Apple’s BROKEN AI Promise, M4 MacBook Air Review, iOS 19 Redesign
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You can handle the truth. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. Huge show this week. We're reviewing the M4 MacBook Air. Me and Jason have them in hand. I've been testing them. And the M3 iPad Air. But the big topic this week, Apple intelligence, which is officially delayed. John Gruber wrote a whole dissertation. Jason has thoughts. I have thoughts. We're going to get them all out there.

That's going to be after the break. Plus iOS 19 might have some huge design updates as well. This episode is brought to you by Green Chef and you.

the members who support us directly. I'm one of your hosts, Steven Robles, and Jason doesn't know this yet, but it's actually my birthday today. And, as always, I'm joined by Jason Aten. How's it going, Jason? I dropped that on you right then. Wow! I didn't... How did I not know that? I don't... Well, you know, I'm not like... I'm not publishing it around out there, but yeah. Hang on, I'm going to put it on my calendar. Well, exactly what I want to be doing. Now, I want to be doing this podcast. I get to do it. I love making this with you and our listeners, and we all get to be a part of it. So, yeah. Today I turn 23. No. You know, the other thing that happened today...

we like that we pulled up this morning and our kids like about lost their mind is that five years ago today exactly we went and picked our kids up from school because it shut down for like two days so that was a weird birthday for you probably I remember that distinctly whenever I was trying to think like when did the world shut down I was like oh it was my birthday 2020 it was literally today exactly

five years ago and can i just say thinking that that was five years ago breaks my brain yeah that's what i'm saying that's why our kids lost their mind they're like wait what what five years ago so weird glad we're not during that time i know i'm glad i'm glad i have a macbook air to talk about and then uh yeah well all right well let's get into it let's get into it because we have a bunch of some five-star reviews listen that we've been talking about trying to become a five-star show again in apple podcast here's the thing

There's been so many of you so graciously leaving us five-star reviews. A majority, it seems like, in the UK. So we're like the top 30 or 40 show in the UK for tech shows, which is amazing because you're all leaving reviews. So here's what we need. Keep them coming. But also, if you're in the US, we're trying to be a five-star show in the US too. So listen, just everybody from every country around the world. Let's just leave five-star. But...

We are still a 4.9 star podcast. We almost have 300 views though, which is exciting. And shout out to Craig C1986 from the UK. Luke Ireland from the UK. That's a bit of irony. Luke Ireland from the UK. From the UK. Wow, there's a lot of levels there. There's a lot of levels there. BRadio48 from the USA. CycloneJack62, I know he's in our community as well from the USA. BatteryPercentageOn. PhoneInRightRearPocket.com.

This is the second rear pocketer, I think, in as many weeks. RU4REALS, with a Z from the USA, has a big question about keeping an M1 Pro MacBook Pro or trading it in for an M4 MacBook Air. We're going to talk exactly about that in a few minutes because we both got him in hand. Matt W. from the UK says he cannot miss the show. And Rick the Wolf from Canada, he calls us informative and pleasant.

Thanks, the other guy. Informative and pleasant. And we have one old tech, one old tech figure. This is from John G. This was, I think it was his phone, but it has an iPhone 5S, still in mint-looking condition. Look at that thing. Nice. The final year where the camera was flush with the back of the phone. Do you remember those days, Jason? I mean, only because, well, you know, the funny thing is the original iPhone, the camera wasn't actually flush. There was like a little lip around it.

And then the iPhone 3 and 3GS was like a bowl that you can rock that thing back and forth with your baby to sleep. Exactly. And the 4 and 5, those were the years with the flush back. Those were nice. Although I still think, this usually goes around, Jason, let's just start with a controversy. What would you say the best iPhone design is to this day? I always go to the iPhone 4 being in my top 3, maybe even top 2.

It's easy to say like the latest design because it's like, I mean, it looks great. Got great hardware. But when it comes to just the overall aesthetic, the iPhone 4 is still one of my favorites.

yeah but in in high so at the time yes but in hindsight that screen is still so small so yeah the screen was small but just the design of the phone the rails on the edge the glass back that was like single color look good i got one right right so you got one right i have my mind in the drawer i should i don't even know that one's right there i'm not going to get up and go get it because that will be well also allies of this iphone four or five which design did you uh the five had the two-tone back that's the only reason when i say the four

But the five had the bigger screen. I think the five probably. Well, nobody's perfect. All right, let's talk about some. But listen, you keep calling me the other guy. And yet reviews keep coming in. They're like, we don't know his name, but we agree with everything. I don't know. I haven't seen any of those. I haven't seen anything there. All right. Are we still doing the movie quote?

Oh, yeah. I asked you last week. I asked you last week what it was. Yeah, you asked me for like three weeks, the previous three weeks, because we hadn't done it. I know. We had to catch up. It's weird to me, though, that you picked one from a Broadway show this time. What?

Okay, come on. Don't tell me you don't know that A Few Good Men was originally a Broadway play. I gotta be honest. Written by Aaron Sorkin. Come on. I didn't know that. I didn't know. You have a movie podcast. Yeah, it's not a Broadway show podcast. You know what I'm saying? Although, sometimes it is. I was gonna say. Sometimes we sing some Broadway numbers. You're being real generous with yourself there. I didn't know that. I didn't know that. And then, of course, the quote is about Apple.

getting hammered about Apple Intelligent handling. Yeah, it's fun watching Jack Nicholson yell and scream about Apple Intelligent. That's the scene that we should do a mashup. Okay, let's talk about... This past week has been crazy because last week Apple released a bunch of products, announced them, then all the embargoes lifted or whatever, and now the products are out in the wild. We both have the MacBook Air to talk about. You have the iPad Air. I want to mention first the Mac Studio because I did not buy one yet. I'm waiting.

to see what I think about it. But I want to point to two reviews. One is iPhonedo. Had a great review, lots of comparisons for the Mac Studio with the Ultra Chip.

And his intro is wild to his video. He did like a Severance style robotic arm. I don't even know how he did it, but his intro is amazing. But he does some great comparisons of the studio. Also, Tyler Stallman had a great video. He runs it through Lightroom tests, LLMs, Final Cut, Premiere, all the things. So if you want to learn about the Ultra, like the M3, go to

Watch their two videos, and of course, The Verge has their review where Chris Welch, I believe it is, yeah, he puts it through its paces as well. No video, but he talks about it. I mean, basically, the M3 Ultra is ridiculously fast, and I am humble enough now to admit that I really don't need the Ultra. So my debate now is do I keep my M1 Max or do I upgrade to an M4 Max?

Or do I just run everything off my MacBook Air? Well, and I do like that the Verge's take was basically, you know, a week is not enough time for us to actually review this. That was too much computer. It's like too much. It's a lot of computer. It's amazing to see like the compile times or like exporting from compressor. Like it's ridiculously fast and they got ones with like 128 or 512 gigs of unified memory. So it's like it can do all the things like there is no, there's no seal. Crazy fast. That's how that goes. Now,

Now, a device I do not have, but you have, and you actually wrote about, was the iPad Air, the M3 iPad Air. And, yeah, unsurprisingly good. How is it? Well, I'm curious. First, I wanted to do a little test. I have both an M2 iPad Air from the previous year, because I'm really lazy at sending things back, and an M3. And I'm just wondering, can you tell the difference? No.

Now... Can you tell which one is which? Okay, well, one's upside down, but I think I can still tell. Wait a minute, the logo. Yeah, yeah, there you go, there you go. Sorry. Well, you know, it rotates, so to me it looked like it was correct because the screen was right. Now, one's pink and one's blue, so I assume the pink one... One's purple and one is blue. Oh, excuse me. The purple one, I believe, is the M2. Is that correct? No. Okay.

The blue one is the M2, the purple. Actually, yeah, you should have known this because last week I said I hope they send me a sky blue. Right. Because everything else I have is blue. But, yeah, they're exactly the same is the point. Even the colors are the same. You can buy an M2 in this color. You can buy an M3 in the blue. They're exactly the same. But...

I think that's fine. People complain that there's really no difference between them. There are a couple of very minor differences, but it's only because the M3 can do more video encoding and ProRes decode. There's a couple things you get for free. Yeah, you get a couple things for free with the M3 ray tracing. Hardware accelerated ray tracing is on the M3, but that's just because it's on everything with an M3, right? It came with that generation. It's great. I

People are like, well, this is such a boring update. So? This is what happens when you just make the products a little bit better every year. And I think Apple knows that people... We have an iPad Air that still has a home button. And those are the people that are probably thinking now to be buying a new iPad Air. And these are going to be just frigging amazing. Now, you got the new Magic Keyboard with the iPad Air, which is basically like the updated iPad Pro Magic Keyboard, right? Nope.

It's not at all. It's the old one with a function row. What do you mean? The trackpad is still the same, right? The trackpad is a physical trackpad, not a haptic or whatever. Interesting. And it's also not metal on the top or whatever. You know, like the new... It's not the aluminum. It is basically the old Magic Keyboard with a better hinge, right? They did adopt the hinge. And I think that it does do a little bit more of the...

like the tilting. So it's kind of like if you took the old one and the new one and you merge them together, you would get this one, but it has the same tactile feel and everything. Same track pad is the old one. Although I think they said the track pad is a little bit larger. It's actually amazing. They added a row of keys, made the track pad a little larger and it's all the same size. I don't understand how that works because it's just less blank space at the top. Physics is just weird like that, I guess. But anyway, but yeah, it's great. Like I don't, I don't love, I have a love hate relationship with the magic keyboard. It's the best overhand.

overall typing experience on a keyboard for an iPad. Right. But it's like, I love the thing. The thing I love the most about an iPad is how light it is compared to like a Mac. And then you put that thing on there and it's more, it's heavier than a MacBook Air. And you're just like, what are we doing? Why are we doing this? And so, yeah. Okay, well, cool. I mean, nice. The iPad Air exists. It's out there. I want to get to the MacBook Air. Great. Because we're talking about Air. Here it is. We both have our MacBook Airs in sky blue. If you hold

Hold it at the right angle. YouTube.com slash AppPrimaryTechShow. Go follow the show. It's right over there. Here's the thing, Jason. I got this laptop yesterday. It's maxed out. Not with an M4 Mac, just M4. Pun intended. As soon as I took it out of the box... This is my first MacBook Air. I said this on social media. I've never owned a MacBook Air personally. This is my first one. I've always done MacBook Pros in the past. So as soon as I took it out of the box...

And I wonder if they make the box heavier than other Mac books, because when I picked up the box, the box felt heavy, but then I lifted the computer out and I was like, this is amazing. This form factor, the thinness, the lightness, like I love everything about it. Like, look at you. You could, you could cut yourself. You could cut yourself on this, this laptop. So razor thin. Uh, but anyway, I love this form factor. Now, the first thing I did was not migration assistant. I, uh,

I always like have that decision to make. Do I do migration assistant? Do I start it up from scratch? And I started from scratch.

What do you do when you set up? So I have a time machine backup that is just for review. Oh, that's brilliant. Yeah, because I do this enough times that I just literally restore from a time machine backup. It doesn't copy my whole Dropbox folder over, which is a terabyte, right? Like it doesn't copy all of the things I need, but it has all the apps that I want and it has enough of my personal data that I can use it as a normal machine, but it doesn't have my whole photo downloaded to it. Right.

That's smart. I was about to do Migration Assistant, and then I saw on my old M3 MacBook Pro, I say old, like a year and a half old, that it had Zoom installed, and I don't need Zoom anymore. I had to have that on there for something else. And so I'm like, I'm not going to do Migration Assistant. That's the reason. That's the reason. But listen, I focused 45 minutes, and I was actually able to speed run. I should have recorded it.

installing all the apps, moving the license keys, because I try to install the least amount possible. You know, so it's kind of like, you know, you finally got compressor, audio hijack, whatever. But anyway, I did all that. My first concern, because I was going to have them side by side, was the display. And I'm literally staring at my MacBook Pro display, which is the XDR display, or no, the MacBook Pro, which is the XDR, and then the MacBook Air, which is like regular display. You know, side by side, you notice a little bit of difference.

As far as the colors and all of that, not a big deal for me, which I was very thankful for. I see the difference, obviously, but it's okay. Brightness is another part of it. I don't think that's going to be an issue. The ProMotion, I felt that a couple times because the MacBook Pro has ProMotion, right? It's got the higher refresh rate. I felt that a couple times, but not enough to bother me. The bezels on the MacBook Air are a little larger, which that

I have to, it'll be fine. I'm not usually comparing them side by side. But then I started, I was just using it. I used it to edit a video in Final Cut. I exported a video through Compressor. I did my transcriptionist, put, you know, give it an MP3 file, get the transcript out of it. And yeah, it's a little slower at some tasks than the MacBook Pro, obviously, because it's not a pro chip. Like the export through Compressor took a little longer, but it can do all the things I need it to do.

And the form factor is wonderful. It's great. It's a great computer. I love it. Yeah, and you have a Mac Studio. And I have a Mac Studio. I mean, this is, I think, the MacBook Air, well, the only thing I could come up with to talk about was the keyboard, so we can talk about that in just a minute. But it's amazing. I think that the, but it's like,

It's been amazing for a very long time. Even the last Intel MacBook Air was amazing, right? It just wasn't very powerful, but that wasn't Apple's fault. But the M1, the M2, the M3, the M4, this laptop has been...

fantastic for a very long time and in fact i had an m4 macbook pro base model that so i was in with 16 gigs of memory like i was able to compare them and if you think about it like apple is selling this computer with a better display and more ports as a pro device right like essentially that's what's happening and so if you're willing to give up the promotion the

you know mini h you know mini led just backlit display if you uh give up a couple you know one hdmi porch an hdmi port a sd card slot and one usbc port right or thunderbolt port if you're willing to give those things up this is like you can save yourself a thousand dollars or whatever once you start configuring them like this is a great great device for most people and it has the benefit of being

So incredibly thin and light. And it doesn't seem like it should make that much of a difference, but it feels like there's a threshold at somewhere around like two and a half pounds that once you go over that, it's like, now I can feel like I'm carrying a thing. And once you're under that, it's like, oh yeah, this is great. In fact, there were times I was carrying around this laptop over the last couple of days that I had to like check. Is it in there? Did I forget it? And the crazy thing about that is I've been using a MacBook Air

for most of my professional life. I've been using an M3 Max MacBook Pro for a little while now, but the MacBook Air has always been my favorite. And the fact that you can run an M4 and essentially do all of the things that you might want to do on your laptop is pretty amazing. It's amazing. It is amazing the weight difference. Do you have a 14-inch MacBook Pro that you can compare? Yeah. It is wild.

the weight difference when you, when seemingly like just looking at them, you think these shouldn't be that different in weight. And I need to look up the exact weights and obviously it is, it is thinner. So, and I, I'm, I guess that's battery, I guess that's taken up the, and the ports maybe like the IO stuff, but it is, I mean, noticeably lighter and that makes it way easier throwing it in a bag, just carrying it out to the patio and working out there. It's a, it's been great. And I mean, it's like,

I don't know if they'll ever be able to get that much thinner. I mean, those USB-C ports are like almost at the edge there. Right. Well, you saw what they did with the 13-inch iPad Pro.

Which is literally the width of the USB-C port. So they got a little bit of work they could do on that. That is true. I will say I missed or I was expecting MacBook Air to be etched on the bottom. So if you have a MacBook Pro, you know it actually has MacBook Pro etched into the bottom of the thing. But they didn't do that for the MacBook Air. Is it too thin? No, and they eliminated it on the M1. It used to be right under the display. Right. And they eliminated that as well. Yeah.

Yeah, I just, I don't know. Maybe it's too thin. If they etch it in, they'll have to like sacrifice something. I don't know. It's like Bono. You don't need the name. You just know. You just know who it is. You just know. It's the only sky blue. We're going to talk about the keyboard in a second. The sky blue color.

It's very muted, as everyone literally has said. It's fine. It's basically the same colors as the shirt I'm wearing. Which is gray. I'm literally wearing the same color as I'm wearing my Sky Blue shirt in honor of Sky Blue. Look at that. I didn't even notice you were holding the computer up. Literally. They are exactly the same. Lends right in. Now, you had told me before I got mine, because you got yours a little early, that

that the keyboard is different. No one has, Apple did not say anything. There's nothing official about it, but immediately, as soon as I started typing a few sentences, I noticed like for some reason, the keyboard on the M4 MacBook Air, and you said the M4 MacBook Pro also, right? Yeah, so this has been the journey I've been on. When I got the M4 MacBook Pro,

unit, which was a really rough time because they sent me a Mac mini, an iMac and a MacBook pro. And I'm not complaining, but it is just hard. And in like what I do to review three different devices in the amount of time they give you for an embargo. Right. Right. You have two days. Yeah. And I had an M three max MacBook pro. So any MacBook pro things I wanted to do, I had a device that I was like going to use. So, but I used it and I found that when I was writing, um,

I way preferred to use the M4 MacBook Pro. And I started thinking like this keyboard legit feels different. It feels much more tactile. It feels crisper. It just like, I don't know what it is. I didn't think anything about it at the time. I just filed that in the back of my brain. I'm like,

This keyboard is different. And then when I got the MacBook Air, I'm like, this keyboard is exactly the same as the M4 MacBook Pro. There's a slight, slight feeling difference, which I think is just due to the fact that the body of the MacBook Pro is deeper, right? So it just feels like you're typing into a larger space. Maybe there's a little bit more sound response just because of the size of the case. Yeah.

I don't know how to talk about keyboards. So I'm making all of this up, but it is different in the, and I asked, I specifically asked, I said, what this keyboard, these keyboards are different. You you've changed something. There is definitely something different about it. And,

And Apple would not say a word in which I actually take as validation because this is the kind of thing that had they not changed anything, they would have wanted to dispel because they would, they know I'm going to write that the keyboard's different. And if that's not true, they'd want to say, no, we didn't actually change anything. I have not seen anyone else write about this or talk about it. Same. I've not seen it anywhere. I'm now like going back and forth, just doing like doodly doodly on each keyboard. I'm like, yeah,

Each key is a little, it feels firmer. Yeah. Like it's less mushy. And so, and I think that gives a little more like clickety.

A little more clickety. But it's not necessarily louder. It's not louder. No, no, no. Not louder. Just the feel. The feel is like less mushy. Yeah, a little crisper. And it's very nice. I like typing on it. And maybe I'll do more writing finally. Write a newsletter. I write my newsletter once a year. You can subscribe at Beard.fm. So you're definitely not going to get spammed on that newsletter. But...

yeah i think it's spam because you'll forget that you subscribed since it's been a year since you got the last issue but it's not it's not subscribe you subscribe two issues ago three years that's right you subscribe three years ago you subscribed uh this computer is wonderful

I'm glad I got the 13 inch. I was waffling between the 13 and the 15 inch, 15 inch. And then I think you told me this, but basically like if you're wanting a computer to be small and light, get the small and light version. Yeah. Makes total sense. Um, the 13 inch does not feel super cramped. I mean, if you're editing video, sure. It's going to be less, you know, you have to work it out, but I mean this, and this is going to be insane, but,

When I do have to like travel, which I actually travel with my Apple vision pro and like Jason, when I do travel and I take this MacBook air, I'm a strap that vision pro on, and then I can have an ultra wide display and,

And you can edit with all the real estate that you need. You get the best of all worlds. You got the, the light HDR burnout, your retinas. Well, that's the other thing too, is like display wise. If the thing I want a great display for is editing video. Well, listen, I could just strap some micro, what is it? Micro L LED, mini, whatever they are, the micro OLEDs on my eyeballs with the vision pro. And there you go. You have it. So I got the lightest computer on my lap and the heaviest one on my face.

And it'll be great. It'll be great. Yeah. It's like you took your $999 MacBook Air and you turned it into a $5,000 contraption that requires two separate parts, an external battery. Exactly. It's totally insane. But hey, it'll be exciting to work in that environment. So anyway, I love the MacBook Air. It's a great computer. I still have like a couple of days to decide. My trade-in kit comes in tomorrow, I think.

And so I have another day to change my mind, but I'm pretty sure I'm sold that I'm going to keep the MacBook Air and send my MacBook Pro away. It's served me well. I think that for a lot of people who have a MacBook Pro...

I would be very surprised if the MacBook air couldn't accommodate those needs. Yeah. And I also think, yes, the MacBook pro has, it does have a better display. Absolutely. Like, and if you can, like, if you compare them side by side, especially if you're watching like Apple TV or something like that on the app, right? Like there's, I mean, you get HDR on the, on the MacBook pro you don't on the MacBook air. That's great. But if you're just using it,

and once you put the macbook pro away you'll never think about it again you're not going to be like watching something on your macbook air and be like it would be really nice to have that macbook pro right like it's just not going to happen and if you're on a plane the macbook air is so much nicer and that and the other thing i i wrote about this morning i that if you think about it the macbook the macbook air in 2022 which was the m2 was 11.99 they raised the price by 200 and

today adjusted for inflation that macbook air would be almost 1400 but instead they went back down to 999 it's a it's a steal like i don't understand how apple is like doing this but it is like they have they are being very generous in that i mean maybe the margins are just so high to begin with well i mean the truth is like this is the last device to get the m4

other than the Mac Pro, which I don't actually think is coming. I just don't think so. We talked about that. We talked about it. But, and I heard on another podcast someone saying they're going to wait to see what happens with the Mac Pro before they buy one. I'm like, you're thinking about it too much. Just buy the Mac Studio now and enjoy it. It'll be amazing. I like how you said on another podcast because last episode we mentioned his name 80 times. I know, that's why I was trying to be... You didn't want to say it this way. I didn't want his Google alerts to be going off. I'm not going to ruin it. I'm not going to say it. One thing I've

Speaking about the price, and we talked about tariffs shortly in the last episode,

the MacBook Air, I don't know if this is actually going to focus on the words, but assembled in Vietnam. Yeah. And I actually tracked this through the UPS once I got the shipping notification. Yeah, sure enough. Comes from Vietnam, goes through Hong Kong, but I guess the tariffs because it originated in Vietnam wouldn't affect this. That's interesting, Steven. You're breaking some news here. That's it. This is what I'm saying. This is what I'm saying. I tweeted my- I wish I would have looked at the bottom of my MacBook Air before I wrote that article this morning. Okay.

Well, I'm just saying it says assembled in Vietnam and I probably showed my serial number. I don't know if that matters on the show. But anyway, yeah. So that might again, one of the reasons why the tariffs might not be affecting this price.

Great computer. It's great. The other thing you were mentioning, the display. I stare at a studio display all day, which does not have HDR, which does not have promotion. And yeah, it's fine. Yeah. The MacBook Air display is not worse than the studio display. It's the same. It's the same. So it's like, I really should have no qualms about it. And if I, and honestly, the best display Apple makes right now of all their devices, Quinn Nelson said this on social media yesterday,

It's actually the iPad Pro, the tandem OLED display. And I have one of those already. And so if I really want just the best display so I can watch a scene from Interstellar, which I don't do regularly, but if I wanted to,

I just want to see the best display that Apple has to offer. Well, I have that. It's the iPad. And you have that vision pro thing, which is also pretty darn good display. It's not quite as good as the iPad pro. I don't think, but the nice thing about the Mac book air compared to your studio display is that the webcam is about 17,000 times better and it's not even great, but it is so much better than the studio display webcam. I logged on to this three quarters podcast with Steven and it, it was on the studio display and Steven's like, you should go back to bed.

Like, what's wrong with you? It just, Jason's video when he first joined, I was like, what is going on? I was like, the white balance is off. I don't know, your background. I was in a dark cave. Yeah, it was real dark. Everything's fuzzy. It was just because it was using the studio display camera. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, continuity camera. Listen, if you're going to do any kind of video content,

Yes. Use continuity camera with an iPhone way more than the studio display. I said that right in my review. I'm like everything in one little section. I was like, yeah, they updated the camera, but if you do, if you need your camera for a lot of things, you probably have an iPhone. Just use that. Right.

All right. So that's the MacBook Air. It's great. Leave us questions in the community post, social.primarytech.fm. We had some new members recently join, which is awesome. Over like 200 something people there. And we are almost at 2000 subscribers on YouTube, which is amazing. So listen, you know, this is my birthday, not to pull that card, but I want to go over to YouTube, youtube.com slash that primary tech show. We'll subscribe. And a couple of quick news stories before we get to this long, listen, we're going to go do a deep dive. A lot of people enjoy the deep dives and I have, I

I have a whole extra note that I have not put in our shared notes. So Jason can't see it. I have a whole note about Apple intelligence and it's about to go off, but hold on before you move to like the software things. I know you glazed over the Mac studio, but I discovered something that I did. I did not review a Mac studio. They only send me things with the word air in them. I mean, pro, I guess they send me pro things too, but they do not send me studio things. Yeah. I got a studio just, but anyway, okay. I didn't realize this until I was listening to,

I think it was the most recent episode of Upgrade where John Gruber, foreshadowing, was the guest. And that was a great episode. It was basically an episode of the talk show, but just in the Upgrade feed. But the M3 Ultra is not two M3 Max chips because there are things on that chip that do not exist on the M3 Max, like Thunderbolt 5. Oh.

The M3 Max does not have Thunderbolt 5, but the M3 Ultra does. So they were calling it basically the M3.5 Ultra. It's almost like there's something about they couldn't get the M4 Ultra done in time or something like that, but they were able to do this stuff. I just thought that was really interesting. It is so confusing, but that actually just makes it more confusing.

confusing because they didn't just have a bunch of m3 max chips around and like sew them together because that's how that probably works there's actually some different stuff on that chip yeah they sew it together they do it's just there's a bunch yeah

Well, and that's, you know, I listened to the ATP guys talk about the processes between the M3 and M4 and how three nanometer there's like, you know, different processes in the chip fabrication or whatever. And that's what I was curious if the M3 Ultra is on one of the newer processes, like the M4 chips are on one of the old ones. And maybe that's a clue to say maybe there's actually it's not on the M3 Pro and Max process. Maybe it's on something newer. Yeah.

I don't know. I think, uh, I think it's a problem. I think it's a problem to tear down. I don't know. I don't know if they could tell from the processes, but,

Anyway, it is interesting. I'm not going to get an Ultra. I can't justify it. I mean, you don't even really need an M3 Max, do you? No, take it easy. No, no, no. I'm not throwing shade, but I'm sitting here with an M4 Pro Mac Mini, and it is faster than that M3 Max laptop sitting over there. I'm sitting here with an M1 Max Studio, and it's amazing. And I...

I'm never waiting around. And this Mac mini would smoke it. And so I'm just saying, if you were going to upgrade. No, I'm not going to. I need the ports. I need the ports. I use all the ports. We've got, we went over this last week. You're right. But you, you know how many Thunderbolt docs you could plug into it? Three. I don't, I don't want more points of failure. No docs. Like Edna mode. No caps. No docs. No. All right. All right. Let's talk about iOS 19 briefly. And Sonos.

A bunch of rumors have been coming out, basically Mark Gurman, but I'm going to use this picture because Mac rumors look, it looks cool. There's this huge thought that iOS 19 is going to be a massive redesign across all of Apple's operating systems, maybe even more than a redesign, but a revamp changing how they look, making things more consistent, some vision OS inspiration in the iconography going to like the little circles and such and

Everyone, like Mike Roman is saying, is going to be the biggest change since iOS 7, which if you remember, if you were around, iOS 7 was the big update from old-school iPhone OS to more modern. iOS 7 famously was just wispy. Everything could barely read text, hairline thin, back buttons and all of that. But this looks like it's going to be taking a lot of design cues from Vision OS.

Listen, you know, this is one way to distract us from Apple intelligence, but also I just want to see some more bug fixes, hopefully along with the design changes, because that's what I experienced more often. Like, you know, autocorrect, just stopping in my text messages and screen time still being woefully bad. Uh, you know, that would be nice. Uh, in addition to a huge redesign, uh,

I also feel like when Iowa seven came out, a redesign was needed. Like he was starting to feel pretty dated, especially compared to other mobile operating systems at the time, like the Palm pre. Uh, but I feel like, I don't know, are we clamoring for a redesign? Is this exciting? Jason? I am not. So there are people there, there are two camps of people.

There are people who think that eventually all technology things should change just so that they'll be different so that they can like... It's sort of like the endless scroll on Instagram. You need more content to just get that little endorphin thing going on or whatever. Right, right. I don't... Like I hear this about the Apple Watch. People are so insistent that...

Apple Watch, Apple is going to be a failure if they don't do something to redesign the Apple Watch. And the way I look at it is like, no, the Apple Watch is just the logical end form factor of what that device should be, right? They might make a couple tweaks. They came out with the Ultra. They made the screen a little bit bigger. But I don't think it's ever going to like suddenly be...

a square with flat sides. Like, well, it doesn't make sense. Like what, what more is going to happen to this computer? Like, it is so thin, like it is a display. It's a keyboard and track pad and some ports. Like, I don't know where this is going to go. No,

No, it's right. Exactly. And I don't mean maybe it could conceivably get a little bit thinner, but it doesn't need to. It is the right form factor for this product. And that's great. I mean, the wedge was great too. I mean, they obviously changed it. The reason though they changed it is because they made the screen a little bit bigger and they stretched it out and they put the notch in and that kind of stuff. So that gave them the opportunity. But I think that when you like look at it, the software, like,

There are things that I think should be different. You mentioned maybe this is just a way to distract all of us from Apple intelligence. I think the problem is it might be distracting Apple from Apple intelligence. It's like there's so much resources going into this. And it's like when you think about redesigning software, and I'm not a software engineer, but I feel like this is a pretty general principle. If you are going to – and this is like companies changing their logo because they just feel like it's time to do a refresh. And the only people who are thinking about –

it's time to do a refresh are the people who like are inside the company and are just bored and need something to come up with to do. I don't think that iOS needs a redesign. Now it is true that like on the Mac, on the phone and the iPad, and then on the vision and the vision pro, there are sort of three different design languages, but they feel appropriate to,

for those user interfaces, right? So I don't, and if they want to like sort of coalesce them together, I think that that's fine. I do not think that we need a visual overhaul to iOS, for example. I think it's fine.

I think it's mostly fine. And I think it just introduces more failure points where app developers, many of whom are not user experience designers, are just going to end up with worse performing apps. You know, and it's funny, the circular design that everyone's saying, you know, is Vision Pro-esque and it's inspiring everything. I don't know if people remember, the Apple Watch exists and it's had the circular icons forever. Well, and I think they mean sort of that frosted, slightly translucent kind of like...

hovering windows but you have to have that on the vision bro because like you have to see through them and know that there's a wall there right like right I don't need that on my phone and people have been saying like the Apple invites app has kind of that newer design language and that's where Apple is going listen I'm also I'm not opposed like cool like let's refresh some stuff we can make it look even more modern I guess fine I think the bugs is really for me like let's not forget the bugs

Please. Sure, but you've got to ask yourself whether or not the juice is worth the squeeze because even with iOS 18...

I think what was my phrase? There are people living in my house who were very upset about it, even though there wasn't that much. But the control center was a huge change for someone. If you're used to swiping down and all of a sudden the things you thought you were going to see are in a different place. Even if you can rationalize that that changes better because someone like Steven can customize it and do all these different things for the average user. First of all.

Steven's not the average user. He's way above average user. Thank you. But most of the people using those 2 billion iPhones or whatever that are out there, there's a real cost involved when you make those kind of changes. And I just don't know if it's worth it because even if you make it prettier, people are still going to be like, yeah, but where's the button that I used to press to do this thing? That is true. I think it's the nicest thing you've ever said to me. I'm not the average user. You are an above average user. Yeah.

That's the exact quote. I just want to be clear. I would change my email signature to above average user.

So we'll see. I mean, DubDub's just a few months away. We might see invites coming out soon. And the last thing I want to say before we get to Apple Intelligence and all that, Sonos, which was rumored to be developing a streaming box, canceled it. So it looks like this is a report from Chris Welch, who's been reporting on Sonos for the last couple years in depth. They're not doing it anymore. And I'll be honest, I was a little disappointed. I guess I get to save some money this year and not buy another streaming box. But...

Now, less competition for Apple TV and we don't have another alternative in the marketplace. So, I was

I was kind of looking forward to it, but it looks like it's not happening. I think this is mostly a function of the fact that right now they have an interim CEO who is trying to get them focused back on the things that actually matter. And maybe that would have been really cool, but this is kind of like the car project. It's not nearly the same scale, but like Apple had a car project and all of a sudden they're like, oh shoot, LLMs. Like we should probably be focused on that, not doing a car. Where like Sonos, like streaming boxes, none of them are great. The Apple...

the Apple TV is a fantastic, it's way overpowered, like for what you need it to do. The interface is like fine, right? It's like, there's, I don't know what better interface you're going to get other than just,

a good voice interaction which whatever we'll talk about that but i mean there isn't really a need because this thing was not going to be cheaper than the apple tv right so it's not like this is going to fill a spot in the market you have roku fire chromecast at one end and then you have the apple tv and then isn't there like a the nvidia shield yeah something like in some other probably you know bespoke whatever things that like feed the things through the ether or whatever but like

I don't know. Like, it makes sense to me that this got canceled because I'm not really sure that it really had a spot. Focusing on what you're doing well. Look at that. Or the things you're already doing terrible. Right, right. Focus on fixing those. Yeah. Exactly. Like your app. Talking about Sonos. We're going to get to the Apple intelligence. It's going to be a dissertation. It's going to be, I got some thoughts. I got feelings. I got feelings. I do. Before we get to that, I want to thank our sponsor for today, which is Green Chef.

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Is this the second time you've cut an onion? It's like the fifth time. This is like the fifth time I've cut an onion. Let me look at that chopping skills. I don't know if those are good skills or not, but I cut it. I cut the onion. I cut the onion. Yeah, and you didn't cut your finger. I didn't cut my finger. It is very difficult not to, but yeah, there we go. I probably should have used a bigger cutting board. Anyway, this is my Green Chef stuff, and this was a ground turkey cream...

Onion tomato soup. It had some of the queso fresca, you know, a little crumbly cheese in it. It was delicious. I made it all myself. No help from anybody except from Green Chef. And everybody liked it. My kids liked it.

My wife liked it. So, yeah. Did you make any? Do you remember any recipes you made? Yes. And it's been a couple of weeks since we had a chance to do this last. So, I know there was a... We did a soup that was actually very, very good. Yes. And the thing that's weird about this, this is a terrible endorsement because I can't remember what it was, but I do specifically remember that it was very, very good. And...

Okay. I mean, it's a good endorsement. It's just bad memory. I just wish I could remember specifically. Listen, we have four kids, all of whom play sports. We don't even get to eat dinner together that often. And so it's kind of chaotic in our house, which is actually what this is perfect for because it took like 30 minutes and everything we needed was right there and it was fantastic.

Exactly. And that's, I like it too. I like the compact nature. I don't want to spend hours in the kitchen. And this Green Chef helps you just keep it all done and compact, you know, get it done quickly. And the recipe cards make it easy to follow, even if you're not a cook like me. So thrive all year with clean, easy meals from Green Chef. Go to greenchef.com slash primary free and use code primary free to get started with free salads for two months, plus 50% off your first box. 50% off your first box. That's wild.

So that is go to greenchef.com slash primary free, primary free and use code primary free. That link and promo code is in the show notes too. Just click it there to get started with free salads in two months plus 50% off your first box. Green Chef, the number one meal kit for eating well. Thank you, Green Chef. I wish I had like my Swedish chef hat. Actually, I don't have that hat.

Ancho chicken soup. That's what we had. It was delicious. Ancho chicken soup. There we go. There we go. That's the end of the read right there because Jason remembered the meal. Okay. Big news. I'm going to go through the timeline very quick. We're going through time because as a company would do, if you're going to deliver some bad news, you do it on a Friday at the end of the day. This is what companies do. It's called taking it out with the garbage. Exactly. Exactly.

And that's what happened in a very strange way. Friday, last Friday, the day after we published our last episode, John Gruber at daring fireball and two other news outlets, Reuters and CNBC, right? I think that's correct. They all received a statement from Apple. So Apple didn't release anything. First party. There was nothing in the newsroom, no interview, no nothing, but there was a statement that

And this is the statement verbatim that John Gruber, CNBC, and Reuters were given. And this is from Jacqueline Roy, an Apple spokeswoman. So John Gruber and others got to quote her directly.

Quote, Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly. And in just the past six months, we've made it more conversational, introduced new features like type and product knowledge, and added an integration with JetGPT. We've also been working on a more personalized Siri. That's the semantic index we talked about last year in DubDub. Giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It's going to take us longer than we thought to

to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year. Now, in the coming year, that's Apple speak for any time between now and December 31st, 2025.

And also in the coming year, does that mean 2026? Maybe? Yeah, that's the part that's not clear. What do those words mean? And also, you remember the last time that they said something about like, we'll complete the transition to Apple Silicon by the end of the year. It took them like a whole other year to get the Mac Pro. There's one more, but that's for another day. Turned out it was like a lot of other days. A lot of other days. The biggest asterisk. So in the coming year,

Who knows what that means? And we'll talk about the credibility even of that statement. So that was Friday. Then after that statement was delivered through John Gruber, Reuters and CNBC, Apple did a couple of things. They added a new disclaimer on its website in various places. And the disclaimer that it reads is personal context, understanding onscreen awareness and in-app actions are in development and will be available with a future software update.

Now, that kind of statement we've seen in the past, like sometimes even in the big iOS like 18 updates, there'll be the features that come out on day one. Then there'll be the features that come out in iOS 18.3.4 or whatever.

Apple's been doing that for a while. I still remember the halcyon days where everything Apple talked about at DubDub was actually released with the iOS update, like in the, like the first one in the fall. Do you remember those days, Jason? Oh, I do. Absolutely. It's only been a couple of years that that's not been the case. It's not. Yeah, exactly. So there was that, but also Apple removed the advertisement that was on their YouTube channel. And it was a commercial that had aired on TV.

But the one with Bella Ramsey talking about the voice assistant personal context, they took that video down from their YouTube channel. So, I mean, it's been uploaded a thousand other places and you can still see it, but they took that down, which I think is more unusual for something like this. So that all happened between Friday over the weekend.

And then, conveniently, all the embargoes dropped for their new products. So Monday through Wednesday of this week, it's all been about the iPad Air, the Mac Studio, the MacBook Air. That's all very exciting. And I want to talk deeply about this strange dichotomy that we have right now in this moment when thinking about Apple. But then just yesterday, Wednesday...

John Gruber released basically a dissertation, a very long post on Daring Fireball. It will be linked in the show notes. The title being Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino.

I'm going to pull some quotes from this in a second. I encourage you read it. This is an interesting statement for a lot of reasons. Basically what he's talking about is Apple's credibility has taken a serious hit from the promises it made last year at WWDC, the promises it continued to make all the way through the iPhone 16 launch. I actually have a clip I want to play from that event because Craig Federighi is in the event video talking about personal context and how it's coming soon.

And John Gruber makes some salient points about he should have, and he's basically getting on himself too, should have called this out as vaporware from the beginning. Mostly because demos of that personal context voice assistant, which I'm going to say voice assistant from now on because I set off my own HomePod a second ago, but...

Being that there were no actual demos of those features in person for the briefings. Apple intelligence briefings included Genmoji, image playgrounds, the writing tools, chat GPT integration, but all of the personal context, which is like the big update to the voice assistant that's supposed to have been coming.

Those were never really demoed, even in person at DubDub or in the basically year hence. And he's basically saying that Apple has promised these things, has talked about them multiple times, again, reiterating them at other events like the iPhone 16 event, and has failed to deliver on those promises. So that was just yesterday. Thinking about the source, like John Gruber said,

If you follow his work, as many of you probably do, he is typically very defending of Apple's choices. Even at times when it feels like Apple has made a decision to, whatever, remove a product or feature or something like that, he is quick to talk about the reasoning Apple has behind a change that they made. And he's critical when there's problems too. This one, I think, being the most surprising. I mean, he had harsh words.

for Apple. And so a couple of quotes from his article, John Gruber says, quote,

Apple's credibility is now damaged. Careers will end before Apple might ever return to the level of, if they say it, you can believe it, credibility the company had earned at the start of June 2024. Basically before DubDub and when they announced all this. Another quote, the fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn't true. One that some people within the company surely understood wasn't true. And they set a course based on that.

And then he goes on to say, you can stretch the truth and maintain credibility, but you can't maintain credibility with BS. Gruber uses the full word, but I don't want an explicit tag. And the more personalized voice assistant features, it turns out, were BS.

Final quote I'll read, John Gruber harkens back to the MobileMe days when Steve Jobs called a meeting and was basically like, WTF, what is MobileMe supposed to even do? It doesn't do that. What are we doing?

And John Gruber says, quote, Tim Cook should have already held a meeting like that to address and rectify this Siri and Apple intelligence debacle. If such a meeting hasn't yet occurred or doesn't happen soon, then I fear that's all she wrote. The ride is over. When mediocrity, excuses, and BS take root, they take over. A culture of excellence, accountability, and integrity cannot abide the acceptance of any of those things and will quickly collapse upon itself

with the acceptance of all three. I encourage you to read Gruber's entire article because he makes some great points. But again, that is some harsh words about the most valuable and profitable company in the world saying that the ride is over and now mediocrity has entered. And we're talking about just Apple intelligence and the voice assistant contextual awareness specifically. So this was quite a bomb that he dropped yesterday.

I have some thoughts on this, but I want to pause for a second. If you wanted to interject anything to set this up before we move on. Yeah. A couple of things. I,

So I was thinking after I read this and I've listened to Gruber talk about this on two podcasts now. He talked about it on Dithering, which is the twice a week 15 minute podcast he does with Ben Thompson. And then also, again, on the episode of Upgrade from Monday, Jason Snell is bringing in some guests because his co-host Mike Hurley had a baby. Well, his wife had a baby.

And so he's taking some, he's on maternity leave. So, and I was like, I really need, I've been thinking about this for a while. I should write about it. And then like, I just looked and I'm like, I did write about this. I wrote about this in January and said, the one thing that Apple needs to get right in 2025 has nothing to do with the next iPhone. And the part that I just would point out is it's like the second to last paragraph. I said, the point here is Apple has to get this right this coming year.

partially because it's so far behind, but more importantly, because it made a promise. And as a company, you have to keep your promises, right? Like, and that's Gruber's point. I think there's two completely separate problems here. One is Apple can't figure this out. And that's bad, right? Like they should be able to figure this out. It's obviously a very complicated problem because they have to essentially build a totally parallel version of contextually aware Siri alongside the one that can control your lights and figure all that out.

But the bigger thing is there was a meeting somewhere where someone said we should, we should promote this. And someone else said, we shouldn't promote this. And as Gruber's point is like, someone made the call to start promoting this and they should not have. And that's the problem. And I was at WWDC. In fact, I was trying to remember, but I think I might've been in the briefing that Gruber was talking about. And, and it's, he's like, there's like, you know, I was in a briefing with four or five people. I'm like, I think I might've been one of them actually. But, but,

I think everything he's saying is absolutely true. And he kind of walks through this hierarchy of how real a thing is. Right. And it is true. If you, if you go to a Apple event, there are times when Apple will demo a thing for you and it's not in the betas yet. So they aren't, it's not available for you to use, but they will demo it on their devices and show you a thing. And that's what happened with a lot of the Apple intelligence features. The next level to that is that it's available online.

Well, it's available for you to try. There are times when they'll have a thing where you can try out the Apple Watches. They're real. They haven't shipped yet, but they're there. You can actually touch them and you can test them out. The next level is they're in a beta for developers. And then the final level is it ships to customers. And what he is saying is all of these contextually aware Siri things were level zero because they didn't even do demos for us. They were just in a video, right? It's just all like...

And vaporware, like you said, but the only demo of it. And actually, the one thing I feel like I really got wrong in that article that I wrote was I said they needed to deliver all of the things they demoed. And I agree with Gruber. They didn't actually demo. But I mean, what I was referring to is like they showed them off in the keynote.

Right. But they didn't actually do demos of it. And I think, I think the real problem here is not just that Apple is so far behind in delivering this because nobody else has delivered this stuff yet either. Right. No one else has really delivered this. Right. Right. So they could take their time on that to get it right. The problem is,

they promoted it as if it was real and then they promoted it in a commercial like it was real and then at the iPhone event they talked about it again Snoop Dogg is in so many ads talking about

talking about well but even just you're going to show a clip of craig federighi talking about it again at the iphone event and gruber i like gruber's point why was craig federighi the one demoing this he is the software guy but he is not the apple intelligence guy and i i think i will be very surprised this is the kind of thing someone will lose their job so i want to get i want to talk about that aspect in a second so this is a clip and again talking about how hard apple was promoting this this is from the iphone event

So not dubbed up. This is months later. Right. Three months later. Yep. Later. Yeah. So here's a clip of Craig Federighi. It's like 30 seconds. I'll put it in the audio version as well. But if you want to see it, head on over to YouTube. And there's so much more to come. Siri will be able to tap into your personal context to help you in ways that are unique to you. And it will be able to take hundreds of new actions in your apps, like updating a friend's contact card with his new address or adding a set of photos to a specific album.

with Siri's personal context understanding and action capabilities, you'll be able to simply say, send Erica the photos from Saturday's barbecue and Siri will dig up the photos and send them right off. So after reading Gruber's article and watching that clip, which Gruber calls out specifically, most of the features that Apple touts is basically like

a white screen with just text floating towards you. Yep. That's, that's the feature being shown off is just in text. And then even the one, the couple of ones they talk about is like, send these photos to so-and-so. It basically just shows a video of like, not someone holding an iPhone, but just like a 3d rendered iPhone generated thing. And it's just pictures being sent via text message, but it's not actually showing anything.

Of the feet, like no physical, because even in that same, that was when Craig Friedrich was talking about visual intelligence coming to the iPhone 16. And there were several examples of like, hold the phone up to a concert poster, do visual intelligence and add it to your calendar, point it at a dog and it'll identify the breed. I did an entire video about all of that, which it basically does now.

Those, they fulfilled those promises. But all of the contextual awareness, voice assistance stuff that Craig Federighi in that event is promoting is not out. We might not see until 2026.

So here's my next question for you, Jason. Gruber talked about air power being one of the times that Apple promised something and then failed. And air power was, I think, Phil Schiller on stage talking about the wireless charging mat that was going to change everything and you would be able to charge your phone, watch, and AirPods. Never came out. Apple, I don't think they ever released an official statement saying it's not coming out. I think it just floated away into the ether. I think they might have. I think there was some, or they gave a statement to somebody.

I think they gave a statement to somebody like they're doing here. But this is not the first time Apple has failed in software.

and the first time they've broken a promise. And I want to put this in the context of these other failings because in Gruber's article, this really feels like he is implying a shift in the company's culture that might affect it long-term. And I'm curious if like, is it really that big of a deal or is it similar to these other situations? And I'll point out a couple. He talks about MobileMe in the Steve Jobs era, but also Apple Maps was a huge failure. Now they

they released Apple Maps as promised it was really broken at first and took a number of years to actually fix and it caused lots of damage in the subsequent years that it was bad and people didn't want to use it and stopped using it but I will point out today like whenever I get on social media and talk about Apple Maps versus Google Maps it's at least 50-50 if not more people saying Apple Maps was well designed I use it as my default it's great now so that was a situation where

They did deliver. It was hopelessly broken. They fixed it. And now it's gotten back with some credibility. Could it have been way more used earlier on and had a better reputation? Sure. But that was recovered just fine.

This next one's not really a failure, but there were many times when Steve Jobs made a promise of something and then it was just never delivered. Like FaceTime being open source on multiple platforms. I don't know if you remember that, Jason, but with the iPhone 4 launch, when FaceTime was announced, because that was the first iPhone with a front-facing camera, Steve Jobs said during the event that we're going to open source FaceTime so other platforms can use it. They did not deliver on that promise either. MobileMe again, as Gruber said. So my thing is, they have not delivered on these things.

And who knows when they will. But is this indicative of a company culture shift or another one of these just kind of software failings? And like you mentioned, someone's going to get fired over this likely because of how it was promoted. Scott Forstall was likely the casualty from the Apple Maps situation. So there was a shift there, namely that he shifted out of the company. And so we might see someone from the Apple Intelligence team or someone else shift out. Now,

Gruber says Steve jobs was the one to go in and have a meeting and say WTF and push everybody to fix these things. As Tim Cook had that meeting, is he one who can have that meeting? Oh, is it Craig Federighi or something else? But how do you put those past failings in perspective? And what are the thoughts? Yeah. Uh, yeah. So I think the mobile me one is interesting because that wasn't like they said, this service will do email, but it doesn't.

Right. And they didn't demo you sending emails with mobile me, but that's actually just not a real thing. It just, it was poorly designed and they just had to fix a bunch of the backend stuff, but it still did email, which is, was the thing they said it would do. It just didn't always deliver them to you. So like that doesn't, it wasn't bad, but that was a situation where he's like,

You have to fix this. Someone had to come in and say, and you had to, he had to put the pressure on those people to deliver the thing that they had promised so that it would happen. I am sure like there are plenty of, you know, stories. Maybe some of them are apocryphal. I don't know about Tim Cook, like get on a plane. Why are you still here? Kind of thing. Like go fix the assembly line kind of thing. I don't think Tim Cook has a problem with that. What I do think has happened is,

Because I can remember WWDC, I think it was the year the Vision Pro was announced. So what is that? Like two years ago now? That would be 2023. Yeah. And so this was like in the heat of the LLM craze. And Apple did not use the word LLM.

AI once. Not a single time. In fact, they didn't use it until that fall when they rolled out the MacBook Pros at the Scary Fast event. These are the first devices designed for AI. Whatever. Although it's funny because I was in a... Well, I'm not even going to go there because it was off the record. So anyway, I just think it's interesting how they can wordsmith some of those things. But I think then you notice they realize at that moment we have to do something.

Because we are the largest company in the world and our market cap is based on the fact that the iPhone is the most dominant consumer product in the world. And if these chatbots and these generative AI tools and these LLMs take hold somewhere else that is at risk, we have to be seen as doing something. And so they started trying to figure it out. They were way, way, way behind and

And they started making forward promises that they should. And the point I think that Gruber is making, and I would agree, isn't that they shouldn't have been working on it or even talking about the idea that we, Hey, and eventually what we hope to be able to do is this. It's the fact that they showed what looked like those features when those features were not real, right? You can't do, listen, I, this is a scary place to go.

this is exactly that. I think Gruber would be, he didn't make this comparison, but it's sort of like when, when Tesla shows off the cyber taxi and you're like, is this going to be a real thing? Are they actually driving themselves or the robots that were at the event, which turns out they were just actually people controlling them and talking to them. That's like,

And you look at Tesla and you're like, yeah, okay, fine, whatever. That's kind of their thing. They just say things and whatever. Maybe they make some of them happen. That is not the reputation Apple wants to have. And I think Gruber's pointing like if you start to shift where it's like, okay, we'll just promise a thing and then we'll figure out how to make it true later. That's a very dangerous place to be. And if you're doing that because you feel the pressure of we're so far behind, we have to make fetch happen and you can't.

Right. Like then you shouldn't be making those promises because as a company, you have to keep your promises. It doesn't mean that you sometimes you can't keep your promise because a thing goes badly. You should be very careful about how you make that promise in the first place. The air power is a good example. It's like, yeah, we just can't figure this out. And it's not a high enough priority for us to continue investing in this. So we hope to do it. We're just not. Right. So.

My last couple of thoughts on this, how much does it even matter to the real world? And I say the real world, meaning outside of the tech bubble, because when I think about what makes Apple profitable, it's selling hardware.

And in this very moment where we had just a slew of new Macs, we just gushed over a new Mac. We just talked about the new MacBook Air. It's basically the old Mac with a new color and a new chip. But we gushed about it because it's amazing. But it's amazing because we have this weird dichotomy right now where when it comes to hardware and the chips, the M3 Ultra, the M4 Max, the actual, you know, the hardware of the MacBook Air, the iPad Pro...

They have this incredible head start or lead when it comes to this hardware stuff. I mean, the iPhone 16 Pro Max, say what you will, how similar it is, has an incredible camera. Every time I take photos and videos, it's amazing. Super fast. I never worry or think about having a faster phone. And so we live in this weird dichotomy right now where there's this whole realm where Apple is killing it. Hardware, Apple Silicon,

I talk about a lot of bugs or whatever in iOS 19, but also like I would, I struggle to move from iOS because of things like shortcuts and continuity and the smart home integration, the whole ecosystem in general, universal clipboard, universal control. I use all these features all the time and they work really well, 90 something percent of the time. And so we have this weird dichotomy where all of this stuff is going extremely well. And it's so easy to like say, well, I mean, look at this. Apple just did this and the M3 Ultra.

And so Apple doesn't necessarily have to have anyone buy Apple intelligence. And that's why I wonder like how much, obviously in the tech bubble in the Apple world, like this is feels like a big deal, but I am wondering, is this a big deal?

long term for the company really as long as they keep doing things like this which they're obviously capable of doing the m4 and the m5 and further chips the c1 brand new chip does it like is it really going to affect their bottom line enough to warrant a change or they just keep jamming on it because it seems to me like this feels like more of the apple maps debacle than it does some kind of tipping point for the company as a whole now i get gruber's point

mediocrity and BS. I don't want those in a part of Apple. And I definitely see that encroaching in and how they talked about Apple intelligence. I joke about the Snoop Dogg Apple intelligence ads, but it's wild to me how many times I saw that commercial in like the two sports ball events I watched this year. And every time I listened to a couple of podcasts, I think the verge cast is one of them. I hear Snoop Dogg at least two or three times talking about Apple intelligence. Clearly they're pushing it hard. And I think maybe that's the mistake.

They're pushing it hard because they want to be in the AI conversation, but they're pushing it hard when there's nothing really to push. They're pushing writing tools and summaries for notifications, which is laughably whatever. Like no one cares. I think they should have just not pushed it as hard. Obviously they should not have promised something that is not close to ready, but

But I also think in this weird dichotomy, like their hardware and other stuff is still going so well. I don't know if this is the shift of it. Like, I don't know if this is like,

you know, red flags. I mean, it is a red flag, but I don't know if this is like companies going down kind of thing. I think it's, they need to get their act together in this one area, namely the voice assistant contextual awareness. And then I think, you know, two or three years from now, maybe it won't be an issue, but I don't know how is that? How was your thing? Yeah. Okay. That's fair. Yes. The hardware is great. I think when there was this like very contentious period, um,

when uh twitter became x and there was a lot of changes happening and some of those in what happened was people use the example of like well elon musk has been so successful i'm sorry for keeping him up i think there's actually a good parallel here at rocket ships and at electric cars and all of these things where there are physical limitations having someone who is like breakthrough

figure it out whatever but there is still literally the laws of physics involved right there are constraints on that there is not just an unlimited blue sky of no pun intended of like possibility when it comes to putting a rocket into space right there are laws of gravity and whatever that you have to work on but software that's not true you can literally just screw it up as badly as you want because there's no friction involved in doing that it's just typing code or whatever so i'm

So I think the same thing is parallel with hardware versus some of these promises in this area. I think Gruber's point, there's two things. And I'm not as mad as he is because I have not had nearly the longstanding relationship with Apple and career covering it the way he has. But I think to some extent, there are people in the media who right now feel used and bamboozled because...

Because it's like, in many cases, the reason that Apple does those demos, the reason they do those things is because that's the funnel at which they disseminate this kind of information. And so they are so careful at planting exactly the information that they want for you to be talking about. And I think that in some places it feels very wrong to be like, I feel, I don't know that, I definitely don't feel this as strongly as he does. Because again, Gruber knows all these people way back, like he knows everything.

the players, the Phil Schillers on a first name basis, the Craig Federighi's on a first name basis. He's had them on his show. He has met them. He's had conversations with Steve Jobs. Like it's a very different category of someone covering this kind of thing. So I think there's that. I think it's personal. He's like, I should have seen this. I was blinded by the show that they put on and I took it at face value, which I thought I could do, but apparently I can't do that. So there's that. But the other piece that he points out

is this idea that there were people inside the company who a hundred percent knew they should not be talking about it the way that they were. Right. And those people were overruled. And that I think is what he means by this shift of, that's not the Apple that I thought we knew because he,

And someone, presumably Tim Cook, was like, no, green light the marketing plan. We've got to do this. And there's people who are like, yeah, but it can't do any of those things. We can't even demo them yet for the press. We can't talk. We can't even show them on a real device doing the things. We are so far away from being able to deliver on this that it's irresponsible to be showing this stuff. And they're like, do it anyway. I think that's the piece that he points out. Here's what I think would be valuable for them to do.

As was with the CSAM and some of those privacy and security concerns that, again, Apple promised a thing, said it was coming out, rolled it back, said, actually, we're not going to do that. Craig Federighi, do it with Joanna Stern, whoever. Do it with us. We'll do an interview with you, Craig Federighi. Absolutely. We'll have you on the show. And just say, listen, we're trying to make this the most private and secure possible.

AI assistant possible. And it's taking way longer than we thought. And so right now, you can integrate ChatGPT directly with your voice assistant. And we have all the best LLM apps and services. You have it on your iPhone already. You can get the Perplexity app, Claude, ChatGPT. You can already do those things on this phone. And

And it's not like even Amazon with their Alexa plus, which I already returned that echo show. Cause I couldn't stay in all the ads. Like they've promised a bunch of stuff. Who knows what it'll be when it comes out, Google Gemini, whatever they're doing. Like it doesn't feel like they're close. Google IO is in may. Maybe they'll announce a bunch of promises, but Google's reputation is the same thing. There's a whole website called killed by Google. Who knows what they'll keep or what they'll, or what they'll throw away. So I don't think Apple needs to feel the pressure to say like contextual voice assistant needs to be out tomorrow because

Just go publicly and say like, listen, this is in the future. We're not going to promise anything. We're going to focus on a great, they're not going to say this, but we're going to focus on the next version of iOS. It's going to be incredible. We're going to focus on making great hardware like we always do. And guess what? People can buy the hardware that they sell right now and still use all the amazing LLMs that other companies are doing really well at that Apple doesn't have to do anything. They just have the apps on the phone. And that's the dominancy of the iPhone means you can access everything

all the best of the AIs and the LLMs on this device, just like you could if it was a contextual aware Apple intelligence. And they don't like, people are going to buy this phone either way. So anyway. You know what they should have done is in October of, was it October of 2022 when chat GPT took off? I think that sounds about right. They should have like the next morning got up and bought Anthropic.

Like just instantly insta buy, just find the best one. That's not opening. I find it and just instantly just, just take it. Cause they can't, they can't, even the largest company in the world can't buy these companies now. And it's also not like they would be hurting the,

series reputation by not delivering this because nobody likes siri anyway like my kids who try to yell at their home pod minis all the time already at their age understand that it's not good that it doesn't play the songs they want to play it can't do the things they want it to do so it's not like there's high expectations for the voice assistant anyway just maybe make it good at what it's supposed to be doing right now and then worry about the contextual awareness later but

Anyway. Well, and actually some people pointed out that like the better thing to do would have been to just to start with making Siri better period, right? Like start with that stuff. And even if it meant you had to have two separate things, this is, that was the problem. They tried to merge these,

It's like you're trying to merge like a mainframe thing with an iPhone's guts. Like it's like you, these are completely incompatible to the way that they're doing it. Right. And you're right because the verge, they pointed out that like a lot of the stuff that Amazon demoed at their recent Alexa plus thing, like, is this all just vaporware? Because you just said, send a Uber to pick up my friend at the airport, which is not a thing you can tell even an LLM because there's way too many considerations there. So like, is that even real? You're insisting that this is real, but like,

You can't just do that. Steven, if you fly into town, I'm not going to just shout out my Echo. Pick up my friend at the airport. What airport? What terminal? What friend? How does my friend know where to find it? What device should I get the location for? Exactly. And how does my friend even know that there's an Uber coming to get him? How do they communicate with the Uber driver when they're at the wrong pickup place? Anyway, so all of these things. But I think the difference is,

You look at Amazon and you're like, didn't they announce like a drone that flies around your house a couple of years ago? Like people look at that and you're like, whatever. But Apple was promising the most significant shift to how you merge voice assistants and LLMs that no one else could do, right? Google could do this because they make Android fine, but Google has other things. Like Android is a much smaller part of its overall business considerations, right? It's a search engine. Right.

Also, nobody uses their first party phone. So they still have to work with Samsung or whoever to try and get that integrated. True. So anyway, yeah. So Apple, keep your promises. A. B, don't make promises you can't keep. How about that?

All right. And more exciting news. Pocket Cast is now on the web for everybody. I sent you a link from it yesterday. I have the link right here. I went to Pocket. No, no, no. I mean, I sent you a Pocket Cast from the web link yesterday. Oh, that's right. That's right. You shared something. Yes, that was nice. So Pocket Cast, listen, I use Apple Podcasts, but is a Pocket Cast still the best podcast app? Just throw that out there.

I got worked up there, Jason. I got worked up. That's what we're here for. This is great. This is it. Before we get to our bonus episode, we're going to talk about tethering because everybody's yelling at me that MacBooks don't need cellular. Okay. We're going to get to that. But for our personal tech, I got a harrowing message in my Files app the other day. I opened the Files app on my iPhone and it said iCloud storage is almost full. I have four terabytes of iCloud storage, Jason. Four terabytes? Four? Four?

What are you doing? Listen, here's the thing. A long time back in the day, or at least I went all in on iCloud Drive. I don't use Dropbox. I don't use Google Drive on my stuff. I just use iCloud for everything. And I also share it with five other people. So there's six people total sharing this iCloud storage. And when I opened the Files app, I saw this message, which I had never seen before, which is terrifying. And then I looked at who's using all the space.

I'm using 2.1 terabytes of everything. And then, you know, my family's using the gigabytes. My son, he does a lot of video stuff. So I know the videos that are probably syncing to photos, taking up some space. But anyway, I deleted some stuff, which your iPhone can like point you to your iCloud drive and show you the biggest files. And some of them were like old HomeKit Insider recordings.

They were still in the folder. I was like, okay, well, I could delete those. There's a MOTS episodes I could delete. Those are already published. But I deleted some ones, but I only recovered like maybe a couple hundred gigs. And so I'm now at the place where

I'll probably upgrade to the six terabyte level just because, because I use, like I use iCloud drive as like my everything folder. I use my documents folder on my Mac to where I pretty much put everything except video files and raw audio files. This way it's available everywhere. But how much,

storage are you using jason well let me just say first of all yes given the conversation we had about mobile meat there's a zero percent chance that i would use icloud drive as my primary cloud storage like even it's good it's good now this is another situation where it's actually good it's good it's

It's not better than Dropbox. Not better than Dropbox. In so many ways. So anyway, my iCloud Drive itself, I have 168 gigs in the iCloud Drive. I don't even... And you know what they are? It's like five folders from my Dropbox backed up in iCloud Drive. It's like... What, you got an Inception folder? I just have... It's not an automatic thing. It's just like I think I put... There's like some archive stuff and I'm like I would...

Our wedding photos were in my Dropbox, and I also put a copy of them on the iCloud Drive. It's like stuff that just, whatever. If someday I'm like, forget it, I'm not paying for Dropbox anymore. YOLO, who cares what's in there? I'm like, oh, shoot, this I need. It's that kind of a thing. But our iCloud photos is like 700 gigs.

Our device backups is 275 gigs. It's like, honestly, there's just not... We're using 1.9 terabytes of 4 terabytes. Now, my Dropbox is 800 gigs. So if I was doing what you're doing, I still wouldn't... I'd be at like 2.7 of 4. So I don't know. You're saving a lot of... Some stuff you don't really need to save, I guess. But I don't know. So when you get to that limit, are you going to...

upgrade to like the six terabytes well i'm hoping that when i get to that limit several of my children can just be on their own iCloud storage just you're done no i don't know i mean we're like almost a half now i guess before apple one we would have been at the limit because i'm at 1.9 right so and if i if that was the case i probably would have just had to figure out

I would have started deleting things from the iCloud drive, obviously, because I'm like, I guess I don't really need those things in there. Put them on a SSD or something. But I don't know. I just, yeah, I guess it's easy enough to just upgrade that. I mean, I think now the limit is 12. You can get up to 12 terabytes in your iCloud drive. You can get up to 12 terabytes. So I have plenty of headroom if I needed to. I do want to point out, Tim,

Chotin on a mastodon. He does the iPad pros podcast, which I've been on. It was a great work. He sent a screenshot of his iCloud storage. His Apple vision pro backup is 720 gigs. That's three quarters of a terabyte just for the Apple vision pro backup. There is literally not 720 gigs of content created for the vision pro. So he went on to explain, apparently he uses an app called moon player and

And he has all of his 3D Blu-ray disc rips, which is around 500 gigs of data. And because you can't pick and choose what apps are backed up in an iCloud backup, it has that entire 500 gig library.

syncing to his iCloud backup. So I think Tim wins the most absurd Apple Vision Pro backup. I would agree. Because I mean, like most people, your largest thing should be your iCloud photos. You would think. Yeah, you would think. Which one was mine? Well, I don't have it here. I think mine was like photo. Well, iCloud Drive was my biggest one. And then photos. I'm probably going to upgrade to the 630. Let's do it.

We actually have hard drive hygiene as another personal tech segment for another day. That's another day. It is nice, though, that you can just kind of do this as you go, right? So you get two terabytes if you subscribe to Apple One, and then we pay for the additional two terabytes of iCloud Plus. And then you can just be like, okay, I just need more.

And I could add, I could, so actually this is interesting. I don't think you can get six. You would get eight. I'll get eight. Okay. Cause so there's iCloud plus with two terabytes. I cloud plus with six terabytes. I,

iCloud Plus with 12 terabytes, but I think you still keep the two that come with Apple One. Right, right, correct. So you would actually have four, eight, or 14. Now, hold on a second. I might upgrade this right now, live on the show. It is a hefty increase, but I mean, honestly, six terabytes of storage for $29.99 a month is actually not that bad. Back in the day, it used to be crazy. So right now I'm paying...

$10 a month just for the extra two terabytes on top of my Apple one. If I want to get the six terabytes, it says six right here. Oh no, no. It says you still have to, right? It says your total storage will be a terrible, right? Your total storage. So that would be another $20 for four more terabytes because I have four terabytes right now paying $10 a month. Yep. If I pay 30, an extra $20 a month, I'd have eight terabytes. Oh,

I'm literally about to do this right now. I'm literally about to do this right now. Six terabytes for a total of eight terabytes of storage. I just tapped buy. Here we go. Yep. I'm buying it.

I now have eight terabytes of iCloud storage, and I never have to think about it again for another couple of years. I mean, the things that we're willing to throw money at to avoid pop-up warnings on our devices. There it is. Storage upgraded. There you go. Just as proof. I now have eight terabytes of storage. This is a very expensive personal tech section. I haven't bought a Mac Studio yet, though. Oh, and see, this is why I do it. So now I can look at this line graph.

in my settings. Look at all that space. Except for it says you're only using 3.6 terabytes, which is... Well, because I deleted a bunch of stuff. I deleted a bunch of stuff. And here's the thing. I was deleting big files...

And I have one Pixelmator project that is like my thumbnail Pixelmator project for YouTube. And I have a bunch of assets in there that I'll reuse sometimes, like the Apple Home tag and the Made from MagSafe tag. And as I was deleting big files trying to save space, I accidentally deleted that one. Thankfully, it was still in my trash, so I was able to put it back and recover it, but I

But I was very sad for a moment when I thought I lost it. That's why I don't like deleting stuff. I might be a minimalist in the real life, but I'm a digital pack rat. I want it all. I want to keep it all. And now I can because I have eight terabytes of iCloud storage. That's amazing. You just literally doubled your iCloud storage. Apple didn't have to do anything to make the voice assistant contextually aware for me to spend more money just for iCloud storage.

And I struggle to get people to convince people to pay for 200 gigs just so their phone could be backed up. Well, you don't have to do that anymore now. They'll give it to you for free for a phone back for a, for to upgrade your phone to the next one. So they'll give you a free backup so you can transfer it. But you're right. You don't get that backup like on an on. Right. Yeah. All right. I want to talk about hotspotting versus built in cellular. We're gonna do that for our bonus episode.

A couple things, of course, leave us a five-star rating and review, especially if you're in the U.S., so we can get us five-star rating. But any country, I would love to read reviews from all over the place, Cambodia, from Germany, from wherever. We'd love to read them, Peru, Brazil, everywhere. So leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. We'd appreciate it. Go subscribe for my birthday to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at Primary Tech Show. Let's get to 2,000 today. I think we're like 40 or 50 away. Like, we can do it.

I'm going to call some people. Go ahead and call some people. Send an email list. And then, yeah, we appreciate that you listen. If you want to support the show and get the bonus episode and an ad-free version, primarytech.fm, click bonus episodes. You can get it there. And you'll get an ad-free version of the video. I've been doing that every week. And you'll get the bonus episode via video as well. And that's primarytech.fm. Click bonus episodes. We're going to go talk about Hotspot. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. We'll catch you next time.