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Apple May Ditch Internal AI Siri, Nothing Headphone (1) and Phone (3), Grammarly AI Work Suite

2025/7/3
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Primary Technology

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Jason Aten
技术作者和评论家,Primary Tech Show 联合主持人,专注于技术趋势和产品评论。
S
Stephen Robles
技术内容创作者、播客主持人和YouTube 视频制作人,专注于苹果产品和视频编辑软件。
Topics
Stephen Robles: 我观看了约翰·奥利弗关于AI Slop的节目,节目中重述了我们在节目中讨论过的内容。我看到越来越多的人,包括老年人,容易被AI生成的内容欺骗。我甚至自己也被AI视频欺骗过,这让我很生气。我对AI视频的未来感到担忧,因为它们会变得越来越逼真。虽然很多人能够识别AI视频,但主要是年轻群体。 Jason Aten: 我认为AI生成的内容确实具有欺骗性,尤其是在社交媒体上。我们需要提高媒体素养,以便更好地识别虚假信息。

Deep Dive

Chapters
John Oliver's segment on AI-generated media highlights how easily fooled people are by AI videos. The hosts discuss their own experiences with convincing AI videos and express concern about the future as AI-generated content improves.
  • John Oliver's segment on AI-generated media highlights how easily fooled people are by AI videos.
  • AI videos are increasingly fooling people, even for a few seconds.
  • The younger demographics seem to be more adept at recognizing AI videos.

Shownotes Transcript

Translations:
中文

I can't just sit here and do nothing. That's all I've ever done. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. A grab bag of topics today like Grammarly acquiring the email app Superhuman. John Oliver had a segment about AI Slot, probably because he listens to this show. Nothing announced their Headphone 1 and Phone 3, their first flagship.

Microsoft has some serious layoffs. Apple might be ditching its internal AI efforts and a ton more. This episode is brought to you exclusively by you, the members who support us directly. And we have even more benefits we're going to talk about in this episode.

I'm one of your hosts, Steven Robles, and joining me as always, my friend Jason Aten. How's it going, Jason? It's good. It's finally not hotter than Florida, so that's good here in Michigan. The world has reached equilibrium. It was pretty humid in here. No one cares, but it was very humid in my office, my shed. I did have to run the air conditioning, which feels weird when it's only 65 outside, but... Get at it. Now you're just bragging. I'm just saying I had to run the air conditioning because it was humid, not because it was...

I'm just a weird. I was like, couldn't breathe in here. So anyway, that's a welcome to Florida. 10 months. I'm coming to Florida in like three weeks. Wait, really? Yeah. We're going to be in Orlando. I think we actually kind of talked about this, but we're going to, we're going to be in Orlando for a week for soccer.

We'll have to figure out what we're doing for the podcast, but I figure I'll just be sitting in a hotel lobby somewhere with a microphone in a corner. Maybe we could finally come and record in person after so many times of trying to do that. Live from the show floor recording. I'll drive over to Orlando. Does Apple have a studio somewhere in Orlando that we could use? Do they have an Apple store? Apple, I know you're listening. 100%.

Open a studio this week so we can record in Orlando. I talked to Ben Cave a couple weeks ago about the Apple podcast thing. I'm going to send him an email and be like, he won't know who I am, but I'm going to send him an email and be like, hey man, can you set up a pop-up podcast studio for us in Orlando?

Listen, that's a free marketing idea. Pop up Apple Podcast Studios, which this is not part of the rundown, but Apple's now on threads. The official Apple account is now on threads. Oh, I did not actually know that. Yeah, and people were like, oh, Apple's now on threads.

And I posted, listen, Apple Podcasts has been on threads for like a year, over a year, but they've not posted a thing. It's like just totally blank. And then someone from 9to5Mac was like, yeah, same thing on X. Apple has never posted. And I was like, what? Yeah, they don't. They don't post. They just run ads. They just run ads. There's not a single post on the at Apple X account. And I'm like, oh, okay.

okay well never mind nope no reason to get excited which tells you they must have some kind of a deep something because most people if you run an ad you post something and then you boost that post on right x or whatever but apple's like no we just mainline these things we just see them right right into the deep veins

Have you seen the meme now where people are like just a little something to take the edge off and they're like holding their what would be a cigarette, but they're holding like random things. Like they'll hold like a pro camera or they'll hold like a mozzarella stick. I have not, but I did start seeing everywhere. I don't know why. When I stopped drinking Diet Coke regularly, I started seeing how like apparently people used to call those like the

They pull out the something cigarette from the fridge. Like a Diet Coke in the afternoon is like having a cigarette or something like that. Oh, interesting. Well, I posted a meme on my threads account about what I did for something to take the edge off. So I'll just, I won't spoil it. I'm so scared right now. Do you know what the movie quote was from? I just can't sit here and do nothing. It's all I've ever done. It's got to be that one creepy Pixar movie. What's it called?

It is a Pixar movie. It's a super weird one, too. It's with the robot guy who goes up to the spaceship. If you don't know the name of this movie... Yes. I was going to say... What do you mean creepy? WALL-E's not creepy. Dystopian. That's a better word. Yeah, dystopian. You can't argue it's not dystopian. No, no. It's definitely dystopian. It is... It's not creepy. Some people's favorite, which I don't understand because Up is definitely the best Pixar movie, but it's... We don't... This...

Is that going to be our bonus content? Are we going to do a MOTS crossover and talk about best Pixar movies? No, this just needs to be the next MOTS episode, which we haven't released one in months. And so we just need to argue about Pixar movies. I have noticed that, by the way. Do a tier list of the Pixar movies. There you go. I just gave you some. We'll do Pixar movies. Okay, let's talk about technology. I know this is not a movie podcast. Everyone's excited. Oh, but listen, last week...

I said we didn't have any five-star reviews, and I asked everybody to leave some, and everybody showed up. Because now we have like one, two, three, four, we have seven, five. Some of you were creating like extra accounts just to leave. We appreciate it. We appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. So five-star review shout-outs from Apple Podcast. Josh Murphy from the USA says loves the host and the other guy. Neither of us are named there. I appreciate it. Tiz Weed from the USA for their favorite tech show. PMT Apple from the USA loves the Daily Update Podcast, which is a benefit for members. I'll talk about that in a second.

Pineapple667, I don't know if I already did this one, but battery percentage on, pencil towards volume buttons, phone dominant pocket. He's a mix match of both. Yeah, he's one of those weird Wesleyan Calvinists.

Oh my word. I don't have time to get into that. Pixar, no. Okay. See you, Sid1969 from the USA. Had very kind words about the show. Thank you. Nesser900, battery percentage on left front pocket. Lost both on that. P.94 from Canada. He said, my downloads go to my desktop, but only since I heard the other guy do it. I tried it and I find it easier to manage. And then he says, sorry, Steven.

People feel so personally like, I'm sorry, man. I'm so sorry. You're doing it wrong, but I'm so sorry. I can't do it. Here's five stars. It's okay. It's all right. It's only wrong if you put the Apple Pencil on it. I actually should be clear on this. I do. There are a lot of things, because I checked, and I have a lot of stuff in my downloads folder. There are plenty of things that just go to my downloads folder. But if it's a thing I'm downloading to use right at the moment, it goes to my desktop. Yeah.

Sure, if I'm manually choosing and it is something I'm going to use immediately, yeah, I'll do that to my desktop. But the default setting, like in Safari, downloads go to... Is there a default setting in Safari? Absolutely. Yeah, if you go to Safari, you go to settings, then you go to the whatever it is, general... File download location. General file download location. What is your set as? Ask for each download.

Every time? I don't know. That's just what it says. I guess I could change. Literally, I didn't know this setting existed. I'm changing it to desktop. This is what the whole conversation was about. The default. No, every time a download pops up, I just pick the desktop. So, Jason, then set the desktop as default. Well, I also don't use Safari.

You know this. I use Brave. This is not a surprise. I thought you just used Brave to record here. No, that's what you do. Yeah, that's what I do. I use Brave for almost everything. Wait a minute.

I got to change all these topics. We got to have a whole different show. Let's save it for either. Hold on. Let's save that for bonus content. Yes, personal. Or personal content, whatever. Yeah, or bonus content. I don't even know. Wait a minute. It's going to be a personal bonus. What in the world? I thought you were a default Safari user. No. What is happening?

Anyway, this show's off the rails. It's already off the rails. It's summer. It's fine. It's a summer show. Listen, as we record, tomorrow is Independence Day here on July 4th. Don't lose a finger. Listen, okay? Okay. I am going to go on... Can you buy fireworks in Michigan, or are they illegal? I don't know if they're illegal, but they're everywhere, so... Exactly. So, you know, in Publix here in Florida, you can get these prepackaged fireworks, and they're pretty...

They all just like spurt sparks. You know what I mean? They're just like, you know, they don't go in the air, but they have all these like tents around Florida as well. Like right off the highway in shady corners of town. There's these tents that say fireworks where you get like,

like big ones that go off. I'm going to try... I've never done it before, but I'm going to try and go to one of those tents today and get some real ones. Yeah, we have those tents everywhere, but we had them when it was illegal. But according to Search Lab's AI overview, consumer fireworks are generally legal and can be used on private property with permission. I don't know if I believe it, though, because this is AI, so it could be fake. You never know. All right, speaking of AI, thank you for that transition. Speaking of, we've talked about AI and media literacy the past couple weeks a lot, and I was watching the...

last week tonight with John Oliver because he has a whole episode called AI slop and basically rehashes a lot of what we have talked about and said on this show so that's why I assume John Oliver listens to the show yeah and that's where I learned all of this but there is a segment and I'll link the YouTube video in the show notes where he plays videos from like tick-tock and Instagram or whatever of people's parents and grandparents falling for AI and

So these people are seeing videos on TikTok. They're exclaiming how amazing this is or how cute this donkey is. And their kids are having to say, listen, this is AI generated. And they are in disbelief when they are confronted with the fact that they're watching an AI video. And they're basically just...

It just exemplifies what we've been talking about. Like increasingly, like this is just, it's fooling people. And there was even, I was so mad. I was on Instagram reels last night and I saw a video and for the first three seconds, I thought it was real. And even that made me mad.

because it was someone like, I don't know, supposedly jumping off a boat and making a big splash like in a lake, something that you would just, okay, well, this is like a fail video that you would just see during the summertime or whatever. And so I'm watching the video and I'm like, all right, let me see what happens. And then once they hit the water, like it does, it went bizarre, like as AI videos do, but it fooled me for like the first three seconds. And I was, I was ticked because I was like, I don't, I don't like that. I was fooled even for a few seconds. Yeah.

And so, yeah, I never fall for AI videos, but if I did, would I know? Right. Well, if you fall for an AI video, the calls coming from inside the house, you know what I mean? Like, you don't, you don't know a couple of mixed metaphors there, but yeah. Yeah, I know. I just, you know, but anyway, I am.

I am not excited for the future as AI videos get better and better. And now I see people will post videos, you know, because there's accounts on Instagram and TikTok that just share audacious clips, but they're faceless accounts. It's not like people. And so there'll be clips that are AI, and you'll see in the comments, the first few comments are like, whoa, that was amazing. And then a hundred comments underneath that are like, this is AI. This is AI. And so...

People recognize it, but I think it's the younger demographics. And I was just surprised. If you watch that little segment on YouTube, it's like how many minutes in? It's 18 minutes in showing the people reacting to it. But yeah, it's pretty wild. But what you should do is watch the first two and a half minutes of the video and then skip to that because you will just be blown away two and a half minutes in.

AI slot. That's what it is. Speaking of AI though, you use an email app that was recently acquired which was Superhuman. So Superhuman is an email app supposedly that uses AI for stuff. You can speak to that because you actually use it. But Grammarly, the grammar proofreading app, acquired it. And they're trying to build like an AI powered productivity suite. Grammarly trying to expand it to more things like that. So you as a user, I don't

I don't know. How did you feel about this? It's interesting. First of all, I love Superhuman and I really like the people behind Superhuman. Raul Vora, the founder, I've interviewed him a couple times on stage for different things and I've had him on a different podcast. And so like they're super sharp people. Superhuman has always had the reputation. It's like

It's kind of an interesting product because it's the email app that I think when it came out was like $20 a month and it was like insane. Right. But it was really geared toward, it's like superpower user email. It only works without like in Gmail, like work accounts. And it was meant to be like, help. How do you help?

CEOs and founders get through their email as quickly as possible, right? And they've added a ton of great features and I use it. So disclosure, like I don't pay for a superhuman account, right? They gave me one when I started interviewing them and reviewing them and they've been gracious enough to let me keep using it. So I just wanted to say that, like, I didn't want to be like, I wanted to be clear about that. But I really do think it's a great product. I also use Grammarly, right?

All the time, right? I have a paid Grammarly subscription. Maybe I could get them to give me a free Grammarly. I don't know. We'll see. Well, it didn't go the other way. Like Superhuman didn't buy. I don't know exactly how I feel about this. And my reason is simply...

If the press release talked about like Grammarly wants to become an AI productivity platform and now Superhuman is going to help expand that. And I'm like, no, Grammarly should be the thing that pops up in Google Docs when I type something wrong. It's really good at that. And in fact, Grammarly has...

There are some things about Grammarly I don't love. It has started to get more aggressive about offering you rewording suggestions when you write something. And I'm like, I don't need you to do that. Like I do this literally for a living. It doesn't mean I don't make mistakes. I want you to catch the mistakes. Catch the mistakes. I don't want you to tell me that I should reword the, you know, this phrase because of whatever. It's like, no, thank you. And so, and you can turn those things off. But the bummer is every time they add a new feature like that, it just comes on by default. So,

I'm hopeful though, that this is like a, an Apple beats thing where like you can just buy beats, right? Like you can just buy them. There's still beats things. And so if what you want is big giant, you know, baller headphones, then you can just buy those. Right. But if what you want is whatever. So like, I'm hopeful that superhuman continues to be superhuman in a lot of ways. And that if you have, but I'm one thing that Graham really will benefit from is, is

superhuman has done a really good job of integrating in an interesting way. AI. I think I wrote about this. I should find out. I was going to, I was going to ask you as a user, do you find like the AI features of superhuman are worthwhile? Yeah.

Absolutely. I did not write about this. I'm going to now. I should have because it was like, it was, I, when they were rolling this stuff out, I had a conversation with the CEO and he, he gave me a demo. We happened to both, I think it was when I was in Portugal last year, um, rolled it out and just like walked me through the changes that they were making. But you can, I could just right now type in, um, to,

to the little AI ask feature. When is my flight? When is my next flight? And it'll go through my emails and it'll provide me with a summary. It'll show me links to all my emails. Or I could just say like, who sent me the itinerary for this trip, right? Like I can just ask it natural. Being able to search your email and ask it questions with natural language is so much better than trying to figure out who sent this

what was the subject line? Is my email powerful enough? And I also use Spark because again, I can't use every email account that I have because I'm weird and have 17 of them. I can't use them all in Superhuman. So in Spark, and the one thing that Spark is...

well, there's two things sparks not good about one. You can tell it where to archive things, right? You can say, when I hit archive, this is the folder it goes into. And for some reason in my iCloud account, it changes it roughly every week. And so I go to search things and it's only searching whatever it changed itself to. And none of my emails are there. So that's bad. But even if it's pointed to the right thing, it's not great about like catching a word inside of an email, but superhuman is insane. It's just so good. It,

Honestly, I would say this. It's for people who...

get a ton of incoming that they need to be able to quickly triage. It is, it is fabulous for that because it gives you like, it gives you the split inbox view, which, you know, Apple has this cute little priority receipts, promotions, whatever thing superhuman. I can literally be like, put everything from Apple in one split inbox, put everything that's a news article in one split inbox. And then when I go through my email, I only look at,

In the categories that I actually need to be dealing with at that time. Is it good enough? So I was looking at the pricing and I've looked at superhuman several times because I loved the design of it. Yeah. It was looking amazing app, but I'd always been, I've never actually done it because the pricing is like $30 a month.

for, you know, like a personal account yearly, I guess it's $300 a year or whatever. So would you pay for it if you weren't given it? The only reason I wouldn't is because all of my personal emails in Gmail, I mean, sorry, not Gmail is in iCloud. And so I'd still have to have a second email if I could. And I've asked them because iCloud now has

Quote work, although you want to know the funny thing about iCloud thinking, trying to position itself as like, hey, put a custom domain in here. Now you can use iCloud for work. No one who makes work email accounts thinks that's real. What they're saying is people who are doing work email are not using iCloud mail.

They're using either Gmail or they're using Outlook for that. Or Fastmail, like we are. I use Fastmail. iCloud Mail also, they do not have as robust filters. So one of the things I have set up, and I've talked about it many times, is a filter like anytime the words unsubscribe or manage my email preferences...

are in the body text of an email that immediately goes to a folder called newsletters and it skips my inbox. And that gets actually rid of a lot of spam. You can't set that filter up in iCloud mail because they don't have a filter for body text. You can filter subject, you can filter who sent it to you or who you're sending to, but you can't filter by body text. And so for that reason alone, I had tried the custom domains in iCloud. The other issue is you can only do a maximum of five. And you need like 23 or something. I need like 23. So that was another issue.

But I'd always been curious about superhuman. It always felt a little steep. My thing is, so they're saying in their press release, they want to build the future of productivity. And in the actual superhuman press release, which I'll link in the show notes, they're talking about how it's going to be a future of agentic work, or the agentic future of work. And they want to build this productivity suite. I guess my other question is, do we need...

Another productivity suite, because we have Microsoft, which maybe they're not doing so great, but we'll get to that. You have Microsoft that's used by, I'm curious, but some large percentage of enterprise customers. Then you have Google Workspace. Again, I think the rest of people use it. And then, you know, five people use iWorkSuite, including me, because I love pages, keynote and numbers.

But like they're going to try and compete with Google and Microsoft, both of which have AI features. I mean, Microsoft has Copilot. Google has Gemini. Google is pushing hard to insert their AI features. It seems like this pretty uphill battle. Like, do we do we need a third one? So here's an interesting thing about what Superhuman is doing with some AI. You can tell it to basically read all my emails and figure out my tone.

And when you get an email, you can just write in line. I think it's a command J.

uh respond to this email and decline their offer but thank them and it will do that in your tone like and it's good like it it feels like you wrote the email and so if you are a power user in that way it is super super useful they did also recently add i have not used this because i don't have anyone like on a team plan with superhuman but they added my other favorite feature from spark

which is that you can have inline comments about emails with people on your team. So you could get an email and you could just share the email with me and you can do this in spark and you can now do it in superhuman without actually having to forward the email to me because then I could just leave you. Basically it's like having Slack in email.

Right. Hey, well, actually, why don't you just we don't want them as a sponsor. Why don't you just say no or something like that? Or I could then just reply to that email from myself, but I would have all of the information in there. So for teams and stuff, but so you can imagine like it's target is high level professionals.

Those are features that are just save you so much time. And I will, I will say that superhuman saves me a ton of time because it's like, I'm sitting down looking for ideas. Well, let me just go look through all the pitches and I just have a, have a split inbox for all of those things. Or I need to find that, that travel information for that trip I'm going on.

I can just go through real quickly and be like, can you give me all the details about my trip to Orlando? And it'll go through all my email, find that stuff, show me a little overview. And then if I need to click, it gives me all the sources. So would it be worth it?

If I could get iCloud mail in it, I would 100% pay for it. So does it only work with Google and Outlook? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh, never mind. I know. It's a bummer. I know. That's the only bummer. But again, that's because they just know their audience. And I think probably expanding that to other places is harder. And I don't know for sure how email works. I just know you click send and it goes to somebody.

I imagine though that they're able to do things because of the way like the Gmail API and the outlook or exchange, whatever works that they may not be able to do with iCloud because like spark has to essentially download a copy of each of your email. We talked about this a couple of weeks ago with the thing and maybe superhuman just doesn't want to do that. And especially did you do the ACE AI stuff? You have to be able to access the server. So I don't know. I think the real reason they haven't made it accessible for like fast mail is

Though I wouldn't be surprised if fast mail is somewhere on their list. I don't know anything, but it is a, it is more targeted towards work uses. So yeah,

all right well this is this show didn't have a sponsor i feel like we we just gave superhuman a free sponsorship so i'm sending them the episode i'll stop you like hey guys episode retroactively we're going to charge them for this but anyway i'm curious i'm curious if they do it i mean if they support fast mail i would i would try it because that's i'm not moving back to gmail well and the other thing they do a really good job of is when you get an email from someone it'll show you like their social links there if they have a bio on like

X or LinkedIn or whatever. It'll show you a summary of who the person is. Like it just does such a great job. Yeah.

That's pretty slick. Oh, man. Well, now I want to try it. I'm not going to move to Google for it. All right, we'll see. Maybe Graham will bring more stuff. All right, let's talk about some gadgets. Nothing had a big event in London where they announced Nothing Headphone 1, their first over-the-ear pair of headphones. They already had the in-ear earbuds, but now they have the over-the-ear ones. And yeah, there's a review on The Verge. This is from Andrew Marino.

The Verge gave it a 7. That has good sound, cheaper than other flagships because it's $300 as opposed to like AirPods Max $450. They said the folds flat but in a counterintuitive way, design isn't for everybody and the analog jack does not work without a battery which is the case for AirPods Max and the Sony XM6s and all that kind of stuff too. But the design is definitely, you know...

it's a bold design. It's like a transparent, like very much. Here's like the raw headphone thing. I want to try it. Pre-orders open July 4th tomorrow. And again, 300 bucks. We just see, I'm,

Sony Ace actually sent me their headphones again. Well, I bought it to review when they first came out and I wasn't crazy about it. And then they finally have good support for moving audio from the Sonos Arc to the headphones. So they sent me a pair. So I'm going to try those. But I think I'm going to compare them to these. I recently tried the XM6s. And so we'll see. I'm going to see how they compare. But I kind of like how they are. They're different. I kind of like nothing's aesthetic. I don't know. I...

I understand that if you are going to introduce a new headphone product, this is sort of like they managed to be a lot more distinct than Sonos did. I think you said Sony, Sony Ace, but I think you meant the Sonos. No, no Sonos. Okay, Sonos. They just look like Sonys. The Sonos ones basically could have easily been introduced by a lot of other companies and Bose. These do not. These kind of have a vibe of the old Sonos.

Bowers and Wilkins that I had only you can't see in them. The ones that I was going to try to pull them out, but they're in the bottom drawer and that's going to be bad. But I just am not going to try. But like what I mean by that is that there's a lot of flat surfaces, right? They feel like they just are pushed flat against you. I don't like the nothing vibe is just not for me. And the reason it's not that I don't think it looks good. If I put headphones on,

In any scenario where I put headphones on, the last thing I want is for someone to be noticing my headphones. And I definitely don't want someone to ask me, what are they? Right? It's like, I put these on because I'd like to be by myself right now. And if you put those on, the nothing headphones, it's like,

People are going to be like, hey man, can I just ask you about those headphones? Hey, what are those? I don't want that. Do you? No, I don't want that. That's why I don't wear Vision Pros on an airplane, to be honest. Listen, I got the Nothing 3A a while ago. I never made a video about it because I didn't really get a chance to use it full-time and I didn't want to give it a short change. But I don't know. I liked it. I think this looks cool. It looks different. And the Nothing UI...

It's actually, you know, it's interesting. Listen, I give nothing credit for being very different. You know, they're trying to be distinct, do their own thing. You know, whether the headphones are good or not, I'm going to get them to review. But yeah, I don't want people asking me about my headphones for sure. But I don't know. I see, you know, when you talk about distinctiveness,

I see like Sony XM headphones and Sonos Aces out in the wild and they are very indistinct. They're very like, yeah, those are just whatever. I do see AirPods Maxes and while they are not very, you know, wildly different looking, they are distinct looking. Like you can spot AirPods Maxes from pretty far away and they are a unique look. So if anything, I mean, nothing will be distinct as well, but I think even more divisive maybe or even stranger is the Nothing 3, which is,

their new flagship phone. They're saying it's the first true flagship phone. It has a wild camera layout. It has like the nothing transparent aesthetic again, but they've gone away from the glyphs, like the little light up lines on the back of the phone. And they now have this dot matrix screen on the back, which can do various things. It can do things like a stopwatch, a timer. You can play spin the bottle, which of course that's what everybody uses with their phone. Yeah.

that's what everybody uses but you can even do things like if you're going to take a picture it'll show you a dot matrix preview of what the camera sees to help you frame it up which honestly might be the most useful feature for something like this to be able to frame up a photo with a back camera um i kind of want to try this as well it's 800 bucks so it's cheaper than other flagships but i mean it is a distinctive look i mean this is like

Yeah. Well, and to their credit, I got to be like what I should say. The look is not for me. But if you are going to be a new smartphone or headphone entry in 2025, you have to do something different because every Android phone essentially looks the same. Right. Like I bet you most people may be looking at the back a little bit, but the average person can't tell you the difference, especially looking at the front between a pixel and a galaxy.

And maybe not even an iPhone. It's like, you're just looking for, is there a hole punch or is there a dynamic Island or whatever? Well, and that's why I think almost the camera layout is the more distinctive feature among phones because you can spot a Samsung galaxy phone with it. Like three in a row camera. I feel like that's pretty distinctive. And even through a case, you know, you'll see the camera. And so you have the iPhone triangle camera layout. You have the galaxy straight line, and now you have the nothing camera.

Whatever that is. I mean, it looks a lot actually like apples. It's just not surrounded by a little mesa of glass. Yeah, but it's like weird. It's like, it's like not even in line. Well, yeah, everything about that phone is weird. Let's just be clear.

I don't know. Like I'm, I'm down for cool phones, but it does make you feel like you should be able to rip one of those out and put in a bigger lens or something like that looks modular, which I guess is what they're going for. But there's like a pull tab right there. Yeah. There's like a little red, like, well, no, but like the right above it and above those two lenses, that looks like you'd stick something in and pull that out. Like, I don't know. It does. I don't know. It looks interesting. I might try to get one. I don't know. I'm not in the nothing cool crowd. I see a bunch of Apple creators and influencers and they get invited to nothing events. I'm like, how do I get invited? Yeah.

I sent him an Instagram DM. Never heard back, but anyway, nothing. Okay. So I'm going to try and get those, especially the headphones. I'll review those. Zuckerberg, he's going full in on the AI. There was a lot of news earlier this week about the pay packages that meta was offering to AI researchers that are coming onto meta, but meta debuted a super intelligence group.

And Mark Zuckerberg is saying that this is trying to develop AI that will complete tasks as well or better than humans. The new group is called Meta Super Intelligence Labs. It's being led by Alexander Wang, former CEO of Scale AI. Didn't he come from OpenAI, Alexander Wang? Hmm.

he's pretty young. I don't know. He's, and he's not an AI researcher. He's like a manager, but he's former CEO of data labeling startup at AI. Okay. Right. And so he, I mean, but he's not very old. He's like in his twenties and he scale AI is essentially a company that hires lots of low wage people in like third world countries to literally label data. Like,

this is a picture of a fish, right? This is a article about this. Like that's literally what they do so that they're basically –

uh, padding the record, so to speak, like for all of this stuff that's going into these LLM models, they're telling that they're giving it extra context, but that's a hugely manual process, like enormously manual process. That's not why Meta is basically hiring him and paying for it. It's because he can scale up. No one pun intended, like an effort. Like he has the management piece as opposed to the research. He's not an AI researcher. Gotcha.

Well, and meta said they're going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars with a B on AI projects and research in the years to come. And, uh,

it'll do things, you know, not actually saying specifically what all this money and AI development will do, but it's going to be amazing. Apparently one other interesting, I mean, now that you mentioned kind of like, but outsourcing to the third world countries, I actually have a friend who started working a work from home job, like a completely online. He's never like talked to a human being at this company, but he basically works for this like AI prompt reviewing type company. And,

And basically what he does is like he goes in and there's a list of projects and he can choose one. And they try to obfuscate what LLM they're working on, like whether it's Gemini or whether it's Lama. But he's like, you can kind of tell sometimes like which one you're working on. And basically he will either be in charge of like writing, like he will either write prompts or write projects.

evaluation metrics for a prompt, like how you can evaluate the answers to see if it's good or not. And thirdly, he like other tasks might be to evaluate someone's evaluation of a prompt, say like, how good was this evaluation of the prompt and its answer from the LLM? And like, he explained me for a while, like this, what he does. And this is like total contract to only get paid for like the work you do in

But there's tons of work available. And I imagine this is like one company that Meta and Google and all these people contract with to help better the prompts and train the models. And I'm sure there's probably dozens, if not hundreds of these companies doing it. And so it was an interesting look at like, this is going on in the background and like, you know, you don't really hear about it.

but that's where some of it is coming from. Like these people being paid hundreds of millions of dollars, like they're not doing like that kind of like granular stuff there. I mean, I imagine doing something higher. I don't even know. I don't even know what. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think there's a lot of this that goes on behind the scenes. I think the interesting piece is like,

Why does Medicare so strongly about this that they're willing to do that? And I think because remember, it was like two years ago that it was like we were all going to be in the metaverse right now. Like you and I are going to be recording this in the metaverse. They literally changed the name of the company. Right. To Meta. Because that was the big thing. So I think there's some degree of Zuckerberg knows there's going to be something and he doesn't know what it is. So it's like this seems to be the thing. So I better do this because there are really only two companies.

obvious reasons that AI should matter to meta, at least that I can think of listeners, the other guy at primary tech. FM, email me. That's a real email address. You can email me. It is. It's a really, but one is obviously their, their ad engine, right? AI can, can give them the ability. I think that Mark Zuckerberg calls it infinite creative, where essentially you can just say, Hey,

I'm a shoe company and I'd like to run ads targeting people who will buy my shoes and meta will do it all. Like they'll just come up with the ads and they can literally serve every person, a different ad they can, they can test. I mean, the problem with testing ads right now is you have to come up with a number of ads to test, right? And that gets really expensive. But if the AI can just generate them,

It'll all be AI slop, but that's how you figure out which AI slop converts the most customers, right? So that's one thing. And Meta certainly does not want to be at the mercy of Google, for example, who's its biggest advertising competitor or OpenAI, which doesn't really have an advertising business, but maybe will. And obviously Meta's thing is we'll spend billions and billions and billions of dollars on this so we can control it. They don't want to be paying somebody else billions of dollars.

But the other reason is simply they have been left out of every platform revolution. Yeah.

right like they don't own any of the platforms they operate on except for maybe vr but like it's just a gaming thing no one cares right and they're the smallest player in the gaming they may be the largest player in vr games but that's a pretty small thing they're the smallest and people don't distinguish between like vr gaming is still just gaming right it's not a separate thing so you're if someone's going to play a game it's like do i put on the quest or do i just

pull out the controller to the PlayStation or the Xbox or the Switch 2 or whatever. So that is, I think, the reason that AI is so important. They're like, if there is going to be a default player, which there will be, and it's probably going to be OpenAI, but if there's going to be one, we're going to try to be...

that option so that we aren't at the mercy of someone else but that is a lot of money to spend just for that okay so three things this is a wide article and it says that meta's new super intelligence lab is offering top tier research talent pay packages of up to 300 million dollars over four years yep how do i convince my kids to become an ai researcher anyway uh so that's like a lot of money with over 100 million dollars in the first year two things to what you were saying

I do think Mark Zuckerberg is still mad about losing out on the mobile race. You know, Facebook tried to make a phone. I think they partnered with HTC or HP. Uh, there was a Facebook phone for like a month and that, that didn't see, I still think Mark Zuckerberg, you can only call people that you were friends with. Yeah.

He's still, I think he's still sore about losing the mobile race. These wild efforts for super intelligence and billions of dollars. It does feel like Zuckerberg is saying to himself, I will not lose this race. I don't know if he's going to lose or win because like you're saying, I feel like opening eyes pretty big at start, but three, I forgot about the ads part. And I'm glad you said that because I actually created a Facebook ad for the first time in a while. Recently, I had the, the reason to do that.

And even creating an ad on Facebook right now, it was astounding to me

how many times during the process Facebook wanted me to create AI versions of my creative, like the photo or video. Like again, I haven't done it in several years and just doing it a few days ago, it was like, I gave it an image, I gave it a video and then there's a pop-up of like, here's nine versions of your creative that we can test, see which one performs the best and then we'll use that one. Do you want to use these AI things?

And they were gross. Like they didn't look great. Some of them tried to make AI versions of me in photos. And I'm like, that looks bizarre. I don't want any of that. But you had like I had to actively tell it, don't use any of these. Don't stop. Like, don't use any of this. Don't generate AI. And it was so clear, like aggressively trying to push that on the advertising side.

And maybe for a product-based business where there's not necessarily people needing to be in the images, like if you were just advertising sunscreen or whatever, and they can put your sunscreen bottle in 10 different scenes on the beach, at the hotel, by the pool, maybe you would be more inclined to use those kinds of AI-generated things. But I've also heard from friends, just last night, we were talking to somebody, and a friend was like, I just hate how much AI ads I see on Facebook now. And even just general public,

Not tech savvy or just like, yeah, it just feels like a lot of garbage, like a lot of AI slop in the ads and just having the experience of creating an ad. I was like, well, yeah, there's a lot of it because most people who are either inexperienced or not creative or don't have a graphic designer on their team, like

It's free labor for them. They're like, oh, I can get all this creative for free because Meta is just generating it. So like you're saying, I do think, as always, advertising is the reason why companies will spend billions of dollars. But I don't know if it's not great now. And I don't know, I'm still leery of the time when AI gets so good, it's indistinguishable from the real world. And now we have ads that are just

Is the AI generated? I don't know. I'm still not sure how I feel about it. Yeah, and the thing is, they definitely want you to just do the AI thing because they want to eliminate all friction to do that. And they don't care about how...

They only care about converting because that's what you're going to pay for. And you only really care about converting because that's what you're paying for. So they don't care how many people see ads that don't convert. They just care. Because if they show you a thousand ads and you convert 10 people, that was 10 customers you didn't have before. Even if 990 saw terrible ads, right? So it's just literally at their scale, it is just a numbers game.

So for a small like I totally get for a small business who doesn't have a marketing team or whatever, if you could tell me because the ad creation for Facebook is so obtuse, like it's so many steps. It's so laborious to try and create an ad that goes across all the platforms.

and like just formatting things in the right ratios like it's it's a lot of work and so if you don't have someone dedicated to doing that this is why like i have friends whose entire business is just helping companies run facebook ads because it is really a complicated process if they could simplify with ai so much where a small business owner can be like um i have 300 bucks uh make an ad of my products and it can like look at the photos your facebook page is already posted it can generate all the ads based on that content even the tech like even the text like

When I was creating the ad, it gave me like nine different text options. Like all I did was give it two sentences, like for the actual post caption. And they were like, here's nine other text options. Do you want to try these? And we'll show it to random people and see which one works the best. And honestly, I did, I did choose one or two of the text options because they were pretty good. I was like, sure, I guess we'll see that. So like, like everything.

from the image the video to the text they'll be like we got we'll take care of this for you yeah you just give us the money we'll show this ad to people and if it works i mean yeah it'd be hard to be mad at meta for doing it because if it works and small business owners are happy because they get to make ads easily and they still get traffic yeah i mean there it is yeah it's weird it's all weird anyway

Oh, it was weird. We live in a weird time, but listen, I'm glad we have the show to cover it. I'm so glad we can talk about weird things. Weird things. Unfortunate news. Microsoft, it was news that they're going to be laying off as many as 9,000 employees. There's a large chunk of them in the Xbox and gaming division. And so there's already been layoffs. I think earlier this summer, more are coming unclear. The breakdown of like how many of those 9,000 are in the gaming versus other parts of the company. But yeah,

Yeah. And that's a lot of people. That's a lot of people, right? You mean Microsoft? Yeah. And they just laid off 6,000 like not that long ago. So that's great. There's a weird trend happening right now that these large tech companies are laying off people. I'm not saying specifically that this is the case in this example with Microsoft. I want to be clear about that. But they're laying off people so that they have more money to invest in AI. Yeah.

It's not that they are laying off people because they want AI to replace what those people were doing. Just to be clear. It is because they are laying off people so that they have more money to buy NVIDIA servers, right? And build data centers and pay for training or inference or whatever. So...

Yeah. And apparently it's seriously hitting morale as close to sources that have given the verge and the Xbox boss, Phil Spencer. The reason for some of these layoffs they gave is to position gaming in Microsoft for enduring success and allow us to focus on strategic growth areas. Is that code for AI? No, no. What that, here's the thing, Steven, I don't want to go down too far of a rabbit hole, but I wrote an article this morning saying,

About the Del Monte company, the people that make like the canned corn, right? Their company is 139 years old. It's older than the Statue of Liberty and sliced bread. Like for real, it's been around a long time. Okay. It filed for bankruptcy.

And in the press release, the CEO said they're basically going to sell off the company. It's a chapter 11, which is a restructuring, not a chapter seven, which is a liquidation. But they're literally just trying to sell off all of its assets because they did the thing Peloton did during the pandemic. They're like, oh, people are buying canned food because no one can go out to restaurants.

Lots of people are buying way more food. We think that's going to continue forever. So they did made more of the stuff. And then people are like, no, we can go back outside. We don't need canned corn anymore. And also people are, they just missed it. Right. So they filed for bankruptcy and the CEO says, well,

in order to position the company for future long-term success, we're selling off all the parts of the company. Like that doesn't make any sense. And the same thing is true about what Phil Spencer's. I didn't even, thank you for showing the article. My point wasn't to derail us down the package thing. The point is CEOs just say things because it sounds good.

In order to like, think about how insulting that that would be to the people who read that letter in order to position, like to position gaming for enduring success. We don't want you here anymore. That is tough. That is tough. In order to position our, our canned corn company for future success, we're going to sell off all the parts. Well,

That doesn't make any, those two things don't go together. If you're going to, there's no long-term success. This is not, this is a fire sale. Like you're just selling off the company. Anyway, sorry. Didn't mean to go out. But I have a radar for when CEOs say these sort of things. And I'm like, that's good. Somebody told you that would sound good.

But one, I'm going to write about this. I got to write about CEO. Sorry. I got to write this down. I'm glad to give you two. I think that two article ideas. I want a running tally. Two article ideas from this episode. I've already forgot the first one though. Unfortunately, for my, for my, uh, kids be like for your longterm success, I'm going to kick you out of this house. For your longterm success. I need you to get a job and stop asking me for an allowance.

I guess the imperfect analogy, but that is for the Dell Monte company. Seems crazy. It's insane. Uh, wow. Okay. All right. Well, let's talk about some Apple stuff. Happier news. Although I'm going to complain about my Apple music playlist in a second. Uh, Apple recently celebrated 10 years of Apple music, which seems wild. Like, I mean, when I started with Apple and max, it was the iTunes store. And then of course, Apple music came. But so 10 years, Apple music has been around, which 2015 seems late. Hmm.

Well, they bought Beats in, what is it, 2011 or 2012, maybe? I can't remember exactly when they bought them. And then they turned Beats' streaming service into Apple Music later on. Time is so weird. That feels like...

2014. They bought Beats in 2014. So honestly, it wasn't that late because it was like a year later. Sheesh. That feels crazy to me. Anyway, so they're celebrating 10 years. There's a new Apple Music Studios in Los Angeles now. And they have a whole room dedicated to spatial audio, which looks amazing. I mean, if I'm... I would love a tour, Apple. I mean, I have a room like that too. It's actually my bathroom. It just echoes everywhere. This...

Okay. Pretty good. I want to know what this room does. Like, what is happening? Are there speakers in the walls? What is this thing hanging from the ceiling? I need to know. I need to know. What is happening in this room? Is there a toilet? That's all we need to know. Is this just the bathroom at Apple Music Studio?

oh i need to know uh so yes that's fun but with with this apple did like a replay all playlist in apple music for everybody so if you're an apple music user you can go just open the music app and it's like they're on the home tab or whatever it's like you'll replay all time is what it's called and i was i was so excited i'm like oh man i could see all like what songs have i played the most over the last 10 years or whatever and

And I immediately was so mad because all my home pods have screwed this up because all the music my kids have asked for to fall asleep to or to play whatever. That's all this playlist is. Couldn't use it. It was not. I just need a filter. Like, I wish Apple would say like only like, yes, make this playlist for me, but only the songs I've played from my phone. Like, don't count any other device or at least just.

you know, iPhone or why doesn't, if you turn on the, whatever the recognize your voice thing is with the home pods, why doesn't it only play from the Apple music account that that person has subscribed to? And listen, before everybody writes, I know that in the home app, you can go to the home pod settings and you can like choose which Apple ID is associated with which home pod. So when music is played, it goes to that Apple IDs history or whatever.

One, that feature wasn't available when I first got HomePods or at least my kids didn't have iCloud accounts to like assign it to them. So like those years are gone. But also I don't think it works. Like I've done that. Like I've made the HomePod in my kids rooms, their Apple IDs and stuff like that.

And I feel like this playlist still has their songs in it that they've played on those thoughts. So anyway, let me know if your, if your replay all was actually worthwhile, that'd be exciting. Mine is fine. I mean, it seems about right, but a lot of the, apparently, well, here's the thing still standing by Elton John. Is that number one? A hundred percent. No, it's not. But,

The problem is all of these songs are super old because we went, we listened to Apple music a lot. Then we did Spotify for a long time and we've just switched back to Apple music. So it's like, I haven't listened to that song in 12 years. Well, not 12 years. Cause Apple music, you know what I mean? Although I think some of this has got to be like from my iTunes history because some of these songs are like,

I have not listened to that that long. Well, I think the play, the play counts might carry over. Yeah. That's just what I'm saying. Some of these are like 15, 20 year old songs. I'm like, yeah. Okay. I still have like hundreds of playlists that I've, you know, created from iTunes days. And I'm like, I don't think, I don't think I'm ever going to actually clean that up. I'll just create a new playlist and they'll just be at the top. And I'll just always sort from most recent. I'm just going to ignore that tab. Just move on. Yeah, exactly.

One of the, so talking about Apple and AI, there was a report from Mark Gurman's Bloomberg or yeah, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. It is Mark Gurman's Bloomberg. Let's be honest. Freudian slip, I guess. I'll link the nine to five Mac article though. But basically Apple might be in negotiations with possibly open AI, possibly anthropic to power the voice assistant Siri and,

rather than trying to build their in-house model because they're just not getting it. And, you know, a lot of people were celebrating this like, yes, please just do this so it can be good faster.

I guess. I mean, again, I'll talk about it. I did the video about perplexity and how it was really good at parsing like my Apple Music requests and then it could play Apple Music and reminders and calendar events. So maybe that's the answer. I mean, right now, most of my requests just go to ChatGPT anyways because the voice assistant can't figure out like time between dates. But I don't know. It feels...

I don't know how that would work. Like if Apple partners with open AI and now we say like, well, chat GPT is just going to power the voice assistant on the iPhone. Is it just that request? We'll go through the open AI, LLM, parse it, and then work with Apple's hardware. And like,

I don't know. How would that work with on device? Well, okay. Don't overcomplicate it because what you're thinking of is the experience of using chat GPT versus the experience of using Siri. Think of it this way. Think about the experience of what LLM is going to power the experience of Siri. Okay. As opposed to right now, the reason it's complicated sort of in our brain is that you can use Siri to just send stuff to chat GPT. But I don't think that that's what this is. I think what they're saying is,

instead of building our own models, right? The stuff that's on the phone or like whatever we are exploring, just using it. So they would just be baking in those models. I think, I don't know that they're saying we would just take all your queries in Siri and send them off to somewhere. What they're saying is we, you, that it would be a transparent experience of just using the voice assistant, but it would just be, and you can do that. There are hundreds, thousands, I don't know, of, of,

For example, we talked about Grammarly and Superhuman. I don't think either of them have their own LLMs. I don't think either of them are... They're just using...

off the shelf probably llama in most cases because it's open source right and so i think that that's what they're talking about it is just and they it says they asked them to train customized versions that could run on apple's private cloud so they're basically saying we want to license your model stuff could you just build it so they're just they're talking of not talking about outsourcing the experience they're talking about outsourcing just that training piece

Right. And I forgot about the cloud, the private cloud detail, which is where basically open AI or anthropic would create that custom model, run it in private cloud compute. So Apple could still say it's private and secure. Like it would be, you would right now, if you send something off to chat GPT using the voice assistant, you can then find that in your chat GPT. If you're logged in. Right. Right. So it's your, you've sent your data off to open AI or to chat GPT. I, this is, I think this is different from that.

And if, if it did mean we could get a good Siri, like in a few months,

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Just do it. Please do this. This is what you should do. Do that. Get a model from open AI or anthropic, put it on private cloud compute. So it's private and secure and then just do it. Yeah. Okay. But do you hold on? So here's the thing. I'm not even sure that the private and secure is the best benefit here because the fact that you can go back into the chat GPT app and find all of those, the number of times when I go back to something from two weeks ago and continue that conversation, it happens all the time. It's like,

But there is no record of any of your conversations with Siri that I'm aware of. You just gave me an idea. Okay, so that's great. You keep working on your... You're giving me ideas. I'm giving you... I'm giving you video ideas. But what I'm saying is I would rather that it all... If it's being powered by that and there's a way to make it work, I would really like to be able to just pick up that conversation again, whether that's in the, quote, Siri app or the ChatGPT app or whatever. I'm not sure that...

I'm not sure that the use case people want is nearly as private as the, is what Apple is trying to do. Right. Hmm. Okay. Well, I'll be down for a better Siri.

A hundred percent. We still stand firm on that platform. If that's how we get there. Yeah. All right, let's do it. There's rumors that Apple is working on another low end MacBook or cheap MacBook, not running the M series chip, but possibly the A18 Pro. This is just rumors right now from Ming-Chi Kuo. But I will just say one of my favorite Macs from the past years was the 12 inch MacBook. And it was terribly underpowered. I believe it ran like

the Intel i3 or the Intel like M chip. Maybe it was the M series chip, which not Apple's M chips. This was like Intel's like mobile chip or whatever. And it was really slow, but I love that form factor. And this would be really interesting. This would be like, you know, 12 inch super lightweight, even under the MacBook air, which Apple hasn't had like a plain old MacBook for a while where there's just like MacBook, but no moniker.

it's just been the pro in the air in recent years so i'm this i think it'd be exciting and i'll be down for like a super lightweight portable one not i already have macbook air not that i need another one but and well in the 12 inch i think the 12 inch was more expensive and and underpowered than the macbook air it was like but what was it that was it the first retina laptop

No, the first Retina, and I only know this because it was like, I was switching jobs at the time. The first Retina was the 2012 MacBook Pro. Yeah, I don't even know why I would say that. That's right. Because this didn't come out until like what, 2017 or something like, or 2015? I don't know.

It was shortly after that. 2015, I think, yeah. 12-inch MacBook release. Let's fact check ourselves. The 12-inch MacBook. 2015, look at that. April 2015. 10 years ago. The same time as Apple Music. Got another. I got to write that down too. Apple's most beloved worst product came out 10 years ago. It was not. Like it was underpowered. It was terrible. Let's be honest. Everyone loves it, but it was terrible. What they loved about it was it was light and small. Yeah. Yeah.

Here's I'll put the actual press release in the show notes. There's no, there's no pictures in this press release. Did Apple not used to put pictures in these? Well, they stopped paying for that server. So they've all just, you know, forward. So they need to repurpose it for a private cloud compute. Right. It's just stripped all the images, but yeah, it was the 12 inch. It was a retina display, but where was the, is the Intel? I got to find it. Intel core M processor. Yeah, I was right. Intel core M processor.

And it was still OS 10 at the time. It's so funny. So wild. One USB-C port too. I think it was the first Mac that didn't have a fan in it though. Oh, you might be right. Yeah, I think the MacBook Air still has a MacBook Air. You had to bring your own fan. External fan going off. Yeah.

B-U-I-O-F. I had it for a while and I love that form factor. So I'm down. Bring it back. Let's try it. And the A18 Pro that runs like the iPhone 16 Pro probably is actually faster than the M1. I was seeing people like post on Massimo. This is what they should do. I hope they have a whole warehouse full of M1 MacBook Air cases.

just reintroduce seriously just reintroduce that with the a18 pro in it call it whatever the heck you like the macbook air junior don't call it that don't call it that but just call it something but like honestly like that form factor is still fantastic and if you put an a18 pro in it i would just buy one for all my children and be like stop using chromebooks never touch one again

And I think people were saying, you know, the Walmart M1 MacBook Air, which was $650 or something. I think $649, yeah. Yeah, I mean, Apple probably likes having a computer that cheap, even if they're not selling it directly. But if they sold a $650, just imagine. If they had a $500, it would never be that cheap. No, it'll be $799 for 16 gigs of memory and 128 gigs of storage. It's $200 different. But I'm going to say something different just so we can see who's right. I'm going to say $749. $749.

$749. That's not different. You got to think of the first number has to be different. No, it says $50 difference. I would say it starts at $749. We'll come back to this episode. Do any of Apple's Macs start with $49?

No, they all start with 999. Or yeah, they all start literally with either 999 or higher. If you go to like the other configurations. Wait, isn't the iMac 1249? I don't know. Let me check this out. This is the part of the segment where we're just going to know it's 1299. Shoot, you're right.

I'm just telling you, I don't think any of the Macs start at that way. This is the segment of the show where we browse Apple.com together. And if you want to join us over on YouTube. Steven finds something and suddenly empties his bank account. YouTube.com slash at primary tech show. Let's see. Here we go. They're all 99s. Yeah, you're right. But that's fine. You picked 49. So that's good. I'm really happy about that. But it's going to the only time they sell something that starts and ends in 49 is when they sell it at Walmart. So there you go.

Wait a minute. I like this conspiracy theory. Oh yeah, because the iPhone 16E is $599. Oh shoot. Wait a minute. Isn't the 16 $799? Wait a minute.

Do we just uncover Apple's secret pricing scheme? Not really. I mean, you should do a video on it and just, I just uncovered Apple's secret pricing scheme. Apple's secret pricing scheme. If they sell it at Walmart or Best Buy. I mean, the base iPad is what, $349? Is that right? So there are, but I'm talking about Mac. Okay, but I'm just, I was talking specifically about Mac. Yeah, about Mac. Base model iPad is $329.

I think that some of the education discounts is 49, but I'm not going to go check it. I don't want to. Also, that's irrelevant because that was not what I was saying. I know. I know. I know. We have padded this episode. I'm proud of us. No, no, this is not padding. This is content. Capital C. Two other quick stories before I want to talk to you about Spotify versus Apple Music because you recently switched.

Figma has filed for IPO, meaning it's going to be going public soon, trading on the stock market. The reason why this is interesting is one, they were almost bought by Adobe for $20 billion a couple of years ago. So pretty wild to go from almost being acquired now all the way to IPO and being publicly traded. That's what's interesting. Number two, the web app. It's a web app that is going public and that's pretty wild. Well, wait, why is that wild?

What is another web app that has gone public? Salesforce. One of the largest tech companies. It's the largest company in San Francisco. It literally pioneered. Is there a difference though between a SAS and a web app? I would argue there is. Well, because there's two. Figma is SAS software as a service.

yeah it's just web apps just another way to say sass then no because you could like i mean technically now adobe is software as a service but you can download the things and install them on your computer so they're not this but i'm just saying like the most obvious example would be salesforce right of a company of a public i mean what is what is sales forces market cap 260 billion dollar company and it's just a bunch of web apps

I guess that's fair. Well, I guess when I think of Salesforce, I think it's like a backend power, like it powers the CRM and all that kind of stuff of a company. Bigma feels like the first modern company

web app i guess to me i might not have good reasoning for that i mean google docs is a web app it's used by a billion people i mean never mind google search but that feels a little different but like google docs is microsoft word but it's a web app also you can get microsoft word as a web app

But I just think it's funny that you're thinking like the shocking part of this story is that Figma is a web app. It's shocking that it was almost acquired and then, you know, now it's going public. Canva, Canva, also a web app. All right. Okay. Netflix, also a web app. I'm sorry. I did not. I called something a web app. Could we have a t-shirt that just says, I can't believe it's a web app.

Well, no, but honestly, the only reason I'm picking on you is literally almost everything now that's new is just a web app. Well, and that's what I guess I was feeling. It's like this...

No context, poor reasoning. It feels like the first modern, like this company started as a web app, is a web app. That's how everyone uses it, is only on the web. And like, that's where it lives. And I guess I probably have Nilay Patel in my head just talking about how everything's a web app now. And this feels like the first major, like,

It's only, I guess there is native apps, like if you want to get like the iPhone Figma app or whatever, but it just feels, I don't know. He's like the first modern one to do it. So that's just how it felt. Okay. No, I'm not saying I have actual, anyway, Figma is going public. It's exciting.

Yeah, I don't have anything to say, although good for them because they tried to get acquired and the EU was like, remember how we don't like tech companies? You can't do that. Wow. All right. And last thing before we get to personal tech, I need to mention this. If you want to listen to someone really talk about this, tune into the Verge cast tomorrow because I'm sure Nila is going to spend a good 30 minutes on it. It makes me so mad. But Paramount agreed to pay Trump $16 million. So here's the deal.

Paramount, which is the parent company of CBS, CBS aired that interview with Kamala Harris during the election cycle last year. Trump claimed that they edited the interview in certain ways or whatever, and I forget exactly what it was, defamation or whatever. - He said it was deceptive editing that influenced the election. - Deceptive editing, which he won the election, so I don't know, anyway. - Right. - So he sued CBS for the deceptive editing.

And Paramount, the other context is, is trying to acquire or merge with Skydance Media. And this was something the FCC could have stopped, the merger. And it really feels like Paramount has paid this $16 million settlement so it can go through with what it wanted, which was to merge with Skydance Media. But this does kind of set a precedent where...

you might need to pay a lot of money if you say something on your news program or edit your news. And I don't know, there's a story here about news press, freedom of the press. And anyway, I'll let Neil, I actually get into all the legalities cause he's an actual lawyer, but it doesn't feel great. Well, here's the thing. The precedent was actually a different case. What's important about this case is that they settled for essentially the exact same amount of money that

that ABC settled for because president Trump sued ABC over, uh, I think George Stephanopoulos step Stephanopoulos said something on the air, uh,

um about the uh the gene carroll case and so trump sued him over it for defamation and abc settled and basically made a donation to his presidential library so if we're keeping score trump's presidential library now has a 15 million dollar donation from abc a 16 million dollar donation from cbs and a 747 from like what was it qatar or whatever like that cutter like so

The important thing here, though, is that CBS settled for the exact same amount of money as the ABC. So ABC actually set the precedent. But the reason that CBS had to settle for that amount is because if they didn't, well, they're just all trying to avoid going to jail for bribery because literally they're paying this money to Trump.

so that they can get their deal through. That's literally bribery. And the only reason that the settlement took a long time and the reason that they will not admit that they won't issue an apology, a sorry or whatever, is they're all trying to avoid going to jail for bribing the president over this thing. So because in the ABC case, I believe, and I didn't pay that much attention, but I believe that like George Stephanopoulos actually said a thing that wasn't technically true

I think he said that he'd been found civilly liable for like rape when technically it was something slightly different. I don't exactly remember the details of it and I don't really want to go down that road, but in this case there was like CBS would have easily won this case if they would have fought it, but they also wouldn't have gotten their merger. And so do the math, right? Trump did seek $20 billion at first.

Yes. But he also, you know, that meme of president Trump, like yelling at the kid, mowing the Rose garden or whatever like that. He probably sought $20 billion from that kid too. Like for you clipped one of my hedges. I will be honest. I'm going to listen to me. I talk about this cause he's, you know, he can be mad.

Well, everybody should be mad because I mean, you don't have to be mad at Trump. I don't think that matters. Like, fine, whatever. You can file lawsuits, whatever. I mean, it's it's lame. But CBS has lost like the executive producer of 60 Minutes, the head of their news division. All the people are resigning. They're like, we don't want to be a part of this. This is not this is ridiculous. And then the people at the top are like, well, we just want to get paid. Sherry Redstone just wants to get paid.

Man. All right, it's not fun. All right, let's talk about something more fun. We need some more, we need a palate cleanser, as they call it. Palate cleanser, Spotify with ads. Yeah, something else for me to get mad about.

so i've never i don't think ever paid for spotify premium but i've also never used it i've always been an apple music user but i do have to jump in sometimes to make videos about spotify especially as it relates to podcasting but you you legit used spotify for years paying for spotify premium is that accurate uh we as a family paid for a family plan for quite a while and we had like six six accounts on there but i think that's probably true there's six of us so yeah and

I mean, like, but it was like 20 bucks a month for Spotify, but everyone liked using Spotify. And to be fair, I find Spotify's interface better for the most part, better than Apple music's interface. I couldn't necessarily tell you why. I think Spotify does a better job of trying to make the listening experience of music more immersive. You know, they have like the Spotify canvases. They've got like the, you can swipe up like Tuk Tuk feed of songs, that kind of thing.

And I've also found the ability to share playlists way, way better on Spotify. Like you can just make a playlist and share with Steven and you just, now you have that, that playlist on, uh,

here well i think most people at least what i see on social media this curated playlist from spotify are one of the better features because people say if apple music had as good curated playlists as spotify i would switch because people like the design of apple music you know especially with like the full screen artwork and now with ios 26 you're gonna have that full lock screen animated artwork so as you're listening to music like your whole lock screen is going to be

animated apple music is that really a feature benefit because here's the thing most of the time when i'm listening to music my phone is in my pocket

Yeah, but I think people, if they have it on the table or whatever, it looks really cool. But why are you wasting battery resources on a thing that... It'll only be when you tap the screen. You should try it. It looks cool. And just because it looks cool, that's a reason to do it? Yeah. Okay, fine. Just because it looks cool. But anyway, so you did Spotify Premium for a long time. Now you don't. How is that different? It's so bad. The free version of Spotify...

is aggressively hostile towards its users because they obviously want you to pay to the extent that if you go to... So I am...

our church has a, like a music label. That's not really true, but they release songs. Like they, they have people who've written songs and released them. So I wanted to go into Spotify because I wanted to see like the canvas thing, like the Spotify canvas. Well, the only way to see that is if you're playing the song. So I go to play the song. So I find the artist, I tap on the song that the brand new song I want to listen to. And I have to watch a 30 second ad from T-Mobile first.

And you can't get out of it. There's no X. You can't be like, forget it. I don't want to listen to anything. You have to force quit the app if you want to get out of it. And then the 30 seconds is up and it plays a different song. It played a different song. And then I tapping through thinking, okay, fine. I made a playlist of the songs that are similar to this. I start tapping through songs and I get to like, I don't know how many it was like five. And it's like, you have to wait an hour before you can skip another song. I'm like,

This is mind-blowingly stupid. I don't ever want to open this app anymore. And it's all because they want to, obviously... I don't like the idea of saying, I have a free service.

It's supported by ads. I also have a paid service that isn't supported by ads. The differentiator should just be ads or no ads in my mind. Not, I have a free service and it sucks and I'm going to make it worse because then maybe you'll pay for the paid service. No, I just won't open your app anymore. And it's just, I've not used any...

Like even ChatGPT, the free version of ChatGPT is great. You can't use it as much and it doesn't remember who you are, but maybe that's a benefit, right? Not a bug. But the free version of Spotify, it's like the old days when you used to use, what was it called? Pandora? Pandora, yeah. Yeah, you just type in, I want to listen to chill vibes or something and it'll just play you songs. You didn't get to decide and you can only skip a couple of times. Fine. But that was like the purpose of that app, right? But this is like...

I'm it's bad. So it's funny that the experience I get, I'll make videos on the Riverside YouTube channel about the podcast features in the app. And if you use Spotify to listen, there's a very small percentage that listen to this show on Spotify, but there are a couple hundred of you. Um, the, the podcast experience is actually, I think better than the music experience because now like,

It features pod, like if you follow podcasts and that's what you do a majority of the time, it just shows you that on the homepage of Spotify. And then if you go to like the podcast tab, you have like the shows that you might follow or have listened to recently. And the discovery mechanism for shows in Spotify is actually really good. I think Apple needs to take a...

you know, some tips off of this, because as you scroll in the podcast section of Spotify,

it will just automatically start playing clips of episodes that even if you don't follow a show. So like I'm like scrolling here and it just started playing this podcast. I don't even know what the podcast is, but I recognize Simon Sinek and I guess, I don't know if this is his show or something like it. And so it's just like playing it. And so like discovery wise, that's awesome. Oh look, and here's primary technology. If you're just scrolling at that. And if you have a video version of a show, it's,

It will just start auto-playing the video, even if someone doesn't follow the show. But Spotify will try and figure out if they're interested in technology. I think their discovery for podcasts is actually great. And they recently added a following tab so you can just see episodes of the podcast you follow and play those. Now, I don't think it's up next queue is great. And the actual podcast player experience, again, it has to...

split the difference between being both music and podcast player but the podcast experience is good and you don't see as many ads with the podcast so like it's like you just see the podcast stuff so it's a weird dichotomy of like the podcast experience pretty good the uh yeah but the difference is it's because they're not paying any licensing royalties for those podcasts as opposed to the music right right and if and if podcast creators sign up for the

insert ads into my show to make money from it. Well, then the ads are in the show. Like you don't have to see the ads like in the feed or as you're browsing podcasts. That's when you listen to it. So the only parallel I wanted to mention is YouTube premium. One of the best streaming services that you could pay for. One of the best, you know, one of the best entertainment. I don't understand people who don't pay for that. Well, cause it's the same YouTube without YouTube premium. Um,

is dangerous place. Like it's bad. I'm listen, I'm thankful for AdSense because I, I get to benefit from that from my own YouTube channel. I get it paid for people watching my videos, but like whenever I'm logged into the Riverside YouTube channel, which doesn't have YouTube premium and I try to watch something, it is hair pulling of like,

What is happening right now? And when there's like two unskippable ads at the beginning, which I don't think I put those in my videos, but if I do, I apologize and I stop. Let me know. It is a terrible, terrible experience. And I'm like,

Oh, I'm so sorry. Yeah. Well, it's not though. It's not as bad though. Listen, I also benefit from ads on the internet, so I'm not, but I have nothing to do with that. Like unlike a YouTuber, I never have to think about any of that kind of thing. Right. Because so I don't want to be like the ad economy has made a lot of people have incomes that wouldn't otherwise exist. It made the entire online content economy happen. So that's great. Yeah.

But when you want to go to like a, cause, and I also know that the site that I write for people have plenty of complaints about the ads. Like I, whatever. I have nothing to do with it. Don't write me. I can't help you. It's fine. Right. Just use the high distractions feature and Safari on your iPhone. It'll be fine. But when you go to like a local news site,

And there's like a video of a thing that happened and you have to watch a minute of ads first. And I'm like, you don't actually care about telling me the news because there's, there is no, you have way overplayed your hand. There's no way I'm watching a minute of ads to watch a 40 second clip about a, you know, a semi truck that hit a bridge for the 13th time. Like it's just not going to happen. And the ad is like one of the local ads from like the car dealership. And it's like, Oh yeah. They're still better than Apple news ads though.

oh yeah yeah the apple news ads still have not gone better i will say we watch a wheel of fortune and jeopardy with my mom every week when we go over to her house for dinner and you get and we get to see the local ads because it's just like over the air antenna and like the dealership ads and stuff where it's like somebody on a green screen they're obviously reading a teleprompter sometimes not even looking into the camera like i'm so sorry but this is kind of hilarious amazing

All right. I need to, I need to ask why you're using the wrong browser for your general web browsing. That's going to be our bonus episode. It's going to be so good. We're going to talk about Brave for Safari in the bonus episode. So listen, here are all the benefits you get when you support the show. Okay. You're going to get our bonus episode every week. You're going to get an ad free version of the show. You get the primary tech daily show Monday through Friday, the top headlines in just a few minutes. And I think we, we started our audio recording yesterday.

pre-show and so we had some people say we would love a bootleg version of the show meaning you just hear everything from the stuff we talk about before we record and all steven's cussing all of that and uh so we can have a feed of that like atp if you're familiar with that their bootleg feed so that can be an additional benefit i think we'll try it i have to set up two new shows to figure out how to do that in apple podcast and but i'll do it i will do it and we'll try it out

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