“New” iPad Mini 7, Robotaxi, Rockets, and the Elon Problem, Apple’s Future CEO
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David has never had a birthday because David has never been born. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. Apple announced a quote-unquote new iPad mini this week. We're going to compare it to the current model. Plus, Kindle announced a ColorSoft. Tesla had its RoboTaxi event and SpaceX landed a massive rocket ship. Roster changes at Apple with major executives leaving and it's going to be easier to cancel your subscriptions in the future.

This episode is brought to you by HelloFresh, Audio Hijack, and The Generator, currently powering my house, but most importantly, by you, the members who support us directly. I'm one of your co-hosts, Stephen Robles, and joining me, my friend Jason Aten. How's it going, Jason? It's good. I'm really glad to see you back in your normal environment, though the sounds of birds and the water was nice. I tried. Last week, I recorded at a lake house in Georgia, and

I tried to cut out all the background noise, and as I listened back, I said, oh no, I heard some chirping. I feel like that was part of the specialness of that episode, just to be honest. Very special. But it is nice to have you back on a normal Wi-Fi connection, I will say that. The internet is much better, although I am literally still on generator power. I think it's a full week, and so the whole house, the lights may flicker. That's been happening. So we'll see. I think you should probably start investing in nuclear power.

We're going to get to that too. I honestly do have thought about now the power battery things for your house. Because we do have solar panels, but we don't have the batteries. And strangely, you can't run the house on solar power without the batteries. It can't just be a constant feed thing. So I don't know if any companies want to sponsor the show and send me some big batteries. Let's do it. Let's do it. Do it. Do it. I never asked you the movie quote last week. No.

because i was by a lake and i i was i wasn't because you were distracted by fish but so was last week the i robot quote yeah and a couple weeks ago okay let's take it easy okay i should have saved i didn't know elon was gonna do a wee robot event i should have saved it for that but uh do you know the quote from today i quote yeah i did not know the quote

I have never seen the movie. I only know that because you told me ahead of time. Normally, Steven doesn't tell me ahead of time. I do not. We start every episode with a movie quote, or at least I do. And I try to sometimes I ask Jason to guess what movie it's from. That was from the 2001 movie Artificial Intelligence, which feels, you know, apropos. Great. We have a one thousand five star review shout outs we need to give. And while we do, I am going to just be in total shock.

Because last week we talked about phone in your dominant hand pocket or not. And I just, of all the things that I have been wrong about,

I did not expect this to be the most wrong. I am the most wrong about this. And the best part about it is, I told Steven this, I have never been happier about a thing that I just don't even care about. Like, I can't think of something I care about less that makes me more happy than the fact that... Ridiculous. It's just like habit. I never made an intentional choice about this. It's just a habit. And yet everyone...

This has become my superpower is finding the things that Steven cares deeply about that everyone else is like, no, that's not how that works. Listen, if there's one thing that like Apple-y podcasts are good at is like teasing out just the most asinine details of Apple device usage. And I think we've done that. We've done a lot of that. Apple Pencil Direction, Battery Percentage. First, I did not think that so many people would put their phone in their non-dominant hand pocket.

I just, I still don't even understand it. But anyway, that's some of our five-star reviews. And listen, if you do that, you can leave us a five-star review this week. And in the comment, in the review, say that you put it in your dominant hand pocket or your non-dominant. And listen, everyone who uses the, puts the phone in their dominant hand pocket, you, I need you to leave reviews this week and let us know. Because right now, I think there's two people who,

that have agreed with me and literally 1000 that I've agreed with Jason, literally the entire internet. But I just want to say, I was trying, I actually interrogated my feelings about this. I spent some time because I was trying to figure out how did I end up doing it that way on the show? I thought it had something to do with like sitting in the car and it has nothing to do with that. I think it's because I sometimes have to carry keys and,

And I actually have to use my keys with my dominant hand. I tried. I literally tried to unlock a door with my non-dominant hand. Nope, could not stick the key in. So I would pull the keys out with my right hand and put them right into the thing. So they go in my right pocket. Also, on most men's jeans, that little copper nub is above the right hand pocket. And I do think that at one point I realized this is a bad place to put the phone because of that. So it wasn't like some sort of...

well thought out thing. I think it was circumstance and now it's just what I do. I just can't believe this. Just shout out to Kristen Otto in our primary tech community. You can go to social.primarytech.fm because she was one person who agreed with me. She puts it in the dominant pocket and I think there's one other person in YouTube comments. Anyway,

Slav FT from the USA gave us a five-star rating review in Apple Podcasts. They fell into the Apple ecosystem four years ago. Never misses an episode. Thank you for that. Christian Devere from the USA, iPhone in non-dominant pocket. This is the new thing. People now have a list of things they do when they leave us a review. They say battery percentage on or off, Apple Pencil tip towards or away from volume buttons, and now non-dominant pocket, which is great.

Riff 8 Rocks from the USA. And we're at the top of their podcast list. Moved above some other big podcasts. That's fun. Cheetah Heels from USA. They're a piano player. They were talking about 9ths and 10ths as they were talking about hand size, which reference acknowledged. Dangerous Dave 27 from Great Britain. He said it's a roundabout, not a traffic circle. Which one did you say it was? I said traffic circle.

I did. I, you know, the traffic circle I was referring to, this came up because I was talking about the full self driving and how it did not seem to anticipate that it should not go 45 through the traffic circle. There is a sign, I don't know, a hundred meters before what I call the traffic circle that definitely says roundabout ahead.

So whatever. I'm happy to be wrong. This is another thing that whatever. It's a circle and traffic goes through it. So technically the Wikipedia page just uses them all interchangeably. Well, okay. Yeah, sure, sure.

Delta Alpha Zulu from Great Britain. Non-dominant pocket. You know, it's non-dominant hand pocket, but I'm going to just shorten it for the future. Stephen Greer from Great Britain. He said, always light mode icons on his iPhone because the Apple Watch and Mac don't unify the light versus dark icons. I thought that was interesting. That's the next level. Brown 1709 from the USA. Phone in dominant. Oh, this was the other person. The Brown 1709. Phone in dominant hand pocket. Thank you.

Marcel from the Netherlands, non-dominant pocket. Nobody's perfect. Robert Isurface from the USA, Tiazos93 from Great Britain, Chamont from the USA, and TrappersHatStew. I don't know what that name means, but I love it. From Great Britain, non-dominant pocket. And one shout-out I wanted to mention, because I mentioned this was weeks ago, but if you're a developer and you listen to the show and you make an app, we'd love to give you a shout-out on the show. And so this is from developer Damon.

He makes an app called Parent Path, and it's basically an app for your iPhone where you can, you have kids, a great way to kind of track some milestones and different information about your kids, even things, you know, like doctors, sickness, stuff like that. And it's a great app. It is free to download. There are in-app purchases, but the best part is app privacy, data not collected. That's what you want to see from an app like this. No data collected. So you are a parent and you have kids. You want to kind of keep track of some of their milestones and information.

parent path. That link will be in the show notes. And if you're a developer out there, DM me in the community. That's kind of the best way. I have so many messages across like YouTube and social media. But if you're a developer and you have an app, I would love to give you a shout out. DM me in our community, social.primarytech.fm. That link's in the show notes too. And I'd love to give you a shout out there. So there we go. We got news, Jason. In the biggest air quotes possible, a new

iPad mini. And I'd like to show a picture of it now if you're watching on YouTube. Here it is. Holding the new iPad mini while wearing the old iPad mini. If you're just listening to the show, I'm showing the meme with the guy wearing the plaid shirt holding the same plaid shirt. That's what this new iPad mini is. Let's be real.

Let's be real. Yeah. Okay, so here it is. Apple announced a new one. I think the most egregious part of this whole announcement was that the wallpaper for the iPad Mini didn't change. When Apple announces new products or updated products, they at least do a new wallpaper look. And this was literally copy-paste. This is the same wallpaper as the iPad 6th generation that came out three years ago? I think that's right. Three years ago. Yeah, because I did the review on it. Actually, with a pilot. So anyway...

New, quote-unquote, new iPad Mini. You can pre-order it now. It comes next week, I believe. Yes, I did pre-order one. We'll see if I'll be keeping one because of the next announcement about the Kindle ColorSoft. But I just wanted to go to the comparison page. Here's the iPad Mini 6th generation, the previous model, with the new one, A17 Pro. Starts at $499 at double the capacity. Kudos for that. Starts at 128 gigabytes instead of 64.

Literally the exact same screen. We're going to have to see about the jelly scrolling. New chip, A17 Pro instead of the A15. Apple intelligence, just there. That's a feature. Not on the old one. Same camera.

Same front-facing camera on the portrait side. It is the only iPad now that has it on the portrait side now. USB-C, Touch ID, no Face ID. Jason's... Probably the one reason Jason might upgrade is Wi-Fi 6E. Can't wait. Instead of Wi-Fi 6. And it does support Apple Pencil Pro, which might seem kind of like meh, but...

That was actually piqued my interest because I realized when I upgraded to the M4 iPad Pro earlier this year, I'd had the Apple Pencil Pro and I went to use it on my mini and I realized, oh shoot, you can't do that. Right. The Apple Pencil Pro doesn't work on the old mini. So now we'll support that. Also the USB-C one. And you get a bigger capacity as you can get it up to 512 gigabytes now.

If you want. So yeah, that's the quote unquote new iPad mini. Oh, and it comes in Apple's ink cartridge out of ink since the iPhone 16 launch. Here's the colors. Pink. Oh no, that's the old one. I can't even tell. Here's the blue. Here's the purple. And here's the starlight. I have a quick question. Why do you think that they made it support the Apple pencil pro?

because now this $499 device, if you're someone who uses the Apple Pencil, is like a $500 or $630 device because they didn't move the camera. That's why it's that way on the other ones, right? That's why on the Pros it's that way because they moved the camera. And same thing with them two and my iPad Airs.

But they didn't move the camera. And so it's... That actually feels like a weird thing to me that they made it support the Apple Pencil Pro. I know that there's technically some different gestures available, but I don't think there's a lot of Procreate users on the...

on the iPad mini well you know a lot of people you have to think of the iPad mini as like a mini iPad Air not a mini base model iPad sure like Apple puts it in like the slightly higher tier even though the screen still I mean it's more expensive so yes it's more expensive so I think you know the new iPad Air supports Apple Pencil Pro and so I think it's kind of like they put the iPad mini in that lineup even though barely got any upgrades so I guess that's why so like

I don't know. And maybe most iPad mini buyers are also iPad, big, big iPad buyers like me. Like, yeah, multiple. I don't, I don't know. The different question then that in this case, they could have made it backwards compatible with the regular Apple pencil because there's no camera there. So they could have just made it so that it supported both. So that if you had an Apple pencil and you bought the iPad mini, the new one that you could just keep using that Apple pencil. I don't know that that is kind of weird to me. But then it wouldn't work with the Apple pencil pro.

If they kept the old compatibility. Well, I'm saying why? They could just put lots of magnets. Like, there's no reason. There's nothing there. There's no camera on that side. There's no buttons on that side. Literally, there's nothing. Yeah. They probably should have. I did like Jason Snell's take. He wrote a piece on Six Colors about this magnet.

being kind of weird because they put the 17, the a 17 pro, which is the chip from the 15 pro. And it is the minimum chip required for Apple intelligence. So that that's understandable why they would do that. But also if you remember that that is like the chip that is on the old three nanometer process that everything we've heard is that Apple wants to be done using that process as quickly as possible. And yet now they stuck it into a new device, like a brand new device that may not get upgraded for several years. And,

And I'm curious what your opinion is. I think that it's one of two things. One, they just had a truckload of these in Tim Cook's office. We've talked about that before. And these have like one less GPU core, I think, than the iPhones did maybe. So maybe they had a whole bunch of them that couldn't be used in iPhones. So they're like, well, let's stick with this. Or...

The alternative is there just aren't that many people that use the iPad mini possibly. And so it's like, well, this isn't that high, high production of a device. We can just stick these in there for now. I think, I think it's both of those. I think it's not a high production device and they got a bunch of these laying around the bend version with the less GPU. And so, and it's,

It's the bare minimum for Apple intelligence, which I know everyone who loves the iPad mini. There's lots of people out there who do. I mean, I, I edited podcasts on the iPad mini for like two years straight without like, and it's a great size. It's great for reading. Although we're going to talk about the color soft in a second from Kindle. I know like Farouk loves it. Everybody loves the iPad mini, but I also feel like it's like the iPhone mini. Everybody says they love the iPhone mini, but then no one buys it. I think there's just very few people that buy it.

And it's just because it's more expensive and you think of the mass market, if they can spend $500 on an iPad, they can get

probably a new iPad Air on sale like at Best Buy for $500 or an iPad Mini like they're gonna get the iPad Air and the iPad Air has like an M processor and so you look you know people I think just in their minds they know like oh the M is the Apple like good chip you know I've talked to people and they were like yeah I know I need to get an M laptop or whatever and so I think just in their mind like they just will go to the iPad Air so yeah I think it's a product in their lineup

Like Tim Cook said, and they just put whatever in there. And yeah, the only reason this is probably upgraded is so they can say Apple intelligence. And then this way, like a year from now, Apple can say you can get Apple intelligence on any and all devices, like whichever device you buy, which means the base model iPad should probably get up graded soon. Cause that would not have Apple intelligence right now. Correct. Correct. Maybe it won't, but we'll see. Uh, that's supposedly Mark Herman, I think said early next year, but let me ask you this.

Now that we have a press release iPad mini, which was supposedly one of the hardware devices that were coming out soon. You think we'll still get an October event with some M4 stuff? I think we will get some form of release. That's very, very kid you. I'm hedging all of my bets. Something will happen. I think, and I do think it'll be more than a press release. Um,

I think that it could be the kind of thing where they do the, like invite some people to New York or whatever for some stuff. I think that that would be the most likely scenario. I don't think they're doing an event at upper park at this point. No, no, no, no big thing where they're going to invite a couple thousand people. Um, so I, I,

I think that that's, that's possible still this, this month. I don't know. Um, I mean, we're getting like, we're getting closer to the end of the month. So like we should know within days if that's really going to happen. So, yeah. And I mean, we still could see M4 Mac mini, the M4 pro or M4 max upgraded MacBook pro possibly M4 iMac, uh, USB-C magic keyboard and accessories, please. Like why?

This, this right here, my magic keyboard still has lightning. I mean, Tim Cook has a lot of lightning ports hanging around in his office. He's got to keep sticking them in something. Just the ports. Just the ports. Just the ports are hanging around. Just holes. Just random holes. That sounds like a horror movie. It's a Stephen King book, I think, actually.

It's where the lingoliers come from. They come out of the lightning ports. Okay. That's the iPad Mini. I ordered one. I don't know if I'll keep it. We'll see. Because honestly, I went to the 11-inch M4 iPad Pro, and it's kind of the perfect size because I edit podcasts on it. I've been reading more just on physical books. I actually don't do it. But that might change because Kindle also announced something this week. Well, Amazon announced it, which is the Kindle ColorSoft. It is a...

first ever color Kindle. And a lot of people were saying like, why would you like most, you're just reading books. It's all in black and white anyways. Well, anyways, well, you could read comics on it and it is supposedly a high DPI. I think it's like 300 DPI display. So you, you know, and you get color covers. That's cool. Uh, but this was very interesting to me. I've used Kindles in the past. I've had a Kindle paper white and I do like it.

The last one I had, it was just old. And so I ordered this one too. It was a very expensive week, Jason. Very expensive. Because we'll talk about Sonos as well. But I ordered this whole thing with the little wireless charging pad and stuff. And it just looked really cool. It's like $2.99 or $2.79 if you attach it to your Amazon account when you order. And it comes out October 30th. Mine says it'll deliver November 1st, so a couple weeks from now. But

I don't know. Do you use a Kindle? I do. Remember you made fun of me one time. You wanted to know why I used a Kindle when I was reading at the pool instead of using my iPad mini. I know. That was a bit facetious. I know why. You know, there's two things truthfully that I love about it is you can use it in bright sunlight without the battery dying in six minutes. Also the battery life. I think, I think I charged my Kindle.

four times a year like it's just plug it in every once in a while there's never been a time when i pulled it out where i couldn't use it as long as i needed to use it but the thing about this is i don't understand i'm sorry i was gonna sneeze i've never heard any

I've never heard anyone asking Amazon to put out a color version, but I hear everyone asking them to just put a stupid page turn button on this thing. Well, I don't understand like what they're solving. Is there anyone asking for a color one? I think it's cool. But like for what people do on a Kindle, I feel like this was not the necessary thing, but for what people do on a Kindle man, a page turn button was really nice.

I did see a lot of people saying now that they took away all physical buttons from like all models like they might get an iPad mini because yeah they physical but I guess the only candles I had in the past were the paper whites that didn't have buttons anyway and so I didn't like and I don't I use iPads and stuff so I don't miss the buttons but I guess buttons are a big deal but yeah now this is like the the e-reader lineup and they do have a new paper white edition so if you don't care for the color you

you can basically save $100. You still get the 7-inch, 300 pixels per inch display. Battery life lasts even longer on that version. 12 weeks, they say, instead of 8 weeks with the color version. But yeah, no page turn buttons anywhere. So, I don't know. It's

Wait, so does yours have page buttons? No, because the one that I had that had page buttons died 12 years ago or something like that. And that's fine. But it's like the screen, especially on the Kindle and the Kindle Paperwhite, the Kindle Paperwhite has a great screen. Don't get me wrong. But it's not like the best touch experience. And so there's a lot of times where you go to turn the page and you tap in an area and all of a sudden like the UI pops up or something. And I'm like, wait, what did I do? Where do I have to do this? Or yeah, I just, the button was really nice.

Okay, well, I don't know. Yeah, people like the buttons. So I don't know. I'm going to try it. Again, I usually buy physical books anyway, so maybe this was kind of a bad idea. I also haven't had a Kindle in a long time, so maybe I'll enjoy reading on this. I don't know. It's a lot lighter than a physical book.

And you don't have to like, and you can take a thousand of them without having to try to fit them all in your backpack. Exactly. Exactly. And then like, you know, do you break spines on physical books if you get it? Like, do you, I don't think so, but my, my habit is like, I'll buy a book on Kindle. And if I like the book, then I'll buy a physical copy to put on my shelf. You know, I do that sometimes too. I do that sometimes too. Anyway, uh, the reason why it was also an expensive week. Sonos announced new stuff. This has been like long rumored, new arc, new sub, uh,

And so right now you can get these, or you can pre-order the Sonos Arc Ultra for $1,000. And it looks exactly the same as the previous model, except it supposedly now has something called Sound Motion Technology. Don't know what that means, but Sound Motion Technology is better immersive sound. And you can pair that with the new Sub Gen 4 for $800. Yes, Sonos stuff is expensive.

And now I was jokingly that it was an expensive week for me, but I'm going to be honest. I did not buy either of these because I looked at my arc and I looked at my sub gen three and I said, you sound great and I'm good. So, and I think, I think this actually replaced the previous arc. Like I don't, you can't get like the old arc. They are calling it the arc ultra, but it's not like you can get the arc regular or the arc normal. Like it's just the, it's just the new arc.

So yeah, it's kind of like the vision pro. There is no vision. It's just, you can only buy the one that's better. And I do, I mean, I, I, I give you credit because if we know anything about Steven, it's that he is a sucker for words that sound like important technology that he doesn't fully understand. And usually that involves spending some money, but I think it's that, that that's good. I don't know. I mean, everyone I know who has Sonos stuff, including Steven loves it. I just, I,

And maybe if I put them in my house, I would be like, this is better. But still, we're rocking the two HomePods in the living room, and they're a great sound system with the Apple TV. To be honest, if you wanted to get...

a nice home theater setup, and you wanted to look at Sonos, the Sonos Beam and the Sub Mini, which are the cheaper soundbar and sub, are actually great. Like I have the Beam Gen 2, which is 500 bucks. You can usually find it on sale close to 300. And then the Sub Mini, which is, well, it's a 429 instead of, it's like half the price. It's 400 instead of 800 bucks.

actually sound amazing like it's really good so unless you have a huge room that you want to like fill sound in this massive space the sub mini and the sonos beam is actually a great combo and then you can if you want to go all the way you can pair those with like sonos era 100s as rear speakers and like you're set like that's great uh app still has like they're always they're constantly making it out sonos is like our app is getting better everybody relax so i don't know

I just use AirPlay, so it doesn't matter. Anyway, this is the first product they've launched since the whole app debacle, so that's kind of apropos, but

I just use AirPlay. It's fine. It's fine. We have a bunch of other news that we need to talk about Tesla's robo taxi event, big click to cancel ruling that should make it easier to change your subscriptions or at least cancel them. But I want to tell you about our first sponsor today. HelloFresh. HelloFresh. I've used HelloFresh in the past, getting a new box coming soon. Love HelloFresh. It is America's number one meal kit where you get farm fresh pre-portioned ingredients and

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because the kids can actually get involved with cooking. And so we actually, you know, they have all the ingredients, the menu and the recipe, and they tell you how to make everything step-by-step, which I'm not a chef, nor am I a lawyer. We've talked about that before. I'm no chef. But they make it so easy to actually follow the directions and the meals. Here's what's on deck this week. These are the kind of meals you can expect from HelloFresh. One pot chicken sausage and chickpea soup.

I like chicken sausages. That looks pretty good. You get one pan pork enchiladas. I like the one pan nomenclature because it means I'm not making a bunch of dishes. You know what I mean? Give me a one pan deal. I like that. And then a one pan banh mi style beef tacos. All this sounds amazing. And I can't wait to get my box to make all of these things. This is a, you know, make the fall the tastiest season yet. You can get kind of fall themed meals with that farm fresh produce, autumn inspired recipes delivered right to your door and

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We got to talk about the robo taxi event. Yeah. I'm going to talk a little bit about Elon. We're not going to get anybody mad. We're not getting worked up. But Elon had this robo taxi event in Los Angeles. And if you want to see a video, you should watch MKBHD's video. He actually did a ride in the robo taxi. And this link will be in the show notes. And he talked about it.

This car has no steering wheel, no pedals. This is supposedly going to be a fully automated taxi in 2027. I believe Elon said, right? Is that what he said? 2027? Well, he said that production should go into production in

before 2027 sort of maybe but he said he'd shave his head if this thing actually gets made before 2027 but look there's a there's an image of it it has very much uh cyber truck vibes it has like the one light bar on the front and the light bar on the back the doors go up like scissor style which i feel like complicate the mechanics but anyway just two seats big old screen in the middle and

And you would supposedly just get in, put your seatbelt on and it drives you wherever the wheels, which look very futuristic, uh, basically just painted gold. And PhD, like this is closed in on the tires and like, they look real futuristic, but they just like painted the actual rubber tire. They're just continental tires. They're just continental tires. Uh, but then let me go back to the, uh, the door thing. Uh, there was also the Tesla robot and all that, but yeah, we won't get into that. But,

Anyway, RoboTaxi. Jason, is this vaporware? I mean, I put vaporware directly in my headline about this, that it's vaporware. I mean, but technically, I think this might be like Nilay Patel's take quote on this, but basically everything's vaporware until it ships, right? Like technically, if you show it. Now, in the car industry, it is really common to show vaporware

concepts before they ship. If you've ever been to the North American Auto Show, you'll see a lot of stuff that hasn't shipped or isn't going to ship. The thing is that the car makers are pretty clear. This is a concept car. We're not talking about ever shipping this. Tesla did this weird in-between thing where it's like, this is absolutely coming, but we're not going to give you basically any details about what might be coming. I don't think

I don't think that... I mean, I put in my article that I am almost certain that SpaceX will send people to Mars before Tesla ships these things. Wow. I mean, we've talked about Waymo before. Okay. So let's explain the difference, though.

Every Waymo has like a $50,000 sensor array on it. It has three types of sensors, cameras, LIDAR and radar, right? Yes. LIDAR is extremely expensive. Those you, the, the, that's where a bulk of that cost is.

And Tesla used to have, I think they used to include a LiDAR sensor. They do not have LiDAR in any of their devices. And Elon Musk is like adamantly opposed to doing that. They are adamant that they can get there with just vision, which is cameras and AI. And let's be clear, like the Waymo, because you have schooled me on full self-driving in the past. And like this Waymo car, like if you're watching youtube.com slash at primary tech show, it looks crazy. There's, you know, sensors all over it. Like it looks like a bunch of contusions on this thing. And it's,

it only goes through very set routes. Like you, you cannot take this to any destination, very set routes. I imagine if the Tesla robo taxi were ever to be a thing, it would, Elon would probably want it just like anywhere in Los Angeles or anywhere in San Francisco, which again, it increases the challenge, not only because you don't have LIDAR and these other sensors, but you're also introducing more varied. But is there anything to the point that, uh,

because full self-driving is a feature in Tesla cars right now, that Tesla might have more data to support this kind of self-driving thing? Or is that moot? Well, that's an important point because Tesla literally has cameras on millions of vehicles. Even vehicles that don't have full self-driving still have cameras on them. I have not looked at the terms of service. I don't know if it's like gathering external information to send back. But that is a real advantage because

that the Tesla has in terms of gathering data, how do humans respond in situations? How do like different cars respond in different situations? That's true. The truth is just like I, so I was driving that model three for a while at full self driving and you turn full self driving on and it starts raining and it's dark and it's like, yes, sorry.

You're out of like, right. So imagine having a robo taxi that just doesn't work when it's dark and rainy. Like when do you need a ride the most when you don't want to walk down the street is when it's dark and rainy. Like, come on. But you land at LAX, it's raining and it says, yeah, we'll take you somewhere. It takes you halfway the route. And it's just like, oh, sorry. Like, sorry, you have to get out now. The scissor doors just open in the flood of rain. No, I mean, it's, but the, the, the reason is Tesla, uh,

Elon Musk is adamant about only using vision because it is so much less expensive. And the truth is that if autonomous driving, autonomous vehicles are going to become a thing, the cost structure has to go down. This is like a parallel story to SpaceX. The whole reason SpaceX is making their rockets reusable is it cuts the cost of a launch from like a few hundred million dollars to like,

two digit million dollars right like it's like a it's a huge cost savings and that's the only way that it becomes viable the same thing is true with full self-driving or autonomous vehicles in general but i just don't think that this first of all like they're going to sell this for less than thirty thousand dollars there's no way there's just no way that they're going to sell it for less than thirty thousand dollars oh that's like people if you remember the cyber truck announcement i believe it was going to be like 40 something thousand was going to be the base model cyber truck

That was like the announced price. 95,000 is the base level. So like the price, yeah, I just ignore the current pricing thing. But, you know, it's interesting. I don't know, 2027, you know, we're almost in 2025. So we're talking like two years, less than two years away. I imagine this would be much farther off. But what complicates it, so that was the Wii robot event where there was like the robo-taxi. They also showed off this like weird bus thing. I'm not really sure what that was. And then like the robots. The robo-vin.

Not the Robo van, the Rebovan. I did not sign it in any way. That's okay. That's what Elon Musk said. He said some people are going to want to call it the Robo van, but it's Rebovan, which I think he was just joking because he has this weird sense of humor that no one is like, are you joking? Are you being serious? I think it's a riboflavin. That's what they call it. I think you're absolutely right. Riboflavin. But also, in the same week of this event was also SpaceX's

It was the first time they have caught the rocket booster. This is actually the video, and I'll put this link in the show notes from the Associated Press. This is incredible. Like, this is amazing. Like, seeing this, it looks like some futuristic, like, sci-fi movie counting, like, amazing SpaceX accomplishment. And so it is such a weird, like, dichotomy to have this Wii robot event with the robo-taxi. Maybe it'll come, maybe it won't.

And then actually like doing something really significant, like amazing achievement. Anyway, you, and you wrote about this. So how do you like, what is this juxtaposition? Okay. Here's the bottom line on Thursday. There's this, we robot thing. And then over the weekend, there's this space thing. And the contrast between these two things is, uh,

like could not be more striking. One of them is a hyped up, mostly ridiculous demo of a vaporware product that we're not sure we'll ever ship, at least not on the timelines that anyone is promising. And the other one, arguably the SpaceX is,

Is maybe the most significant technological advance of our lifetime because what they demonstrated by the ability, first of all, they, it's a 23 story tall rocket that they just caught out of midair. Like with these, they call them the chopsticks. And if you watch the closeup, there's these, what they call the nubs or the nibs that just like land and just sat right on it. And it's just like, it is mind blowing to think like that they just pulled this off. Yeah. And, and,

People used to give SpaceX a hard time because they'd launch one of these things and then it would go up or it would blow up. But that's because they are making these things at a factor of a tenth the cost of what other rocket companies were making. So they can blow up

Each rocket – they can roll 10 rockets and they have accomplished so much more. They have this iterative approach, right? And that is like by design. It's like it went up. It did this thing and this thing. Okay, and then it blew up. But we don't care about the blowout part because this is just a test. And this is such a huge thing because –

Elon Musk has said for a long time that the goal is to put people on Mars or to be able to send people back to the moon or just to, you know, habitats in different places. You can't do that if it takes three weeks to move this rocket from wherever it crashes in the ocean or lands on a thing back to the launch pad. But when you can land it on the launch pad...

Now you move closer to something more akin to air travel, right? Not exactly the same because it's still going to be a lot more expensive and you don't have like 7,000 rockets taking off every day. But even if you aren't going to Mars, think about if you could have one of these things and now suddenly going across the Pacific Ocean takes like 40 minutes instead of 14 hours, right? It is the economic possibilities here are unbelievable. And I think what's interesting is, and I'll just make this point briefly,

The reason the two things are so different is Tesla's a public company and its valuation is almost entirely based on its promise that it will unlock this fleet of robo taxis that people will buy. And then when they are not going places, other people will just get in them and they'll make money. So the owners will make money off of the things that they buy. And that's why Tesla is like a $750 billion company right now. SpaceX is private.

They're not a public company. They don't have to impress investors, right? They are just going to keep iterating on this and keep working on this and keep doing this until they get it right. And so they're actually like shipping. Now, they still are like a little bit later than they promised, but like, I don't know. They're not trying to pipe up a bunch of investors just to get more money so they can keep doing this stuff. Right. I think, yeah, it's a great article. My thing is, I don't want to talk about Elon as a person. I'm talking about like...

For real. Like talk about him as a meme. It's more, it's more like the issue with the internet and social media nowadays. Like the lack of, like there's no nuance, you know, that's, that's the bottom line, like social media on the internet. Like there's no nuance. And so you have this guy, Elon, who here at SpaceX is doing like genuinely impressive groundbreaking things. He's also announcing robo taxis, which is kind of weird, but okay.

And then he also owns a social network. And I think one of the, you know, two things can be true at the same time that like SpaceX is doing really cool work. Tesla might be announcing vaporware and also something bad might be happening in the third place. And like all those things can be true at the same time. And I don't think a lot of people because of the internet can grasp the nuance to differentiate that.

And I feel like people see this rocket launch and they're landing and it's amazing. And it's like, okay, well, Elon Musk is a genius. That means everything he does must be great. And that is where like, there's a breakdown because I'm still on X and like, it's not great. It's like the content moderation is not great. The spam, it's just wild. Also just,

To throw the shade to Threads, too, their algorithm is crazy, too. No one's doing great in this short-form posting social media thing. But also, Elon is very active...

In the political side, he was literally at a Trump rally last week. And so it is increasingly difficult, I think, for people to separate these things. And when someone accomplishes something great, I think people apply that greatness to everything they do.

And listen, I might play trumpet really great, but I really suck at playing drums. You know what I mean? Because you're good at one thing, even if it's tangentially related, like in music, it doesn't mean you're great at all the things. And this is not just about Elon. This is just kind of about the internet in general. I worry about people's ability to parse the nuance out of

these companies out of these people because also it's like it's even less company based and more person based like people ascribe like they think Elon before they think SpaceX Tesla and X you know they just they think about as the person they just kind of refer to that and so it becomes like a blanket statement for all the things that like Elon or whoever is under and so

I'm just and then throwing AI generated junk and all this other kind of stuff. We're talking about Adobe generative fill in a second, like throw in all that to complicate matters. And I'm just like long term. I'm concerned about like what this means for how people think about these things and the ability to parse out the details. And I think that's important, like to be able to do that.

I don't know. Am I talking crazy? No, because it's really pretty simple. You've hit it on the head. I'm just going to be more blunt about it. Elon Musk, not a good role model, not a great leader, extraordinary visionary. Those things can all be true. I don't tell my children, you should look up to this guy as an example of how you should treat people. But at the same time, there are...

people who are a force of nature and are able to make other people accomplish things that wouldn't otherwise be done and he has proven like the model 3 is a great example the model 3 was like a horrendous production process but they shipped it and it is probably the most important car like vehicle that has been built in the last 50 years because it was the first mass market electric vehicle for a long time it was the single most popular vehicle that wasn't picked

pickup truck in the world right now I think it's the Model Y but the Model Y and the Model 3 combined for like they sell more vehicles than like the next 30 cars combined or something like it's stupid that I mean I mean exact quote don't send me feedback on that but my point is they are the two most popular vehicles sold that are not the Ford F-150 and I so like you have to be able to look that and say that's that is amazing I

I still don't think I drive a Tesla. I finally got my model S back just yesterday. It is the best car I've ever owned. I mean, the full self driving on the model three wasn't great. I can acknowledge both of those things. Also, I think Elon Musk is like crazy in my article. I shouldn't say like crazy. I mean, like the way he behaves is like, it's crazy to think about. I put like, listen, there's a lot of reasons to not be a fan. The politics is a great example.

But if you interrogate that for a minute, think about it. The California Coastal Commission just said it's not sure if it's going to continue issuing permits to SpaceX to keep doing these launches. They launch out of Vandenberg Air Force Base, and Vandenberg Air Force Base wants them to launch even more often. SpaceX has a lease there on the launch pads. And they're like, yeah, we're not really sure we want to give you more permits. The FAA takes months and weeks to issue permits for these flights. And they're like, no, we need to do this. We need to launch this rocket every week. We need to do this every...

And so it's really not surprising. I'm not arguing politics here, but it is not hard to understand why Elon Musk would be like, I think I'd like a change in the administration because what I'm currently getting is a lot of friction. Maybe some of the friction is like justified friction.

But that's hard to believe when you look at the reason that the California Coastal Commission has said that they are not sure they're going to continue issuing permits is because of the way he posts on X. So like it is so such a complicated thing. And like, and at the same time you look at Elon Musk and you're like, maybe you should just lay off the post on X a little bit because maybe like, I think it's your, the European union just is debating how much money it should find X and

because of it's a violation of what it calls with the dsa the digital services act or something like that which requires companies to prevent certain types of like hateful content on their platforms and they can find them up to six percent of their global revenue and they're like well maybe we should also include spacex's revenue and the boring company's revenue it's like because he owns those companies like they're privately held companies and so it's like i i

maybe you're not being your best advocate by behaving this way. And it just makes it complicated for everyone because on one hand cyber cab, I don't, I mean, I'm not going to shave my head. I will watch MKBHD shave his head if they do it. That's what I'm willing to do. I don't think it's coming anytime soon, but the SpaceX stuff is just like no one.

No one is doing anything close to that. So listen, anytime we talk about Elon or Tesla, people might get mad. So here's what I need you to do. If you're listening to us still, go leave us a five-star rating and review in Apple Podcasts. You can say you were wrong about Elon. And then what you do is you go to social.primarytech.fm and you can leave comments on the episode post that's going to go up right as the episode launches. And we can all argue over there in the comments. And, you know, I'm not super into it. I just...

again, Jason wrote the article. And so you should go read that. I don't know. I just hear people talk about Elon Tesla X, like family members and friends. And I, and I just think in my head, like, you know, I don't, I don't say a lot. I don't argue whatever, but I'm always like, I feel like there's nuance here. That's that's missing. And I, and, and that I think is, I don't know if we, maybe if we do anything as a podcast, we can bring nuance back. Yeah.

That could be our first shirt. Let's bring new ones back. I'm here for it. So, all right. Well, one other thing before we take a break, and this is the click to cancel, which is actually pretty big. But if you've ever signed up for a subscription and then you have to like basically send a carrier pigeon to cancel it because they make it really difficult. Well, the FTC just passed the...

laws where the way you sign up for a thing that companies have to let you be able to cancel with that same method. So if you sign up online by clicking a button for something like a gym membership or maybe the New York Times that you'll have those companies will be required to let you cancel using the same method. So you don't have to call to cancel if you just clicked to sign up.

And I think hopefully this happens really fast and all the companies have to abide by this. I'm not sure the timeline, but this is, I think, an example of a good law and keeping people in check.

And you have a couple articles about some difficult and easy companies. Yeah, well, just to show people know, they've written a rule. Once it's published, the rule will be – once the rule is published, then the companies have 180 days to comply with this. And the reason for that – I actually didn't realize I had written about this rule before. I just remembered writing about SiriusXM and the process of trying to cancel SiriusXM.

a subscription where you literally had to, you go to cancel and it doesn't even give you an option to cancel. It says, no thanks. Chat with an agent to cancel. You have to chat with a person in order to do it. And what do you think that person does? They just spent an hour of my life trying to talk you out of canceling the subscription. And then they're like, well, we'll cancel it. But you have to still pay for a year of the service. Like the whole thing is like ridiculous. The way the companies do this, a lot of,

like newspapers were like this for a long time. You couldn't cancel them online. You had to call and talk to a person who spends like all this time just trying to get you to like stay. They'll offer you all these deals or whatever it might be. What do they call that department at companies? Isn't it like a customer retention, customer retention? Yeah. It's, I think it's the, I hate our customers department, which is really the thing that's crazy. It's like, why are you spending so much effort?

trying to force customers who don't want to be your customer to stay. Like you really just think so low of them. They're just like a few dollars a month. It just does not seem worth it. And you contrast that with Netflix. I just sent you the link to the article I wrote about that because there, if you go to there, if you scroll down in this article, if you go into your Netflix account,

there's just a giant button on the membership page. It just says cancel. And if you click it, I think it like takes you to one more page to confirm, which seems like a reasonable thing because you know, you don't want your kid going in and just clicking that button or whatever, but then you're done. And they're like, we're sorry to see you go. Your stuff will be here anytime. Just come back. And we did that. We wanted to watch, I think it was like the Simone Biles documentary. So we just repaid for a month and,

And then when we were done, we just canceled it again. Like, it's amazing. Like, everything should be like this. I totally agree. I've done the same thing with Netflix. Like, I canceled for a few months, signed back up to watch The Crown. I haven't canceled yet because we haven't finished watching it. So I'd watch that terrible Jennifer Lopez space movie with Simu Liu. You know what I'm talking about? You've seen that thing, Atlas or something? Yeah, I know what you're talking about, but...

So anyway, yeah, this is great. I mean, yeah, Netflix is like, makes it easy to cancel, sign up. That's what a company needs to do. This law will help that. Great. Also, just Netflix, just for a second, because I, listen, I like cheesy action movies. Well, I think I used to like them. And I think the problem is that I'm getting older. Maybe I don't like them as much. And like, I don't know how to like tell the Netflix algorithm. Maybe I need to just watch like documentaries for a while on Netflix. So like retrains it. Or maybe I think there might be a button where you can say like,

You can take it out of your history. Just go into your account and go to your viewing history and you can just delete things from your viewing history. Well, I need to do that because there's all these Netflix originals that look like cool space action movies and it always tricks me. I'm always like, yeah, I think I'll like that. And then I do this, like I never used to do this, but now I'll basically like fast forward through a movie. Like I basically like I'm just watching the tiny thumbnail at the bottom. I'm just like clicking forward and I'm like, I don't think I'm going to like this. I mean, it's actors I would like and

and it's in space and there's action, but, but no. So I think Netflix, the original content, they have some great shows. Like I still, you know, enjoy the crown, at least we're still watching it. Uh, but the, the movies, I don't know. They've had some cool ones. Like I'm cool with red notice. I'm cool with the, the gray man, you know, doing those kinds of like things. It's fine. Like they're not like Academy award winning, but they're fine. But yeah, I got to retrain my algorithm. Yeah. The thing is you, Netflix will let you delete things from your history, but,

but you'll never be able to get them out of your head. That's the AI I need. Wait, no, that's Total Recall, isn't it? That's a whole movie. You just need to... Implant memories in there. But anyway. Well, Men in Black, same thing. You just need one of those buttons. Neuralizer. Yeah. The Neuralizer, of course. Men in Black.

you know it holds up by the way i watched the first one with my son the other day it's the third one not so much but yeah not that's not so much the third one and then you got the international with chris hemsworth you know it's a you know the original the original holds up pretty good all right we still need to talk about adobe max it's generative fill video and then google and amazon literally getting into nuclear power which is wild but i want to tell you about our second and final sponsor one of my favorites audio hijack yes

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for sponsoring this episode. All right. Adobe Max Conference is happening right now. I think it's in Miami, actually just a few hours away from me. They're announcing a bunch of wild things with Creative Cloud, Photoshop. I saw a demo where you could basically resize a graphic into like multiple aspect ratios and Photoshop will just do it for you. But you had mentioned this to me and then looked up this video.

This is Generative Extend in Premiere, the video editing application. And so I'm going to put this link to the YouTube video in the show notes. And just a quick word, Apple Podcasts, if you listen there, cuts off show notes after 4,000 characters. So there's a bunch of links that I say I'm going to put there. They're there. Apple Podcasts just cut them off. So you can go to primarytech.fm. You get all the links in the show notes. Or just use Pocket Cast or Overcast or Castro. They all show all those show notes.

Anyway, this is a video showing degenerative extend. And basically in like Premiere, let's say you have a shot. You can literally just extend the end of that shot in Premiere and it will use AI to generate more footage of that shot. And it is imperceptible. I mean, we're watching this live demo right now.

wild wild and this feels like a like an ideal use for ai because when you get that fully ai generated video it can look pretty crazy like andrew edwards on threads post clips of these crazy ai generated videos all the time but because it's extending footage that's already there i imagine it's going to be much more realistic and look like real footage and man like this looks wild

Yeah, I watched the keynote where they were talking about this and the person was actually doing this live. I will say it's not quite this fast. They've done a little bit of time magic here. It takes a little bit longer, as you would imagine AI-generated video would take.

But in the keynote, they had a guy, I think he was either skateboarding or doing parkour or something like that. And he just was tumbling and all of a sudden it just continued on like they did it. And it is just wild that this is the case. It raises a whole lot of questions that we don't have time for. I will just say that this feels like, though, the kind of thing...

So the way that generative AI keeps being pitched, I keep wondering like, who would do that? Even like the writing tools and stuff that Apple has talked about. I'm just like, you didn't have any better ideas? Like, come on. The way I use generative AI, I use ChatGPT almost every day. And it's fantastic for things like you could take a transcript of this show and say, give me a five sentence description.

that I can use for a podcast and it'll nail it every single time. Every single time it'll do a fantastic job. But other things are like, great, this feels like somebody was like, we know what our people really could use and we're going to do this because there's so many times where you need to LinkedIn it, but you don't want to, you know, you can LinkedIn a video clip by making it slow motion, right? Like you can just like,

but I don't want it to be slow motion. I just want like another second. I just need 24 more frames or whatever it is. And it's like, yeah, I can do that for you. And Premiere will just do that all right in the thing. Which is wild. So yeah, I mean, they're making it valuable to continue subscribing to Creative Cloud. I actually personally use things like Pixelmator Pro and I use Final Cut, which when it comes to Final Cut...

I love Final Cut. I edit in it every day. But man, is it behind when it comes to features like getting a transcription of the video in Final Cut. A lot of the tools like in Premiere and DaVinci are just not there. I'm sorry. Side note, because that's the phantom name of our podcast is side note. But I, yesterday, for the first time in a very long time, took...

Did some senior photos for someone who was like, Hey, our senior photographer, our photographer moved or something. We wanted to do something. And I was like, yeah, I'll help you out their family. So it's fine. Uh, and a couple of the photos had a distract, like a fire hydrant and a small building in the background. And they were real out of focus. I was shooting at 200 millimeters, like F 2.8. So they were like out of focus, but I'm like, I still want them gone because the people in the photo, uh,

would have known what they were right you know it's that kind of a situation so i use lightroom and lightroom has a remove tool and it's very good yeah i took the same photo and i put it in apple photos and i hit the cleanup and it was better it was better listen it is good like i made a whole video on it and like we had uh photos in like times square we went to new york city and just removing people in the background like it is very good it's not perfect

but it's good. I mean, it was way good enough that I'm like, I don't have to do this brush thing in Lightroom. I'll just pop it right in. So yeah, it's true. There's a lot of potential for Apple intelligence, which maybe it'll come out someday. Yeah. If we ever see it, lots of potential.

It's probably the end of this month. Mark Gurman, he's out there being like, I've had many comes out of whatever and Apple intelligence is four days later. Like he's just out there saying it. So we'll, we'll see. He's just reading from a teleprompter. He's like, here's what's going to happen. Here's what's going to happen. I mean, he's yeah, he is the Apple leaks culture right now. I don't know. I want to know how many, how many people does he have inside? That's my thing. Cause it can't just be one person. I mean, unless it's just Tim Cook.

They have breakfast twice a week. He's like, listen, I need to get rid of some of these A17 Pros. So what we're going to do is release this thing. I need you to prime the pump for me. That is the conspiracy theory of the year right there. Mark Gurman's source. I'm just telling you. Tim Cook himself. He's like, listen, I'm out of here in a couple of years. I'm retiring. I'm just going to call up Mark Gurman. Real quick. I saw a couple of articles here. I just thought it was crazy. So Google...

actually has signed a deal to invest in nuclear power. I have to focus very hard when I say that word because I have the tendency to say nuclear and then everybody uses it. George Bush. Is that what you all know? Nuclear. I try to pronounce it like new clear. I try to say those two words, but together. That's not bad. Anyway, Google and Amazon, this was just this morning, have signed deals to go nuclear and investing millions of dollars in this

It just seems wild to me. It seems a little bit like a plot point of a disaster movie that'll take place 10 years from now that AI, Gemini, takes over the power plant.

There's tons of movie plots here just waiting to be written. And that's going to be great. But I thought it was interesting. Nuclear power. This is how the AI turns us all into paperclips is all the nuclear plants, right? Because that was the thing, the paperclip problem. That was like the doomsday scenario. But, well, I think it was Ben Thompson who pointed out the AI, these server farms are actually the perfect scenario for nuclear power because nuclear power puts out a ton of energy

without emissions right it's enough energy to power these things but also nuclear power requires a consistent draw right you can't you just can't fire up a nuclear plant and have it just sit there it doesn't idle like you don't go up and down to match like whereas a coal plant or a natural gas plant you just like turn a knob and be like more gas less gas or whatever but like nuclear power is a little bit less nuanced in that sense and so having something that will consistently just

Take the power. Like, give us all. We'll take all the power you have and we'll just more AI things as we get the power. So all the generated things. This is a this will generate from nuclear reactors to generating a little longer piece of footage in your premier. That's what generative AI means. That's that's the whole line. Also, TSMC, again, riding the AI demand train, making money.

Yeah. I mean, they make all the chips and right now lots of people are buying chips. And so TSMC is profit. Their profit doubled 50%. I guess it wasn't the last quarter. Like it's not doubled 50%. It increased 50%. Right. Right. Right. But yeah, TSMC, just in case our listeners don't know or care, which is fair, they make all the chips for Apple, right? That's, that's what you need to know. And they're selling lots of chips. So lots of chips, lots of chips. Uh, but also I'm glad you mentioned Apple, uh,

Have been some changes to Apple's roster. This, oh, by the way, this is what a Bloomberg article looks like when you hide all distractions, but you don't have a subscription. This is what you see. Just a grayed out title. Anyway.

Apple's chief people officer exited. This was... Deidre O'Brien was the head of retail and the head of people. She actually was the head of people first. And then when Angela Ahrens left, she took over this retail. And then she also took over the online store. So all of selling things and all of the people and stuff.

They hired a chief people officer from Medtronic, Carol Surface. And someone apparently realized that Microsoft sells a product named Surface. And so now Carol Surface is leaving. That's not the reason why. But it's been less than two years. She's leaving.

This is a thing that seems to happen from executives that come in from other companies. This happened with their most recent chief communications person, their head of PR. It happened with someone like Angela Ahrens. It's happened with the retail guy before that. I don't even remember his name because he was there for such a short amount of time. It just seems to happen to people who come in from the outside. Like they just don't last very long at Apple. And so now,

DJ O'Brien will be still over retail and online retail as well as people. And it's not just new people because Dan Riccio, who was most recently over the Apple vision pro, but he's been at Apple for over 26 years. He was the SVP of hardware engineering in 2012, various roles. Most recently, again, led the Apple vision pro team. He's stepping down as well, transitioning out. So even for 26 years, just interesting roster changes, people leaving,

curious he'd been dan and riccio had been kind of on the way out because he used to be the head of hardware engineering and then john turnus took that role and dan riccio kind of like took on a special projects sort of role which was turned out to be the vision pro they've launched the vision pro he's like continuing phase two of his retirement and but i think the funny part of this was he just was at an event where he was like speaking and he's like yeah i'm retiring my last days tomorrow

It's like, wait, hold on. It's a one-day notice. I mean, I'm sure that the people at Apple knew that, but that's how it was announced. He's like, yeah, I'm done. I'm out. Tomorrow I turn in my badge. Peace. There's that. Okay, and finally, before we get to personal tech, we have a couple of personal tech things, but you interviewed the Airbnb CEO, Brian Chesky, who I've seen a lot of the founder mode posts around, which supposedly originated with a talk he did.

And maybe you can explain that, but it was a great interview. We'll link Jason's article in the show notes, but you guys also talked about like Apple founder, CEO dynamics and Tim Cook for Steve Jobs. So it was a, it was a great interview, but yeah. Yeah. Well, so this was the second time I've interviewed Brian Chesky, the founder and CEO of Airbnb and like, not only the interview was supposed to be about their winter release of software, but we ended up spending most of the time talking about founder mode and related leadership principles. But,

But anyway, Founder Mode came from an essay written by a guy named Paul Graham, who is the co-founder of Y Combinator, which is like an incubator for startups. Airbnb was a Y Combinator startup. Yeah.

Brian Chesky was invited back to an event with like their top 200 alumni. So these are all founders of like multi-billion dollar companies. And he was just asked to sort of share his leadership journey. He was thinking he was going to talk for 20 minutes. He ended up talking for two hours. And, and then about that talk, Paul Graham writes this essay talking about founder mode. Brian Chesky had said something about how he'd been given advice and

early on that what he should do is like turn into like a manager instead of a founder and delegate a lot of authority and, and, and sort of, and, and basically Paul Graham sort of made this distinction between founder mode versus manager mode. And it was really funny because one of the first things that Brian Chesky told me in the interview, he's like, I never said founder mode. I've never used those words. He's like, I do like that phrase except for the fact that it seems to pit founders against managers. The,

The general gist of it is just that he thinks that one of the things that founders do well is they are, especially in the early stages, involved in everything. And then there becomes this temptation to...

sort of hire people and delegate everything to them. And he thinks that that's a mistake. He thinks that found that the leader should actually stay involved in the details. And he uses the illustration of Johnny Ive and Steve Jobs. And he, he said, he asked Johnny, Johnny, I love from like, did some stuff for Airbnb. So the two of them know each other very well. And he asked him like, did you ever feel micromanaged by Steve Jobs? And Johnny, I've said micromanaged.

No, we had lunch together. I think he said every day or every week. And we went over everything we were doing, but Steve jobs never dictated to me what to do. He was my partner in sorting through ideas and that kind of thing. And so then I asked him, I said, do you think, because we released the whole interview as a podcast episode, not this podcast. Sorry. Don't mean to be confusing. I just want to be clear. People are be looking in the feed for it. It's not there. And I just asked him, I was like, did you, who do you think that like should be the next or what type of person do you think should be the next CEO? And he said,

Because he's very high on Steve Jobs. And I'm like, but you could argue Tim Cook, by everything that we would measure a CEO by, has been a far more successful CEO than Steve Jobs was. And he basically just pointed out like, well, you know, the iPhone...

was a Steve jobs thing. And that's entirely the reason that Apple's a $3 trillion company, which is a hundred percent true. So I think his point was if Apple is going to introduce new products and he said, they don't have to be iPhone scale, but they do need to have some sort of innovation and that it might be good to have someone who,

who thinks more like founder than someone who's just a manager. So I thought, yeah, I listened to that. It was great. And I think he's right. Like Steve jobs, obviously the iPhone, the iPad, you could argue that the Apple watch AirPods, obviously Apple vision pro all launched under Tim cook. How much Steve jobs? I mean, surely he would have, I don't know if air AirPods came out like 2015 or 2016. I don't know. Those are Tim cook. Those are Tim cook. Those are all Tim cook. Apple watch.

I imagine Steve Jobs was aware of. Yeah. At least in the testing, that would have been the same thing. But anyway, you know, if you look at the innovation versus like the stability growth, I feel like it makes sense that path of like Steve Jobs introduces these groundbreaking products. Tim Cook as the nuts and bolts guy, like grows that and add some products to it to this point. I do think that today as we're on the cusp of 2025, that be with the rise of AI and like

The gadgets of yesterday, which obviously they're not yesterday, like we all use an iPhone. But when we think about like the phone, it is hard to be as excited about that as like new product categories today. Because the phone is very, it's like a mature product. It's like, yeah, you get excited when you get a new sofa, but no one's like reporting on sofas. You know what I mean? Like it's a longstanding product. It's a very different analogy, but yeah.

I think Apple does need to have maybe someone after Tim Cook that is more forward-thinking, obviously needs all the people behind them, like another kind of Tim Cook behind the scenes, continuing to rein things in and keeping the money going so they can continue innovating. But I think we are entering a phase now where I think the economy and customers are going to reward new innovation now and

less so kind of the iterative improvements which Apple is great at and like you could argue that maybe it's not all iterative like maybe the 16 Pro Max camera is actually significant and not iterative but I think in the minds of people in the minds of culture like now is the time to really like put the gas on let's throw stuff against the wall maybe see what sticks like Meta's Orion glasses they don't exist you can't buy them but I think that there was a lot of excitement generated around those and likewise it was short-lived but

but the hype around the Humane app in Rabbit R1, which is now hopelessly dead. Like if Apple could create something with that hype and excitement, but then actually deliver on the promise, unlike all these other companies, I think it could really set Apple up again for the future. And even in the little things like, you know, I talk about a lot about podcasting on the Riverside YouTube channel. And one of the recent data points was that Apple Podcasts is now like third place in podcast consumption.

More people watch podcasts on YouTube and listen and watch them in Spotify than people use Apple Podcasts worldwide. And that's an interesting data point because Apple Podcasts was number one for years and years. Like it was literally Steve Jobs with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher and Steve Jobs like working the iTunes interface on stage talking about podcasts. Like it was Apple spearheading podcasts for a long time. And it's

Apple has not done as much in the podcasting space. They've done lots of stuff like Apple podcast app has come a long way. But when it comes to like innovation, adopting what is happening now, Apple's just slower and like video and podcasts. Like we do a video version of this podcast for a reason because there's lots of people that prefer to see podcasts that way. And it's a great way to discover.

And Apple does not have a good way to watch or create video podcasts on their platform. Like, yes, you can have a video podcast RSS feed and put that as a separate show on Apple Podcasts. The only people that do that and have the time to do it are like Twit. Like, the Twit network does that. And pretty much nobody else. Like, you can't sustain it. So I would like to see Apple maybe...

continue pushing on innovation in areas where they've been sitting for a while and something like Apple podcasts, not so much the app, but as like a service and as a backend. And then also, yeah, it'd be exciting to have kind of that founder mode energy and like new product categories in the coming years.

Yeah. And he's Brian Chesky said that he believes that as often as possible, the CEO should be the chief product officer. And if you look at that was the model Steve Jobs, he was the chief product officer, Tim Cook, no one has ever accused of being a product guy, right. And what Brian Chesky did tell me was he thinks that it would behoove Apple to contemplate at some point in the future having a CEO who is a chief product officer.

And I think it's really interesting. He said that Tim Cook has done a fantastic job of quote scaling Steve's vision. So if you think about it,

It's so hard to... You can argue, and I just made the argument a couple minutes ago, that Tim Cook is a far more successful CEO because he's increased the value of the company and he's returned so much money to shareholders and yada, yada, yada. But all of that was on the back of the iPhone. And all of those products, the Apple Watch doesn't exist without the iPhone. It's just an accessory. AirPods, both of those are just accessories to the iPhone. So Tim Cook is...

the services play is literally just a play on the iPhone. So all of the things that Tim Cook has done that have grown Apple have just been extending the dominance of the iPhone into all of these different areas. The iPad, I think you could even argue is just a big iPhone. I mean, it literally ran iPad. Oh, I mean, iOS for a long time and it's in iPad. OS is just basically iOS, which means that so is vision OS, right? The, the, the vision pro is the example of the,

it's not an extension of the iPhone. It's like, it's like the, it's the least extension of the iPhone. You could argue, maybe it's an extension of your Mac sort of because it's most useful function is as an, is a great monitor for your Mac or whatever. Like you have a giant thing, but I think, I think that Brian's point would be that Apple's next Tim Cook was the right CEO for the phase that Apple was going through, which is let's maximize this singular consumer product. It is the most important consumer product that,

Ever the iPhone is in Tim Cook was like the perfect person to fine tune that and extend it and even grow that business. But he's not going to be the person who is going to come up with whatever the next thing is. And I, we even talked about, you mentioned there, Ryan, we talked about Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and never have walked out and done a demo before.

like Mark Zuckerberg did because Mark Zuckerberg can literally not be fired. So he can just do what he wants to do. He can walk out and he'd be, he's like, these are the cool things we're working on. I'm growing these crystals in my basement and they're 10,000 bucks a piece. And at some point, you know, if not Zuck, then who, you know, whatever his shirt says to like, so yeah.

I do encourage people to listen to the interview. If you go to the article, there is a link to the full conversation that we had. It was fun. Yes, you should listen to it. All right, well, let us know. What kind of CEO does Apple need next? You can comment on the post in our community. All right, a quick personal tech. A couple quick things. So one, do you still subscribe to iTunes Match?

I think so. I don't ever really pay attention to it. I think I do. Every year, every year this comes up, I get the email $25 a year, just cheap enough to just that. So the point of iTunes match back in the day was if you had MP3s that you ripped or like someone gave you a mixtape CD or whatever, which is funny phrase, but anyway, you ripped the CD or you had your own MP3s that you loaded into your iTunes library and

Paying for iTunes Match would basically, iTunes would match it if it was an actual song. So if it was Superstition by Stevie Wonder, let's say you had that off a ripped CD, iTunes Match would basically give you the higher quality iTunes Plus version in your Apple Music account, basically, even though you never bought it originally. So that was the purpose of iTunes Match.

That part has been part of Apple music for a long time. So even if you don't pay for iTunes match, if you had those ripped CDs and let's say you had the song superstition in your library, if you had stopped paying for iTunes match, but did subscribe to Apple music, you would still have the song superstition in your library, mostly because it's just there. Like it's already in Apple music. So it doesn't matter. But iTunes match. Also, if you had uploaded MP3s that weren't necessarily songs, you,

iTunes Match would save those in the cloud for you, and you could download them anytime in the future. Here's my situation, because everybody yells at me that I'm still paying for this.

When I was in college, I recorded all of the music department concerts. I was a music major. And so I have all of the wind ensemble, orchestra, all the concerts, choral concerts. I saved all those. I think, yes, they're in my Dropbox somewhere, but they're in my Apple Music Library. And I can listen to them whenever, and they're just there. And so iTunes Match uploaded those MP3s, and it's saving in the cloud.

Supposedly the Apple Music subscription does that also where it will save those MP3s that are not matched to a song like by an artist. I don't trust it. I don't know what's going to happen. And so I'm going to pay for iTunes match until they either cancel it or I die.

And that's all I have to say about that. Wouldn't the easier solution? I mean, I was just trying to figure out if I'm subscribed to this and I can't actually find anywhere in the interface to tell. You can go to subscriptions on your iPhone and see if it's there. Well, my iPhone is my camera right now, so I can't do that. So I'm not going to take that down. You got to go to your iCloud subscriptions. Well, I was just looking in the Mac App Store to see if I can log in. Anyway, it doesn't matter.

Wouldn't the easier solution for you to be just download those songs and have them on your computer? Yeah. I don't want. Yes. Yes. I don't want to hear about it. I just want to make sure I'm not missing something. I don't, I don't know all the things that are in there and I don't want to take the time to like sort my library and try and search for it. So anyway, so in that case, 24 99 a month is a deal for you because it's avoiding having to do any work. So there you go. That's right.

I don't know how many years I have to pay for it that will commensurate with the hours I would spend going through my library. We've probably crossed that Rubicon already, but anyway, I'm going to keep paying for iTunes match forever. That's the bottom line. That's the bottom line. And I also want to share my most viewed piece of content that I've ever made. This right here. I feel for you. I was, I was helping my daughter with something on her iPad and she went to set an alarm because it was around bedtime and she opened the clock app on her iPad and I saw this monstrosity and

She had like 30 something alarms that said 9 a.m. And it's not like they were custom songs or whatever. It's just 9 a.m. So I posted on threads. I may have failed as a tech dad. This is my daughter's iPad. Jason, do you see how many views this post got? Millions. 2.3 million views.

Number one, I don't know what I'm doing as a content creator, apparently, because I can get millions of views if I play the game right. That's number one. Number two, the threads algorithm is hopelessly broken. Like, I don't understand why this made such views. And then I did a follow-up, like, failed tech tag thing. And I guess this could be my meme if I wanted it to be on threads, but I'm not monetized, so I don't care. But, like, what?

2.3 million views. But anyway, this is a... A lot of people said in the comments too, like, this is a problem with Siri. Because if you ask... Oh, sorry, I said the name. Anyway, if you ask it to set an alarm for tomorrow for 9 a.m., it'll just keep creating alarms in your thing. You can say...

turn on my 9am alarm and it will just toggle on the alarm you have set and it won't create a new one. But if you just say, send an alarm for 9am, it'll create a new one every time. Now, yes, you can also ask the assistant, delete all my alarms and it will do that too. But this is funnier. And so we just left it. Well, and I just realized it is not just the voice assistant who shall not be named because, uh,

It turns out I'm actually not using my phone as a camera. I'm using a different phone. The iPhone 16 is a camera. I just realized that because I picked up my phone. So many phones. Well, apparently it's not just the voice assistant who should not be named because this is our Alexa app. And our daughter just has like the same thing. Every day she sets a new alarm for whatever time. And I'm just like...

Do you just have to turn it on? Like there are 39 alarms in here for 5 a.m. And then there's another 30 for 515 a.m. The funny thing is she doesn't even get up until 545. So why are there 60 alarms set? Yeah.

This is going to be our next asinine thing, but how do you do your alarms? I just use the sleep feature on my iPhone and just set an alarm for whatever 5 a.m. And you don't set any additional alarm? No, I get up pretty, I use my watch. Oh yeah, I just get up, yep. So if you look in your clock app right now on your iPhone,

How many alarms does it say? Well, I mean, I have a lot of different alarms in there, but they're for like other reasons. Like I do have, they're not all set for the same thing. It's like for some reason I needed an alarm. So I'll just like set an alarm for different things. Okay. Okay. I mean, I do have like a 504 alarm that if I really have to be up, I might set that as like a backup because my alarm will go off. And I don't think it goes off on the, this is usually why I have an alarm set. I don't have the sleep thing. I have not do its thing on Saturday and Sunday.

Right. Right. And so I'll set like a, if I'm not up by six 10, I should get out of bed. But on a Saturday, I never, I never sleep past seven o'clock. I can't. So I use the sleep feature also. But I also, you know, I got some backups because, you know, if I wake up at seven, you know, I put this in 15 to seven 30, just, just to be sure, you know, just, I do have a request for David Smith because I use his sleep plus plus app.

But the sleep plus, because it gives me a score, which I really like having a score, but it assumes that I'm up at the time that my sleep schedule ends, no matter what, because the phone goes out of sleep mode or whatever. So it'll be like, oh, you got up at five.

459 you only got whatever amount of sleep but if I decided no I'm gonna actually sleep a little bit longer it doesn't it stops counting that sleep it's really weird so it needs to like be a little smarter there David Smith okay all right use some of that use some of that Widget Smith money and make sleep plus plus a little bit better do

Do you, so you don't snooze, you don't snooze alarms. Uh, I should not say that I never snooze an alarm, but if it's, but when I reach over and it's on the very fancy, whatever stand that you sent me, that looks sort of like the AI robot, that's going to kill me someday. I just always hit the done button or the offer stop or whatever. But on my watch, most of the time my watch wakes me up and I just hit the done and I'm good. Amazing. I need, I need to get your, your ability to wake up. That's pretty good. All right.

Let us know how many alarms you have set in your device. You can leave a comment on the post social.primarytech.fm. If you haven't yet, leave us a five-star rating and review in Apple Podcasts. We'll give you a shout out at the top of the show. Thank you to everyone who did that this week. And you can support the show. You get an ad-free version and a bonus episode every week. You can support the show directly in Apple Podcasts. And if you go to primarytech.fm and click bonus episodes, you could support us there. I've had more and more people ask for the video version of the bonus episodes. Those do exist.

If you support us through Memberful on the website, the links are just in the show notes. I can't put them in the show notes on Apple Podcasts because then just anybody could see it because even if you don't subscribe. So anyway, I now have a playlist link. And if you, I'm going to do a secret code word in the bonus episode. And if you DM me that word, I'll send you the playlist for all the bonus episode videos as well. And we'll do that in a second. We're going to go talk about, Jason finally got his Tesla back and he met a famous person. I do want to hear about your famous person experience.

And it wasn't the CEO of Airbnb. It was not. No, no. At LAX. So we're going to go record that bonus episode. Again, links to everything is in the show notes below. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you next time.