640: Put It in a Potato
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Hi everybody, we're live. Um, no. Ha ha ha!

No one will ever know what that was with regard to, and it sounds really juicy. They have to get the bootleg bootleg. Yeah, that's right. You have to come to my house. Don't do that. And, you know, steal the file from MXP3. Don't do that either. We actually have a bootleg-related question to ask ATP this week if we get to it. We probably won't, but hopefully we will. We might. We could. It's possible. We can do it. I believe in us. Well, then we should. Is that the pre-show then? Should we just move right along to follow-up?

All right, let's do it. All right, so we're going to do the unthinkable. We're going to combine home networking and Vision Pro Corners. Is that unthinkable? Because I thought about it. It is unthinkable. Wait, we have to, before we do that, we have to promote our member special. Oh yeah, no, we almost missed it again. Oh God, I almost forgot. I almost did it again. Oh my gosh.

Wow. I'm an idiot. This is why I wrote in our internal show notes something along the lines of, don't forget to promote the member special, you dolts. And then it got changed to the more adult and appropriate listing about the member special. And then I just skipped right over it. And you forgot to mention that I just said that we... That's also true. Also true.

96 seconds ago, I said, oh, don't forget, we have to do the member special. Anyway, so here we are. We're going to do it, I swear. Yes, all right. So here we go. Here's our new pre-show. Pre-show, take two, click. That's a clapperboard, like my icon. From all the clapperboards in podcasting. Right.

We're bringing some weird energy tonight, so buckle up, everyone. All right, so we have a new member special. We also did last week, but we never talked about it. So we have a brand new member special, the completely original, not copied from anywhere, ATP Top 4.

game consoles. And among other things, you can hear some of us get perturbed about what is or is not a game console. So if that doesn't rev your engine, I don't know what does. John, do you want to fill in anything more about this? Yeah, we've actually done one top four before and I would not, I'm not going to make the totally original joke because my original conception was it is duly licensed. We have licensed the top four format from someone we know with an inside line on top four.

and this is our second top four, and we didn't do it as a tier list because there's just not enough game consoles, really, to tier them, I suppose, and top four is kind of a better way since these are, you know, so personal. As you'll see if you listen to the episode, it's kind of hard to rank consoles any way that's not personal simply because of the role they fill in our lives, so if you are in for some game console nostalgia, this is the episode for you, ATP Top Four Game Consoles.

Yep. I thought it was pretty good, actually. Not to imply that the other ones are bad, but I thought this one was fun. Yeah, a lot of nostalgia from three, well, two 40-year-olds and a 50-year-old, so a 40-ish-year-old. Jeez, really got to point that out, do you? Yep, sure do, sure do. Just cross over that threshold and suddenly I'm in a different category. Oh, wow.

You know, it's coming for us all, hopefully. Hey, John, I found this knife in your back. I think it has Casey's name on it. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play? But yeah, so anyways, it was a fun one. There's a lot of nostalgia there. The feedback we've gotten has only been mildly grumpy, which for a member special, I consider that to be a personal victory.

Because usually we make everyone amusingly upset, which is not by design. It just kind of happens that way. So yeah, check it out. If you don't know how to do that or if you don't see a member special in your feed, that's probably because you are not a member. So if you go to atp.fm slash join, J-O-I-N,

Then you can become a member and you can give us a little bit of money each month or a not insignificant amount of money each year. And you can get all of the member specials that we've ever recorded. John, what's the count now? Like 20 or 30, something like that? Somewhere in the 30s. I need to look this up because every time you talk about this, you try to speculate a number and I tell you it's too low, but neither one of us actually ever looks it up. So that's my homework.

Fair enough. So anyways, there's somewhere in the vicinity of 30 of these, and I think they're all fun in their own way. So you should go check them out. And again, ATP.FM slash join. Let's do some follow-up, and we are going to do the unthinkable. We are going to combine home networking and Vision Pro corners. Prepare yourselves. Buckle up, everyone.

Uh, I was looking at Reddit because I do that because I hate myself sometimes. And, uh, I noticed at the ubiquity subreddit, somebody posted how I use my Apple vision pro to retrofit unify access points and finished homes. And it's a, like it's, it's a video where the voiceover is regular speed, but the video has been sped up.

And it starts, well, let me just say this. If you have five minutes with which to kill and you're in a position that you can watch a video safely, you should pause the podcast right now and watch this video because seeing it without the description will make it land that much better and it will be quite amusing to see what I'm about to describe.

With that said, welcome back. So what this person does is they use USDZ files. I forget what the technical term is for those. Universal Scene Definition Zipped. Oh, there you go. I did not know that. So thank you. So they use these USDZs that are in the Files app and they just drag them into 3D space.

And what they do is they take iPhones and Pepsi cans and Iron Man and they put these things in 3D space to mark out walls or accesses or things like that. So it begins with this person in the garage and they put a Pepsi can and Iron Man, something else in there, and they go upstairs to see

where those cans are, because I'm sorry, I left out the important part. They're putting these in the ceiling of the garage because they're software, right? They're not real. So they just put them right in the ceiling of the garage and then they go up to the second story and they see exactly where that thing is. Now, granted, it's probably off by a couple inches here or there, but...

effectively they're poking a virtual hole through the ceiling slash floor to see where they can get access to all these different things. Then they use iPhone models to map out where walls are because iPhones are roughly rectangular shaped. It is incredibly clever. I am so mad that this never occurred to me. I haven't really had this need, but just in principle, I'm so mad that I never thought of this. And for all of the many problems that the vision pro has, uh,

Things like this are just so cool. And Leo, earlier today, I went to a library as I often, but not always do to do prep in the morning. And I went and I got a little room in the library to myself and I put on the vision pro and did Mac virtual display. And I got to tell you, if you have a vision pro and you're

And if you don't, if you haven't tried Mac virtual display, you've got to try it because it's so cool. Anyways, home networking and vision pro together at last. You know, I watched that video too. And I had the same thought as you kind of like the, the measure app on the iPhone where you can like supposedly measure things in real life. So they put the soda can in the garage and then they walk through a door, walk up some stairs that are like not straight stairs, but like stairs that kind of circle back on themselves, go into another room. And then they see the soda can poking up.

I'm like, okay, what's the error here? What are the error bars on this? Like you think a few inches? I'm like, is that a few feet off? Because all I'm thinking the whole time is like, oh my God, how is it registering? How is it tracking? Like how is it, you know, how much is, what is the error here as they leave the room, go through several doorways and up a winding staircase and into another room and see the soda can and it's,

roughly where you think it would be. But I'm like, is it three feet off? Is it six inches off? Is it nine feet off? I'm dying to know. So I want you to actually try this in your house, Casey. Like, find like a known good spot where like, I know that this spot on the ceiling here corresponds to that spot on the floor on the upstairs thing and do it with something a little bit smaller than a three foot wide Pepsi can. And, uh,

Tell me what the accuracy is like, because I know from experience using the measure app on your phone that just uses the camera and your screen to like draw these little lines and measure things. It's not that accurate. I'm like, if the phone can't do like, you know, I'm trying to measure something. Is it 10 inches or 12? And it gets it off by an inch. Like, what's the error rate of walking into another room? So please try this and get back to us.

Well, you know, we've talked about this long ago, but one of the reasons why I was really interested in putting fiber in the house is because if you recall in the garage, we used to have the furnace for the entire house. And that meant we had ductwork running from the garage all the way up into the attic. And we've since gone to a two zone system. So there's a furnace in the attic furnace in the crawl space and that ductwork is empty. And what I had planned to do was run fiber through that ductwork because that's a direct

path from the garage all the way into the attic. Easy peasy. Well, that duct work, it's behind drywall, but it goes through the corner of the primary bathroom, like our bedroom's bathroom. And so what I should do is stick a Pepsi can in there and then in the garage and then run up to my bathroom and see if it's approximately where it should be. I should have done that. I didn't think about it, but I will take that as homework and do it at some point.

All right, let's talk about SSDs and long-term storage. Paul Chernoff writes, Steve Gibson on this Security Now podcast covered the SSD longevity issue in episode 1023. According to Steve, simply powering up the SSD on occasion does not help. When the bits don't get refreshed, they start going bad. If you rewrite every sector on a drive on a regular basis every six to 12 months, the problem goes away. His Spinrite app, S-P-I-N-R-I-T-E app, and we'll link it in the show notes, will do this, but it's for John, I mean, Intel only.

I think it may be, is it for Intel only for Windows? I'm not sure. This extra bit of information is worth repeating. The just powering on the drive is not enough. You need to read and then rewrite the data, apparently. So that's a bummer. Anyway, SSDs for long-term storage, don't do it.

All right. Semi-breaking news. We'll have real breaking news in a minute. Fortnite is back in the App Store, in the United States App Store even. Reading from The Verge, Fortnite is once again available on the iOS App Store in the US. Epic says it has returned to the Epic Games Store and Alt Store as well.

Epic asked the judge in the app in the Epic versus Apple case to order Apple to review its fortnight submission to the app store on May 16th yesterday, which I believe was the 20th as we record this. Maybe it was the 19th. It doesn't matter. Anyway, recently the judge said in a filing that Apple is quote fully capable of resolving this issue without further briefing or a hearing quote. And that if a resolution wasn't reached, the Apple official who is quote personally responsible for ensuring compliance would have to appear at a hearing next Tuesday. Um,

That is literally see you next Tuesday. Shortly after Fortnite returned to the app store on Tuesday, Epic and Apple filed a joint notice saying that they have resolved all issues from Epic's May 16th filing. Apple didn't immediately reply to a request for comment. Epic also recently rolled out a new promotion to encourage its players to use its

payment systems. If you use Epic's system in Fortnite, Rocket League, or Fall Guys on PC, iOS, Android, and the web, the company will give you 20% back in Epic Rewards that can be used for other purchases in its games or on the Epic Games Store. The app shows that 20% bonus when you pick which payment system you want to use to buy V-Bucks. So it says choose how to play. Epic Store, earn 20% or $1.80 back in this case in Epic Rewards or in-app purchase.

They've been very nice with this dialogue. Don't you think this is much nicer than it needs to be? Like the two things are side by side. They're roughly the same size. The urn, 20%, is so tiny you can barely read it. Just very, very... Yeah, I'm not sure why they needed to be that nice, but they are. I love how in-app purchase is all lowercase, including the I. Well, I feel like that's just, you know, laziness. But yeah, so this whole thing was interesting because...

You know, the rulings in this case were, you know, basically Epic, you lost. The App Store is allowed to exist. But Apple, you're not allowed to stop people from telling about better payment methods. That was the ruling. Apple didn't comply with it. Then Apple got smacked down and said, guess what? Now, Apple, you have to let anybody do anything. You can't take any money for them, blah, blah, blah. But still, Fortnite wasn't in the App Store because Epic broke their developer agreement and Apple banned them. And it was like an open question. Did...

Does this ruling say anything? I mean, it doesn't say explicitly, but does this ruling or the follow-up ruling where Apple got spanked for disobeying the original ruling, does it mean that Apple has to let Epic back in? It seemed to me always as a separate issue. It's like, okay, here's the rules of the App Store, but still Apple can kick people out of the App Store for breaking rules, even if they were rules that existed a long time ago. So...

It didn't seem to me that anything having to do with this court case meant that Apple had to let Epic put the put Fortnite back in the US App Store specifically. And so they didn't. And Epic kept saying, we're going to be back in the App Store. We're submitting it. And Apple just ignore them and not even review their app. Like they didn't even reject it. They're just like because Epic pulled it themselves and then resubmitted because they have content refills they need to do. And Apple was just like slow walking and say, we'll just never going to look at it or whatever.

But Epic went and ran to the judge and said, hey, mom, Apple's not letting us put our app on the store. And the judge basically said, oh, you should probably let them put... Apple can resolve this. When he's saying Apple, just let them put it in the store. The judge said, see me. Yeah. If you can't resolve this amongst yourselves, you'll have to see me. Now, it's not a slam dunk that the judge would have said, okay, you have to actually do it. But Apple, I mean...

to the you know i was gonna say the apple's credit but the bar is so low here uh looking at this whole thing you may be thinking what is apple doing don't they want fortnite on the app store it's just so vindictive like this is like it's all over except for the shouting here epic wants to put their game back on your store you've already lost you know you won the thing you cared about which is the app store can stay but you lost the thing about steering and you lost it hard and twice but you're still appealing or whatever

just let like it's like apple speaking of biting off your nose to spite your face don't you want fortnite yeah and apple's answer was no we don't because we don't like them uh but apparently they finally cooler heads prevailed and they said you know why don't we just let it back in the store if it turns out we win an appeal we'll kick them out again but why don't we just let them back in so they did they didn't have to go before the judge and so we are uh they are spared that uh that punishment and so there you have it uh if you want fortnite

on your iPhone and you're not in the EU, you can get it again now. Yeah, this is one of those like we only record once a week.

And it seems like that's not actually enough to keep up with all of Apple's legal problems. Court filings and public battles, especially when it comes to Epic and Tim Sweeney's is making statements online. You know, this is going to happen. That's going to happen. And Apple's not doing this. And Apple's mostly just sitting there quietly. And the judge is saying things and issuing rulings. And, you know, weekly cadence is pretty good because we got to skip over all the drama. Just guess what? It's back. Yeah. But the good thing is, like in this case, I don't think Apple for a second.

wanted to let epic back in the store but i think what what happened finally was they you know it's almost like when you know when you have somebody you care about digging themselves a hole and they just keep talking and they keep digging and you just keep thinking oh my god stop talking please stop talking oh my god you're just making it worse please stop please stop

Apple finally realized that if they get themselves back in front of this judge, only bad things will happen. So obviously this judge is not pleased with Apple's behavior. We know Apple would have arguable grounds to keep Epic out of the store forever. And if the judge issued, say, another injunction, I don't know how the legal system works, sorry, but if the judge somehow...

As a result of this hearing that she was asking to have, if it ended up that Apple lost the ability to keep anybody out of the App Store, that would be very bad for Apple indeed. So I think Apple's finally realized...

We should just let this through. That way the judge never addresses the issue of whether we can reject things or not. Because if the judge addresses that issue in a way that does not go in our favor, that's very bad for us. So finally, Apple realized, maybe we should stop digging. So, you know, it's a limited effect in this particular case. But maybe they're finally realizing now the position that they're actually in. And, I don't know, it at least...

maybe has stopped bleeding. Yeah, and because for whatever reason they did that, guess what? Now they've kind of walked themselves backwards into, oh, now you have this very popular game back on your platform. See, isn't it nice, Apple? Seemingly nothing could happen to make you act in your best interest except for now the threat of whatever the judge was going to do was enough to say, fine, we'll make our platform better for everybody and we'll slightly increase the amount of money we make because before we were making $0 from Fortnite in the US and now we'll make,

some portion, depending on which button people pick in that dialogue. And you know what? I think a lot of people will pick in-app, but we'll see how it goes. Honestly, so my prediction is that, you know, assuming that the current injunction, which forces Apple to permit everyone in the U.S. app store to allow link outs to web purchases, I bet in, you know, six months when we start to see whatever the quarterly results would be that would include this time period, that

I bet we see no noticeable difference in services revenue. Like I bet they did all of this and risked all of this and fought this hard and just destroyed their credibility with developers in so many ways. I bet they did it all for very, very little. But we'll see what happens.

Maybe they'll win on appeal. I don't figure what the dates are for the appeal, but suffice it to say, this is still winding its way through the court process. It's not over. It's seemingly never over. Right. But unless they get that emergency stay on the injunction that they filed to say, wait, let's wait until we fight this. If they don't get that, and therefore, if they have to go through an appeal to turn this over, that could be months or years. So we will have enough time. If that does happen, we will have enough time to see the impact in their quarterly results.

And again, I bet it's going to be basically nothing. We are brought to you this episode by HelloFresh. Ah, fresh air, sunshine, and of course, good food. That's what spring is all about. HelloFresh makes it easier to fit quick home-cooked meals into your schedule every week. They curate delicious recipes like pasta primavera, chicken Dijon, pecan-crusted trout, and over 100 more seasonal snacks, sides, and treats.

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All right. With regard to fiascos, let's talk about Mark Gurman and the Apple Intelligence fiasco. So Gurman basically said plus one to everything that we talked about. Was the last episode, I don't know, recently on ATP episode 635, an effective operator? I know it was a couple episodes ago. Anyways, there's a lot here that I can read. John, do you want me to just...

start? Do you want to just start talking about any particular highlights? How do you want to handle this? No, we can just go through the ball. This is mostly the juicy quotes because like I said, when we talked about this in episode 635, it was from a report from the information which really got the scoop on like all the inside info from Apple folks and we talked about it at length and there's not really anything in this report that is just not more of the same, you know, sort of confirmation from of the

the seconding of the earlier reporting. But there are a bunch of what appear to be direct quotes and some of them are juicy. So I figured we would just hit the juicy quote. So we just there's not again, there's not a lot of new information here. If you want to hear a longer discussion of this, check out an effective operator. We'll put a link in the show notes, but the juicy quotes are fun. So we should just go through all of them.

Cook, who is generally known for keeping his distance from product development, was pushing hard for more serious AI effort. Tim was one of Apple's biggest believers in AI, says a person who worked with him. He was constantly frustrated that Siri lagged behind Alexa and that the company didn't yet have a foothold in the home like Amazon's Echo smart speaker. So this is the first I'm hearing of this angle where like this is obviously pre-HomePod, right? So this is before they had anything that was like the Echo in the home. So this is a while ago. And Tim Cook was...

You know, seemingly like I really want to do AI. I don't like us to be behind it. It kind of explains why the HomePod project existed or got, you know, reportedly it came out of the Apple TV project. That's how long ago it was back when Apple was supposedly making a television set. But if this is true, that he's a big believer in AI and was frustrated that Apple didn't have anything like the Amazon Echo, then

He did a good job of changing that, and he's the CEO. So I'll put a black mark in Tim Cook's book for that one. Yeah, I mean, you've got to judge the results, like what actually has happened. And what has happened is Apple is really far behind in AI and seems to have taken a lot of missteps along the way to what will eventually hopefully be the right path. So regardless of what some anonymous report says that Tim thought about AI at some point in the past, look at the results. Didn't happen.

That's why it's surprising to hear that it was the top person in the company that they really wanted Apple to do this. Because if you want Apple to do it and they don't do it, then something is wrong. When JG started at Apple in 2018, almost immediately he concluded the company would need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more on the kinds of large-scale testing and image and text annotation required to train the machine learning models that AI technologies are built on.

Oh, that was a lot. He got enough money to hire some top AI researchers away from Google and to expand the teams responsible for testing and data analysis. Still, Gianandrea's efforts were often stymied. Federighi, Apple's software chief, remained reluctant to make large investments in AI. He didn't see it as a core capability for personal computers or mobile devices and didn't want to siphon resources away from developing annual updates to the iPhone, Mac, and iPad operating systems, a

according to several colleagues. Craig is just not the kind of guy who says, hey, we need to do this big thing that will require big budgets and a ton more people, a longtime Apple executive says. So this is interesting. So JG coming in and saying we need to spend tons of money. We talked on earlier episodes about how he wanted to buy a bunch of GPUs and the CFO said you can get them, but only...

have to start and then more slowly after that or whatever. So it seems like when he landed at the company, he was pushing for things to be in the right direction, but sort of the other folks who were there, like Craig and

being responsible for essentially the sort of annual cycle of like, what does Apple do every year? They revise all their operating systems on all their platforms. They have a bunch of new features. They put a bunch of new hardware out, like just keeping up with that treadmill. We talk about how difficult it is for developers to keep up with the Apple update treadmill. But if you're inside Apple, you have to actually generate that treadmill every year and ship it. And so you can see like he's there. Craig's got enough on his plate to do. And if some new guy comes in the company, this is actually what we should be doing is this big other thing where

Like to be a very successful executive in Apple to be as an effective operator as I described Fetty Riggi in that earlier episode. You kind of have to know like look here's how we do things in Apple and the way we do things is every year I don't go to my boss and say hey give me 500 new employees and millions and millions of dollars because they've got this harebrained idea. It's like no I know what I have to do every year new versions of all our major operating systems that work with all the new hardware and

With new APIs and new features and we show it every year at WWDC. I'm not going to be down here asking Tim Cook for money every time I have a harebrained idea. And this new guy comes in the company, he wants hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm going to push back on that. So I understand it. In hindsight, it's easy to say, oh, Craig, you made a mistake. But, you know, back in 2018, when you look at this, you're like, well, Craig's doing what he's supposed to be doing and JG's doing what he's supposed to be doing.

Other leaders shared Federighi's reservations. In the world of AI, you really don't know what the product is until you've done the investment, another longtime executive says. That's not how Apple is wired. Apple sits down to build a product knowing what the end game is.

As a result, the company was blindsided by ChatGPT's launch in November 2022. One senior executive says Apple intelligence wasn't even an idea before that. It's not like what OpenAI was doing was secret, says another. Anyone who was paying attention to the market there should have seen it and jumped all over it.

Within a month of ChatGPT's release, Federici used generative AI to write code for a personal software project he was working on. The technology's potential was suddenly evident to him. Hmm. Who would have thunk it? So this is a little hindsight 2020, though. The whole like, oh, you should have known. You know, Apple needs to know what they're building ahead of time. And that's not the way it is with AI. I would argue even today, a lot of the biggest AI companies are kind of like,

We're not sure how far this can go. Like how far can we take this? What are these things good for? Let's try like L companies with LMS have tried all sorts of things. What's the best way to make this product? Is it just chat bots? Can we image generation coding aids, like fixing your writing like this? They're not sure exactly what it's going to be good for, but they know it's useful for a bunch of stuff already. And they're trying to figure it out. And that's just not how something is going to work. Like that's, that's what new companies and startups and, uh,

people on the edge of new technologies that's how they can act but apple can't be like anytime there's something that could potentially be good we need to just start investing in it as hard as the as the biggest startup so i kind of understand that and whoever they're quoting here i'm saying like they could just look at open ai it's not like what they were doing with secret it's like yeah there's a million startups doing stuff but you don't know whether they're going to be successful now arguably given the timeline of federighi waking up and saying wow this lm stuff is really good he was a little late on that uh i

I always give him credit for noticing and saying, we need to get on this right now. Better late than never. But the sort of, you know, armchair quarterbacking, even people inside the company, just because some people were very enthusiastic about OpenAI and everything. Until OpenAI had shown that they had the goods, it's, you know, it's not the time to tell Apple, you have to invest in this because there's, I'm sure there's people who work for Apple, who

whatever their pet technology is, they think Apple should be investing more in this. And it turns out the technology fizzles and goes away. It just turns out this was the one that actually turned into something good. So Apple was late. But, you know, I still feel like condemning the company for not getting on it as early as OpenAI was is asking for a bit much. Well, OK, I'm not sure about that because Apple has...

so much money that all they can think to do with it is buy their own stock back like they have so much money why shouldn't they have more major r&d projects like i i don't i don't think that's necessary especially like when there's something really exciting in technology that is you know causing a stir and and pushing a lot of you know products and investment forward like

maybe that's a good reason to have a bunch of R&D projects and to invest more often in things. The thing is, Apple does have tons of R&D projects. That's the whole thing. It's like, again, hindsight 2020, it's like, look at all the R&D projects Apple has, whatever they're doing with the robots and like, not just like the car and stuff that we hear about, but like,

I'm sure there's tons of R&D projects where they're doing tons of things. Even just in software, setting aside all the weird hardware stuff that they're surely doing, figuring out new materials or whatever, they're constantly doing R&D projects that go nowhere. That's what I feel like the hindsight thing is like, oh, well, but you have all this money. You should chat, you know, chat GPT or LMs should have been one of those projects.

It's easy to say that now, and I agree that they were late, but I don't agree that they were so egregiously late that like in 2018, they should have known that open AI was going to be the next big thing because that's asking for a bit much like it wasn't clear to the world until a year or two later. And it wasn't clear to Apple until maybe a year too late. So I'm going to ding Apple for being late, but I'm not going to ding them for being

predicting the future and saying, this is what we should invest it in. And you may be right that there was like surplus budget that someone should have spent on this. Obviously, again, in hindsight, they should have or whatever. But I get the feeling from all the random stories that I read that there's tons of research projects that Apple is doing all the time, most of which go nowhere.

So I don't think they're being stingy and like, oh, we're just going to buy our stock back because we can't think about what to do with their money. I think they invest in the things they think are worth investing in and they just made the wrong call on this particular one. But anyway, it's hard to tell from an article like this because it's obviously this is going to be all about, you know, why Apple missed? Like, why were they late?

Who was for it? Who was against it? Again, hindsight 2020. In the end, it turns out these people were right and these people were wrong. And let's get some juicy quotes from that. I mean, I think that's very generous of you to look at it that way. The way it looks to me is Apple is a company that its ability to hustle has atrophied.

because they've had so much success, and success in ways that have allowed them to build up walls to preclude competition, that they really don't seem like they're trying very hard in a lot of areas. In some, sure, they are trying very hard in some. But it seems like the company in general lacks any kind of hustle in most areas. And again, this isn't true of everything. I do think they are leading in things like

and, you know, computer power and, like, processors. Like, they're really good at all that stuff. But, like, when it comes to, like, new areas, certainly most areas of software, I would describe this way, but certainly, like, you know, new types of devices or kind of new areas in tech, it's, like,

It seems like Apple's got no hustle whatsoever. And I think it's because they have just gotten so used to not needing to compete much in those areas because of the walls they have built that it seems like they've lost the ability to really bust their butt and actually get out there.

All right.

J.G. is low-key, and some people say he didn't fight hard enough to get the money his group needed. Quote, J.G. should have been much, much more aggressive in getting funding to go big. But John's not a salesman. He's a technologist, says an employee who knows him. He is not an effective operator within Apple. Sure seems that way. Others say Gianandrea isn't hands-on enough and doesn't drive his workers particularly hard. Quote, every other team at Apple, at least in engineering, is balls to the wall, get it out, get it out on time. And J.G.'s team just doesn't operate that way, one executive says. They just don't.

They just didn't. So, you know, yeah, this is one of the consistent things you see. There's much more about this, about jealousy, about the perks that that team is getting or whatever. Like, and again, I mostly give Apple credit for

And understanding that this is an important area and making what seemed like a very good hire and allowing that person to spend a lot of money and hire a lot of people and run their kingdom the way they want to run it. But in the end, the bill comes due. It's like, OK, we like Apple, the company is doing trying to do what's right, even though they're starting late to say we need to invest in this. We need to do it as best we can.

If you are the person in charge of that, you got to produce results. And that's why we had the big shakeup. So anyway, no news here, but more juicy quotes. We didn't even put all of them in. You can read this in Bloomberg if you want to see more. But someday someone will write a nice tell-all book. The EU App Store warning that we were talking about a week or two ago, I think last week,

about external purchases. Apparently it's not new. Reading from Daring Fireball, John Gruber, Apple told me this external payments warning has been in place since the very beginning of their DMA compliance in March 2024. Jacob Eitling, who is the CEO of Revenue Cat, tweeted, I think this is EU only and might have been around for a while. I just assume nobody bothered with the DMA implementation for external purchases since they were pointless. Fewer than 100 developers have availed themselves of this option for obvious reasons.

Then back to Gruber. I think this blew up a bit yesterday on May 14th because despite the fact that it had been around since March 2024, few of us had ever seen it before because so few apps in the app store use it. Eitling includes a link to Apple's own developer documentation for its DMA compliance features, which makes this clear, quoting from there. To help users understand whether an app contains an alternative payment option, the app store will display an informational banner on the app's product page to identify the developer's enablement of this entitlement.

When downloading an app, users are also informed if the app uses PSPs. What's that stand for? Payment something, something. Payment service processor? I don't know. Something like that. There you go. Or links out on the purchase confirmation sheet. Apps that contain an alternative payment option are required to present users with a disclosure prior to each transaction or link out to purchase to help them understand that the purchase isn't backed by Apple.

A real-time follow-up, I believe it's payment service provider. Thanks to Chris Bonasso in the chat. Yeah, this is, I mean, all this, these facts are actually coming up in court now. Like, as we said, when Apple, you know, implemented its supposed compliance, we said, you know, this Apple is making it as unattractive as possible to use these things. And lo and behold, if you make it really unattractive, nobody uses it, which is exactly what Apple wanted and is also why their compliance is not particularly compliant.

Yeah, I love like, yes, we were indeed wrong last week when we said Apple just started to become a jerk in this way. Apple's defense was we've been a jerk in this way for years. Look at us go. You just never noticed because we made it so attractive that no one ever wanted to use this. We are brought to you this episode by Delete.me. Delete.me makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data from hundreds of data broker websites online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable.

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All right, let's do some topics. And we're going to start tonight with some news from Bloomberg. Reading from there, Apple is working on a software development kit and related frameworks that will let outsiders build AI features based on the large language models that the company uses for Apple intelligence. Apple expects to unveil the plan on June 9th at its Worldwide Developers Conference.

This sounds pretty cool. I don't know. I was thinking about this over the last couple of days after I read this article. I don't know specifically what I would do with this with CallSheet, and I obviously don't know the capabilities either, but I can see how this would be really neat. And as an example, I can imagine being able to ask this AI theorist

you know, given, given all the information, you know, about my pins and call sheet, for example, show me movies that have, uh, you know, at least two of the actors I've pinned in call sheet in, in the same movie. I don't think I'm doing a good job verbalizing that, but hopefully you know what I mean. Uh, and I think that would be really neat or, you know, maybe show me a podcast that are similar to ATP and overcast or something like that. We'll see what this actually is. And I'm, I'm, I'm really trying not to get my hopes up because I,

Oftentimes Apple really doesn't like to give us a long leash with which to run, but I'm here for it. And I mean, I think we talked about last week, the week before that, you know, Ben Thompson's been calling for this for months now. I'm here for it. This sounds great tentatively. We'll see what actually happens.

Marco's been calling for it for months. Yeah. Tom Thompson has mentioned recently Marco's been for maybe years. This is what Marco wanted out of Apple Intelligence. He's complained since WWDC 2004 that he was not getting. So how do you feel about this announcement? Right, because, you know, last WWDC, you know, there's been a lot of the recent stir up about how, you know, Apple Intelligence stuff that was debuted in last WWDC was delayed or seemed like fabricated in some degrees. But my problem at the time was,

At this developer conference, you've just announced a whole bunch of features that developers have no way to use. All of iOS 18 has gone through with Apple intelligence slowly appearing in bits and pieces, and there's no APIs for developers to use any of this stuff. And so these days, there is actually a lot of utility that apps can have by using LLMs or other advanced AI models, like transcription, for instance, which would be relevant to me. There are other...

you know, uses of AI in apps. And the only way for apps to do this to date has been to either bundle in a giant model into your app and, you know, and run it on the device, which is, you know, huge and cumbersome and requires, you know, some, some advanced knowledge to actually get it to work. Right. Uh, or you could call it to a web service and use some kind of API, uh,

which is very expensive, or you could host your own on your own servers and have your app talk to your servers and do it server side, which is also very expensive and requires, you know, very, you know, advanced knowledge and everything. So what I hope and what I hoped for last year and what this sounds like, maybe we'll get, uh,

is whatever Apple intelligence is currently capable of doing with its models, let apps have an API to do similar things. You know, when you look at the history of software development and the advancement of computers, what really makes the tide rise and lift all boats is

Maybe that's a bad analogy in the era of climate change as I live on a barrier island. But what really raises the standards for everybody is when the platform, when they add APIs to make things that used to be difficult easy for everyone.

That helps everybody. It used to be back in the days, basics of graphics and sound APIs and then networking APIs got added. And then over time, we've gotten much more advanced APIs that the platform vendors offer nice API layers on top of complex things that are maybe hard to do yourself if you're not an expert in those fields. And then individual developers like me can have an app that does pretty advanced things because I didn't have to write anything

every little detail of like the UI framework, the graphics layer, the animation layer. The audio engine. No, sorry. Yeah, right. But even I haven't written a lot of the audio engine. Like I wrote the parts that generates the samples and processes them and I didn't even have to do that. But like there's a lot of parts about like routing it to different speakers and stuff. The whole airplay layer, like I didn't have to write that. You know, so there's a lot of power when the platform owner writes

makes an API to make otherwise complex things possible, easy, and free to do on device to all developers of all sizes. We all win, including Apple, because then more great apps are available for their platforms, and therefore more people buy their hardware and use their platforms. And Apple's APIs...

in many ways, in many instances throughout time, have been class-leading. So certain things are way easier to do with Apple's APIs than they are on competitors' APIs. So that also tends to bring you better apps or the best apps or apps come out first on your platform, which has been an advantage that Apple has enjoyed a lot with iOS.

So there's huge value in the platform vendor offering amazing APIs to make complex or expensive or tricky things easy. And Apple also has this amazing asset that the iPhone is a really fast computer and has a lot of resources. And even though we've complained about RAM in the past limiting LLM models and stuff like that, the reality is

Compared to other platforms, the iPhone and, of course, also the Mac, which would presumably also benefit from some of these APIs, Apple's hardware is really good. It's really fast. It's really capable. They have really good neural engines that they've had for a long time. They have lots of memory. So they have the hardware grunt to do on-device LLM processing to an extent, and generally to a greater extent than most of their competitors in most ways.

So that's a huge asset. All of Apple's developers are writing software for these supercomputers that people have in their pockets. So like, you know, from my point of view for Overcast, if I wanted to offer transcription, I could do a whole server-side thing

It would cost a fortune. I probably would lose a lot of money on it. And I don't really know much about server-side hosting of AI models and stuff like that. And so I would have to learn a whole bunch about how to do it. I would spend and lose tons of money. It would be a huge ordeal. And it might, at the end of the day, not even be able to be worthwhile because I might just lose too much money on it. But my app is running on...

many many many iPhones all the time and those iPhones have all this computational power and I can't use it whenever I want but I can use it when they're plugged in and charging overnight like there's there's like a huge resource there of all these iPhones that are sitting around that could do local computation for our apps now if Apple wants to enable a whole bunch of developers like me

to be able to make cool AI features in our apps from big to small. Like it could be as simple as a basic text summarization API so that I can summarize things in table view cells the way they do in mail. Like that would be great. It could be as simple as that. And it could also be more advanced stuff like transcription or like generation based on prompts, like text synthesis. It could be image generation. It could be all sorts of things that we see the devices are able to do now.

If Apple makes those available as APIs and those APIs are not fatally restricted, then we can do a lot with that.

The entire app ecosystem can grow. Apple's software platform can grow. Everybody wins. And we all also, you know, that generates maybe some iPhone lock-in, which I know Apple loves, because the iPhone's really good at this stuff and usually is a generation ahead of Android phones and computational power and stuff. So that would be great for everybody. I hope they actually have done it, and I hope there aren't too many fatal limits. So what would a fatal limit be? Number one,

If we can use all these models on the phone, but they suck, that would be a fatal limit. I don't expect the models on the phone to be competitive with flagship chat GPT and stuff like that, models that run on giant servers. They're not going to be that. There's not enough memory for that. But I hope whatever they're shipping on the phone, if there are APIs for it, I hope it's decent at least and decent for what it is, for an on-device model. I hope they're able to do that.

Number two, I hope that the apps are allowed to use them in an unlimited fashion bound only by like power constraints. So obviously, if your app is being used in the foreground, you should be able to use LLMs and whatever these APIs might be in an unlimited way, the same way you can use unlimited graphics and, you know, GPS and stuff like you can use all these things as much as you want when your app is in the foreground.

I also hope that there's some way to do them in the background. Like they have the system I mentioned earlier about being able to use power when your phone is plugged in and charging overnight. There's a whole system called background tasks in iOS, this whole API. And you can register for a background processing task, which you basically tell the system when your app launches, hey, if you get a chance to have like unlimited power

let me do this and wake me up and call me when you're ready and then you can do as much cpu time as you want during those tasks and the phone will tell you if you have to stop but like otherwise you can just go nuts whereas and you can do this all in the background so this you're typically scheduled when you're charging your phone overnight like most people do and so you like any all the ios limitations on like how much cpu time you can use in the background over the course of a minute or whatever those are all lifted when you're in that mode

So if we can do things in that mode that process things with the LLM APIs or the AI APIs, whatever we're calling these, great. Like, so there's all these ways that this can be really good. I hope these models or APIs, I hope they don't suck. I hope they're not limited in ways they don't need to be, but like they absolutely need to be. And I hope Apple gives us

a breadth of access to them. Like, not just a couple of really narrow uses, but a more broad way to access their capabilities and a more broad set of capabilities so that we can all make better software for their platform. Because that's, you know, we all complain about Apple. Look, I'm, I leave the charge about complaining about, like, the way they treat developers and everything. But,

You can paper over a lot of the way they treat developers if they enable us to make really good software for the computers that we have. That is what we all love doing. All developers want to make great software for the computers that we have. That is the dream of being a developer. We love that. So if they enable us to make great software for their platforms, we can whistle past a lot of the ugly stuff. So I hope they are doing that.

A couple of people in the chat room are pointing out that, uh, the typical Apple pattern is they will roll something out that, uh, only their apps use or only the OS uses, uh, before they are ready to make it a third party, uh, API that, uh, developers can use as repeated for decades. Uh, it's just generally the way Apple does stuff. And most, a lot of operating system vendors do that. A lot of platforms do that. Um, two things on that first, uh,

This is another result of being late. If you're late, that means that Marco was complaining because he felt like he should have had these APIs last year. But of course, last year was the first time that even Apple was using them in a major OS update.

So yeah, if you're late, that's, you know, I, I'm not, I think you'd be feeling better if 2023 Apple did the stuff that only they could use in 2024, they rolled it out to everybody, but now it just feels like everything's farther behind. And second is tangentially related to our past discussions of the various DMA requirements in the EU of saying basically when Apple adds a feature to its platform, it needs to be available to third parties. This is another place where, um,

This will be difficult for Apple to comply with because and again, it's not just Apple. The usual way to do it is you roll it out first as a private thing and shake it out and make sure you figure out what works, what doesn't, you know, like figure out how useful it is. And then a year later, you can say, OK, now we have something that we can make an API, because, of course, once you make something an API, Apple tends to support its APIs for a very long time. So you're really committing to it.

Uh, and it's like, well, if Apple could get it right on the first time and the first try and say, here you go, it's a new API and it's available for Apple's apps and for third party apps all at the same time, that's so much harder than saying we're going to give it a year. We're just Apple apps. Use it to figure out like how it works and work out the kinks and figure out what we want the API to look like or whatever before we commit to it for third parties.

Maybe that's one of the reasons that Apple's APIs are usually pretty good because they do, as they say, dog food it themselves and use it themselves internally. Most of the things that like, you know, like when SwiftUI came out here, that came out for everybody at the same time, didn't it? Well, no, because they were kind of using it on the watch before you knew it was SwiftUI. There are exceptions. Like it is possible to roll something out both internally and publicly more or less at the same time. But all I'm saying is that it's more difficult. So anyway.

Apple is behind and Marco is impatient, but maybe this will be his year. I don't think wanting like basic LLM and modern AI APIs on your smartphone platform in 2025 is being impatient. And you can kind of judge by looking around at the rest of the industry to see like, look, they're all shipping this stuff. They're late and you are impatient. Impatient doesn't mean wrongfully so. That means your patience is being tested by Apple being late in this area. Oh, and the other thing I'll add here is that I feel like

This is a perfect fit for the model that Apple has used with some of its other developer services. Like, I don't know the names of these, maybe you two do, but like the various like CloudKit APIs where you get a bunch of stuff for free.

But then if you go over a certain limit, either it starts being charged to the user's iCloud storage, for example. And isn't there one where also the developers have to pay for something? I forget. Yeah, weather also works that way. Yeah, the weather is a good other. It's like it's a great thing that Apple does that platforms can do is say this is too hard for a small group of developers to do on their own. So we will vend this API. But this API does cost us money to run.

but you can use it for free for a small number of customers, for a small number of requests, for a small number of calls, but then above and beyond that, we'll charge you for it.

That's actually, I mean, that is a thing that developers like. Like, I don't want to have to worry about this. I would love to be able to try it for free, especially if I can like ship. And if I don't get a lot of customers, I don't, I never pay anything. But if I get a lot of customers, that's a problem I like to have. I'll gladly pay for this API for me to use. Private cloud compute is a perfect solution for that. We're saying all the models that run on device are going to be crappy and burn your battery.

Apple has a solution to that. Don't want to run it on your phone? Transparently, through a private cloud compute, you can run it on our servers, which costs us money. So we'll probably have to charge you just like OpenAI and other companies. And that seems like a reasonable business. I really hope that's part of their announcement is not just,

You can use our dinky tech summarization engine on the phone and kill your user's battery. I would love to be able to say, can I use your big honking model? And I get X number of requests for free, but then, and you start charging me or whatever, because that doesn't have to run on the phone. And, uh, and, but with private cloud compute, it can be fairly transparent that that's happening. So fingers, that's, that's my wish for this story here. Well, be careful what you wish for, because you know, that, that can also go a little bit wrong. So for instance, uh,

So maybe one of the ways that Tim Cook will start squeezing more profit out of developers, if they can't, you know, hike the rates and keep looking for everyone's, you know, keep looking under everyone's couch cushions and be like, hey, it looks like you got some income coming some other way. One of the ways that they could grow the services revenue more would be, hey, you know what, these new APIs that everybody wants to use that even run locally, you have to pay extra for those.

They could do that. That is not beyond Tim Cook. I 100% guarantee that. They shouldn't do that for lots of reasons. I think that would be a strategic error in many ways. To be clear, that's not what I'm asking for. I'm just asking for what OpenAI has. If you use their API, you have to pay for it above a certain usage order. Yeah, you're saying, let us use Apple's server-side APIs. And that would be reasonable to charge for, but I would be careful because

Because then, you know, as devices get bigger and better over time, Apple would have more of an incentive to not make the on-device models, or at least the publicly available on-device models, to not make those better.

You want to be real careful what kind of incentive you give Tim Cook because he will squeeze every single cent out of whatever he can without regard to the quality of the software experience. So you absolutely don't want to do that. And also, once you're paying for it... I mean, again, there's precedent here with all the CloudKit APIs and stuff that so far have not been a slippery slope that has led us into doom. So I'm mostly okay with it.

Yeah, but those didn't debut recently. Let's see what today's Apple does. I mean, Tim Cook was in charge when they rolled out the CloudKit APIs too. Yeah, but he was also printing money from the App Store back then. If things are starting to get squeezed...

you know they will never accept less money as the solution. They will find other ways. Like, look, we have search ads came up in the meantime, and now we all have to pay to get our apps installed in addition to paying Apple the 30%. If there's a way for them to squeeze us, they will. So if they get into the business of charging us to use private cloud compute...

that could create a bunch of very bad incentives that over time I think would not be good. That's a competitive market though because apps are out there now saying please enter your OpenAI API key here that you're already paying for. So it is competitive. It's not like we're locked into using Apple's private cloud compute APIs which currently don't exist. Tons of apps are out there using third-party APIs and paying them for it. So I feel like it's a competitive market and it won't be that big of a deal. Well, the other thing is if they are making you pay to use their private cloud compute...

you would probably also start looking around at other APIs as competitors. And I think I would be shocked if Apple's APIs were competitive. Once you're already going out to a server and paying for it, I bet you have a lot of other options that would be better and or cheaper than Apple's.

Well, like I said, it's competitive. So if Apple wants people to use it, they have to like, you just look at the cloud APIs. There's lots of other APIs you can use for data, remote databases or sync engines or just rolling your own AWS. And there's all sorts of like managed and unmanaged solutions to doing that. Apple rolled out an API and they did make it, you know, it's convenient to use. It's nice. It fits with their APIs. And it's actually pretty cheap. Like it's price competitive with the other things throughout there. So again, that's why I'm not worried about this, but we'll see.

We'll see what they announce. I mean, I don't think any of the rumors even talked about server side stuff. It just seems mostly like that you'll be able to use the on device models, which is less interesting to me because I feel like the on device models are, like you said, are going to be dinky. And even if they're not dinky or they do what you need them to do, they are going to they're running locally and they're burning your battery. So like there's a bounce to be struck there. And I think a lot of the, you know,

I don't know. Actually, I would love to see a survey of all the apps that are shipping now. How many ship their own models and eat up the disk space on people's phones or whatever versus how many use API keys and what the best practice is these days because some things you just can't run on device. But if you can run on device, maybe it's better to do it over the API anyway just because it simplifies everything about installation and everything. Although, again, as we've talked about, apps aren't shy about taking disk space. I just looked at, I think,

I think someone who posted about this, somebody posted about it recently about the LG app that tells them when their laundry is done. And I instantly they had said they had said it at the same time that I got a notification that my laundry was done from this very same LG app. And I looked at it.

800 megabytes. Good gracious. It sends me notifications when the washing machine is done. 800 megabytes. Oh my God. That's bananas. I have home assistant powered solutions for you that we can talk about. I got a Raspberry Pi and point a camera at it and it'll be great. No, no, no. It's not that bad. It's not that bad. We'll take it. We'll take it offline. It's almost that bad.

Stop it. Now you're going to make me talk about it. I'm going to be an adult and I'm going to resist. But there are solutions. We also have other breaking news. OpenAI has decided to buy Johnny Ives' AI company.

I'm sorry, what? Let me say that one more time. OpenAI decides to, or is going to buy Johnny Ives AI company. This is not love from mind you that's his design company. This is his AI company. So reading from the verge, uh, open AI is buying IO lowercase IO, uh, not the really good Peter Gabriel, but instead a hardware company founded by former Apple design chief, Johnny Ive and several other former engineers from his time there, including Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey, and Tang Tan. Uh,

We gathered together the best hardware and software engineers, the best technologists, physicists, scientists, and researchers and experts in product development and manufacturing. I have an open AI CEO, Sam Altman said in a joint post, many of us have worked together closely for decades. The IO team focused on developing products that inspire, empower, and enable will now merge with open AI to work more intimately with the research engineering and product teams in San Francisco. It's a nearly $6.5 billion all stock deal. Bloomberg reports, uh,

Uh, from the announcement as IO merges with open AI, Johnny and love from will assume deep design and creative responsibility across AI. Oh, excuse me, open AI and IO. Uh,

Uh, just as a quick reminder, humane went for 116 million IO, which has been around for like 10 minutes, apparently has just earned or sold for 6.5 billion. I think it's like 55 people. So that's a good payday for, uh, yeah, for real. Wondering how those people who, Oh, they left Apple was that they, why would you ever leave Apple? I know Johnny left, but why would they leave and go off and do their own thing? It seems like they should just stay at Apple. No. Well, you know, join, join a company that gets bought out for six and a half billion.

And you're one of the founders slash early employees that probably worked out pretty well for you. Again, it is all stock and not cash. So they're kind of pinning their hopes to open AI. But so far, open AI seems to be doing pretty well. So kudos to all those folks for getting a good exit, as they say. And, you know, we had on the show rumors about this before that Johnny Ive was working with open AI and some kind of AI thing. We talked about it when we were discussing the humane pin that you just mentioned. Yeah.

And in fact, I didn't get the quote for it here, but I believe there was a quote from Johnny saying,

basically dissing the humane pin and the rabbit r1 saying yeah those are bad products we're gonna do better he was right paraphrase this is a paraphrase but johnny ive is not one to say things like that but he was pretty blunt in saying yeah they didn't do a good job and we're gonna do better um there was the did you guys watch the video that accompanied us the announcement video thing oh i sure did so it was the slowest hold on like 18 minutes ever

So what this is, is they put together like a kind of a single serving site and in a video associated with it. This is at openai.com slash, what is it? Sam and Johnny with hyphens in between. This video is,

Oh, my word. It was beautifully shot. That's about where... By the Coppola family, maybe, if I saw it in the credits? Yeah, I saw that in the credits, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's about 10 minutes long, if I recall correctly.

It is 10 minutes of navel gazing and talking about how San Francisco is the best place in the entire world, which as a born and bred East coaster, I take major offense to, but that's neither here nor there. Um, it was so vapid and silly and weird and, and,

a lot of words were said, but nothing was really accomplished. Like, well, it was kind of, it was kind of a love fest, not a love from, but a love fest. Sam and Johnny, uh, both believe in the same thing and have the same values as far as Johnny knows. Um,

And they both really care about the future of technology and they want to help people with technology and they believe in beauty and truth and all these other things. And I'm watching this and it's like, I don't know Sam Altman that well, but the little I know of him makes me...

whether he actually shares his value. Johnny, I totally believed us. I've seen Johnny for many, many years, but following his career very closely, read at least one complete book on him, maybe two. Uh, I feel like I have a bit of a read on the public persona, at least of Johnny Ive. Sam Altman, uh,

I know less about and what I have seen makes me think, hmm, that's what you would say if you wanted Johnny Ive to buy his company and have him join you. So I'm wondering how that relationship is going to... Because if you watch the video, you think, Johnny, I've found the next Steve Jobs. And it's like, dude, it's Sam Altman. Like, he wore two collars on stage at WJC or whatever. Like, it's not...

It's that guy. Or he got kicked out of his own company. I'm not saying Sam Altman's a bad person. I don't know that much about him, but he just does not seem like a Steve Jobs caliber visionary, but he fancies himself one for sure. In this video, he plays himself up as one.

And like you can do that if you're not sitting next to Johnny Hive when you do it, because I feel like there's a little bit of a little bit of a resume imbalance there. But then you get Johnny being like, I think like my whole career has been leading up to this. Like all that time I spent in Apple was just a warm up back. So I'd be ready to do this thing. And it's like, all right, Johnny. Whoa. OK. All right. Just, you know.

I love the confidence. Yeah. You know, a lot of ability there. But anyway, so we mentioned the Humane Pin and the Rabbit R01, both of which we talked about in past episodes of the show. The things that were headwinds, as they say in earnings call for those two products are still things that OpenAI and IO and LoveFrom have to deal with.

No one in this new collaboration has a phone platform. That was a problem for Humane and Rabbit. They had to do things on their own. They were not allowed to integrate with Android or iOS in the way the product like the ones they were making needed to. OpenAI will have to deal with that too. And I'm not sure there are any easy solutions. Second thing is Humane and Rabbit had the problem where their entire products hinged on

you know, large language model AI things that they did not make. OpenAI doesn't have that problem because guess what? They make the LLMs. So plus one for OpenAI there because if you're building a product on top of someone else's thing that you don't control and don't have ability to improve, it's a big weakness. But then the third thing is,

We don't know what this product is, but I'm not the one who brought up humane pin rabbit. Johnny did. And everyone thinks it's some kind of post phone thing that you can use an LLM with. And, you know, maybe you don't need a screen. Maybe it's a pin. Maybe it's a headband. Maybe it has a small screen. Maybe it's a family of devices. One of which has a screen or whatever, but like we're thinking in the same, that kind of realm right there, right? Those type of products are,

are essentially a way for you to get access to OpenAI's AI technology. And Johnny has been talking, making the rounds, saying like, oh, you know, people on their phones and the consequences of that, and we could get away from that and have a more human interface. I don't doubt Johnny Ives' ability to make an innovative, attractive, nice thing that connects human beings to OpenAI's technology. Where our doubts come in is,

Can the thing that it's connecting me to do what Sam Altman and Johnny Ive hope it will be able to do? OpenAI, unlike the other companies, is empowered to make that happen because so far they've made a lot of things happen with LLMs. So, hey, they're the ones to do it. But right now, I have never seen any...

AI based technology that is able to do the things that a successful humane pin or rabbit R1 type product needs to be able to do to be useful. And all the demos is like I talk to it. It does these things. It's so useful. I ask it questions. You know, everything's

Great. But in real life, if you've actually used these products, you know, they can't do that yet in a way that is not frustrating, right? You really, especially when you've got no, no screen, no keyboard, you're not at your computer, you just ambiently, it's like a thing that you carry with you. Um,

In the video, Sam Mulder makes this weird analogy of like, just think if I wanted to ask ChatGPD a question, what would I have to do? I have to go into my bag and take out my laptop and open a web browser. And it's like, dude, you take out your phone. Why are you not saying that? You've heard about smartphones, right? Right. But I felt like he wasn't saying that because one of the products they have is kind of phone-like. But anyway, here's the thing. Like so many of these companies, including OpenAI, have stars in their eyes about how

If things keep advancing the way they are, pretty soon we'll have a thing where we can just talk to it and it will do what we want it to do. And that's the dream. And kudos to them for shooting for it. And if anybody could do it, they're a leader in the industry. So I'm not saying they're not going to do it. All I'm saying is if they've done it, I haven't seen it.

And so this whole product, this whole Johnny I've powered $6.5 billion acquisition, huge amount of investor money depends on them being able to put something in that thing at the other end that you talk to that isn't insanely frustrating and they can actually do all the things that you want it to do. Apple certainly isn't in this race. Amazon, which we'll get to in a future show, announced that they've redone their, uh,

their dingus product i don't want to say the name uh and we're like well look they've done what apples couldn't do but they have barely shipped it and it's not totally working so it's like i just i just feel like this entire industry is always uh they're what is it the phrase they're uh

Their reach always exceeds their grasp. They're always looking, you know, to the future, to the horizon, whatever. I don't know which thing I'm referencing now, but like they believe they can get to this place where it will be good in this way. And and it's not good in that way. It's good for a whole bunch of other things. And it's good. It has utility now. It has places where people can use it. But they're like, but imagine if it was just like your friend and you could talk to it and do stuff where it's like that would be cool.

But you don't have that yet. So don't make a product whose entire existence depends on that existing unless you're sure that by the time this product comes out, supposedly next year, you will have something that does that. So this is quite a moonshot. And I'll feel bad if Johnny makes a beautiful, thoughtful, humane, sorry, humane hardware product that connects to an LLM that just makes a lot of mistakes and frustrates everybody who tries to use it.

All right. So I'm going to go out on two limbs here. You're going to hate them both. Number one, I think it's going to work. And number two, I think that there is a potentially likely future. It could be a distant likely future where Sam Altman becomes a high Apple executive president.

What? Well, so the first one I don't hate at all. Because again, like I said, if anyone's going to do it, it's going to be the leader in the industry and not like Humane or Rabbit, right? But all I'm saying is they need to do it because no matter how good that hardware is, the LLM has to fulfill the promise of that hardware. Like it has to be a good product. In the end, it has to be something that people want to use. And the problem with all the other products that are like that is like,

Well, I try to use it for its intended purpose and it doesn't work. And there is no screen and no keyboard and it's not a phone and it's not a computer. And I just get frustrated and chuck it. So they have to make that work. So I don't hate your first point. They could do it. It's a year from now. We don't know what they've got in the works or whatever. Like, I'm not saying it's impossible. Like, I think a product like this is someday possible. And that's what everyone thinks. I just I doubt their timeline. So I don't hate that one. Second one, Sam Altman is a high powered Apple executive. Yeah, I hate that.

I think OpenAI is valuable enough that at some point it is possible that OpenAI and Apple might merge in some form. Microsoft might have something to say about that. I know exactly what I'm... I know how big of a scale thing that would be. And that's also...

Like, that's part of why I'm predicting that this might happen down the road. I don't know how far down the road. I don't know in what form. But I think something like that could happen because OpenAI is both really good at AI, which Apple is not, but also has really good product sensibility, which Apple lacks. Apple has, as we discussed last time, they really don't have clear product leadership under Tim Cook.

I think Sam Altman has really good product sense. Yeah, he's young. He could use some experience. He's getting that. Maybe this is like next. Like, I know that's a reach, but I honestly think it's a possibility. Not tomorrow, but, you know, I think there is an actual possibility that Sam Altman has the right kind of product sense to

to actually bring a lot of good to Apple if he had enough power to actually execute on what he wanted to do. And that could take, you know, a few forms, but I think that is a possibility down the road. If Apple's own AI efforts don't work as well as they want them to,

If they're not very competitive and if AI starts to actually really disrupt Apple's core products, which I think it has the potential to. So that's that's the Sam Altman in Apple prediction. Now, let me let me just pause you for two seconds. Yeah. How old do you think Sam Altman is? I don't know. Maybe like 40, 38. He is freshly 40 like a month ago. I thought he was younger than that. And 40 is not bad.

old, old because he was young when he was on that stage with the two collars, but that was a long time ago. Yes, it was. Uh, no, I didn't. I mean, cause you said a minute ago, he's young and he's still learning, which I think that is true, but he's already 40. He doesn't look 40, but he is 40. So, uh, he's not as young as I thought he was. He's got a little bit of a baby face. Yeah. But I'm telling you, he has really good product sensibility and that is rare in this business. I don't know if he has that sense. Yeah.

It's hard to attribute to the person. Obviously, he's in charge. And so everything the company does that's good, you say it's him. I don't know. I don't know enough about him. But the Apple, you know, the prediction that Apple is going to buy one of the AI companies has been going around for years. Anthropic is usually the name that comes up like Apple should buy Anthropic.

They're they're smaller, less expensive, and they actually have really good technology. What they lack is open eyes money. So they're kind of behind open in a lot of ways, but they've done a lot with what they have. So maybe Apple should buy Anthropic buying open eyes for it because Microsoft is heavily invested there. And that's there's the whole nonprofit connection in that whole drama. It's a little bit messy over there, but, you know, it could happen. I like Apple having to buy one of these companies, like you said, because they have the potential to disrupt Apple's business.

And if they started to, Apple would say, well, time to take out the wallet, right? And then we'll see if the, depending on what administration is active at the time, whether that merger is even allowed to happen. But yeah, I can see that happening. But then Sam Albon is an Apple executive and

Apple's track record with making big acquisitions than integrating the people who used to be in charge of those acquisitions is uneven. Worked out with Steve Jobs, right? That worked pretty well. Other companies, those executives, even if they're still at Apple, they're still at Apple.

They don't they don't set the world on fire like they if they find a place at Apple and Sam Altman strikes me the type of person who would almost not be happy in that. And we will be looking for the door as soon as whatever his golden handcuffs let him leave Apple.

Like, I don't think he relishes being a cog in the Apple machine. I think he wants to be the CEO of OpenAI. I think he will accept a buyout for enough money, but I think he'd be itching to go do something new because like that company he was on stage for at either Macworld or WWDC was not OpenAI. He seems like someone who is wants to be starting new and interesting things. So,

I'm not sure how that will work. I'm not currently, again, I have limited knowledge on Sam Holtman, so I'm basing this not on a lot of information, but the information I do have makes me think he would not make for a great Apple executive who wouldn't fit in and want to be looking for the door, even if Apple could buy them. But I do agree with you that Apple sure is headed on a course right now where they're going to have to buy one of these AI companies, even if it doesn't turn out to be a huge threat to their business, even if it just turns out to be an essential thing that's out there.

The Tim Cook doctrine, which I mostly agree with, is own and control the primary technologies. If it's real important for every company to have a great model and Apple doesn't have one and can't make one, then you got to buy one. They had to do it with operating system. And again, that worked out pretty well. But the other companies have their own LMs that are way ahead of where Apple is and they're iterating on them. So Apple needs to have one too. And if you can't make it, buy it. Yeah. And I think, you know, the more prudent approach

thing for Apple to do would be to buy an established large team that has built these, but not necessarily OpenAI the company, because as you mentioned, there is a lot going on there. You know, OpenAI also does like, you know, spin off a lot of talent through all the messiness, like a lot of talented people. That's a nice way of putting it.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, a lot of talented people flee open AI and go somewhere else and start their own stuff. And so there's a lot of smaller AI companies out there that Apple could buy or, you know, somehow. Yeah, I mean, that shows, like, Google being smart for whenever they bought DeepMind. Like, Google was so much farther ahead of the game on this in terms of making acquisitions and making it work. I don't know. We're probably not going to talk about Google I.O. I don't know if you two watched it, but...

Google, once they finally settled on a name for their thing and called it Gemini a few years ago and stopped calling the thing Bard, they are just iterating. Like you can, again, Google's product sense may be not great, but the Gemini model and the things it can do and the rate it's advancing, it's just, it's really embarrassing for Apple. Right. And again, like this is like, this is why this is critical technology for the modern era. Like talking about owning and controlling, as you said, like,

Apple needs a strong AI story on their platforms. Right now they have no AI story. We'll see. The rumors from these articles are that they're getting there maybe, but there's a large amount of space between getting there maybe and there. And so we'll see what they can actually do. I do think that long-term...

What will happen is Apple will end up buying one of the medium-sized AI companies. But I would not rule out the possibility that somehow Sam Altman ends up, like, heading up a large part of Apple. And I think – and I'm not saying, like, you know, next year, but maybe, like, within the next 10 years? Maybe. I think he's somebody to really watch because he does show very strong product sensibility. Now, in the meantime, what I think he is making with Johnny? A watch.

Think about it. Johnny freaking loves watches. He also loves cars. They're probably not making a car. I agree. I'm just saying. So I think they're going to make a... Because what we saw with the Humane dumb pin is that

having some kind of like wearable for AI lookup type stuff is not completely a terrible idea. They just did a terrible job of it and they kind of picked a bunch of wrong decisions on the way there. But what a lot of people kept saying was like, this should be the Apple Watch. Like the Apple Watch should just do these things. Well,

Apple's not doing it. And so I think this is actually very likely to end up being some kind of watch that we know Johnny loves making watches and he's decent at designing them. So we'll see how that goes. We know that the watch is a physical role that a lot of people will have in addition to their phones.

Like it doesn't compete for an already like it doesn't try to create a new category. Like you don't have to realize like, oh, how do I wear this with jackets or whatever? Like this is the way the AI pin just failed on a number of like physical fronts. You don't have to worry about that. People are already used to wearing smartwatches. They're very popular.

Also, despite the success of the Apple Watch, which is largely successful, it's far from ubiquitous. Not everybody has an Apple Watch. And changing your smartwatch or adding a smartwatch to your life is a much smaller request and it's a much smaller competitive burden to overcome than replacing your phone.

or replacing your computer. Although speaking of phone though, what do you think about the barrier to platform integration? Oh, I do expect to get notifications from my iPhone on it. Why can't your thing do that, Johnny? It can. So number one, like you look at what, like what can Pebble and stuff do?

They can show notifications. They can't interact with them necessarily, but they can do that. Right.

And that, you know, changing your watch is easier than changing your phone platform. But you never know which integration features that someone with an Apple Watch is just expects to be there. And when they find out the Johnny Ive thing doesn't do it, it will be a little bit of a problem. Like platform integration is a tool that Apple has to preclude competition in this area. Oh, and believe me, they're going to fight very hard on it. But I think the watch is the area that like a well-designed, like a Johnny Ive designed watch.

product could look really cool a lot of people buy watches not for their utility but just because they look cool the application surface area for what people expect their watches to do is very small like you don't need a whole phone platform to make successful smart watches lots of smart watches exist that aren't apple watches and they do just fine in the market lots of smart fitness trackers and stuff like that those lots this is a very healthy category lots of them exist

And the EU keeps trying to crack open more capabilities out of watches from the iOS. So I think this idea would make a lot of sense. If you imagine the Humane AI pin done far better as a watch, that actually could be something. And when you have OpenAI and Johnny Ive

Those are two massive titans in these respective areas of physical design of small electronics and in particular watches and the AI backing of it. I think that could be that could really be something. It could have its own cell modem. We know watches can fit cell modems just fine. Many of them do. It's like it can even have its own cell modem. It wouldn't have to use the phone for that. It could be an independent device.

watches use very little data so you know they could have a subscription to some you know to carriers and you just use like the existing quote smart watch plans that carriers offer for like 16 bucks a month or whatever like i think there's enough ground laid there and it's an it's enough of a category that like people are willing to take risks with watches and wearables and stuff that they wouldn't take with their phones so i i'm guessing that's what they're doing and if they do that

I think that could really be something that could be really cool. So the one wrinkle to this is I believe the rumor is that this is a family of devices. So that's why people are thinking one of them might be screenless and one of them might have a screen. So maybe one of them might be watch like kind of one of the problems with watches. And the reason they go with brooches and necklaces and stuff is they're

Based on even this video, they kind of make it seem like, oh, if I take out my laptop, I won't have heard the whole conversation that we had, so I'd have to catch it up and type a bunch of stuff in. So it seems like they're leaning towards something like those various pendants that are constantly listening to you and everything. So if you put something on your wrist, but you have your hands in your pockets, it's harder to pick up audio than something that is around your neck or, you know...

an open AI nose ring. I don't know. Like, anyway, I will say, like, I think there is something to the watch thing. There are barriers to entry there. If it's a family of products, there's probably going to be one with a screen and one without. And it seems like they'd have to be on your body somewhere. And a lot. Where can you put a screen that it could be on your body? A wrist? The wristwatch is a place to go. So I could see that. But I'm thinking I'm thinking more towards like

The low end one that doesn't have a screen. Is that around your neck? Is that behind your ear? Is like, I don't know. Johnny, I will figure something out, but it seems like it has to be somewhere where I can hear your voice and potentially see what you see and hear what you're hearing. And so anything that you can stick in your pocket might be a bit of a problem there. But anyway, I, what I keep coming back to is that I, there's lots of, if you gave me a magic AI, they could work the way everyone who raves about it. I think say I will someday be able to work, but,

The form factor almost doesn't matter. You could put it in a potato and people would be like, I need one of those potatoes. It does everything. I just talk to it and it does stuff for me. Like the value of a thing that you can actually talk to and have it do things for you reliably is so huge. People will buy literally anything that would do that because it's not the potato they care about. It's the thing inside it.

So I feel like this is really on Sam Altman and Johnny can just, you know, fulfill his little desires to make a beautiful object. And like it, like I said, it almost doesn't matter. Like, because it's all about, you know, because on the flip side, if he makes a beautiful thing, they're like, this is the best hardware I've ever seen. It's a brilliant idea. I never even thought of making a nose ring, but it turns out it's great. Like if it comes up something no one ever thought of before. And when you talk to it, it behaves like the humane pin. No one wants that product. But on the flip side, Apple will be able to buy them for cheap after that.

Right. Now, I don't know. I'm not sure what to make of this. I find it very easy to believe that a watch is the product or a product. I think that you can sell that to me pretty easy in a figurative and literal sense, potentially. Them slash Sam getting swept up by Apple, I can see a series of events where that happens, but...

I don't know, man. And plus, OpenAI is getting big. I mean, I know Apple is gigantic, but OpenAI is getting big. I mean, they're buying companies for $6 billion. They're just big in venture capital. Like, they're in the phase where they're not big like Apple, where it's a machine that produces billions of dollars of profit. OpenAI is not there yet. They're in the growth phase, let's say. So they have collected a huge amount of investment, but they are burning money like crazy now.

including spending $6.5 billion of their stock, not money, but stock to do this acquisition. So they will need to someday eventually make money, but that day is not yet. Yeah. I don't know. It's fascinating. I mean, it's as silly as that video was. This is very, very, very interesting. And the,

2026, if they meet their self-stated goal of, you know, premiering something in 2026, it's going to be an interesting time. A really, really interesting time. Did they say they would show it in 2026 or ship it? I think they said show. I think it just says next year. Like, I don't, I don't know how, I think they were pretty noncommittal. There's enough wiggle room where they could announce it next year and ship it in 2027. But like, you know, take your time guys, because we know that the thing you are sort of hinting that you're going to make does not yet exist in the public. So,

Wait until you have it. Yeah, but I mean, no matter what, can you imagine watching Johnny effectively competing with Apple? That would be very funny and very interesting. Honestly, he seems like he's embracing that. Like, you know, he gave that interview last week, or rather it came out last week, where he basically like insulted the smartphone. And what he said, you know, he basically said like, you know, everything in this video, he's basically said like,

all the platforms we use today are decades old form factors. Like that's, he was taking aim right at the phone. He's looking for the next, next new thing. Yeah. I mean, even when he was at Apple, he was kind of bored with doing Apple-y things because he, like he basically produced some of the biggest hardware device revolutions. And once you've done that, you're looking to do it again. You don't do it again by making more iPhones. Yeah.

Yeah, that's why I really think this is going to be something. I'm very optimistic between Johnny's seemingly renewed drive to do cool new tech and Sam Altman's good product sense and the amazing resources they both have at their disposal. I think this could be something really, really good. I really hope that Johnny is not just like,

has you know bamboozled by the promise of a thing that doesn't exist I really hope he is seeing things that I'm not seeing and I hope an open AI actually has tech that will it doesn't have to be perfect it just needs to get over that threshold I think of it like you know a million times we talked about touchscreens and the iPhone touchscreens exist for decades and people hated them and it was you just had to make them just good enough where you passed over the threshold and it goes from this annoying interface that no one wants to use to like oh my god this is the best thing I've ever seen and

and the original iphone was not perfect by a long shot but it crossed that threshold and we're just waiting for ai that you can talk to without a screen and a keyboard i don't know a way to conceptually this we're waiting for that to cross the threshold it's already crossed the threshold for like this can do tons of useful things uh you know for people in its current incarnations that's why these are popular companies we've talked about all the time and limited applications for a thing that you wanted to do it's better than it's ever been like google was just showing off their uh

you know, real time translation or whatever, like the LM was originally made as a thing, like the original LM paper basically was talking about doing translation from like, you know, one language to another, like human languages, Spanish to English or whatever. Fast forward to 2025 at Google AO and they're showing the seventh revision of their thing where you talk and it translates in real time with like a human sounding voice to a person at the other end.

Like, that was science fiction decades ago, and now it's a real thing. So, like, it can sneak up on you. And that's current technology. Things exist now. But everybody wants, you know...

What's the thing? Plan a birthday party for my five-year-old. Here's the budget. Go make all the arrangements. Go to all the things. Not even. Let's just say like ask it questions and have it give you truthful answers. Have it do what you could do if you had access to Google and could turn off all the AI results. Look something up. Find some information.

You know, put it together, figure out, read a couple of web pages, figure out an answer, go to a Wikipedia page, do a thing or whatever. Only now you know how to do all that. You just ask it a question and it gives you the answer. We want a thing that does that and doesn't make up stuff.

And then you can maybe ask it to do stuff for you. And that's the promise of something with no screen, no keyboard connected to an LLM that's somewhere in your body that's listening all the time that can see things, yada, yada, yada, right? So I wish we had a better name for that, but that's what everyone is trying to make and does not yet exist. And so here we have a new, a new contenders entered the ring and,

With a stacked cast. Johnny Ive and the leader in the world of LLMs. And yet still, like, look at Johnny. He's so hopeful. I'm like, Johnny, I really hope this is real. Because I believe Johnny is sincere. Don't entirely believe Sam Altman is sincere. But we'll see. We'll see how it goes. Yeah. Especially since, you know, from what it seems...

Johnny has the A-team of Apple expats, whereas I'm not so sure that Humane and some of these other, and Rabbit and some of these other companies necessarily did. Yeah, like they, yeah, Marco mentioned the people, people who have left open AI and Anthropic has a lot of good people too. And there's a lot of good people from DeepMind at Google and like the, the smarts for AI, people working at the cutting edge of AI technology are spread pretty well throughout the industry today.

Even in Apple, I would say that there's a lot of good people. You wouldn't know it from the results the company has produced, but I'm saying like staffing-wise, I bet they have some good people on staff there too. So that's not the secret sauce. But yeah, but Johnny Ive has...

has some people with experience. You know, in the later years of Johnny Ive and those same people who are at Apple, some of the things they produced were not great, but you know what? There's a lot more leeway when you're entering a new product category to be fanciful and go full iOS 7 on it because what are you comparing it to? It's not an established category. Do whatever you want. Figure it out. Be bold. No one else has done it yet. So you are free to be full on Johnny Ive, unedited by anybody, and

Uh, and, uh, good luck to them. Except potentially Sam, which I mean, to come back to what Marco was saying, I'm sure Johnny's going to let Sam tell him how to change his product. They're such buddies. I don't know, man. They're best friends. They're soulmates.

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All right, let's do some Ask ATP and let's start with Harrison who writes, I'm in grade nine and I love listening to ATP. I'm about to go on a four week residential camp with my school. I decided to send my question now because based on Ask ATP times could be answered while I'm away and I will be able to listen upon my return or it'll be in a show weeks or months in the future.

Clearly Harrison knows what's going on. So here's my question. What was your favorite school camp or trip and why? For me, very briefly, I went to school in a lot of different places because we were moving a lot at the time. And I went on a trip when I was in fifth grade and I was going to school in Naperville, Illinois, and we went to some like

I want to say it was a college campus. I couldn't tell you what it was. I couldn't tell you where it was, but we did like a night or two there, which was really fun. And then when I was in high school, I feel like I've told the story somewhere very recently, probably here. But when I was in high school, I was a member of the future business leaders of America, FBLA. And,

It's so nerdy. FBLA, as it's known. That's why I said FBLA. I know. I remember it from high school. And when you go to school, into high school in a little podunk state like Connecticut, and you decide that you're going to join the statewide competition for

I want to say it was called computer concepts or something like that. It was typically like marketing and sales and things like that, where you would like take a test or something along those lines. Well, I did one in computer concepts and guess what? I placed second in the state of Connecticut and that entitled me to go to nationals at Disney world. And so myself and a few other people in our teacher, or I think it was maybe five students and the teacher all went to Orlando and stayed in either the Swan or the dolphin. I forget which one. And we're told that,

you know, you're going to be here for a couple of days. You'll compete. I did not place at a national level. And then we'll go back to Connecticut. And I remember vividly that we were told by our teacher who we all got on really well with. We were told by our teacher, Hey, here's the thing. You need to be in the hotel. If you leave the hotel, you need to tell us what's going on. You know, you need to tell, tell me where you're going, et cetera. And this was in the late nineties. So none of us had cell phones, uh,

Um, we were, we got that speech and let that, let's say two o'clock in the afternoon by three o'clock in the afternoon. We were, I remember sitting in the back of a Volkswagen Jetta that was being driven by former students of the same high school that we, that we were in, except he had moved down to Orlando and he was taking the rest of the people I was with to go get like cold cuts and, and sandwich bread and whatnot, because all of them came down to Walt Disney world with like 20 bucks in their pockets. Um,

And so they knew they weren't going to be able to eat for the three or four or five days that we were there. If we didn't turn our sink in, that we had like a little suite in the hotel, if we didn't take the sink in the like, not bar area, but like kitchen area, and turn that into a makeshift refrigerator that these idiots wouldn't have been able to eat. And so don't leave the hotel, crash. I'm in the back of a Jetta driving around downtown Orlando. It was crazy.

so wild and so ridiculous and so much fun. And I, I value that trip to this day. Marco, what, what about you? Uh, to nobody's surprise, who knows how much of a nerd I am. Computer exam. No, no band band. Yup. Band camp. There it is. Oh, one time at band camp. Yep. I, it was nothing like American pie. Uh, I, I went to band camp every, all four summers preceding my four years of high school. And it was so,

such a good time every time uh it was each time it was like about a week i believe maybe a little you know a little less than a week and we would go up to like one of those you know like campground kind of things you know like i guess a couple hours away in ohio um and you know and i was in the drum section so we would like you know figure out all the all the cadences for the year and we'd practice them and teach all the freshmen or i was the freshman i was learning them um that was like when we got our like when you're in the drum section you kind of

move around to different different drum types as you get older so like that was like you know we're learning the new you know oh now this year i'm on snare drum this year i'm on quads like you know so you learn the new instruments you get to flirt with all the people that you want to flirt with um you get you know you're like it's sleepaway camp so it's all the fun in that um it it was a great time every time i absolutely loved it definitely far and away band camp

John. So I'll first give my least favorite. Okay. Trip just because it's, uh, when I, when you say school trip, this is literally the first one that I think of. Um,

In fifth grade, my elementary school took us all to go on a whale watch off Montauk Point. Oh, you've talked about this and you were like sick as hell. And that's where I learned that I get seasick. Oh, no. Not an ideal time to learn it because whale watches, if you've ever been on one, are long and they're not going to turn that boat around just because you're puking your guts out.

I threw up 16 times on that boat. I love that you still remember this 40 years later. And then also on the bus ride back home. I still remember what the ground looked like when I got off the boat after being stuck on it. I also remember that it was cold and rainy and they wouldn't let me back in the cabin of the boat because I was puking my brains out and I was cold and I had short sleeve shirt and shorts on. And yeah, that's not the great, not the best way to find out that you could violently see sick.

I did break that record later in life as an adult with the flu, but it stood for many decades. I get seasick. I'll never go on a whale watch again. Uh, it's, you know, anyway, so there you go. Fifth grade whale watch. No good. Uh, other people had fun though. Uh, anyway, my best, my best school trip. I think I might've mentioned this before was, uh,

uh, it's part of the, part of the way they used to do school back in the, uh, late eighties and early nineties was they had a G and T program, which was not gin and tonic, but it was gifted and talented. And so they would separate the nerds from the rest of the population for maximum bullying potential on the bright side, uh, gifted and talented people got to go on a trip. I believe it was between junior and senior year, uh, somewhere in there. Uh,

Uh, and we, it was supposed to be like someplace like scientific where we were going to like study some environmental thing or whatever. Like, you know, it's a high school trip, right? To take a bunch of high school students and, and take them somewhere for a week. And yeah, there's maybe some science was done and some learning happens, but it was mostly like Marco's band camp. Anyway, uh,

where we ended up going like, I forget how it was kind of like a committee or the teacher kind of knew where the places we could potentially go. And I don't, I think they made it seem like that the kids were like had input in it, but for all I know it was preordained, but we ended up going to Newfoundland and Canada. It's the first time I've been out of the country. Uh, and we were there for like a week or maybe, uh, nine or 10 days or whatever. Uh,

And we slept in, we spent some time in like a day or two when we got there in like a college dorm. Then we were in like a campground. Then we were in tents. And yeah, it's just, I mean, it's really, it's like a Canadian version of Marcos man camp. I'm sure with a bunch of hormonal teenagers out there in the wilderness and

Uh, at one point we were trudging through the Canadian wilderness in pants that were absorbing all of the damp, uh, cold water from the bushes that we were trudging our way through. And we came around the corner and there was a moose standing right in front of us, like far enough away that you could like practically reach out a stick and poke it.

And we were all so startled. We just came around the corner and believed they're huge. They're way bigger than you think they are. And we just all stood there with our mouths open and the moose looked at us and took off into the woods and we're like, I cannot believe that happened. We went on a whale watch. I went on another, I had no choice. I had to go on another whale watch to end. We went to go see icebergs and I was also seasick, but I managed not to puke in a Herculean effort of embarrassment of standing in just the right part of the boat and bending my knees to try to keep my head level.

incredibly embarrassing but i didn't puke i'm proud of that uh i ate an entire one of those weird silver fish heads bones and all i'm sure someone from newfoundland can tell me what it is but i've sent long since forgotten you ate the bones or you they were just they were present you eat them no you eat the whole it's like it's maybe like the size of like the length of a pencil and like maybe three or four times is why it's kind of a flat silver fish and you eat the whole thing

Oh my god. Okay. It's not that dramatic. When fish have small bones, you just eat the whole fish. I don't, but okay. Anyway, just to give clarity why I remember that, I did not eat seafood for my entire childhood. I still basically don't eat seafood. I eat shrimp and

But like other than that, I don't really eat seafood at all. And at that point, I don't think I'd ever eaten an entire fish of any kind. So that was a little bit exciting. But yeah, that's... That was surely the most memorable one. It kills me that, you know, camera phones had not been invented yet. I did have, I believe, a Kodak disc camera. If you know what the quality of the photos are like from that. And it just...

I wish I had so many more pictures. I envy my kids. They have these amazing cameras with them all the time. They never take pictures. I'm like, you are going to regret this. Take more pictures of the people you're with and the places you go. You think you're not going to care what like the, the back room at your first job looks like and all the people you work with, but someday you'll want to know. And they take zero pictures. So anyway, I have a few pictures of that, but I wish I had taken more. No one would have got a picture of that moose though. Again, we were all stunned. So yeah,

So you have Newfoundland. It rhymes with understand in case you ever want to know how to pronounce it. Wow. That was way more than I expected. So thank you, Harrison. He's back from his trip, by the way. This has been in here for a while. Sorry, Harrison. Not as much time as it usually takes, though. So I'm proud of us in that regard. Yeah. He's still a kid. He's still a kid. But well put. Josh Kincaid writes, what's the significance of the tire markings on the bootleg feeds cover art?

John. So when I saw this question, I was like, yeah, we should explain that. And then so I pulled up the bootleg cover art. Can people see the bootleg cover if they're not members? We'll put it in the show notes. I put a link to it if you don't know what it looks like. But it's the wheel from a Mac Pro. And the wheel has like tire markings like on the sidewall of the tire on your car tire. There's a bunch of markings on it. So we put that on the side of the Mac Pro wheel. And so I go, yeah, we should put this explanation. And so I pull up the picture. I looked at it and I realized that

I no longer remember what the, I know we had meaning behind them because I picked out the meaning of every single one of these things in here. Uh,

And I'd forgotten, but thank goodness for the Slack scroll back. I looked it up and I said, we need to put this in a show because if I've already forgotten this, I need it. I need it burned into audio so that at some point in the future, I can say, oh, we talked about what those markings mean to remind myself, Casey. So here you go. I'm with you on this. I'm not remembering. Thank you. However long ago we made the show. You didn't remember this? I remembered every one of them. I didn't remember all of them.

I mean, I remember some of them. I don't remember any of them. Do you really think I remembered even one? Come on. I don't know. You remembered the name and face of the person who drove Marco around the BMW driving school. I have no idea how your memory works anymore. And your boat trip. Thank you very much. Where you puked your guts up. I remember that. Yeah. Oh, I've told that story about it.

Anyway, so on real car tires, there is a meaning for all of those little letters and numbers. Each one corresponds to something. We'll put a link in the show notes to something that shows you like what the numbers mean. And so I tried to pick realistic values for the bootleg thing. So the first is the P prefix. If you're starting from like sort of left to right, going around the wheel clockwise.

And that is a P metric tire or a tire used for passenger cars. And I felt like that was appropriate. And most most tires you see are going to be car tires, even though this is a Mac Pro wheel or whatever. There's also LT for light truck and HL for high load rating. Those didn't seem to apply to a Mac Pro even though it is a big computer.

So the next thing is the tire width in millimeters. So I got someone when we did this, I asked around, probably Mastodon back then, I forget. Can someone measure the Mac Pro tires? Because real tires have like, you know, 255 millimeter for like a big sports car tire or whatever, or 210 millimeter for like a regular skinny car tire, right? Can someone measure the actual Mac Pro wheels? And they're about 40 millimeters. So it says P40. So it's a 40 millimeter width.

The next number is the aspect ratio, which I think, what is that? Like the, the ratio of the sidewall height to the width or something. Yep. Um, anyway, that's 25%, which is again, we're relying on people send us pictures of like holding like a ruler up to the Mac pro wheel. So it's P 40 slash 25, 25% aspect ratio B for rigid sidewall, which is the same as the tread material, which seems appropriate for the Mac pro wheels. Um,

a two inch rim diameter and a 32 load index. So a typical car tire load index range is from 70 to 126. I couldn't look up what all those numbers mean, but it's like each number corresponds to how much load they can endure. And I'm like, well, the Mac Pro wheels are,

let's say they're a 32. It's a round number. It's a power of two. Maybe it's a little high for a load rating for the Mac pro wheels, but you know, they are $700. So, so maybe they really do have a great load rating. So it's P 40 slash 25 B two 32. And then Z, which is the speed rating and Z, which Marco knows about because I made a big stink stink about that when we were in Germany, because we were trying to hustle back to, to Munich and,

at something like 140 miles an hour and it occurred to me, oh wait, these are winter tires. We should probably make sure that they can handle 140 miles an hour. And I basically made Marco pull over so I could quickly look at the side of the tire. And I think they were Z-rated winter tires, which is preposterous. It's Germany for you. Yep. And that was, by the way, that was when I learned that tires had speed ratings. Like I had no idea. Yeah.

Well, it's a good thing you have Casey with you to tell you the tires have speed ratings and to find the battery in your car. But anyway, so yeah, the Mac Pro is fast. Of course, it gets a Z rating. So that's the meaning of P40 slash 25 B2 32 Z. Then it says unedited live stream. And then also there's usually a maximum tire pressure printed. That's not the pressure you're supposed to inflate your tires to. If you want to find that number, look at maybe the door sill on the driver's side door or

But it does tell you what the maximum air pressure you're ever supposed to put in these tires is. And this one says 80 PSI. And the reason it says that is because ATP SI. Get it? 80 PSI, 80 PSI. So there you go. That's what all the letters and numbers on the bootleg show art mean. You can't see them at small sizes, but if you get a podcast client, they can zoom it in and you will see those numbers printed there.

And then finally for this week, a friend of mine, Matt Richardson, who does incredible Disney-related content. Matt actually works for Raspberry Pi, but his hobby is doing Disney-related stuff. I'll put a link to Matt's Instagram in the show notes because if you are a Disney person, you absolutely should be following Matt. But anyways, Matt writes...

I'm a Canon shooter and I've always splurged on good glass, but for travel, those lenses are starting to feel so heavy. So I don't take the camera with me as much. Is that always going to be the trade-off? Is there good glass that's also light? I'm not sure if I should switch to cheaper or lighter zooms or maybe stick with good glass and get like a 35 millimeter prime. So let's start with Marco. What's the right answer here?

It depends on what trade-offs you're willing to make. So, first of all, if you need long reach, like if you need a good zoom reach, you're going to be looking at pretty heavy lenses unless you want them to be very low quality. The other thing is, what Matt said at the end, maybe stick with the glass and get a 35mm prime.

That is very close to pancake lens territory. Most pancake lenses are approximately somewhere around the 40mm range. I would suggest when traveling, if you're okay with that perspective and that being like your only perspective on the camera, I would say...

absolutely get whatever the pancake lens is for your camera system and try traveling with just that much on the camera because when you compare the pancake lenses to any other like decent quality lens they're shockingly smaller and it radically changes how the camera feels and you know just it not not only in terms of like sheer weight and space in the bag but also just how it handles in your hands like

Pancake lenses generally weigh approximately nothing compared to any other lens you can put in a camera. And so it radically changes how the camera feels. It feels much lighter and much more nimble. Um, so that is, I would say the, the budget option is get a pancake because pancake lenses also, they tend to be like, you know, F 2.8 or similar. Like they don't tend to be like super fast primes. Um,

But they tend to be very small, very light, and usually pretty inexpensive depending on your system. Now, that's the responsible option. The irresponsible option. Ah, this is the Marco option. Excellent. What makes camera lenses big and heavy often, not always, but often part of that is it has to account for like the distance between the lens and the sensor on the mount and the format that you're using it on.

If you get a compact camera that has a built-in lens, you can usually achieve...

the same quality and speed in terms of aperture as a much larger lens on a detachable system. So that's, I'm talking about things like the Fuji X100, the Leica Q, like, you know, the old Sony RX1 series. I don't know if they're still doing that one, but, you know, the Leica Q is probably the flagship in this market. The new Fuji GFX100RF, which I happen to have gotten. That's an interchangeable lens camera. Which one?

Isn't that interesting? No, I thought you were talking about the one that's like a solid block of aluminum. Not that one, right? Oh, no, that's the Sigma thing. No, I'm not talking about that. Oh, sorry. Okay. Yeah. So which one did you buy? The Fuji GFX 100 RF. You talked about that. Isn't that the medium format thing or no? Yes.

It's basically a medium format X100. And it's – I just – I've only had it for a couple days so far. It's amazing so far. We'll see how it goes. But that kind of thing of like when you look at the size of something like an X100 or the GFX100RF or a Leica Q, like when you see like how big of a lens is needed to achieve –

that aperture and that focal length on that size sensor, it's always much smaller on those bodies than it is on detachable lens systems. So if what you're optimizing for is small size for travel and small and light for travel, something like that could be an option at the high end. I mean, obviously, you're talking about buying a whole separate camera. These are often very high-end models, so they can be pretty expensive. But

That might be worth looking into if you want like a fancier or an upgrade pick. But what you should start with, like for now, if you don't want to get a whole new camera for thousands of dollars, is get that pancake lens for your system. It's a fantastic option and you will find it so compelling that I think you will start bringing the camera on more trips. So this isn't really what Matt is asking, and I'm sure he knows this anyway, but I'll just say it for the listeners. I'm in a similar situation where I don't want to

be carrying around these big lenses. And my advice for travel is the way to deal with this trade-off is to get a smaller sensor. Um, I'm sitting here on my desk with my full frame camera with a 24 to 70 lens on it. And then I have my AP, APS-C, uh, size sensor on my other camera. Um,

And it has a 70 to 350 lens on it. And the 70 to 350 lens is smaller on the APS-C camera than the 24 to 70 is on the full frame. So for people who don't speak camera speak, there is a very small zoom range lens on my big sensor camera that only goes from 24 millimeters to 70 millimeters.

And then there is a huge zoom range that goes from 70 to 350, which is a big range. 350 is way zoomed in. Like if you can look at, I guess people are starting to learn millimeter numbers. If you look at the camera app on your iPhone, even if you don't have a real camera, now that they put like little millimeter equivalents that you can see, 70 to 350, that's a pretty far zoom. And if you've got a 70 to 350 on a full frame camera, even if you've got the cheapest one you could find, that's going to be huge and heavy. So what I'm getting at is,

the lenses for APS-C sensor cameras are so much smaller and lighter for the quote unquote same lens, even the same quality. Like, yes, you are sacrificing by having a smaller sensor, but if you're on vacation and you're not doing everything at night, maybe you're in a sunny place. There should be plenty of light for an APS-C sensor. You know, you lose some pixels, but like it's, it's worth it for how much smaller the lenses can be. And I know you've got a Canon thing. I think Canon makes some kind of small, I don't know. I don't know the Canon line or whatever, but

Mark was introducing the new camera thing, so I'm going to throw it in there too. Get a camera with a smaller sensor because all the lenses are smaller. And then you can pick from whatever brand you want. Every brand makes small sensor cameras. If you want to stay with interchangeable lens cameras, not detachable, interchangeable lens cameras, get one with a smaller sensor. They're like modern APS-C cameras,

Take amazing photos. You will not miss the 61 megapixels from your giant thing or whatever, because like Marco was saying, there's no getting around like you can't you can't fight physics. You either if you want interchangeable lens camera and you want it to be full frame, those lenses are going to be huge. And yeah, you can go for the pancake or the prime or whatever. But like if you need it's like, oh, but I need lots of long reach. Well, what are you going to do? Like it is what it is.

But you can get around that by getting a camera with a smaller sensor. And yes, the cameras that are an interchangeable lens where the thing is built in, they can be smaller and lighter, but...

then you can't change you can't change the lens on them so i hope you like whatever range that lens is giving you and i feel like it especially like if you want to keep the size and weight down you're going to get better quality from let's say an aps-c camera with a pancake lens on it than you would from that same focal distance in a non-interchangeable lens camera of the same size and weight because the the good non-interchangeable lens cameras you're

They're either horrendously expensive, like the ones Mark was describing, and sometimes they're surprisingly big. They're not as big as they would be if they had an interchangeable lens, but since they're so expensive, it's not going to be something that's small and light. They're going to be like high quality and actually pretty big. So that's my advice. Look at APS-C.

If you don't travel that frequently, this is a good consideration to maybe rent cameras. Like, you can go to Lens Rentals. That's what I always did in the past. And, like, you know, you can actually rent one of these small, compact, fancier cameras if you want to. Or, you know, some lens that you wouldn't normally buy, like,

you know, for constant use, but maybe you go on like one trip a year that it might be useful for, you know, renting is an option. It can be a little expensive if you do it more than rarely, but it's an option. Do it to audition the camera you think about buying. Like, so look at a bunch of, let's say you decide you're going to do like a non-interchangeable lens camera. Narrow it down to a model or two, then rent the one you're thinking of buying as sort of a last check.

Yeah. I would also say don't go smaller in size, in sensor size than APS-C. You can get like the super zoom cameras that are smaller. I actually did. I rented one or two of those. I tried them here and there. Like the Sony RX100 series is one of these. What I have found is that they are not better enough than an iPhone to be worth carrying. You know, unless you have very specialized needs that they fit for some reason, but like

don't go with smaller sensors than APS-C if you want it to be better than an iPhone. Within the APS-C family, if you really want...

very very small but very high quality APS-C sensor camera look at the Ricoh GR 3x it is very high quality for a very small camera it is almost pocketable not quite unless you have big pockets but like it's an almost pocket-sized camera it's shocking how much quality it has in such a small body and

And it has image stabilization in there, which I don't know how they did that. But when you look at the challenges, like how Fuji takes forever to add image stabilization to their small cameras, and Ricoh came out with the GR3X, and it's built in, and it's really great. We have one in the family. I got it for TIFF a while back. It's a great camera overall, but it's very, very small. The only reason I don't use the Ricoh GR3X more is because the handling of it is very small for me and my fingers and my hands and everything.

I don't like the way it handles. It's too small for me. But if I want to have a good camera with me to be able to capture good images at the smallest size possible, nothing comes close to that one. But I personally like the larger offerings from Fuji better just in terms of handling and in terms of how they render JPEGs and stuff like that. But anyway, yeah, definitely look at APS-C or larger sensors. Renting is a good idea and...

definitely the pancake lens category if you can if you don't mind the loss of zoom

All right. Thanks to our sponsors this week. HelloFresh, DeleteMe, and Squarespace. 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 all those awesome specials we were talking about earlier. Another perk of membership is even more exclusive content, ATP Overtime. This is our weekly bonus topic. Every week, we talk for usually like, you know, another 15 or 20 minutes on some bonus topic called ATP Overtime. This week, that topic will be, as John put it,

Meanwhile, in Europe, what's going on with the EU and the DMA and stuff like that? That'll be this week's Overtime. Thank you so much. You can join us at hbtfm.com. Thanks. 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. 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.

CarPlay Ultra was announced, kind of. The next generation CarPlay has been now deemed CarPlay Ultra. There was a press release about it and Top Gear did a video review of it. Well, they also did a written review, but the video review was very well done.

I want to say it was a little less than 20 minutes long, but it does a really, really good job of showing you top to bottom how CarPlay Ultra works. This is not something that I need in my life, but I think I would like it if I had it. The basic gist is,

The car actually will render its own stuff like the tachometer, the speedometer, a lot of the error indicators and things like that. The car will render them itself.

But it's doing it in a visual language that Apple provides. And so when you initially connect to CarPlay Ultra, one of the things that happens is Apple downloads a whole bunch of assets and resources and whatnot into the car such that whenever you turn that car on henceforth, it will actually use Apple's UI, I believe, even before it connects to your iPhone.

And then it will obviously use regular traditional CarPlay as well as have this new Ultra stuff on top of it. And the Ultra stuff will integrate with the onboard infotainment for things like the backup camera for perhaps unique settings that they couldn't really figure out a good way to do in the CarPlay world.

If you control HVAC or your air conditioning using the car, like if the car has dials, it'll be reflected in CarPlay. It looks really, really well done. That being said, some of the...

Um, gauge clusters that you can choose between. I like that they let you choose between different gauge clusters. I like that they work with the car manufacturers in order to build, uh, at least one or two different gauge clusters. So the Aston Martin, you know, looked like an Aston Martin in the corner of the, of the speedometer. It said, uh,

I don't know, something like hand-built in Britain or whatever the case may be. Or maybe it said it'll fail in two months. Isn't that how that works? No, never mind. I think I had that wrong. It was hand-built in Britain. Hey-o! But anyways, the point is they work with the car manufacturer to do these things. But then they also have a purely Apple interpretation where you can have one of the dashboards or gauge clusters and

was a bunch of horizontal progress bars, and that represents speed, engine RPMs, et cetera. It's really, really interesting, and I don't think I will ever buy a car, well, asterisk, whatever. I don't think I'll ever buy a car without CarPlay, regular CarPlay. I don't think I would go out of my way to get a car with CarPlay Ultra, but I think I would really like it if I had it.

John, what do you think about this? So we talked about this a much more extensive discussion of the, what was then called next gen CarPlay, the next gen CarPlay architecture, an episode 593 right after WWDC last year. But next gen CarPlay was actually introduced. I think it was WWDC 2022. Maybe that's right. Yeah. It's been a while like with it because they announced it and like we didn't hear anything about it. And then they waited for it.

From 2022, 2023, 2024, they like re-announced it, but then they had sessions on it, WWDC. So we really got the nitty gritty detail. Like all the questions we had were essentially answered. But at that point, no car company had actually shipped it. Apple kept saying, here are our partners. Porsche is going to do it. And Aston Martin is going to do it. And like the list of partners is very long.

But since 2022, it was like, okay, is anyone ever going to use this thing? And now Aston Martin has. And just to refresh with the questions that we had from before and the answers that we got at technical depth in 2024, when you get into one of these cars, you don't need an iPhone. Like everything, there's, you know, there's an instrument cluster in front of you. There's a screen. There's all this stuff. The car has all its own interface if you don't own an iPhone. So...

You don't need an iPhone to do this. And if you don't have an iPhone, don't worry, you're not going to see any of this crap, right? So what that means is that anyone who uses CarPlay Ultra, any car company, they have to make a full interface for their car because they can't assume that everybody has an iPhone. But if you have an iPhone and you get into the car and you pair it and initialize it and say, yes, I want to use CarPlay Ultra, then essentially every screen in that car will

is covered with CarPlay stuff. And as Casey noted, it's not just all projected from your phone. There's a bunch of stuff that the car itself is projecting because you have to make it so that when you get in, like the screens can light up and you know, like you don't have to wait for your car to connect to see your speedometer, for example. Right. So the car is doing this stuff. And the thing is CarPlay Ultra, the product gets to cover all of those screens. And

And part of the technology they have is that the sort of quote unquote native car interface can punch through that interface for regulatory reasons. And for practical reasons, the regulatory reasons that you got to have like the

The warning lights and whatever jurisdiction says you need to be have these warning lights have to be visible and you have to show this like that's all sort of the quote unquote native car interface and that punches through the car play interface, which sometimes doesn't look great. Even the Aston Martin is like this. There's very strict regulations about what like the the fuel gauge or the oil light or the not the fuel gauge, but like there's the warning lights do have lots of regulations around them.

They kind of have to be there and they have to be on at a certain point. So those punch through and they don't always match the rest of the interface because those you can't restyle as easily. And then things like the backing up camera, the 360 camera and the Aston Martin, the thing that controlled like the seat massaging, that was a punch through of the native interface, punching through the Apple interface. And then around all of that is Apple's thing. Some of it projected from the phone on like sort of the main, you know, CarPlay screens and then instrument cluster stuff that's downloaded into the thing.

And the question was always like, who's ever going to do this? Who's going to basically...

do a full interior of their car because you have to. You have to do, because not everyone has an iPhone, do a full interior design for your car software and then allow people with an iPhone to cover all of that with an interface that you, in cooperation with Apple Design, to be a blend of Aston Martin or whatever your company is and Apple's aesthetic. And they talked to the nice Aston Martin designer and he put a brave face on it and saying, oh, we love this or whatever. It's like, if you're a car designer,

like do you want to work with Apple to design an interface that is part Apple part Aston Martin I don't think you do I think you just want it to be Aston Martin and Apple should get what it needs to get for its apps to display but the instrument cluster what value is Apple adding there but Aston Martin has done it so we'll see how the finally there is a car I mean they're not going to sell a lot of these it's not a high volume model but I the questions still we had of a CarPlay Ultra are no longer about how it works um

And now we're about, is this a thing that people want? Is this a thing that car makers want? I mean, obviously, Apple was able to make it happen with at least one car maker after, you know, three years of trying. So kudos for Apple. A car is going to ship in very low volumes to a very small number of customers. But how many of those Aston Martin owners will choose to use this? What they didn't say is if you have an iPhone, can you do CarPlay but not Ultra? I think the answer is no.

Like, what if I just want CarPlay on the middle screen where I can just see my music and maps and stuff? Can I do that and still have the Ask Your Martin native instrument cluster? I don't think the answer is no, which is kind of a shame. But anyway, this is a good... We'll have a better market test if the other car makers and their supposed list of people who are going to support this comes out. Because Hyundai was on that list. And other large volume brands that make affordable cars.

I don't know about this. I, you know, again, see past discussion. It just seems like something that appeals to Apple and maybe appeals to people who really dislike the aesthetic of their car and prefer the aesthetic of Apple. They want, they want the Apple look because they think their car is ugly or unappealing or not as nice, but yeah,

And CarPlay is the color for ultra is extremely flexible and able to be modified and themed and changed or whatever to look more like the other cars. But in the end, it looks like because it's supposed to look like a blend between Apple and the car company.

I don't really want Apple blended at all with my instrument cluster because I don't see them as a car company. I want them. I want Apple to show me an app interface because I see them as an app company. And there are lots of apps for their platform like that makes sense to me. But anyway, I'm not excited about CarPlay Ultra. Let's say that. And I don't think Aston Martin is excited about CarPlay Ultra either, but they are a trusted partner of Apple. So here it is.

I think it actually looks really good. Yeah, me too. So, you know, it is worth pointing out, there was a really good segment on the Verge cast about this a couple days ago. So I would say if you want to hear more about this, listen to that because they did a really good coverage of it. I think the, you know, obviously when you look at what Apple debuted and what we talked about back in 2022 about like their next generation CarPlay, this seems like it is...

a little bit of a step back from that. This is a little bit more like we're going to compromise and we're going to have some stuff designed by us, some stuff rendered by our phone, not everything and not everything. We're still going to have some of your UI show through when you feel like it or when you refuse to give it to us. They announced that in 2024. The punch through stuff was there when we talked about it in episode 593. Right. Anyway, this is

a bit of a walk back from what they did, you know, a few years back or that what they demoed, but could get apparently nobody on board with. I think this is a more approachable version of it for the automakers, but,

it's very clear, like when you watch the video and when you kind of, you know, listen to some of the details here, it's very clear, like Apple has to work very closely with the automaker to get this done. And so I don't think this is ever going to be a common thing. Uh, I mean, maybe they could work with like Toyota, but you know, I doubt it. I think it's much more likely they're going to do a few boutique integrations like this with the Aston Martin. Um,

And I think it will mostly fizzle. I don't see this becoming the common case. That being said, it did appeal to me more in the Aston Martin demo and what we were seeing there. It appealed to me more there than the original version they shut off in 2022 for the next-gen CarPlay. Because...

Ultimately, I don't want the entire dashboard and instrument cluster of my car to look like an iPhone forever. Apple designs things nicely. Also, Apple's design is really boring and safe and bland. And I don't want my car to be boring and safe and bland and to always look the same no matter what car I have. I like the personality that cars bring. You know, sometimes it's not as nice of a user experience in certain ways.

But I don't want

everything to always be the same. Like iOS's design is really stripped down and safe. Like when it showed like navigating through those setting screens, I just wanted to die. I'm like, you're in an Aston Martin and you're navigating through these like big gray table rows. Like that's just so boring and ugly. And then occasionally you have the Aston Martin's own UI punch through to show a totally incongruous art style top view of the seats. Yeah, exactly. Like it's just...

It's nicer in some ways. And certain parts of it I did think looked nice. But I don't want every car to be like this. And that's a good thing because not every car will be like this. Not even close. I think this is going to be a very rarely implemented thing. But it's a fun thing. It's a unique thing. And overall, I do like CarPlay as a whole.

But I think what CarPlay is today in every other car, which is a rectangle the phone projects onto the screen, that's fine. I don't need CarPlay to be more than that. Having more integration with that is maybe nice. Like, you know, one of the nice things about this is not necessarily that it has to take over every screen in the car. But one of the nice things about CarPlay Ultra, as shown here, is that by having more integration with the car...

You can have things like, for instance, the climate control, like the status, like the temperature and everything, that can be displayed on the CarPlay home screen, like next to your CarPlay stuff.

That kind of integration, that could be nice here and there, depending on your car model and how it's displaying stuff otherwise. That could be nice. So I think this has a lot of potential to be nice little upgrades here and there, but I cannot imagine most automakers agreeing to it. That's why I was asking if you could just do the main CarPlay screen, because then you would get the integration where you can see your AC control or the current temperature and stuff, but you didn't have to say, okay, but take over every screen in the car, including the instrument cluster. Right, exactly. But again, I don't know if that's even an option. Yeah, I don't know.

I also think CarPlay could really use a redesign. CarPlay, again, it looks really bland and boring and kind of old and stale. It has looked the way it looks for its entire life, basically. Like, it hasn't ever really gotten a redesign. So I'm curious to see, like, you know, as Apple...

allegedly redesigns all of its OSes that we'll see in a couple of weeks if the rumors are true. I wonder if any of that gets to CarPlay and how that affects this announcement. How it's going to look like. Do you want Apple to redesign software and all of a sudden your entire car looks different? I had that with Tesla. It sucked. That was a terrible experience to have your car all of a sudden get redesigned and all of a sudden you can't find your defroster anymore. So I...

I think this is fun. This is interesting. I'm curious to see where else it goes. And I'm glad that Apple is putting a lot of work into car play. And it seems like I'm glad that they are willing to walk back some of the ambition and hubris they have with that original design to actually work with automakers instead of just fighting them with everything. So we'll see if anybody actually ever, you know, adopts this in a car that I ever want to own. Um,

Although, if I end up having to buy an Aston Martin to test out my app in CarPlay... You'll suffer through. I guess I'll get that DB12 for my work. It's a work expense. Sorry, it only comes on the SUVs. No, it doesn't. So far. So far. So far, it's just on this one SUV. Who would buy that SUV? Who would...

Who says, I want a Aston Martin and looks at that and says, I want that? The best-selling Porsche is their SUV. Never forget. Yeah, but Porsche is at least a little bit more of a common brand and a little bit less expensive. But they're sportier than Aston Martin is what I'm getting at. But if you're buying an Aston Martin, you're buying an iconic look more than you're buying raw, sheer numbers. I would almost guarantee you that they sell more of their stupid SUV. Oh, God. That's so sad.

That's the world we live in. I agree. Here's from nine to five Mac. Here is supposedly the list of car makers that had pledged to support what was then known as next gen car play from 2022 Land Rover, Lincoln, Audi, Volvo, Honda, Nissan, Ford, Porsche, Jaguar, Acura, Polestar, Infinity and Renault. And Mercedes was on the list. But Mercedes has since come out and said, no, hell no, we're not doing that. We talked about the Mercedes CEO saying we do not want Apple taking over.

our cars and obviously Aston Martin has actually shipped it even though they weren't on the list so from this 2022 list how many of these people are still pledging to do support what is now known as CarPlay Ultra we don't know I'm not sure Apple is saying but yeah this it's been a long time for a single car company to actually produce a product with this because things happen slowly in the car industry and it's not a very good test bed because so few of these will sell and it's not representative of the overall market but

Yeah, I kind of agree with Marco that I don't want all my cars to look like Apple stuff, mostly because I don't think I don't particularly like how, for example, any of the Apple instrument cluster things work. And one of the things I choose a car based on is the

whether I like the interior and the software. And in some ways, CarPlay can help. Like, oh, I love everything about this car except for the inside, except for the screens. But I don't have to worry about that because when I get them with my iPhone, they'll all be replaced with Apple thing and I like that. But I would prefer to choose a car where I like everything about it as it comes out of the box and then just let me put a rectangle on the screen with my phone. But we are all at the whims of the market. As I well know, as someone who prefers stick shift sedans, sometimes the world moves on without you.