a couple hundred grand that I have to spend on a car and I'll show you there's definitely cars that are not honest. Uh-huh, sure. Honestly, John, if you fell upon a couple hundred grand tomorrow... And had to spend it on a car, don't worry. Even if you had to spend it on a car, there's...

Don't worry. I could do it, and it would not be a Honda. I can tell you that. No, I really don't think you would do it. You may not buy a Honda, but you wouldn't do something like a Ferrari that you've always wanted. You would get an expensive Honda, or you would get an Acura. That's what you would do. You would get a frigging Acura. No, I'm not a fan of Acuras. Not a fan of Acuras at all. I like Hondas better than Acuras. It's the same car. No, they take a Honda and they ruin it.

Okay. What? Citation needed. I don't like how they look. I don't like the changes to the interior. I don't think they're much nicer than Hondas. I would definitely be looking at like Audi, Mercedes, BMW, Porsche. I'd probably be leaning towards Porsche if I'm not going to go for something like a Ferrari because I'd be too afraid to drive it. Yeah.

It all depends on how big of a check you give me, again, that I have to spend on cars. Because if you don't tell me how to spend it on cars, I'll just invest it or something. Exactly. Did I tell you? I think I said this privately to you guys. I didn't say this on the show. I made the mistake of looking at how...

what the pricing is like on used Porsche Taycans, Taycans, whatever you, however you pronounce it. And they are kind of almost affordable, which is a piece of information I did not need to know. Yeah, but the problem is they just did like a generational revision of it and the new ones are just like so much better than the old ones.

I know they look exactly the same. You're like, what did they even change? But the battery and electric and stuff is just so much better on the new one. So yeah, the first generation is like, do you really want one of these? Because the new one is kind of the same, but better in every way. So I think you could get a good deal on a first generation. I got to say, now that we're talking cars and EVs, a few people have been asking me for an update on the BMW iX after, I mean, what's it been? Six, seven months? It's still ugly. Yes, it is still ugly. So far, it's...

It's really good. Like, I am extremely happy with this vehicle. And this is, I mean, let's see. In my family, I've had two models, S, the Rivian, and Tiff has the i3. This is then my fifth EV, and it is by far the best all-arounder.

Low drama, high functionality, high performance, and even just the EV drivetrain itself, like BMW's EV drivetrain is seriously good. One of the best things about it is that it performs exactly the same way. It responds exactly the same way, regardless of temperature or charge level.

So that means, for instance, is it fully charged? Does it regen break? Yes. Just the same way it always does. In the cold, are there any problems whatsoever? No, it's fine. It has no noticeable phantom drain. Like there's just, there are so many things about this EV drivetrain that are just low maintenance. And it isn't just because the iX is new. TIFF's i3, which is I think like a 2019 or 2018 model, is

it's exactly the same. Like it's exactly as good in like the drive train. And that's, that's like a whole generation earlier. At least BMW's EV drive train is incredibly mature. I am so happy with this car and the way it functions. Like I haven't had to reboot the car. I don't know how yet because it doesn't matter because it hasn't come up. The only bugs I have found are that sometimes it takes the Bluetooth a little bit too long to like reconnect to car play. Like when I get into the car,

And I might have to drive up the block before CarPlay connects. But that could be Apple's fault. And I also run iOS betas on my phone a lot of times. And Bluetooth, for whatever reason, they mess with Bluetooth in the betas all the time. So that could be the phone's fault. I don't know if that's BMW's fault. But also CarPlay. I have CarPlay the whole rest of the time. What?

which is a pretty big feature and it's a very good implementation. It's pretty freaking nice, isn't it? Yep. It also has the iPhone car key functionality. So while my car has physical keys, I never use them. I just walk near it and my phone is the key and it unlocks. Rivian does the same thing, but I have found that the BMW version is more reliable. Oh,

Overall, so far, my iX is great. Yes, it is a stupid-looking shape. It is also a very practical shape. It's a very comfortable car. It's a very quiet ride. It's a very luxurious interior. This is the first EV I have driven that feels like its price is

And that is so low drama, I don't have to worry about things like how do I reboot it? Because I never have to. I just get to use it like a car. It's great. What's the MSRP on that? Like 80-ish, give or take a little bit? Yeah, something like that. Well, I think it might be a little higher. And I didn't even get – there was like a super fast version. I didn't get the super fast version. I got the regular version. It's insanely fast. Like I don't need to be faster. Okay.

But it's a great vehicle. If any of you out there are finding yourself in a position where maybe you have a Tesla and are looking to replace it with something that's not a Tesla...

Go look at BMW. Their EVs are awesome. Like I've seen like the people up the street replaced a Model 3 with the new i4. It's a great looking car and the specs on that are pretty great. I still love my iX. It's a fantastic car if you want a little more space. They have a whole bunch of other things that include the letter I somewhere in them. It's

Seriously, check it out. I love... And the service situation is so much better. There's a dealership up there. If I ever need service, which I haven't yet, but if I ever do, it's just up the street. And you can get appointments in two seconds and it's no drama. It's nice kind of being out of the beta car game. And while I did enjoy my Teslas and my Rivian, they always felt like betas.

And there were downsides to that. You did have to reboot your car on a semi-regular basis in both cases in some form or another to fix some kind of bug. And it's really nice not having to do that and just being with like, oh, now I'm with the adults again and I can just use my car like a car and not worry about it. And again, the BMW EV drivetrain.

is so mature and so low drama. It just works. It works all the time. There's no problems with it. It works the same way all the time. And so far, nobody has designed a way it might defrost control from where it always is. Nice.

You know, it's funny that a company that has been building cars for nearly 100 years, something like that, I don't even know. Imagine that, a company that's been building cars for nearly 100 years can apply some of the learnings, if you will, from that, some of the lessons learned from that, to a different kind of, let me check my notes, car education.

No, I don't know. I don't want to slag on Rivian because I really enjoyed the handful of times I've driven one. I think they're a well-meaning company. Mostly. I still think they're petulant about car plays ridiculous, but they're a well-meaning company that's just trying to survive and do something new. And so I'm not really slagging on Rivian so much, but yeah,

Yeah, if you're still driving a Tesla now, yikes. I mean, look, I understand. Not everybody can afford to replace their car all the time. I get... But these days, I would suggest if you...

If you are in the position of choosing what you drive and you're looking at a Tesla, I would suggest maybe look around first because the market is much bigger than it used to be. And there's a lot more entrants now. And some of them are pretty mature and I think are better overall experiences of ownership.

All right. We have an announcement to make. We have a new ATP member special. So we have, and this was John's idea, ATP Insider, our websites. John, tell us about this.

I think it was my idea. I think this was another listener idea. And I've got I we had an editing overlap. I wanted this to be called ATP Insider making our websites. But and I did change the title of that and save it. But I got I got sniped by overlapping save. So there you go. I can't really fix that in the CMS, but I did not anyway. Now it's too late because it's part of the slug in the URL. So I'm just leaving it.

All right. Anyway, this is about our websites. We all have websites because we are people of a certain age and people of a certain age who are tech nerds tend to have websites. Why do we have websites? What are our websites? How many websites have we had? And finally, how do we make our websites? And it is Byzantine. I guess that's the best word for it. So as I say in the show, it's not a show where we recommend how you should make your website. But if you want to know how we make our websites, this will tell you.

Indeed. I loved, by the way, that a listener whose name is not in front of me, and I apologize, sent in feedback saying that John's website did not actually meet the validator or, you know, there were validation errors in your website, which John gave me a ton of stick about on the episode.

And then apparently within 15 minutes, John, you have corrected the error. And I assume the offending parties have been. So, you know, you know what the problem was? I can tell you what I don't know if you looked at it. I guess you couldn't because by the time you looked at it, it was fixed. But the problem was like I validated all my articles before they go up. Right. But what is the front page of a website look like?

It's a bunch of articles. Exactly. So you get bit by the thing where it's like, well, what if you have the same ID in two articles? Now you have two IDs on the same quote unquote page. That was the problem. Been there. Yeah. Anyway, that was easy, easily enough to fix.

Anyway, you can go to ATP. FM slash join. If you want to listen to this episode and, or start funding John's, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollar car project. So you can go there, uh, check it out. Now, John, if you do join as an AB as Nate, I almost said ABC as an ATP member. Uh, what do you, what perks do you get other than this one and only one member special? We're doing a pitch for membership now. We'll know what you get with membership. Sure. Uh, well you get, uh, the show without any ads in it, which is nice. Uh,

You get all of our member specials going back in time for everything that we've ever done. All of them, John? No way. All of them? That's right. All of them. If you have the power of downloading, you can just download all of them and then cancel your membership. No, you can't. No, don't tell people that. I mean, it's true. But don't tell computer people. They know they can do it.

You also get ATP Overtime. In every single episode, we do a whole other topic at the end of the show called ATP Overtime, and lots of good stuff is in there. Again, you can go back and listen to all the overtimes because we have chapter markers for every single one of them. But yeah, going forward, you'll get all that stuff as well. Am I missing something? I think there's some more stuff you can put in there. Bootleg!

Oh, the bootleg. That's right. If you want to hear the unedited feed with all our mistakes in it and all of Casey's unedited cursing and everything else, sometimes the bootleg is significantly longer than the show and we go off on a really big tangent. So that's there if you want it. And also, this will be relevant in maybe a month or so. We'll see. You get a discount on all of our time-limited merch sales, and we will have a pre-WWC merch sale coming up at some point in the future. And if you're a member, you'll get a discount on that sale. Excellent. ATP.fm slash join.

All right, let's do some follow-up as seems to be the tradition, which is entirely my fault. Let's do Vision Pro Corner. It will be quick as always. First of all, in the beta, there is the new Spatial Gallery app, which we talked about, I think, two or three episodes ago now. I wanted to point out that as of the 20th of March, which is almost a week ago as we record this, there are now seven new items in Spatial Gallery. And the original batch, I should remind you, was on the 3rd of March, which was about two and a half weeks ago. So...

So there is some motion here, which I'm happy about. I was hoping for, you know, daily or every other day or something like that, but I'll still take, you know, every couple of weeks. It's better than nothing.

Then we got a lot of follow-up. I guess Jonathan Goldbranson was the first one to mention this about, hey, Marco was whining, and I think justifiably, about, you know, you can't change the volume of the Vision Pro easily, which I agree with. And I think another thing you said was you can't change the volume of the Vision Pro with a physical knob. And I knew at the time that that was...

technically inaccurate, but I didn't say anything because I find the way I'm about to describe to change volume to be too fiddly for my taste. Now, maybe my eye tracking just isn't as good as other people's eye tracking, but what you can do is if you're in the, if you're, if you have the vision pro on and the digital crowns on the upper right-hand side of the vision pro, if you twist that a little bit by default, it will adjust how much immersion you're, you're within. So if you think about it, when you put the thing on, it's initially full pass through. And as you,

spin the, the, um, the dial at the top, then I get, is it a digital crown on this one? I think it is, um, as you spin the digital crown, then you will get more and more immersed from the center of your view outwards. And so you could say, for example, have, you know, 30, 40, 50, maybe 90 degrees of immersion, but on the edges, on the periphery of your vision to the degree that you have periphery in the vision pro, um, then it's, it's actually passed through.

Well, as that's happening, there's two little circles that are overlaid on your screen. And one of them is like a landscape indicator and one of them is a volume indicator. And if you pitch your eyes over to the right, and so now you're looking at the volume indicator, then the digital crown becomes a volume knob.

This is all true. There's nothing factually incorrect about that. But in my experience, I find that that is not exceedingly reliable. And I don't recall if I said this on the show last week. I think I did. But when you do the look at your hand, the back of your hand dance, so you look at the back of your hand and then you flip your hand over. So now instead of looking at the back of your hand, you're looking at the palm of your hand. Then you get quick access to a couple of things. And if at that point you pinch and slide laterally,

That to me is the easiest way. It is. And this is, this is your point. And this is, this is why I agreed with you then. And I agree with you now that that is to my eyes, the easiest way to adjust the volume. And to your, to your point, it's not terribly easy. Um, so I, I completely agree with you that it's, it's too convoluted, but we didn't explicitly state on the show that you can do it with the digital crown. So yes, um,

As Jonathan Goldbrinson points out, the Vision Pro has a physical volume knob. When you scroll the digital crown, you either look at the mountain icon and then it changes environment percentage or look at the volume icon and the digital crown controls the volume. That is something that I'm pretty darn sure Marco knew. I certainly knew, but it's such trash that I didn't bring it up. I actually didn't know about it. So thank you for pointing this out. It is ridiculous how hard this is to discover.

um like everything else about you know all these weird gestures but you know hey maybe if i use the vision pro more maybe i would have known that so oh well uh steven clink writes john's analysis of the siri llm delay was spot on and reminded me of an issue you covered in a past episode apple is used to solving problems by throwing more programming hours at them but llm based siri requires a different approach one where engineers are essentially writing pleading letters to the model

Quote, do not hallucinate. Do not make up factual information. Only output valid JSON and nothing else. Quote, instead of debugging in the traditional sense, they're left waging a letter writing campaign to the LLM, hoping it compiles. Good luck to Apple in fixing that. Hoping it complies. Yeah, this was a topic that we covered. And actually, we did do some follow-up on that later, saying there are better ways to make sure you get valid JSON instead of pleading with it. But yeah, that's prompt engineering. And to be clear, I don't think that necessarily the

The people who are responsible for making Apple's L and based off perform wetter better are just spending their entire time prompt engineering by set setting up different sets of strings to feed the thing because that's definitely not going to fix the problem. Maybe that will help a little bit in one direction or another. No, but they have to do is say, OK,

Can we have a different model, a better model, multiple smaller models, some specialized models, a retrained larger model? Should we use a server? Should we use it locally? All those things take a large amount of time. And that's one of the reasons why Apple is late on this.

Mark Gurman writes, with regard to the smart home hub, Apple is still developing a device codenamed J490 with an iPad-like screen and home control features. At one point, the company had hoped to announce this product in March, but because the device, to an extent, relies on the delayed Siri capabilities, it has been postponed as well. I don't know if they should have postponed the entire HomePod.

line until Siri got better. It was like, this is some consequences of them missing on Siri. It's not just that the Siri they advertise doesn't arrive in time. It's also that any product that kind of

expected to have the better Siri is now just sitting there waiting and going, well, I guess we can't launch this with that. Because presumably products like this were developed with the in-progress better Siri, and you can't really launch without the in-progress better Siri, and they're not going to launch it on the smart home hub. So there is a cascading effect to being late on this. All right. Apple has been, as everyone foretold, sued for false advertising over Apple intelligence.

Reading from Axios, Apple has been hit with a federal lawsuit claiming the company's promotion of now-delayed Apple intelligence features constituted false advertising and unfair competition. Quote, Apple's advertisements saturated the internet, television, and other airwaves to cultivate a clear and reasonable consumer expectation that these transformative features would be available upon the iPhone's release, the suit reads.

Quoting again, this drove unprecedented excitement in the market, even for Apple, as the company knew it would. And as part of Apple's ongoing effort to convince customers, excuse me, consumers to upgrade at a premium price and to distinguish itself from competitors deemed to be winning the AI arms race.

Yeah, I wish them luck in the suit. I'm not sure how well they're due. I'm not sure how easy these kind of suits are to win. But we knew there would be one. And so here it is. And that's just, I mean, easy, as we said last week, easy to predict. If there is a possibility of a class action lawsuit against Apple, someone's going to try it. And I think there is a good case to be made here. I'm not sure the description that was just read from presumably from the people who are suing Apple makes that case well, but maybe they'll do better in court.

Look, Apple brought this on themselves. I think they deserve this. A lot of the suits filed against them, I think, are BS. And I don't think this is one. Yeah, keyboards weren't either. I mean, anytime we end up getting checks or stuff, it's usually because there is a good founding for the class action lawsuit. And the whole class action system in this country is not particularly great. But it is better than not having any recourse at all if they ship a mildly defective product for years and years and then stonewall about it.

Apple's Vision Pro chief Mike Rockwell was about to take over Siri. So this is news from a few days ago reading from Bloomberg. Apple Vision Pro chief Mike Rockwell will take over Siri, which is being removed from AI chief John Gianandrea. Rockwell will report to software chief Craig Federici. Rockwell is currently the vice president in charge of Vision Products Group, or VPG, the division that developed Apple's headsets.

As part of the changes, he'll be leaving that team, though the Vision Pro software groups will follow him to Federici's software engineering group. The hardware team will remain under John Ternus and report to Paul Mead, a hardware engineering executive who worked on the Vision Pro team.

Uh, Jean Andrea will remain at the company, even with Rockwell taking over Siri. Uh, JG's other responsibilities include oversight of research, testing and technologies related to AI. The company also has a team reporting to JG investigating robotics.

Last year, the company tapped Rockwell deputy King Kim Vorath to help advise the Siri team. She's known for bringing order and execution to trouble development programs. In January, she was officially moved over to the AI group as a top Lieutenant to JG to oversee AI program management.

She's now moving to Federighi's division. Inside Apple, Rockwell hasn't been shy about critiquing and criticizing Siri, according to people familiar with the matter. For years, he's pitched senior vice presidents on ideas for overhauling the voice assistant to make it more personalized. He has also been advising the AI group in recent weeks. Even before the management changes, JG long considered Rockwell a potential successor.

Not a successor anymore, huh? Yep. So this is a pretty big, uh, leadership reshuffle here. Uh, and it seems like more thing, things that used to not be under Federighi are now going to be under Federighi, which for the, in the case of things like the vision pro software, like I'm kind of surprised that wasn't already. Like it makes sense. Like Apple does this thing where they have a new product. It's just kind of like off on its own little Island. And then if it, if it is allowed to live, it slowly gets folded back in. So that seems like that's happening there. Um,

But yeah, the series stuff is I can't tell. Like when I first saw the story is like, is this like G. Andrea, like is saved the embarrassment of getting booted out and it just shift into a different role. But really, he's on his way out the door. Or is this like actually he's much better at dealing with research development and people who want to publish pictures? And that's what he should have been in charge of all along. And we need a product person involved with the product.

Yeah. I don't know the vibe I get based on pretty much no facts whatsoever is that it's, he, he really is a research person on a product person, but I can't cite any particular reason that I feel that way. It's just kind of the way the wind is blowing. It's things that we've heard and the fact that they haven't really been good at shipping products under his leadership. Here's the thing about my outsider's perspective on his tenure at Apple so far. This is true of every company, but it seems especially true in Apple because

to succeed, you need to be able to get things done within the context of the organization as it exists when you arrive. So if you arrive at Apple, you're not going to change the whole company unless you're like the CEO. And even then good luck. But,

But especially if you're, you know, if you're a high-level executive or whatever, you can have some influence on your corner of the world. But what does it take to get things done within Apple? Because it doesn't work departmentally in general, with the exception of, like I just said, when the Vision Pro, they all spin off into their own little world. In general, you're going to need to work with a whole bunch of other people at Apple to make anything happen. And it seems like DeAndrea has not...

found a way to succeed in that organization at getting things done. I don't think he didn't want to make a better productized series, but there's like...

And I'm sure within Apple's culture, there's a specific way that the people who get things done operate in order to be one of those people who has a product that gets announced in a keynote that goes out to customers that is successful in any company figuring out how to do that. OK, how do I work in this company? How do I how do I actually get products out the door in this company? What do I have to do? Who do I have to talk to? Who do I have to cooperate with? Who do I have to work with? How do I make sure I have budget and resources and all of that? And that's a difficult task. And it's not saying that like Andrea is like, oh, he's a.

bad manager or whatever because he couldn't do this because every company is different. Maybe he was successful at doing this in another company, but then you come into Apple and you can't figure out how to get this machine to work. But when you tap like existing executives have proven who they know how to get that done, like Rockwell for all the problems of the Vision Pro was a product that shipped, right? And presumably it shipped like...

The question is, did he ship a product that was what he expected to ship or what he was supposed to ship? And that is separate from, is what they shipped an actual good product or whatever? And it seems like him and Kim Vorath and, you know, Federighi or whatever are people who know how to get things done within Apple and know how to execute on a plan and succeed in that plan. Whereas Gian Drea seems like,

I'm sure part of his purview was launch a better Siri, and he has thus far not been able to do that. Yeah, I mean, and there's all sorts of potential reasons and complexities why that might be the case. I mean, I know that the way things are, the way divisions are structured in Apple matters a lot. You know, Apple has a lot of

secrecy. They have a lot of walls up within the company. They have a lot of, from what we've heard, they have a lot of turf battles and things. So this shakeup probably matters a lot. This is a big deal, not a small deal. And as for the people, who knows? It's always hard to know who within the company is responsible for successes and failures. Obviously, the higher up you go, the more it becomes people's responsibility to

My impression of the people involved here is very limited because we don't really hear... We don't know that much about John G. Andrea. We don't know that much about Mike Rockwell. But we have seen both of them speak. We've seen all those people speak in short stints at WWDC stuff, like on the talk show live or like last year, G. Andrea was on stage in the Steve Jobs Theater talking. We do actually... In the rare case, we do see these people and it just so happens we've seen pretty much all these people speak...

you know, in a PR capacity about their technology. And obviously, Craig, we've known for years and years. So, but that's just their public face. We don't know what goes inside, what goes on inside the company. Sure. And I would, you know, again, with the disclaimer that like, we don't know that much about these people directly. I have had opportunities to, you know, in various press contexts, I've had opportunities to be around John Gianandrea and Mike Rockwell in limited bursts.

And my impression of both of them is that they're both very, very smart. What struck me about Mike Rockwell, and again, this is based on a very small amount of exposure, he is broadly very smart. He knows a lot about a lot. That's a very good thing for this role, I think. To be the person heading up Siri, that's a very, very, very good thing. He also...

Again, based on very limited exposure still. He also seems like he had a bit of a different attitude compared to the other VP people. He was a lot more no BS seeming. He seems like the kind of person, especially having heard in the rumor mill and stuff that apparently he was not a huge fan of the Siri experience when he was working on the Vision Pro.

I think that's a very good sign here. And when you look at, you know, the failings of the Vision Pro, the stuff that I think was most likely Rockwell's responsibility and where he had the least, you know, interference from other divisions was,

That stuff seems like it all works really rock solidly. Like things like the actual pass through the actual latency, the actual, like the, you know, the, the placement of objects in space and how, how like all that AR stuff, the fundamentals of that, like, you know, we talked about before all the ridiculous technical challenges that are involved in the vision pro just displaying an empty home screen, basically, you know, having, having everything work to that level, uh,

There were a huge number of challenges to get it to that point. And when I look at the Vision Pro as a product, obviously I think there's a huge amount of it that is a failure. But I think most of the failures come down to ecosystem and industrial design choices that probably were not his responsibility or his responsibility alone. And when you look at the technical side of how the Vision Pro behaves on those technical levels...

It's rock solid. It's really good at those things. And those things were really hard technical challenges. So when you take somebody with the attitude I think he has, who is broadly intelligent about lots of things the way I think he is, who also seems to dislike Siri the way it is now, I'm very excited about this. I think this is going to be great. I think he's going to, especially again, when we heard about Kim Verath and her reputation about being a fixer and being really good, like this combination of these two is

I think that's going to be great. And as for the move under Federighi's organization, it is a very good question to wonder, like, why wasn't the Siri division already part of, you know, under that? I think it might have been part of getting Giannandrea to come to the company was that you won't be under Craig, you'll report directly to the CEO, yada, yada, because they poached him from Google. Oh, that's true. They hired him away from Google, so that could have been a thing. But again, it's just like, do you have what it takes to get products done and shipped within Apple? And I think that

Rockwell has shown that he can make that happen. You know, I don't know how much she knows about AI, but he's a really sharp person. I think he can learn it. Like, whatever he doesn't know about AI, I think he'll be fine. Well, I mean, Jandre is still there.

Right. So that was the question. Like, is he on his way out the door or is he just going to have a more limited role? I think he got promoted to the roof. Like, I think he's hanging up hanging out there like, you know, with with Johnny Ive being in his advisory role. You know, like, I think it's it's more like it's done. I thought it might be. I'm just talking to my butt. Yeah, that's that's probably the case. But still, hey, you said say that about Phil. Phil's still there, right?

Phil is still on the roof. He's still testifying in court cases. I mean, he's still hanging out up there. He built a little shade shelter. He's serving drinks. I don't know what he's doing. Do you remember we saw Rockwell was on a talk show a year or two ago? Do you remember that? Talk show live? Yeah. Yeah. So it was like, he's not a complete... That was the most longest and most free-form conversation. I think he might have been one of the rotating guests on that one where they brought in a couple other people, but...

Yeah, I feel like of all the people involved in any Apple drama, we actually have some in-person impression of these people. Yeah, and that's why I think this change is going to be very good. Now, I still think

Apple has missed AI in the way that Microsoft missed mobile they're already very late and it will hurt them greatly and I think this is not a small miss this is a big miss and they it is a huge problem that that will take them I think a long time to catch up if they ever do and they might not so he's not starting from position of strength here like when you look at the timelines like

I was saying last week how it takes Tim Cook's Apple a long time to course correct when something is not right to the point where we were questioning, like, what is their feedback mechanism? Are they getting bad information? What's going on? Like, because it does seem like Apple does eventually course correct on most of their major shortcomings, but it takes them a very long time to do so compared to when you look at most of their companies in the business. Like Apple, Apple fixes problems very slowly.

It took them until now...

To realize that Siri was not good enough and turn things around. That's concerning on a number of levels, but at least they are doing it now. That was what JG's hire was supposed to be about to turn around Siri. But remember, there was a report in the information about a year or two ago talking about how there was an effort internally to rebuild Siri from scratch and apparently it lost a turf war at some point. So they kept going back to

We can keep fixing the old one, just like the butterfly keyboard. We can keep fixing it. We got it this time, we swear. If this is what we're seeing is basically another cycle of that level of restart or refactoring...

It's going to take two more years before we see anything out of this project, at least. So that part is concerning in the sense that, like, did it take them this long to finally realize that old Siri was not going to be patchable to the modern world because it didn't even work in the world it was in? I don't know. They seem very slow to address that kind of large failure. However, if they were going to address that kind of large failure, this is how it would look. So...

I'm optimistic. Again, I'm pretty confident about Mike Rockwell's general abilities to solve exactly this kind of problem. So I think this could be really good. We'll see. But I think if it ends up being really good for the product, I think we have to contextualize what that means because they're so far behind. So what does being really good look like? I think A,

It's going to be a long time out before we see any effort and any outcome from this, probably a year or two at least. And B, we have to see how much Apple prioritizes this.

They have not done well in the area of, you know, Siri and related tasks or AI and its related tasks. They have not done well in that area so far. And it is not because they lack resources. They have all the resources in the world. It's because they don't prioritize them well or don't utilize them well or there's some kind of bottleneck somewhere in their structures or their workflows or whatever.

They can do these things. They've been able to do these things for years. There's no reason why Google or OpenAI or like Amazon or all these other companies, there's no reason why all those companies were doing things that Apple couldn't do over the last three to five years. No, Apple could have been doing all the same things. They just didn't. They just failed to see what was going on and failed to get into it or failed to do it in the right way.

So what this is going to look like over time depends a lot on how much Apple realizes they messed up and how much they realize change has to happen. I get the feeling Mike Rockwell is not the kind of guy to BS around about that. I think he knows because he seems like he was held back by Siri in his previous product.

the Vision Pro, and I think he probably hates it as much as we do, which is a good sign. I do think this also then raises the question of what the heck happens to the Vision Pro? What happens to it now? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, it seems like it's already on cruise control anyway, for the most part. I mean, we certainly haven't heard very many rumblings about new hardware, and I feel like... No, no, all the existing rumors, the cheaper one, then the better one, those are still in process, then there's the Vision OS 3.0 is supposed to be a big change. I feel like that is...

that train is continuing along and I don't think it needs someone driving it the way the initial one needed someone driving it just to get it out the door. Again, is it on the right course? I don't know. Is that $1,500 one? And then the more expensive one, are those the right products to be making? What about all the various glasses projects? Some of which have been canceled. That's still an open question, but I see nothing that indicates that the vision pro is just not going to continue the way it's currently continuing, which is extremely slowly.

Yeah, I mean, probably. But I don't know. I think...

Having the Vision Pro chief be reassigned and having kind of nobody maybe assigned to his previous role? Paul Mead is taking over and also Vision OS goes under Craig, which is more or less like it graduating to be in with the rest of the family, you know? Yeah. To me, this is very good news for all of Apple's products except the Vision Pro where it's questionable and probably not good. It is neutral, I feel like, for Vision Pro.

It's not going to benefit it, but I don't think it should hurt it that much given the plan. It's not going to hurt Apple's rumored existing plans. What we know of Apple's plans seem like they will continue fine with this change and not be hampered by it. Are Apple's existing plans the right thing to do for Vision Pro? That is a good question, but I don't think this change. Certainly, we're not hearing the story of like, you know what, Vision Pro needs all-know leadership because we were going in the wrong direction. That we don't hear happening. I do echo your optimism, though, Marco, that I think this is on

the whole and potentially for literally everything a good thing you know if Siri really does get better and yes I mean it may not get better for a year or two but if it does get better that's that's wonderful because how many years have all of us and I don't just mean the three of us I mean we've

all of us. How many years have we been whining about how bad Siri is? And I would love for it to be better. And if Siri's better, it makes pretty much every one of Apple's products better. And, you know, I agree with you as well, John, that neutral, being neutral for the Vision Pro, I think is fine. And that seems to be mostly cruising along anyway with no real urgency, which for better and for worse. Again, maybe the wrong move, but that just, that's the way it's been going. So no change there.

Yeah, absolutely. But the key is, I think this is a good sign. And I don't think we didn't talk as much about it because we don't know her really at all. But, you know, Kim Verath really is supposed to be really freaking good. And so if she and Rockwell, who from what Marco was saying, you know, is kind of a don't take any names, kick butt kind of person. It sounds like the both of them are. That could be a really great way to write this ship. So I'm excited. Yeah.

uh the good news hasn't stopped there though uh john your long national nightmare is really for really for real this time i swear over there is one more story in the verge it looks exactly like the story they ran before which is hey threads now lets you choose your default feed no for everybody really this time and as far as i can tell i think that is actually true the places where i got it and then lost it now i've got it back again and it hasn't gone away so yeah i don't know what the timeline is in this but maybe like

120 days or whatever since it was announced as being available in the limited capacity. That's too long for rollout threads I don't know what you're doing. Anyway, just wanted to follow up on that if you want to choose the Your threads view to default to the one that shows your timeline of people you follow You can do that through a slightly Byzantine thing of long pressing on the following tab and then doing edit feeds or something and then grabbing the little gripper thing and dragging the feed you want to be the default to the top and

Not obvious at all, which I think is part of the rollout of this feature. It's like, can we make it so obscure that most people can't figure it out? And they apparently felt safe doing that because they want you to default to the algorithmic feed so they can feed your engagement muscles or whatever. But I don't want that. And so now I can change my settings.

We are sponsored this episode by Delete.me. Delete.me makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data from hundreds of data broker websites at a time when surveillance and data breaches are super common and make everyone vulnerable.

So data brokers are these creepy businesses that will collect your name, your contact info, like your phone number, your social security number, your home address, like really creepy stuff. And then they'll even do the same things for your family members, which I think is the most creepy part. So people can do a web search and they can find like, here's your name. Here's where you live. Here's your phone number. Also, here's like your mom. Here's your sister. Like that's messed up. It's just a creepy business. What Delete Me does is

is you go to them and you tell them what information you don't want on these data broker sites. And they will go and file the takedowns and the opt-outs to hundreds of data broker sites on your behalf. So that way, your data gets removed from all these different places online, which makes it a lot harder for people to find it and less likely that people will use it for annoying or harmful purposes against you. So it's a great service. And this is just, you know, to me, I use Delete Me myself because...

I looked around before they were even a sponsor. I looked around the landscape and I thought, you know, this could help. It was so easy to use and they're out there and they constantly monitor. So it isn't just a one-time thing.

You go to Delete.me, you tell them your stuff, and they constantly monitor for you, and they'll send you reports like, here's what we found, and here's what we were able to remove. It's a great service. So, today, get 20% off your Delete.me plan by texting ATP to 64000. The only way to get 20% off is to text ATP to 64000. That's ATP to 64000. Message and data rates may apply. Thank you so much to Delete.me for sponsoring our show.

Okay, so we have some iPhone 16E or 16 follow-up that we've been meaning to get to for the last few weeks. And we just have had other more pressing things that have bumped this off the list. This almost became an overtime topic because if you recall, that's kind of what overtime is for. But I think we can plow through it real quick. John, can you put on your micromachines man's voice and take care of this for us, please? The first item is for the rumored phones that are...

This should have been down in the 17th section, but I think we can put it up here as well. Some people wrote in for reasons why they might not rearrange the cameras on the new phones that are coming out. Like, basically leaving the three cameras like they are on the pro phones. Leaving them in the same place, despite the fact that they're extending the island to be huge on top of everything. And one of the reasons was third-party lens attachments systems. If someone makes an attachment thing, they have to make an all-new one for the phone.

I'm not sure I buy that one. Apple doesn't care if they break your stuff from phone to phone. They'll just break it. Yeah. But, you know, hey, maybe there is some influence in there of like not changing it too radically to help them out. But the slightly better reason is to minimize view changes when you're changing lenses. This kind of runs counter to the spatial video because for spatial video, we're like, wouldn't it be great if the lenses were farther away from each other?

It would be better for spatial video, but it would probably be worse for when you change from like the 1X to the 2X to the 4X. Like they want zoom to be smooth. And yeah, they do this now, like the, you know, smoothly blending between the different views of the cameras to make it look like it's just one camera. But obviously it's not. The farther away you make the lenses from each other, the harder it is to do that because when you switch to the camera that's on the other side of the phone, it necessarily has a different angle on the thing that you're viewing. And so that transition could be more jarring.

Maybe that's the way it is. I mean, you see a lot of phones with cameras in the back that are not in a triangle arrangement, that are like three top to bottom, like a stoplight across the back of the phone. But it seems like Apple doesn't want to do that. Anyway, back to the 16E. Sorry for the slightly rearranged topic. When the iPhone 16E came out, MKBHD put out a video. He is not a fan of the phone. He introduced a video with this little...

fictional skit of, as you could describe, world's most honest salesman versus the buyer trying to get recommended the iPhone 16E. So as a customer, he plays both parts. He's both the salesman and the customer. A customer coming in and saying, I want a phone, but I want X and Y and Z. And basically he's trying to say, what would a customer have to say for an honest salesman to say, you know what? The phone for you is the iPhone 16E. And the list of things that you would have to say to make that true are absurd, but

But mostly only because MKBHD considers one of your options to be a refurbished iPhone 15 Pro. Because go watch the video, especially just the intro part. Like, you know, how specific would you have to be? Why would you ever buy a 16E and not one of the many other phones that are offered? The 15 Pro is basically better than the 16E in every way, including price. But here's the thing. You might not be able to get a refurbished 15 Pro.

How many are available? Are they available in your area at all? How long will they be available? So I think it's kind of unfair to compare a refurb 15 Pro versus a new 16E. That said, it's kind of on Apple for saying, okay, well, if the 15 Pro really is better than 16E, why didn't you just keep selling the 15 Pro at a lower price? And that's not a thing that Apple does. They don't really keep selling the Pro phones year after year. Anyway, this video, we'll put it in the show notes, does make a pretty compelling case that

The 16E is not really a price performance champion. It's missing a bunch of weird features, as we said when we talked about it. But it does look really nice from the back. It does indeed.

All right. And then do we want to talk about teardowns? Yeah. These are a little bit old at this point, but they opened up the 16E to see what it's looking like inside there. And the battery is about 12% bigger compared to the 16. If you look at the inside of the phone, it's,

you'll see that the battery is bigger mostly the dimension you notice is mostly how tall it is because there is just one camera up there and the place where the other camera was especially the camera below it that's all filled with battery now uh thickness wise like oh they made the battery thicker and not having magsafe help with that that doesn't seem to be an issue at all in fact if you look at like one of these it's not x-ray but like some some kind of like

Thing that lets you see the internal components of the phone. You can see a faint ring of where the MagSafe magnets would have been. I don't know if that means there's actually a channel card for them. That could just be like the Qi coil, right? Because it still has wireless charging. It's just a magnet. Maybe. I assume that's just the Qi coil. I don't know. It's difficult to tell. It's not like you open it up and there's a place where the magnets go. But the point is the magnets are not actually that thick. And so if you're thinking that the 16E has a bigger battery because it has extra thickness to put the battery in,

If that is true, it is dwarfed by the actual square centimeters of additional battery you get by not having those other cameras. A single camera on the 16E is not just a cost savings, it gives you more room for battery, and it's a stark contrast if you look at the 15 or any other, even just the 15 with just the two cameras. There's just so much more room for battery when you just have one camera. Hopefully someday we'll get to a point where we can just have one really good camera on the back of the phone instead of three or four or five of them, but that's...

That way seems a long way off. And also, if you want to look at the teardown, you can see what the C1 looks like. And it's actually pretty big. So this is a pretty significant chip. Someday, some portions of this may move into the SoC. But if you look at the size of the C1 chip right now, you can see that some portion of it is probably still going to be external because it's pretty darn big.

17E, there's a post on 9to5Mac that reads, Fixed Focus Digital, one of the first sources of the iPhone 16E name ahead of Apple's announcement, recently posted this on Weibo. E model is likely to be available in the next generation. At present, a new project code has been seen.

which is suspected to be the 17E. Embarrassed of slim rumors, but as we discussed in past shows, does the fact that this is called the 16E and not the SE whatever mean that there'll be a 17E? People want there to be, and they see a model out there that...

with a code name and they're going to say, maybe this will be the 17E because what else would it be? Like if it, if the rumor is for a phone that is clearly not, uh, the plain 17 or the 17 pro, there's another model out there with another code name. Uh, and it's not the slim, like,

Maybe it's the 17E. I think that would be a wise thing for Apple to do to revise the cheap iPhone every year, especially since I think they made a lot of bad choices with the 16E and 17E will give them another shot. But stay tuned. Yeah, I think it's really it's interesting to think about like

The SE line was always like, here's a bunch of old parts on the outside inside a new chip, upgraded every two to three years, basically. I think what we've seen so far with most of the way Apple addresses the lower price market is just keeping around old guts or old models.

And in this case, they're not doing that. Like, in this case, like, they really may... I mean, they're still doing, like, last year's phone as a cheaper option from the flagships. But...

In this case, they really did make like a cheap phone from scratch that does not really have a lot in common with an older model that they just picked from. Like in this case, they didn't need to worry about like maintaining the home button, maintaining face or touch ID. Like, you know, like they they went all in with the modern stuff, but they made a custom phone that was explicitly targeting inexpensive stuff here.

But it's not like any of the others. It isn't like just a three or four year old model. And then adopted the new, better, easier to access, better service case that they innovated in the 14 or whatever. So unlike the other ones where they did like, oh, it's like the old case but with new guts in it.

one of the weaknesses of that is like everything that you've improved about the case you don't get that in the cheap phone which is like oh the cheap phone always gets a crappy old case but this case is like a hybrid of all the best ideas we had about how to make this more easily repairable and easy to manufacture and so on and so forth with a bunch of stuff removed to save cost and a mixture of some different parts that we're trying to like it's it gives them a platform to try to make a phone that is

that doesn't throw away all the stuff that they've learned over the past several years, but also is cheaper because it is essentially decontented. I just think they did the decontenting a little bit wrong this time. Sure, but look at how this will play out then in the future. First of all, I think a way to look at this, people were rumoring it and kind of framing it as this is the replacement for the iPhone SE. And I think that's not quite right. I think what really happened is they discontinued the iPhone SE recently

and introduced a new line. And I know that's, you could say, oh, that's just naming, that's marketing, whatever. But when you look at the roles they filled, the iPhone SE was filling two roles. It was fulfilling the, you know, less price role, but also people who wanted to hold on to the old style of phone for whatever reason. Maybe they hated Face ID, maybe they didn't want to change from the home button, whatever it is. It was serving both of those roles.

The new one throws away the latter and is only serving the price role. So what I think will happen now, if these rumors are correct that there's going to be a 17E, which will probably be fairly soon, you know, after the 17 is launched, maybe it'll be another one of these like springtime things, then...

If you think about them keeping this one around, they have right now... So where will we be a year from now? I think it'll be... We'll have the 17, and then we'll have the 16 for $100 less. The 17E for this price, $600. And then the 16E kept around for $100 less at $500. Ugh.

I don't like that. I bet that's where we are headed, where I bet this, I bet the E line sticks around the same way the other lines do, where you keep last year's model around for a hundred bucks less. And maybe in certain like more price sensitive markets like India or other places, maybe you also keep the N minus two year around. Cause that's what they do with like, you know, right now we're on the 16 phones. They sell the iPhone 15 directly from Apple and,

In some markets, they would still sell the minus two. I don't know if they... Are they still doing this? Is the 14 still for sale in some markets? Well, we were just talking about how the M2 MacBook Air is still for sale in some markets. Not in the US, but somewhere it is. Right. I mean, the M1 MacBook Air is still for sale in Walmart in the US. The M1 is the Walmart thing. But setting the Walmart thing aside, the fact that they basically stopped selling the M2 MacBook Air except in certain places. Right. So I can see this playing out similarly where...

They won't sell the iPhone 14 right now from Apple, but I bet they're still selling it in certain markets. I bet the E line will work the same way where Apple in the US and certain other high-profile markets will sell 17E and 16E for $100 less next year. But then in some markets, the year after that, they'll still be selling the 16E.

As the as like the hundred bucks less than that, even when we when we have an 18 and a 17 from Apple. And I think that would be a fairly smart thing to do, because when you look at the 16, like as much as you hate the compromises they make.

they did make compromises that keep the price down and that's what they need not that much it did get a lot more expensive than the se i if i had to vote i would say do not continue selling 16a replace it with a 17a but we'll see what they do we'll see i i i you want to make it a one dollar bet i'm not i'm not predicting i am i'm prescribing i'm saying apple should not do this like i agree that it definitely seems like something that tim cook would do absolutely should not do it

But they probably will. We'll see. All right. And then finally, the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max. A reading from MacRumors. According to the latest note from Jeff Poo of GFHK Tech Research, both the 17 Pro and Pro Max will feature 12 gigs of RAM. I love it. Love it. Keep adding more RAM. You got to run those bigger local models that don't do anything useful yet. But someday they might. So keep adding RAM to our phones. Excellent.

All right. Breaking-ish news. I believe it was yesterday as we record. WWDC 2025 has been announced. It is June 9 through June 13. It is going to have a one-day thing at Apple Park like it has since almost, if not every year since the pandemic. And that's basically the story so far.

Well, the real story is they're laser-like precision at exactly nailing the weeks that both of my children graduated from high school. Thanks a lot for that, Apple. When my son graduated from high school, you put WWDC at the same week. Now my daughter is graduating from high school. Boom!

This is not great for me. Even though her graduation is slightly later in the week, her prom is on Tuesday, WWDC is on Monday, the odds of me going to this, even if I am invited, are not looking great. There are discussions happening amongst the family, but time-wise, it may not make sense. I am disappointed, but that's just me personally. Bad luck. The real story, though, is...

Uh, we got to look at the graphic for the WWDC announcement and what is featured in the graphic besides the weird, uh, conjoined, uh, double W's, uh, and a rainbow tinted DC frosted glass kind of 25. We do this every year. There've been years where there's been like a bunch of, remember they did like, uh, one of the San Jose years, they did a bunch of geometric shapes, uh,

poking out of like a field, like cylinders and squares and stuff. I was like, is this a sign of what the new UI is going to look like? It was not. It was not a sign of the new UI at all. It was just a cool looking graphic. But this year with all the rumors and the various rumor battles about saying that Jon Prosser's video showing the Vision Pro-like OS for iOS 19 is not really what it looks like. Gurman's saying it actually looks a little bit different. And then Apple puts this out with a frosted glass look for the 25 that looks so good you could lick it, but it's also...

Not exactly the same as Vision Pro, but it's also not exactly the same as the Invites app, but it's also not the same as the mock-up of the phone app. Who knows? Is Apple just teasing us, or are we going to be seeing a bunch of frosted glass UI in iOS 19 and Mac OS 16 and iPad OS 19 and...

Vision OS 3? Anyway, we'll see. We'll see what we get. I still do believe that they are going to launch a big redesign across all their OSs. I assume it's happening this year, although I wouldn't guarantee that.

But yeah, if there was no rumors of like an OS spanning redesign, we wouldn't be reading that into this. We'd just be like, oh, look, it's nice. It's frosted glass. Because we wouldn't be thinking, hey, what's the new look going to be for all of Apple's major OSes? But we are thinking that now. So everything we see is like, is this it? Especially since it aligns somewhat with

with the rumors and a little bit with the invites app and a little bit with the phone things. Uh, I do have to say, I like this frosted glass. I don't know if I would like a UI made out of it, but I think it looks nice for the letters 25 and the logo. I mean, I think I said this last week that when I use the vision pro, it feels like the future, not only because of the hardware, but also because of the software. And so part of that is the look and feel. And if we can get a look and feel that, that, that,

feels like that on iOS, iPadOS, macOS, et cetera. I think that could be really fun. That being said, and again, I think I'm regurgitating what happened, what was discussed last week, is that

a lot of what feels so, or a lot of the affordances that feel so fun and new on Vision Pro relate heavily to depth. And there is, at least on macOS, for example, there is some modicum of depth, but nothing like a world that is 3D, right? And so I don't know how much it would make sense, but I mean, look at the invites app on iOS. Like that has very strong, a very strong feature

feeling of the Vision Pro while still not really having too much depth. And I think that's a good thing. I may have come across as a bad thing, but it's actually a good thing. I think it looks nice. There's a lot of translucency. There's a touch of depth there. And it just generally feels very Vision Pro-y. See also the Sports app, which is very similar, if I'm not mistaken. I haven't looked at the Sports app in a couple of months. But yeah, you know, it's a

A lot of, I don't even know how to put my finger on it. I don't know the vocabulary for it, but it just has a very similar feel to Vision OS, where Vision OS is much heavier on depth and very heavy on translucency. This is fairly heavy on translucency, but not as heavy on depth.

But it looks good. I'm hopeful. I have tentatively booked lodging, which unfortunately is getting ever more expensive, and flights. I am hopeful that, you know, the three of us will get a press pass, and I'm hopeful that, you know, all three of us can make it out there and see what happens.

Um, but we'll, we'll see if, if I don't end up with a press pass, I probably won't bother making the trip. And I presume Marco, you feel the same way. This is, this is also a laser focused on ruining, ruining or improving your birthday, depending on how you look at it every single year. So, uh, this is over Marco's birthday week as off as always. Uh, well, no, not as always as sometime my birthday is June 11th. Usually WBC was before my birthday. Um,

know if I'm going to go this year. I think there's a combination of

You know, we'll see how busy I am with the restaurant. Frankly, I don't think I'm going to be too busy with the restaurant to go. I think I can go just fine. But first of all, I don't want to ruin my birthday by flying through it. And I'd rather be with my family and celebrate my birthday in my favorite restaurant, which I now own. I want to have a nice family day. But also, I don't know...

how much I need to be there. As I was discussing on Under the Radar a couple episodes ago, you know, my relationship with Apple, I think, is evolving in my own mind. And I'm realizing that it's... Basically, they care a lot less about me than I care about them. And that's not really healthy for me. There's some question of, like, you know, whether us going is kind of, you know, carrying water for them in a way that they might not do for us. As press, I mean. Like, as developers...

If you're a developer and you want to go and have fun at the events, go and have fun at the events. It is really fun. It is really cool to see Apple Park. It's really cool to be there. It's a cool experience. I think from a press side, I'm needing a little bit of distance. As I mentioned before, I still love Apple's products and a lot of what they do as a company. And I still love computers and they still make the best computers. And I still love writing software. And I can write my best software using their tools and their platform. And

And I, and I love overcast and I can, and overcast is an iOS app and always will be an iOS app and will always probably only be an iOS app. Um,

So I'm not leaving the ecosystem, but I do think I want to create a little bit more distance between me and them because certainly they have done their best to create that distance from their end. And the idea of going out there and clapping for Tim Cook right now is not something that really appeals to me. And applauding Tim.

you know, this very corporate performance. I don't know. I think I've done a lot of it and I could use some distance from it. So I think I'm going to take this year off probably, but we'll see.

I feel like it's always a fun time when I go. And some of that is because I know, you know, a lot of my friends that I don't have an excuse to see many other times during the year, including the two of you, you know, oftentimes we'll all end up there together. But I will echo what Marco said. If you have the ability to get to California slash get to the United States, which I know is troubling for a lot of people at the moment, um,

if you have the ability to get there safely and, you know, experience the event, it is neat to experience. Again, I would love to be able to be there to cover it from a press perspective, but I don't disagree with what you're saying, Marco. I mean, I think if it's healthier for you to not go, I think that makes perfect sense. And John, obviously, as much as I agree

I would never want to see you uncomfortable. I can only imagine how uncomfortable a red-eye home would be after a very long day. It's not even that. It's just like if anything goes wrong with flights, which is a thing that's known to happen, I could end up missing my daughter's senior prom. That's not a thing I want to do. Yeah, I get that. Yeah, I certainly, John, if I was in that position, I wouldn't do it. To me, that's not worth it.

I think I agree. Even though I know this is the only chance I ever get to see you ever during the year because you refuse to leave your house ever, ever, ever, ever other than this. There's always next year. And then someday when my kids are gone, maybe we'll all get together.

Yeah. I'll believe when I see it. But anyway. With no children. So get yours to grow up fast. Yeah. But nevertheless, you know, I am enthusiastic about the idea of going because my situation affords it. I am American and I, for now, feel like I can travel domestically okay. So if I am offered a pass, I will probably go. But if not, I don't know. We'll see what happens.

But yeah, if you have the ability, like I said, I definitely encourage it. And you can sign up to get a free pass as a developer on their website. So you can check that out. All right. There's been a lot of news from the EU. It's funny because a lot of what they've been saying recently is like, ah, it's fine. You know, the browser choice screen recently, they were like, yeah, you're fine, whatever. It's good. You're fine because Apple made changes in response to things they complained about, to be clear.

True, but the way the prior EU administration, you know, for whatever this group is, seem to be hell-bent on sticking it to Apple no matter what. And for better and for worse, it seems like now, in a lot of ways, this administration is not as concerned with that. Well, I think they're equally concerned. They're just more chill about saying mean things in public about them.

about them. There is a rumor that actually a big giant fine is coming down the line for them and for Meta. I don't know if the Meta one has already actually landed, but like, I think like there will be findings that are not in Apple's favors and there will be fines that are issued and that is going to happen without the previous head of this effort saying mean things about Apple all the time. So I think Apple cares less about the mean things said about them and much more about the potential for very large fines. So stay tuned.

Yeah, so the European Commission has said, and I'm reading from MacRumors now, they've announced a long list of changes that Apple is legally required to implement in future iOS 19 and iOS 20 updates. The announcement clarifies interoperability requirements that Apple is required to adhere to in the EU under the Digital Markets Act, which has been fully enforced since March 2024. The changes will further open up the iPhone and its technologies to competing companies and devices. Some examples.

Third-party smartwatches must be able to display and interact with iOS notifications by the end of 2025, which likely means iOS 19.2 or earlier.

Apple must make its automatic audio switching feature available to third-party headphones by June 1, 2026, which likely means iOS 19.4 or earlier. This is the feature that allows most AirPods and select beats to automatically switch connections between Apple devices such as Mac and iPhone. This is Marco's favorite thing in the whole wide world. This all sounds like a bunch of BS from the EU. Like,

I think I fall mostly on the Gruber POV on this one of like, this is pretty ridiculous, largely. We got two more items, so you'll hear a few more of them and we'll discuss. Apple must make changes to iOS to allow for third parties to offer equivalent AirDrop alternatives by June 1, 2026.

Apple must make changes to iOS that allow for third parties to offer equivalent airplay alternatives by iOS 20 or the end of 2026. iOS 20 is expected to be released to the general public in September of 2026. The European commission says, as always, these decisions fully respect Apple's rights of defense and remain subject to independent, independent judicial scrutiny. Now, if you heard of that big list and you're like, all right, well, this is just like giving years and you know, the Mac rumors are saying it wouldn't mean this iOS version of this iOS version, right?

But we will link to a page on the EU's website about the Digital Markets Act. And you will see on their own web pages, they have like a bulleted list of all the things that they're talking about.

and they have requirements for them and they say you need to do this in iOS 19 you need to do this but in time for iOS 20 or they do stuff like in iOS 20 and in any case by the end of 2026 so they're hedging their bets by saying well we're not just going to say iOS 20 because then Apple never rolls out iOS 20 and they just go to decimal points or something and just never get to 20 so there are year boundaries on them but it is

quite an interesting phenomenon to see a regulatory body putting in the names of in the apple world we've been so trained to say ios 20 that's not a thing that even exists what are you talking about there is no ios 20 there is no ios 19 i don't know what you're talking about those aren't real products but the eu is like no we all know the next ios will be the current ios with the number incremented by one and so we're going to put in our requirements you got to do this on ios 19 which i

is probably pretty wrongheaded i mean that's why they're putting year dates on these things to say end of 2025 end of 2026 regardless of what os is really releases by the end of this year you need to do x by the end of this year you need to do y but this is just this type of uh requirements and timelines are a thing that no project manager would ever put out i'm going to lay out your next two years of features for all your os's with with deadlines on them go like i'm

Even the people inside the company who know everything the company is going to be doing and all the resources involved and all the things like they couldn't make a plan this far out this many years out with this specificity and this kind of accuracy. And yet here's a regulatory body saying, I've just decided a bunch of your most important features for your next two years of OS releases with year deadlines. Now go. Yeah. I mean, this to me, I mean, look,

And listeners know I am happy to criticize Apple for their long-term poor strategy of inviting regulation by blatantly anti-competitive behavior. Like they have brought this on themselves 100 percent, and that goes right to Tim Cook's feet. By doing that, Apple was basically overplaying its hand and inviting a hammer to come down on them.

I think the EU is now making a very similar strategic error on their end. I think the EU is overplaying their hand and inviting a lot of challenges and friction and pushback. They even say, at the end there, they say about judicial interpretation, I think they are inviting Apple to break the law, sue them,

and possibly even also involve some international trade war style diplomacy. There's going to be a lot of pushback against this from Apple. Before we even get to the pushback, though, let's just imagine this hypothetical. Say Apple desperately wants to do everything on this list, not because the EU told them to, but because Apple wants to do it. They think it's important for the company, for Apple to do all these things. I still think Apple couldn't do it.

You know what I mean? Like say they wanted to do it. It's the thing they want the most. Forget about AI. They don't care about it. They want to do the things on this list according to these timelines. I'm not sure they could. It's an ambitious list of pretty big changes that involve third-party interfaces to their major OSs that do really important things that have never been opened up to third parties. Let's say Apple wanted to do this and put all of its effort in like,

That is the first and most important overreach before we get to the fact that Apple doesn't want to do this and is going to fight them and so on and so forth. I don't think it's plausible given the feature sets and timelines. Oh, yeah, but I mean, there's a lot of problems with this. I mean, but I think what it ultimately comes down to is the problem of a company like Apple inviting regulation by blatant anti-competitive behavior is that you get

and regulators like doing things like this that just from a technical or realistic product perspective are just bad ideas or are impractical or impossible. You know, see also whenever there's a threat to end-to-end encryption and people want to build in like

back doors only for the good guys. And, you know, this isn't as bad as that. These are all, these are all plausible things. It's just the timelines that are associated with them are not necessarily. It isn't as bad as that. However, it's you're, you run the same risk. Like when, when technology, when, when the tech business gets looked at by the government, uh,

typically the people in the government who are looking at it don't have the expertise that they really need to make detailed regulations like that that are that run into problems like oh that's technically impossible or that's a really bad idea for other reasons or that would have all these different effects that you don't understand so for apple to have been so anti-competitive for so long this is the kind of risk they were running that like

Yeah, the EU is not happy to just go after the App Store. Now they're going after vertical integration of all kinds. Like, that's significant, and that could be very damaging, and it is Apple's fault that they started on this path because it was Apple's behavior that invited it. However...

This is a bad regulation now. There were parts of the original DMA, I think, that were pretty rough. This extended version of it, the director's cut, I guess, this should have been deleted scenes. This is pretty rough. But this version of it is the EU going even further with bad ideas that are, I think they come from

a good hearted place i see what they're going for this is not a good idea and this is not a good way to go about it and apple will probably retaliate hard enough and maybe you know maybe involving you know us to eu diplomacy as well i think the result of this will be they will have like the eu will get so much of a challenge on this

That I think the other parts of the DMA, like the alternative app stores and payment processing rules, are at risk of being challenged and overturned into oblivion because of this part. Like the EU has now pushed too far. They are inviting way more pushback. And that puts at risk the other parts that we actually would probably want to keep. So the EU is making a big error here. I think Apple is about to get fined for not complying with the other parts. Yeah.

That's what's going to happen. The other things that they're supposedly doing with the alternative app stores on term of payment things, that's the rumor is that the EU is about to levy huge fines because they said we've set out these requirements. You said you did them. We disagreed. We fought about it and we studied it. In the end, we've decided, nope, you didn't actually do it. Here's your fine.

That's not going to help any of the negotiations say, oh, by the way, we are fining you for X billion dollars. But also, let's just talk about these things. I disagree that these are bad ideas. I think most of these ideas are good, but...

You can't just ask for all of them all at once and put timelines on all of them and expect you're going to get anything like that's not a winning formula. Like Apple opening up its platform to third party competition. That's the whole point. Like there's there's not enough competition in this market. Only Apple can make a watch that works with the iPhone. The EU thinks it's not fair, not because no one can ever make a phone platform that only works with its own watch. Sure, feel free. But once you reach a certain size and become a quote unquote gatekeeper, like this is the determination that the EU has made.

every time Gerber writes about this he this idea cannot penetrate into his into a place in his mind where he will agree with it but he'll say like what do you say they're gonna making a bunch of rules that Apple has to follow but its competitors don't yes that's exactly what they're doing the whole point is there are rules that Apple has to follow and other people don't and it's like it's always brought out as like the hypocrisy of this like that is literally the

basis of their of their decisions there are gatekeepers and those people and those companies have different rules because of whatever now you can disagree you say okay well i don't agree that they should be classified as gatekeeper i don't agree that whatever but the whole point is that's the premise of these regulations it's not like can you believe they made rules that only apple and and google and and meta have to follow yeah i can believe it because we've known from day one they're like we think these companies require special regulations that other people don't so

You could be on board with that or not. But anyway, like the opening up of things that only Apple has been allowed to do to third parties, I'm generally in support of that. But as we all know, every time Apple has done that, it is difficult, time consuming. And this is when Apple wants to do it. When Apple decides we've had this internally for years and now we're going to go up to third parties. It is always painful and difficult.

Things like this are, which is why you have to be judicious about them. You can't say like, you know what? Every single thing on the iOS platform needs to be open to third parties. That's not technically sensible. All right, so let's come up with a short list and let's prioritize them. A prioritized list wouldn't be this long, first of all, and it would be sorted and not unordered. And second of all, you can't just put out your wish list and say, and here's when we want all of them.

that is not going to happen like again if apple wanted to do it they couldn't and they don't want to do it believe me right they really don't there's no way like this so regulation like that's the problem with regulations if you let it go so far that you have a totally closed ecosystem you've got to open it up slowly like what they were doing before is like look the app store that's a business thing this thing we can see apple's kind of uh

you know, chose to do a huge amount of implementation work to make it as difficult as possible, which is why they're about to be sued for billions of dollars, whatever, right? But like, you can see that changing and the timelines they had for the DMA seemed to be reasonable-ish. They were reasonable enough that Apple had enough time to make all these frameworks and all this stuff that makes it so much harder for third parties to do everything, right? But,

But this, this is just, this is just a laundry. Like you can imagine this on like a whiteboard. Like again, if Apple wanted to do this, like a top 100 day of like, this is our 10 year plan for our platforms because we think we need to open it up and we're going to open it. But like, you can't just ask for it all at once and put it on a two year timeline. So I don't know how that's going to work out because again,

like the judicial scrutiny and blah, blah, blah. It's all happening within the EU. Like there's no guarantee any of that will go Apple's way. So let's say they decide, you know what, this is what we're going to do. And Apple challenged it. But upon review, we've said, you know what, actually we're right. And you're wrong, Apple. This is what you have to do. You can have, you can make laws asking for Apple to make a rocket go to the moon. Doesn't mean it's going to happen. Yeah.

So what happens when this becomes the, if this becomes the law of the land and these deadlines start rolling around, of course, Apple's going to be like, well, we haven't had time to do it. And it's all blah, but they will. In this case, I know it's hard to believe them. They won't be lying. Like you can't, this is too much work in too little time. It's like, Oh, they have all the money in the world. Like you can't make new engineers pop out. Like you can't hire them fast enough to do this. Right. And again, this would be assuming that they really wanted to, which they absolutely don't. So,

I think, like Marco, I think the EU's heart is in the right place, but I think they have overreach with this, not because they're doing something that's not in their power, but because they're asking for essentially the impossible. Timeline-wise, the impossible. It is technically possible to do all of this, but it's going to take time. And it's best not to rush Apple, because if they rush it, you get lousy miracles, as they say. Casey, anybody? Nothing? Nope. Got nothing. Okay.

It's Princess Bride, man. It's a really good movie. Maybe we should do that for a movie club. Oh, I haven't seen that in 30 years. And Marco hasn't seen it at all. I did see it 30 years ago. But you know what? The problem with that movie is that I saw it with my high school friends who had all seen it a thousand times before I did. And so the whole time they were all like repeating the lines or like saying them with the characters and laughing and like,

that's a terrible way to experience a movie for the first time when you are the one person in the room who hasn't seen it. Everyone else has seen it a thousand times and you're hearing your friends badly imitate the lines instead of hearing the actors deliver them. Like that's, you know, sorry guys, that was a bad way to experience that movie. Anyway, it was a good movie and there's a line about don't rush a miracle man, you get pretty miracles. Yeah. So don't rush it. Like you can't, you can't hurry love. Casey, anybody?

You just have to wait. Hey, not a movie. He gets it. It's music. So I, so I don't know how this is going to resolve itself. Like if, if I were the EU, I would pick like the one or two most important ones of these and put extremely generous timelines on them. Because honestly, like the app store was kind of the big one in terms of competitiveness on a platform and a thing they control and every other aspect of this, like,

take your time, do it right. Let, let them, you know, like, first of all, get Apple to comply with the one thing you did already do, which they still haven't done. Like he was seemingly about to declare that the previous regulations they had after years of trying out, they have, Apple has not complied with them. So maybe don't get ahead of yourself by taking a bunch of new ones out. And then, yeah, don't make it just like a giant wishlist of like, we wish all this would happen and we wish it would all happen within one or two years. Oh, that's great. But I don't see that happening. So,

This is just, it's like a slow motion train wreck. We see it coming. We'd like, but this is not going to end well for anybody. And as Marco said, it's Apple's fault for inviting all this regulation. And from my perspective, it's the EU's fault for asking for unrealistic things, not because they are the wrong things to ask for or because they can't be done, but because you will find more success if you have some alignment between your desires and what is practically possible.

But I don't think the EU cares that much what's practically possible. I mean, they're going to care when there's no compliance. We put in these regulations and you didn't do it. And Apple's going to say, well, we couldn't do it because there wasn't enough time. The EU's going to be like, oh, that's not true. You've got all this money. And it's like, I'm here to defend Apple to say, even if Apple wanted to do this, I don't think they could.

But again, I don't think the EU views that as a bug. I think that's a feature. So then they get paid a whole pile of money. No, they're not just trying to extort Apple. That's not their thing. That is kind of the implication of what I was saying. That's not what I was trying to say. My point is just that I don't think the EU gives a crap whether or not Apple can make this happen in those timelines. I think it's more like what Marco said. They're just not...

equipped to know what is and isn't possible. They don't have the technical knowledge base. That is very true. Right. And so they think this all seems reasonable for the biggest company in the world, not understanding that it's not like that these things themselves are, are,

you know, again, it's technically impossible. They can't do it. It's that opening up any major component, even when Apple really wants to do it is difficult because you're going from a thing that you were just using internally. It could change wherever you want it to an API that you have to support forever. And like I said, when Apple wants to do that, they have difficulty like third party keyboards, right?

We didn't think they would ever do. How buggy were third-party keyboards for like the first two years? That's a thing they wanted to do that no one forced them to do that is very small compared to like allowing airdrop alternatives or like allowing other watches to go. Like it is so narrowly focused. Third-party software keyboards.

They, Apple, the large, very successful company, had difficulty rolling that out in a way that wasn't a bugfest. And some would argue today that there are still problems with that system. And that is so much smaller than everything that's being asked about here. And, you know, some of these things touch on things that are equally or even more sensitive to security in terms of like, you know, wireless communications and communications with third party devices and background execution. And like, there's all sorts of things here that to me,

to open them up to third parties at all in a way that is not filled with bugs and damaging to users and to everybody involved is difficult. And another thing that you might not realize is this is not Apple's strength. Apple is good at certain things. Opening up formerly private APIs to third-party access has historically not been a thing that Apple is particularly good at, again, even when they want to do it. That's not the EU's fault, I get it, but like,

If you just erased all the dates on these and had it as like a staggered timeline, this is going to be the next decades worth of work or whatever, Apple would hate it just as much. But at least I'd feel like, all right, there's a chance that an Apple that is acting in good faith could comply with this. And I look at this and I think an Apple acting in good faith is set up for failure. And believe me, Apple will not be acting in good faith. Not even close. And again, and I think this part too, like,

You can look at all, like, again, I think the EU's strategy here is wrong because they are risking the win on the App Store payment stuff.

to do a lot of other stuff that i think is much more challengeable and they're coming from a weaker position on a lot of it i don't think they've got that win yet they're risking what win they don't even have that win yet they're about to fine them for not getting that win so they have a they have a they have partial compliance they got something did happen but it's like unsatisfying to most involved right but but like i i think what's going to happen is they're going to get

a much larger pushback with this and we are going to lose the payment thing. I mean, I don't see how we could lose it if it's still the law of the land. I mean, as we talked about with the, with the UK thing, which by the way is still totally up in the air and we have no idea what's going on because secret courts or whatever. But anyway, um, it's just, it just seems like it's running headlong to Apple pulls out of the EU because if the EU insists that these are the laws and Apple does not comply with them either because they can't or

or they at least claim they can't, then we're at an impasse. Apple's not going to endure fines equal to some huge percentage of its global revenue or whatever. And so how does this resolve? This resolves by Apple no longer selling products in the EU. That's the doomsday scenario for everyone involved. Apple doesn't want that. The EU shouldn't want that. And yet both of them seem to be headed directly for that through their actions during this conflict. I agree with that very much. But I think

What I keep coming back to is I don't think the EU's request, the timeline, yeah, the timeline is a bit absurd. And I think Marco's probably right that that probably comes from ignorance because every politician is ignorant about this stuff. American ones, European ones, it doesn't matter. All of them are. But I feel like the EU today is,

feels like they're in the driver's seat. And what is Apple really going to do? They're never going to pull out of the EU. I actually think they would. But from the EU's perspective, they're never going to pull out of the EU. And we're fighting for our citizens, which is what that organization is literally supposed to do. They're fighting for their citizens. And I mean, I don't know that these are the exact things that I would hang my hat on personally, but I don't think they're unreasonable requests.

And I feel like from the EU's perspective, they're doing everything they're supposed to do. And I kind of agree with them. And is Apple really going to pull out of the EU? Well, I don't know. I mean, I think they might, but...

Is that a bad thing from these politicians' perspective? Look, we chased the big scary shark out of our waters, and that's a win for us, isn't it? Well, I mean, they're constituents, though. If you look at this list, you can squint and see there was some European constituent that said, we are not able to integrate with Apple's phone platform because they don't allow third parties to do X. Every single one of these looks like you can just probably pick a bunch of companies and say, these companies wanted to do this but couldn't.

That's what they all look like. And that's as they should be. That's exactly what people are complaining about. These platforms control too much about our political, our technical lives. And we would like to make innovative things, but we can't because the platform owner says no. So let's just go down the list. You want to make a watch, but you can't do it because Apple's watches can do stuff. Yours can't. You want to do something with payments, but you can't because Apple controls the NFC chip. You wanted to make AirPods that are, you know,

earphones that work like the airpods do but you can't because apple like it just goes on and on now are these all european companies i don't know but either way that's the constituency so what you're saying casey's like okay well we we chased this big scary company out of europe isn't that great and the companies that were complaining that they couldn't make a watch for the phone or or earpods for the phone we say no that's not what we wanted we want to be able to make earpods to the phone and sell them to all the people who have money who buy iphones so i think

I mean, certainly the citizens of the EU probably don't want Apple to pull out. And I think all the companies that are lobbying the European Commission to say we can't integrate with Apple's platforms because of unfair practices, they don't want Apple to leave either because Apple is the place where they think they can make money on that platform. They just want it to be opened up. So I really do think

that the European Commission's goal is and should be to try to make the platform more open for companies to be able to sell into it and make an ecosystem that benefits more than just Apple.

And so I really think it is a failure mode for everybody involved if it just turns out like, no, we can't come to agreement. You refuse to do what we do. We give you fines and you refuse to pay them or you pay the fines, but they're not big enough. So we keep ramping up like it just comes. You just it's a rising crescendo of corporate argument until eventually it just blows up and everybody leaves. And that's that's a failure on on the EC side. They should they should be trying to avoid that.

And I look at this list and I think you are headed directly for that. I mean, they're playing the world's most expensive game of chicken. I mean, that's really what they're doing. Do they know they're doing that? That's the question. Or do they think what they're asking for is reasonable? I think the European Commission 100% believes that what they're asking for is reasonable. And I think that...

The loudest members of their constituents would agree. But I also agree with what you said a few minutes ago, John, that the rank and file European Union citizen probably does not care that much. And this is where all the European nerds are going to write me and be like, no, you're totally wrong. I totally care. And I live in the EU. You're a nerd. I'm talking about regular people.

I don't think regular people do give two craps that they have to use an Apple watch with an Apple iPhone. I really don't think that regular people do. They don't give a crap here. They don't give a crap there. They don't give a crap anywhere. I mean, that's, that's when someone makes a closed market where there's no room for competition, of course, people aren't going to miss what they've never known was possible. Like that's kind of like, but, but yeah, like in general, people still want to be able to buy Apple products. Like that's what it comes down to. Like it would be weird if you couldn't get an iPhone in Europe and,

that the European citizens would see that as a bad thing. I think, you know, like you were saying, like the company that wants to make, I keep saying AirPods. What the hell is the generic name for them? Earbuds? The company that wants to make earbuds to compete with the AirPods, but they basically can't because Apple keeps all the private APIs that allow that cool switching to happen or whatever. That company really wants this to open up.

And if that does open up and citizens get access to less expensive earbuds or earbuds that have different features than Apple's, and then you take it away from them, they'd be mad. But right now they just don't know what they're missing. So gauging consumer consent is just like consumers may be vaguely aware and they think this is probably the right thing to do, but they'd be mad if the products went away. But the companies are like, we want this to be opened up. We think we should be able to

Like basically more than just Apple should be benefiting from this ecosystem. We think we, more companies can benefit from this. If the platform was more open and that's what, that's what the EC, I feel like it's trying to do. All right. And then a little bit more EU stuff, because apparently we haven't ticked off the citizens of the EU enough yet. Reading from Mac rumors, the European commission's decisions wrap us. I'm sorry. This is Apple's response to the new EU interoperability rules. And,

I think

I think what this is saying in a roundabout way is that the European Commission really is opposed to vertical integration. And I don't think that's not necessarily an unreasonable read of the situation. And I'm not here right this second to argue whether or not vertical integration is good or bad.

But that is kind of what the EC is saying. The EC is not against vertical integration. They're against vertical integration at the scale where it forecloses the potential for healthy competition in a market. There's always that qualifier. Again, if you want to make a vertically integrated platform or it's like everything works together with all your products and they only work with your products, that's fine until you become...

a dominant player in the market according to the EU's definition, which again, I have quibbles with their definition of what constitutes that, but I think the duopoly and the mobile phone space is, it's not the same as a monopoly as we've discussed at length in the past years, but look, it's Android and Apple.

And that's not enough. And so that's what they're foreclosing. And is Apple coming? I might, I might've been a blaming Gruber for something in Apple's own statements, you know, to give away our new features for companies that don't have to play by the same rules. Yes. Those companies don't have to play by the same rules. They will. Apple will argue the premise further because Apple disagrees with the premise. They said we shouldn't be a subject to different rules and other people. We're not, we're not any different from them. And it's like, Oh, you're one of only two mobile platforms in the whole world that matters, but okay.

I, you know, that's your argument, but I think they're arguing at another level here. So yes, Apple doesn't want to do this. They're being wrapped in red tape. They're angry about it. They will fight it. And then finally, the EU confirms that Apple can indeed make a portless iPhone without USB-C reading from nine to five Mac. European Commission press officer Federico Miccoli writes, since such radio equipment cannot be recharged via wired charging, it does not need to incorporate the harmonized or wired charging solution.

Yeah, I don't know why people are debating that. I think it was because there was rumors that the iPhone Slim or iPhone Air was originally conceived as a portless phone. They're like, oh, but they felt like they couldn't do that because of the EC. That never made any sense to me. And I'm glad to see the EC say, no, if it doesn't have a port, it's fine, right? You want to make a portless phone, go for it. The EU doesn't say you must put a USB-C port on every single device in the world. They're saying if you do have a port and it's for charging, it better be you. And it's on a phone, it better be USB-C. Yeah.

I don't know if there's any foundation to those rumors other than like Apple was going to do X, but instead did Y. Is that true? Is that not? The rumors of a portless phone have been around forever. Probably Apple will get into around to it eventually, but not this generation. Anyway, the EC says that's fine. Go for it. All right. Thank you to our sponsor this week. Delete me. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at ATV. FM slash join one of the many perks of membership.

is ATP Overtime. So in addition to the special we talked about earlier, Overtime is our weekly bonus topic. So every week, every episode, there is usually between 15 and 30 minutes of the show that if you're not a member, you're not hearing because we are talking about bonus topics. So that's called Overtime. This week on Overtime, our bonus topic is going to be

revisiting some developments in solid state cooling. This is what it sounds like. It's solid state fan alternatives that can move air without being fans. So hear that and more in overtime and to join atb.fm slash join. Thank you so much. And we'll talk to you next week.

Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.

And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's K-C-L-I-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T. Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A. It's accidental. They did.

Okay, so a year and a half ago, and I don't even know when it was, when I released Call Sheet, it's been a little while now, we spent a lot of time on the show talking about pricing and

I was a little bit cagey about it, if I recall correctly, but that was because I didn't want to call a whole lot of attention to it. But in the end of the day, the reality of the situation was that the movie database, which is at themoviedb.org, they offered their API for free. And then if you were a commercial user, you needed to let them know and work out some sort of deal.

and I started using it for free before the app was released, and then when I was about to release it, I said to them, hey, what's the story? I want to make this real. Can I have a key or whatever? And they basically said, don't worry about it.

Oh, okay. So I didn't worry about it. And up until this week, the API was free for me to use. But having seen what happened with Reddit and with Twitter and several other sites over the years, I knew that that wasn't going to be the case forever. And because of that, that's part, really a large part of the reason why I decided to make CallSheet a subscription app.

You get 20 searches for free. After that, you have to pay me. And I stood by that. I thought it was the right answer at the time. I certainly thought it was the right answer up until I got an email from the movie database saying, hey, we

we've just launched our official super-de-duper commercial API, so you're going to have to pay now. And so now, as of earlier this week, happy birthday to me. Well, it was really last week, I guess. Happy birthday to me. It was my birthday week. And the movie database said it will be $150 a month for you to continue to use our API. And my first reaction to that was, holy God, are you serious?

Because when I think of adding a new bill to my household at $150 a month, that's a lot of freaking money.

But it didn't take me long to change my perspective and think of it not as a bill to the household, but really a bill to the business, which is what it actually is. And so it is not an insignificant amount of money, but it is thankfully, and I'm very, very thankful for it, quite a bit less than I think it could have been. And

it ultimately, and I think Marco might've said that maybe it was John when we were talking about this privately in Slack, but, um, you know, it was at least once a week, sometimes several times a week that I would wake up wondering, is this the day that I get the email I just ended up getting? Is this the day that they say, Oh, you need to pay us now. And it's $3,000 a week or something like that. And,

Thankfully, that day came, but it was not $3,000 a week. It was $150 a month. And so the way the movie database API system works is that for non-commercial use, you can use it for free. I guess maybe not in a limited fashion, but there's no stated limits as far as I'm aware.

Um, then there's the commercial, uh, level, which is what I'm at now, which again is 150 bucks a month. Uh, if you're using the movie database in a commercial manner, do less than $1 million in revenue per year and have less than 2 million users. I am saddened to report that I both make less than a million dollars in revenue per year and have fewer than a 2 million users of call sheet, but you never know. You never know what will happen. How would you know how many users you have? Is that available somewhere?

I have it through my very basic analytics, but I think it is available on App Store Connect. I almost never look at it. How would App Store Connect even quantify that? Apple IDs, I guess? Just counting Apple accounts? Well, they have a concept of opt-in versus opt-out stats.

And I don't know if your total number of users is, is requiring opt in or not. Cause, cause any of their stats, like that's like when you, when you go through the iOS setup process and it's like share information with developers or don't share. Um,

many of the apps that connect stats, for people who don't select share with developers, they're just not included. And so it's hard to... A lot of the stats are not that useful because you don't know what percentage of people opted in versus opted out. Yeah, because Apple doesn't tell you that, really. And the thing is, even if everybody opted in,

Mapping from users to Apple accounts is not one-to-one. And I'm not even sure which direction it would go in because you could have seven people using the same application on the same Mac signed into the single Apple ID. For example, my wife uses apps that were downloaded using my Apple ID for the app store, but she's a separate person than me. Or you could have the reverse where there's like, you know, one person with seven Apple IDs. So, uh,

I think it may actually be difficult to comply with that particular thing. But at any rate, if you can't audit it, neither can TMDB. And I think if you ended up having more than 2 million users, that's a problem you would love to have. Yes, I would. And then finally, you know, they have an enterprise level with the pricing of contact sales. If your business does more than $1 million in revenue per year or has more than 2 million users, enterprise is right for you. Contact sales for more information and pricing options for this plan. Yeah.

Yeah, that third plan is what you should have been staying up at night worrying about because like, oh, you know, you know the other shoe was going to drop at some point. Like you're not going to have free API forever and ever unless the company goes out of business or something, right? So eventually they're going to have to find a way to monetize this and you hope what they don't do is, okay, now you can use it for free and for non-commercial use. Otherwise, contact us because it's time for an enterprise license and they start at $50,000 a month.

Yeah, you never want to see contact us. As an independent person, you never want it. That's always bad news for you. Yeah, because companies can decide, look, it's not worth our time to do business with small fish. We just want to do business with people who can afford to pay us $100,000 every month or something. And that is a reasonable business plan. And your problem was uncertainty. Your problem was not so much like,

oh, you know, they're going to charge me too much money. The problem is I don't know how much they're going to, it's just hanging over your head. Like, what is it going to be? Like, they're going to come for the money eventually. And I hope what they decide is that their business plan includes me. And when I saw your, you know, you were posting in Slack, this happened, I was like, oh, this is great. This is the best thing that could have happened to you because the uncertainty is gone because now you're not wondering what they're going to charge you. They can tell you. And their business plan shows they do want customers like you.

that this is in your price range for an app of your size. And yes, it's worse than paying zero dollars, but the uncertainty, like just knowing that this is now just a cost that's part of your business, assuming they don't raise the rates 400% per year or something, if they instead just raise them slowly over time, now you know, now you can actually run your business with knowledge and say, here are my costs, you know, here are my expenses, here's my income, and make decisions based on that, as opposed to just wondering, like, this just is

part of the spreadsheet, but just an empty spot that is this faded cloud that could be negative $100,000 per month or, you know, negative 150. And I think you had a good result here. No, I definitely did. You know, you were waiting to see the other shoe drop someday and there was just like this act

hanging over your entire app that's like, if this axe falls the wrong way, I'm dead. This app is dead. So now the axe fell in a really low damage, normal, affordable way. So now I think if I were in your shoes, I would be breathing a sigh of relief. Like, oh, okay, this I can do. And look, this is a really good app.

In the future, they can always change their plans if they want to. There's no guarantee they're going to keep it this way forever, but they'll probably keep it like this. This is probably what you're going to have for the lifetime of the app, and it'll be fine.

Yeah. Again, unless they go out of business, which would be worse. Like you wouldn't want them to keep going with free thing and never figuring out a business plan. And then just going out of business because your app doesn't work without their API. Yeah. Yeah. No, you're exactly right. And that's the thing is that, like I said, my initial reaction was, are you kidding me on $150 a month? That's an incredible amount of money, but that's because I was thinking of it in terms of like, you know, my cell phone bill or something like that. Like how much you'd pay for Netflix. I wouldn't pay $150 a month, but as a business expense, it is reasonable.

and that's the thing is it took me, you know, a half an hour to an hour to really adjust my thinking on this and, and, you know, take a different lens to it, if you will, and realize ultimately it's not money. I am in love with the idea of spending, but if it keeps the site operating, so it doesn't, you know, fold, as you've said, and if it, if it keeps them interested in having me around, then this is in the end of the day, a win. And, you know, it's, it's a win-win. It's just at the first reaction was, well,

woof. And then after that, I realized, no, this is actually pretty good news. So just hope they're not paying attention to Apple and they come for you and ask for a share of your revenue. The Oracle way of pricing. Right. But no, I'm tentatively very excited about this. And then, you know, in the email that that was the email that was sent to me, you know, I think the team there is like

five people or something like that. And the email was sent by, I think, the founder, if I'm not mistaken. And the first email I wrote back was, are you freaking kidding me? But I didn't send it. And then the actual email I sent was, you know what? In the end of the day, I'm happy to do what I can to support the movie database. And their API is very good. There's a few things that I don't love about it, but in the grand scheme of things, it's well-designed. It works really well. It's really, really fast. Yeah.

I can't imagine it's super expensive for them to run. I certainly hope not. So this is, you know, all of us are working together, kind of holding hands and working together to keep all of our independent and individual businesses alive. And I think that's really the most you can hope for. Well, and the thing is, like, you know, it doesn't really matter how much their API costs them to run. What matters is...

Their business costs them something to run and you are getting a lot of value from their business. And so, you know what you're paying for with 150 bucks a month, you're not paying for like the additional web request traffic. Like you're not paying for the resources used by your API usage. You're not paying for the resources used by your API usage.

You are paying for the value of their service. That's what you're paying for. And given that your entire business depends on that service, I think that's a very good price to pay. Yeah. Yeah. Clip that segment out that Marco just said and try to insert it into our future conversations about copyright and OpenAI. Yeah. And LLM scraping the entire web and my earlier comments that their products are absolutely worthless without all the data they scraped.

But once the data gets above a certain volume, apparently it's free. Anyway, different conversation. It's very easy. Uh, yeah, yeah. But yeah, so that's, that's why the app is subscription. That's why I didn't want to do a, well, I mean, we could get into this argument, which I'm not interested to be honest, but this is why I didn't want to do a lifetime purchase because you know, what if my costs go up forever? What if a ton of people did a lifetime purchase? You know, those are all things I didn't particularly want to mess with. And,

honestly, the people who want lifetime purchase, they wouldn't have been happy with the amount I would have charged anyway. So ultimately, I'm feeling pretty happy about the way I priced the app. Maybe, actually, if anything, it might have been too low, but that's neither here nor there. But my point is that I am happy that I made it a subscription app.

and I'm happy that I stuck with that. And ultimately, I'm happy that this axe, as you said, Marco, that was hanging over my head, it has fallen and it's not fallen on my neck. So that's the very good news. Yeah, you just lost maybe your pinky toe or something.