New M4 MacBook Air, Mac Studio M4 Max vs M3 Ultra, is Mac Pro DEAD?
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I'm giving her all she's got, Captain! Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. All the news this week as Apple released new MacBook Air, updated Mac Studio, iPad Air, regular iPad. We're going to talk about all of that, what it means for WWDC, and will we see an updated Mac Pro at some point?

Plus things about tariffs, Skype, a little memoriam for them, Apple versus the UK, and a special bonus episode about that Sigma BF camera that everyone's saying it's the one Apple would make. This episode is brought to you by 1Password and you, the members who support us directly. I'm one of your hosts, working off just a few hours of sleep, Stephen Robles, and joining me, also on just a few hours of sleep, my friend Jason Aiton. How's it going? I'm good. I'm trying to decide which of us has a better reason for only having a few hours of sleep. I was driving home from the airport.

Because it was so windy through like most of the country that my flight both to where I went yesterday and home. So I flew somewhere. Yeah, I flew to Nashville. I posted that so I can say that. Right. You can say that. I flew to Nashville and back yesterday and it was so windy that flights were delayed like hours and then I got to the airport in Detroit and I bought a

a cortado do you know what a cortado is it's three shots of espresso with a little bit of steamed milk wait what time did you buy that it was like nine o'clock and normally i don't think that would bother me yeah but then i didn't go to sleep until very late and so and you historically get up at 5 a.m i was up immediately immediately don the apple vision pro that's that i should have just done that and everyone in my family would have just thought i was working and i could have taken a

nap and i just want to be clear you still have not yet used an apple vision pro on a plane i didn't take it on the plane yesterday but here's my reason why i flew there and back would you how am i going to take it if i just all i had was one back in a backpack backpacks exist jason we're not having a lot of sleep i feel like we have a lot of energy you know what i mean this is good we gotta it's gonna expend it all right we're giving it all we got steven we're giving it all we got oh you know a movie that's from obviously isn't it from star trek but it's a movie

It's from all the Star Trek. Okay, I was sure it was from Star Trek, but... I know the Scotty and the Chris Pine Star Treks, he says it at some point. And then, anyway.

Anyway, I don't know how many Trekkies we got out there, but all right. Quick five star reviews. And then we got an old tech and we're going to jump into all the Apple news, which is just wild this week. Thank you all for even flooding our five star reviews for the last two weeks, trying desperately to get us back up to a five star rating. I don't know why William Gallagher just keeps leaving one star reviews, but we're still a 4.9.

But it's okay, because thanks to Jono24 from the UK, we got another five-star review. Battery percentage off. Thank you, phone in non-dominant pocket. That's a Jason win. Jamie from the UK, battery on, auto app updates off. He said, or no, on. He said he keeps his apps auto-updating. Christopher Erickson, long-time listener and friend, back from HomeKit Insider from Sweden. And he helped us understand how to pronounce IKEA products. Do you know how to pronounce that word that I have there in the notes? It's in bold.

Next to Christopher Erickson's name. It is an IKEA hub. It's a smart hub. I'm going to say Dira Jira. Yeah.

He actually sent us a voice memo years ago. It's Diddy Huera. No, that's definitely not what it is. Diddy Huera. It's from Ikea. Anyway. And then Bob6310 from the USA. Battery on, battery percentage on. Right rear pocket. A rear pocketer. That's kind of a wild card in our listenership. And then finally, Matthew G sent us an email. He wanted to share some of his old tech. Which, listen, this is an ongoing segment now. Just send us your old tech. He's got an original iPod Nano. First generation.

He said it still turns on, works perfectly, but someone set a volume limit on it and locked it with a pin. So all the songs are super quiet. Oh, that's like advanced data protection for your iPod. So the first advanced data protection, you lock your volume with a pin. He said, does anyone know how to fix this? So I'm asking the community, if anyone knows how to help Matthew G unlock the iPod Nano, I guess, can you factory reset those?

I mean, do you have a device you can plug it into at this point? Because it's got a 30-pin, right? It's got a 30-pin. You got to go on eBay, buy the 12-inch PowerBook G4 from 2005. I don't know. But it looks cool. It looks great condition, I got to say. So anyway. Yeah, so hey, one thing. I'm sorry. One thing about the reviews. Okay. I was reading Bob6310's review. And I just want to ask Bob. There's no shade. And we don't know his real name.

But have I read that? I feel like the prompt was, write me a review for my favorite tech podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But even if that's true, I want to just call out this is my favorite line from the whole thing. It's a cornerstone of my tech information diet, and I love it. But the reason I think that he didn't write that, which go ahead. I don't care. If you can find a way to make the bots put all the five-star reviews, please just go ahead and do it. Well, not automated. We don't want one of those review farms. I'm not saying like that.

I mean, find all your friends, send them Chad GPT prompts, but it says four years. And I think we've only been doing this for like 14 months. But thank you. I'm not really, I don't mean any like disrespect. Thank you for the five-star review, but I did read it and I thought,

I saw that and I was like, well, technically, I guess 2024 and 25. I guess you could say four years, but I love it. But John of 24 is review is very kind to that. That seemed a human written, human written or chat. You could be written, go get it, get a review and go to that podcast. Five stars pasted in there. We would,

We would greatly appreciate it. Absolutely. Apple released 1,000 products this week, Jason. So we got to jam through it. Let's go in order. It was reminiscent of years ago. There was that week where Apple had three press releases three days in a row. Wasn't it last year? They had Mac Week or whatever it was. Oh, yeah. They do it for a reason. Okay, first of all, before we even get into it, why didn't they do an event? Why do you think they didn't just do one event? Like, this is an event.

Well, and I think that they did the hands-on thing because there are hands-on impressions. So they did bring some people somewhere. It was not Nashville. I was not there, just to be clear. I was not there either. I would have posted. I saw Andrew Edwards. I saw K-Digital Studio with the iPads. I saw a couple other creators. But it was very like... The Verge had the M4 MacBook, the SkyBlue MacBook Air. It seemed like they were showing off the SkyBlue MacBooks.

of all the things. And the iPad air is what a K digital studio had, but it just seems so strange. Like,

they, Apple has done events in March and April. I remember there was like the event for the original redesign, iMac air tag and a iPad, something like Apple would do an event, even if it's just a virtual event. Why do you think they chose to do it this way? I mean, they're not doing as many events. I think, well, I think it's partially because when you look at the, like they're always going to do an iPhone event. Right. And,

And these are just updates. And I don't think that based on what... Last year, they did the iPad event, sort of. I mean, they sort of did an iPad event where they did the iPad Pro with the M4. But that was a pretty big difference because you had the tandem OLED screens. They finally moved the camera to the right spot and they were able to make it bigger. I actually think...

I actually thought about this a lot. And I actually think that Apple is just trying different things. Like they're in there. They're in there. Let's try some stuff era, you know, like because they've done a bunch of like set things throughout COVID. And I think what they're trying to do is figure out,

how should we be doing this post COVID? And they're just trying different combination, like because they did the one where the embargo was at 9 PM. Like, was it a week or two ago? Right. Oh yeah. Well, it was, it was last week for the 16 E for the 16. Yeah. Yeah. And so they're doing a bunch of different things, I think, and just trying to see like,

what gains traction, what, because if you just do the same thing all the time, especially for products like this, I mean, the MacBook air is they're probably next to the iPhone and the AirPods gotta be like their best selling product. I don't like, or it's definitely the best selling Mac. They make no qualms about telling you that every time they talk about it, it's the world's most popular laptop. And, and, but the Mac studio, uh,

is a pretty low volume. It's an exciting thing because it's like this thing's... I mean, they announced a new chip with it. It was a new chip and everything. It was new versions of two existing chips. Fair, yeah, that's fair. Well, speaking of how they're doing things differently, Tim Cook, now the last two weeks, has teased both things. You know, he teased the iPhone 16e by saying, welcome the newest member of the family. And then he teased all the Air stuff

And let's see, I'm going to go down to, yeah. So he said on March 3rd, this week, there's something in the air, which was an allusion to the original MacBook Air announcement where that tagline, there's something in the air, was literally on like posters at that announcement. So he teased that. And then, I mean, I think this is new. I mean, to your point, trying things new. Tim Cook basically just like tweeted, introducing the newest iPad Air, picture of the iPad Air.

that's it that was that was the whole tweet same thing and then macbook air here's the macbook air he didn't tweet uh notably about the macbook the mac studio for some reason but also he kind of got a little hammered on the ipad air there was like a bunch of quote tweets of quinn nelson said okay there's a bunch of quote tweets being like is this how apple is doing it now like apple has fallen off whatever which

I don't know how you can read that into a tweet. I want to know from that picture, Stephen. Pull that picture back up. If you're listening to this, you can't tell what this picture is. It'll be the chapter. It's a picture of an iPad Air on one of the new Magic keyboards. There's an Apple Pencil that was literally just attached seconds before they took this picture because you can see the drop-down Apple Pencil charging indicator at the top. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Listen, every time. Yeah, it's going the wrong direction. Wait a minute. Hold. Everybody stop. Everybody stop. Everybody stop. Basic Apple guy sent me literally screenshots of every product marketing image of the new iPads when they came out earlier this week showing me the Apple Pencil direction. And I just want to note...

That this, this picture that Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple posted announcing iPad air, that Apple pencil, that tip is pointed towards the volume buttons. And I rest my case. That's all I got to say. I didn't even realize that until we, I'm, I'm glad you had me pull this back up, Jason, because now I can feel vindicated.

That that Apple pencil is on. That's actually not why I did that. It's just, I think it's funny that they literally just snapped it on immediately before taking the picture because it's still showing up up there. But, but if you look at that, they could have taken that picture two and a half years ago.

Yeah, I mean, they could have taken it in 2018 if the color was a little different. Well, I mean, I'm just like, what is about that that tells you that that's the newest iPad Air? Literally nothing. Even the wallpapers kind of were the same. Anyway, let's talk about each product. I'm just so excited that I'm not vindicated. I also wish these guys, namely, I say these guys, like Apple SVPs like Greg Joswiak and Tim Cook, why don't they post this stuff on Blue Sky and stuff?

Like I understand, I understand the meta issue. Like maybe they don't want to be on meta platforms or whatever, but like blue skies just sitting there.

Why aren't they posting this stuff in multiple places? Well, they have a partnership with X, right? So they actually like, so I don't want to, you know, I'm no, I'm just saying like the reach and the volume that they would get on blue sky is pretty small. And the reason they're not going to post links to things on meta is that metal literally deprioritizes that stuff. And he wasn't posting links anyway. Like he was on that one. It was just a photo. You're right. Yeah. But anyway, all right, let's talk, let's talk about the first thing Apple announced, which is the iPads, new iPad air with M three, uh,

new quote-unquote magic keyboard and new base model ipad not a ton of news here m3 there's not really any i mean whatever m3 is like faster same pricing same storage same sizes same colors as the previous ipad air bigger update is the new quote-unquote magic keyboard which now is the function row of keys and a larger trackpad to match the updated uh

Magic keyboard for the iPad Pro. And also this now has like the bespoke cutout. So if you want one that actually matches your iPad Air rather than the iPad Pro that has the larger cutout, you can get that.

The Magic Keyboard situation is a little confusing. I'm going here as we're recording on YouTube. The Magic Keyboard for iPad Air, it's compatible for all the previous Airs. So if you had an M2 Air or even the Air before that, but it's still the same body style, it's compatible with all of that. But if you get the new Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro, remember that's only compatible with the Pros because the magnets are a different formation.

But if you have the old Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro, like until the one that was released last year, that one would still work with the iPad Air and presumably with this iPad Air because this is compatible. Anyway, there's a new Magic Keyboard for the iPad Air. Steven, this wasn't even supposed to be the most confusing part of this episode, but I... It's confusing. Well, and I asked and...

the new magic keyboard. Yes. Is backwards compatible. And if you have an old one, you can continue using that. So that is actually nice. You can buy a new iPad air and you don't have to buy a new magic keyboard. If that's the thing that you want to use, which was obviously not the case for the iPad pro it's like buy our most expensive thing. And then buy all the most expensive accessories. You're going to need a new one of everything. And it's going to be a new one of everything.

It's like suddenly your $999 iPad Pro is $2,000 and you didn't even get to upgrade the storage. You're like, what is even happening? Right. But speaking of storage, the other thing Apple introduced was the new base model iPad. And honestly, I was more excited about this

than the new iPad Air, only because, I don't know if my kids are listening to this, but I would consider upgrading them to this one because the base model iPad Air now comes with 128 gigs storage standard. They have the same colors. You get the blue, red, yellow, whatever, but 128 gigs as like the base model storage, that feels like a win, honestly, and the prices stayed the same. We're going to talk about tariffs after the break. It's very exciting.

Just kidding. Good, hard-hitting podcasting right there. Yeah. But even with all of that going on, Apple kept the price for the base model iPad the same, lowered the price of the MacBook Air we're going to talk about, and the storage starts at 128 gigs. This feels like a win if you were in the market for a base model iPad Air or a base model iPad. Yeah. And it was interesting because they did them in the same press release, right? Right.

It was sort of like, what actually happened here? And the reason it got confusing is they have now officially dropped the... There's no 10th gen. This is not the 11th gen iPad. This is just iPad, parentheses, A16, close parentheses. That's just how they denote these things now. And the other notable thing is they dropped $100 from the 10th gen.

Because when the 10th gen iPad launched, it was $449.

Remember how it had jumped up in price when they did that new form factor? And then they were still selling the ninth gen, which was the older form factor with the home button. And they have brought the price back down. And so this thing is actually kind of a steal, right? It really is. Yeah. In some ways, people are like, well, it doesn't do Apple intelligence. And I'm like, that's kind of actually a benefit. Not a bug. It's a feature. It's actually fine for this particular device. I was having a conversation with someone and, you know, you have to ask yourself, like,

because this was just yesterday, someone was asking me about like, well, why wouldn't they put the A17 Pro into this device? And I think the answer is actually really simple because the iPad Mini has the A17 Pro. Everything else about the iPad Mini is just a smaller version of the iPad, which means you can't charge whatever $500 for it. If everything else is the same, only it's smaller. So they can't, they're pricing tiers differently

requires that the iPad mini be like, what are they going to do? Sell the iPad mini for two 99. Like that's never going to happen. No. Well, and also the other iPad mini feature, which is the one reason why I would struggle to buy this base model. iPad is the wireless charging Apple pencil. Because if you get the base model iPad, you have to charge the USB-C cable. And sure. Maybe it's not a big deal, but it's just annoying. And like, it would be really nice to have a wireless charging pencil, especially because I have like a couple around, um,

especially like with the older iPads that I can't use anymore because the new iPad pro is the different magnets. So it's like those two features is like the key to Apple wanting you to upgrade. Like if you want the wireless charging pencil and Apple intelligence, maybe, maybe not. But the, uh, what you said, which I already forgot. Well, I was just saying they had to keep that price differentiation. So they put the eight 17 pro in the iPad mini. And it seems pretty obvious that next year we're going to see an iPad, uh,

It's actually really interesting to hear Apple try to talk about these things because they don't call it the base iPad, right? Like that's not the name of this product. It's just iPad. And it's not even the iPad or iPad. It's just iPad. And so I wish there was some moniker after that because it gets really hard because you have iPad pro iPad air iPad.

That's not the same with the MacBooks. There used to be a time when there was a MacBook with no moniker. It was just MacBook. But like with the iPad, it is difficult. Yeah, because it's both the category name and a product name. Sort of like Apple TV, Apple TV, Apple TV app, Apple TV Plus. Apple never does that. I don't know. That's why like I saw...

Oh, is it Sigmund? On social media, he posts all about Apple TV updates, like the OS and stuff. And then I saw Matthew Castanelli, and it was like, there's new shortcuts actions for Apple TV. And I was so excited. I was like, oh, I can do more with my physical Apple TV? He's like, no, no, no. These are shortcuts to change the Apple TV app settings on your iPhone. Okay, never mind. Lovely. I mean, that's cool, too. Anyway, so those are the iPads. Then I think more exciting, which is probably why this was the second announcement, is...

New MacBook Air, starting with an M4 chip and a new color and at a lower price. MacBook Air and Mac Studio. That wasn't actually the second announcement, but yeah. Wait, what was the second announcement? The Mac Studio came first. Oh, sure, sure. Yeah, if you go to the newsroom here, I'll go to the newsroom. It doesn't matter. I know, I was saving the Mac Studio for the last because it's a little bit, but yeah, it was the iPads and the M3 Ultra was the next announcement.

and then five seconds later was the mac studio press release and then the ip and the macbook air but anyway but the macbook air yeah we can talk about the macbook air this is exciting i'm excited about the minute listen the first thing you need to know is that it was a really tough day for the copy editors because if you have to look if you have to write three product launches back to back like this one of them is apple reveals one of them is apple unveils one of them is apple introduces it's

It's like, this is a really rough day. Like how many different words can you use to talk about doing the same thing? You know, I wonder in the, in the M three ultra newsroom headline, it says Apple reveals M three ultra taking Apple Silicon to a new extreme. Yeah.

Is that copywriter trolling the entire Apple press community because we've talked about the M4 extreme chip or whatever? Of course. That's pretty slick. Whoever wrote that, if you're listening, I like it. I like what you did there. That's pretty good. Okay, so MacBook Air, sorry. No, MacBook Air, almost as long a headline as yours. Sorry, I had to blast you on that.

I don't know what's wrong with long headlines. No, it's great. I mean, you just wrap it. I mean, this is literally a one, two, three, four, five, six line headline, you know, with the breaks. But anyway. To be clear, my headline was five things you should know about Apple's new MacBook Air and Mac Studio. That's it. That's my whole headline. And then you get a sub line. You get a little, but hold on, hold on a second. Let me see. Let me see. What are the headlines we got here? Okay. Three line, three line. Do you know, do you like when you write articles, do you purposely try to like keep

keep it to three lines max or do you have some kind i could not care how many lines it is but i do keep track of how many characters and words it is and what's the max characters you do when you're like now this is too much anything over 100 you start to lose the seo like the in the it starts to it starts to disappear in google's okay well i think apple might have beat you with this that's about 400 i'm just kidding apple choose a new macbook air

It lowered the price. The previous MacBook Air M3 was $1099. And even amidst all the tariffs or whatever, it lowered in price $999 as the M4 chip is an upgraded camera, I believe, correct? Isn't the phone upgraded? Yeah.

and new sky blue color. Notably, no more space gray color for the MacBook Air. Which is a choice. I would have thought that space gray was the most popular color. Probably. I mean, the midnight is, you know, it's kind of like a gray in all the other lights. But anyway, the MacBook Air, I was very excited for this MacBook Air because I've been waffling about whether I want to try MacBook Air over my Pro. And now being a $999 and...

Base storage is, well, you still got 256 base storage, which is, you know, okay. But 16 gigs unified memory is the base. And you quickly get to that 512 SSD. If you wanted to spec this out, which I did, you can get 32 gigs of memory, 2 terabyte SSD, and you're at 2199. But that's kind of a nice computer right there. Yeah. So first of all, this is the killer. This is the best computer anyone should think about buying. But here's the funny thing.

You can go from $9.99 to $21.99 and there's literally only two things you can change. Memory and storage. There's two choices. That's it. You only get two little clickies you can do and suddenly you've added $1,200 to the price of this computer. Yeah. That's bananas. It is bananas. The sky blue. So I saw the press pictures that shared by like Andrew Edwards and stuff and obviously Apple's pictures here. Just

This does look like one of those colors, like starlight and whatever, that you really got to get it in just the right angle to be able to see the blue part.

I think it's going to be a lot like this, which is the M2 iPad Air. That's a silver iPad. Nope, this is blue. This is blue. I don't believe it. The way you know it's blue is because this is the color that they sent me of the thing. Because of the packaging? But yeah, I mean, if you look at it in and on, you can see there's a little tiny, tiny, tiny drop of blue in there. Tiny hint of blue. Well, you should try and match it up and see.

I think I should get a blue one because the iPad mini that they sent me is also that same color. So I'm going to rock sky blue everywhere. Anyway, this is a great computer. $999, M4. This is going to do gangbusters, as they say.

I also got one because... What'd you configure it as? $2,199? That's correct. Yeah, that's like... Seriously though, like so the M3 MacBook Air that I've been using was 24 gigs and two terabytes. And honestly, like...

You never need to upgrade that. You know what I mean? You're going to be able to use that for seven years and hand it to a child as they graduate from college and be like, here's a brand new MacBook. It's a brand new MacBook. So I have an M3 Pro MacBook Pro.

I didn't upgrade to the M4 version there. And I love the Mac, that MacBook Pro. My biggest thing will be comparing the displays, which I know you're not going to sit side by side with a MacBook Pro display and a MacBook Air display. I also work off a studio display, which is not even to the quality of the MacBook Pro. But if I'm good with the display...

I mean, the MacBook Air just looks so good. One of the reasons why I told myself I kept the MacBook Pro is the SD card slot, which I thought about recently and I was like, actually, I don't think I've used that in years. And now that I got the Osmo Pocket 3, I actually transfer footage just with the USB-C cable anyway, so I never have to deal with the SD card. So I'm like, maybe now is the time.

And I got the 13 inch, I think based on your advice, because like if you're buying a small computer to be a small computer, buy the small computer. Right. Don't buy the big version of the small computer of what you want as a small computer. Exactly. And so I'm very excited to try it. Yes, of course, I got the sky blue version. And yeah, it's exciting. Now you had an article too, which I'll include in the show notes. Five things you didn't know.

Oh, I said five things you should know. You probably do know them all. It's fine. But I just like was looking at like, what were the highlights for someone who's just quickly wanting to know what the differences are. And there's not a ton of them between the two. This one I learned. I mean, I think I might've seen it in passing, but your article reminded me of it, that it, uh, sports now you don't have to shut the display on the, on your laptop to support two displays up to six K two, six K displays from the MacBook air.

For some reason, I had thought, because of previous laptops that I've had, that there were USB-C ports on both sides, which is not the case. And I was like, oh, shoot. Because charging-wise, sometimes it's just convenient. Charge from either side. But it'll be fine. Those braided MagSafe cables, they're flexible. They're flexible. All I want, Jason, I'll tell you this. I'm hoping that the MacBook Air provides this for me. I want an Apple device that can just sit there

on standby for days and allow me to pick it up and use it without it being dead. And unfortunately, all of my portable Apple devices do not offer that anymore. My M4 iPad Pro, I actually created a shortcut, believe it or not. I actually made a shortcut. I know, it's shocking. I used push cuts and it notifies me when my iPad battery drops below 25%. It notifies me on my iPhone. So I get a notification on my iPhone that my iPad battery is dying.

And if I, if the iPad is just sitting there unplugged, I mean, it happens within a day. Like I get the notification and that's it. And I, I don't know if you have the same memory I do, but back in my, back in my day when I, it was like 2018 iPad era and slightly before, I feel like you could leave an iPad for a week or two.

If it was at 80%, the next time you pick it up, it would be at like 70%. Is that like a sense memory? Or do you recall, maybe it wasn't that good, but you could leave it there for days and days and still have battery for you to pick it up and use it. Is that right? I think you're probably right. I was just thinking about the fact that you didn't do this shortcut for your Vision Pro because your notification center would just be constantly full of batteries dead, batteries dead, batteries dead. You take it off and you unplug it and 30 seconds later, batteries dead. Well, and that's it.

That's a good point. Because when you have a device that you just know is dead, then it's less of a stressor. Because it's like, I know my Vision Pro is dead. Like, I don't have to question it. But my iPad, it's like Schrodinger's battery. Like, is the battery, is there battery? There's not battery. Also, the Vision Pro, there's a lot more intentionality to, I'm going to use this thing because you have to strap it to your face. Whereas an iPad, by definition, you want to just be able to reach over, grab it, flip open the cover, and start doing something on it. Exactly. I understand. I understand.

And my M3 MacBook Pro, M3 Pro MacBook Pro, is actually the same way. Like I'll have it fully charged. I'll use it. It's at 90%. I put it away. And if I pick it up two or three days later, I mean, it's gone. I have to immediately charge it. And I feel like MacBooks years ago would last a little longer. So I'm the one, like, honestly, I'm excited about the color and the thinness and lightness and using it. But I want to know, was the standby any better on this M4 MacBook Air? And we will see.

No cellular, though. Yeah, that's the thing. We didn't get the C1, and we didn't get nanotexture. Super disappointed. No nanotexture. And the C1, not even in the iPads, it seemed like that would have been a nice...

But maybe it's too soon. Maybe they want to see how it goes. Yeah, and they... It's so hard to know. The iPad Air has to be the most popular iPad they sell to consumers as opposed to schools or whatever. So I can understand. Do they even offer cellular in the base iPad? iPad A16? I don't even know if they offer cellular in that model. In the base model iPad, let me see. You can get 128 gigs. You can get the yellow, blue, and red. Oh, pink. Excuse me.

You can't get cellular in the base model iPad. It brings it. It's $150 upcharge. So you really have to want it, but you know what they did? They've been doing like, okay, so we give Apple a really hard time about their upgrade, upgrade prices. Cause they are ridiculous. Like they're still ridiculous, but yeah,

You can argue that they've somewhat mitigated against that by increasing the base memory on the devices, right? Where it's recorded, like the MacBook air now comes with 16, right? And they doubled the base storage on that iPad to one 28. It is now a viable device at that price, which I think is notable and worth mentioning. So, which, and that's why like I bought my kids, the base model iPad, like three or four years ago. And it was 64 gigs of storage.

They've filled that up already. That's over. So they don't even update their operating system because they don't have a Mac to attach to it and they try to delete things to have enough. So anyway, the 128 gig storage alone plus the camera in the right place seems like a good year for an upgrade. My son has been trying, well this is, I'll tease my video idea for the 16E. My son has been using the 16E review unit that I have and I'm going to ask him,

Would you want the 16E or would you want to stick with your iPhone 13? And I'm curious to see his answer because there are trade-offs. Yeah, and there's a lot of people who seem to really...

think that this phone doesn't make sense and yes for you it doesn't like for those people it does not make sense if you are not if you are commenting on youtube videos about phones this is not the phone for you that's no that's seriously that's that's a good metric it is and it's like why would you upgrade to this phone from and it's like you would upgrade to this from the se

or from an iPhone 11 Pro, right? It's like you just have to under, like no, no one is upgrading from the 15 to this or the 14 or the 14 Pro. That is not why this device exists. And sure, you can buy an iPhone 15 still, but it's more expensive. Well, you can get an iPhone 15 Pro refurbished from Amazon for like $650. So it's still technically more expensive. It's $50 more expensive, yeah. But, you know, you gotta,

We got to talk about Mac studio, but before we do with all these new Apple devices, you got to make sure they're secure in order to, in order to secure them, you should use one password extended access management. Thank you all. Please hold the applause for that transition. Uh, I know, I know, I know you were probably just, I didn't even know what was happening right now. I know I was trying to keep you guessing, trying to keep everybody guessing.

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But when they do that, when employees do that, then that causes breaks in the system and it increases risk for things like bad actors and malware. So here's what you do. 1Password Extended Access Management is the answer. It's the first security solution that brings all the unmanaged devices and apps and identities under your control. It ensures that every user credential is strong and protected, every device is known and healthy, and every app is visible.

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That's how you do it. That's a way to do it. Now, the moment that caused much consternation within me, Jason, because I had been sitting here with my M1 Mac's Mac Studio since it launched, eagerly awaiting the day when I might upgrade it to something with an Ultra in the name.

Specifically, because I'm like, I got an M1 Max when I got this, because I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know, you know. But now I do video for a living, and I'm like, I use some AI stuff, and I wanted to beef it up, get a more powerful Mac studio. And so I was very shocked. First of all, Gurman leaked this, what, 12 hours before it launched? Which is, we should talk about that, but okay, go ahead. It's just funny, because John Gruber's just been hammering over it.

Well, he's not hammering Gurman as much as someone leaked an NDA briefing to Gurman.

There's a lot of subtle stuff going on there. It's like someone who signed an NDA would rather just get good with Mark Gurman. Yeah, it's interesting. John Gruber had two articles about it yesterday. He was like, Mark Gurman, your source for leaks 24 hours before they're announced. I was like, that's cold. But also, he went all the way back to Mark Gurman's

prediction about the new base model iPad, and Gurman was pretty much wrong about that. He was like, it's going to have the A18, it's going to have Apple Intelligence, all this stuff. And he did not call it. So, not flawless track record, but he did get these 24 hours in advance. So,

congratulations. I don't know what you say for that. We have a new update. Well, updated. Mac Studio. Hardware is exactly the same, save for Thunderbolt 5. The new chips allow for Thunderbolt 5 connections, so you get fast speeds there, but you still have all the ports. That was the thing I was most excited about. You got all the same ports, and I use every one of those ports, Jason. Literally every single one, except for the headphone one. What are you using USB-A for?

Well, let me tell you, Jason, I have my... I don't want to know, but that's fine. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. I have my Rodecaster Pro 2 in one Thunderbolt port. I have my Blackmagic ATEM Mini Pro in a second Thunderbolt port. I have my studio display in a third Thunderbolt port. And then I have a CalDigit USB-C Thunderbolt hub in the fourth one because then I have multiple SSDs and other peripherals connected in that.

I have it hardwired to ethernet. One USB-A port is for my mechanical keyboard. The second USB-A port is for my stream deck. HDMI cable. Yes, I have the studio display connected, but I have the HDMI going to my Blackmagic ATEM Mini Pro, so I can use the secondary display as an input. Then the headphone jack usually leaves empty, but I can, you know, sometimes... I use every port. I use all the parts of the Buffalo. You know what I mean? Everything. So...

We have a new Mac Studio, and so I was excited when this thing came out. I'm like, okay, let me jump on it. Yeah, I know it's going to cost $1,000, which you can spec this up to $14,000 if you really want to spec it out. We'll get to that. But in a confusing turn of events, we have your choice of either the M3 Ultra or the M4 Max. And I spent my time saying that, so I said it correctly.

But that's right, we don't get an M4 Ultra in this machine. You have to choose the Sophie's choice between an M3 Ultra and an M4 Max, and I'm not going to pretend I know about all the chip stuff. I will be listening to Syracuse. I'm hoping for a multi-hour tirade about what these chips even mean. I'm excited to see that.

But apparently, I'll just mention this, Ars Technica, they got a statement directly from Apple, and Apple said, apparently, that Apple told us, I'm reading from the Ars Technica article I put in the show notes, not every chip generation will get an Ultra tier, which is ironic because every M chip has gotten an Ultra so far. We've had an M1 Ultra, we have an M2 Ultra, now we have an M3 Ultra. So Jason, what's happened?

I don't know, but I'm on a simplify it for you. Please. The numbers mean nothing. The only thing means anything is max and ultra at this point, right? That's what you need to decide. Do you need the max computer that you can possibly get?

Or do you actually need more than that? And then you get the ultra version of the computer that you actually, right? So it doesn't make any difference. The, the, the, the important thing is that ultra means two maxes basically. And so even the M three, if you have two M three maxes, that's still better than one M four max, right? That makes sense, right? It does. It just makes sense. And so,

I think the only people who really need that M3 Ultra are if you need that memory bandwidth, if you want to be able to put 512 gigs of memory into it. I did see somebody posted that this is the first Mac where you can spec the memory and the storage to be the same configuration. I think that was Eric Wielander, which is hilarious. Which is just perfect. Because I did see multiple times like 512 gigs and like your brain does that like double take of like, wait a minute.

512 ZEN. That's Torch's memory. Wait, why would I ever do 512? Oh, memory. Okay. Which you can't configure it this way, but it would be hilarious if you could configure it with a 512 SSD and 512 memory. It's like...

what memory would swap where yeah what would swap in what direction just store your hard drive stuff you just i just want to find a car and then in the memory please the whole thing yeah so one of the things that apple did say in the press release is like yeah you can run llms completely in memory sure i mean you have that much memory so you can customize this multiple ways it's it's a little confusing if you went with the m4 max chip you have the choice of

14-core CPU, 32-core GPU, or 16-core and 40-core. And when you do that...

The memory options will gray out and enable depending on which chip you get. And so you can get the M4 Max with up to 128 gigabytes of memory. You can get that one with a 512 gigabyte SSD, which is kind of hilarious. And then that, you know, you can upgrade all the way. If you got, let's say, let's just say a two terabyte, 128 gig memory M4 Max, Mac Studio,

You're looking at a paltry $4,000. 4K for a very powerful 4K M4 Max chip.

You go to the Ultra, which again, because you now have two max chips together, you can get all the memories. And your options there, if you go with a big M3 Ultra chip, you can go up to 512 gigs of memory. You can get up to a 16 terabyte SSD. I don't know if that's more than the last version, but it's a lot of SSD. And there you have

And that was only two things, memory and storage, just like the MacBook Air. Well, no, you had to choose several options in that chip. That chip, that's right. It changed all of the other options that you could choose from. That's right. The chip is a big difference. But that M3 Ultra, you can get a 28 or 32-core CPU and a 60-core or 80-core GPU. Listen, I'm going to be real with everybody.

I edit videos, but I'm not doing 3D animation. I'm not doing Cinema 4D or whatever. I understand that this computer is not for me. I am not so arrogant to think that I needed M3 Ultra maxed out for my workflow. I literally could do my workflow on my iPad, probably, as far as power. I mean, you do half of your workflow on your iPad. I do edit the audio version on my iPad. So, like, I totally get it. But...

I would love to see what it's like to export a video on that maxed out Mac studio and run some like AI transcription stuff on that Mac studio. Cause I'm just, I mean, that has to make it go faster, right? Cause that stuff is, you know, especially if you have the LLMs on the thing, I don't know. Wouldn't it, that would expedite all that. Well, I mean, yes, but yeah, exactly. Yeah. So anyway,

And do you have any thoughts about these? I mean, it's exciting. I don't know what to buy. I don't know if I should buy. I literally never want for speed on my M1 Macs, Mac studios. I literally have no reason to upgrade. I probably won't. Yeah. I mean, and I'm sitting here with an M4 Pro Mac mini and I can't imagine a scenario where anyone would need this. Like the people who need this,

Again, are not the people leaving YouTube comments on our videos. But in the other direction, right? It's like the 16E is not for you and the M3 Ultra is also not for you because I just don't... The thing is, if you are going to spend, let's say, $14,000, but even if you're spending $8,000, $6,000, $4,000 on a computer...

either you just have a lot of money, which is great, good for you, or you have to be able to justify that investment with whatever it is that you're doing. And there just aren't that many things that you might be doing. And the thing that Apple touted the most was that you could run, I think they ran like the 400 billion parameter Lama model on it or something like that. Running LLMs on it, great. But that's still not a...

Chat GPT will do it in the cloud for you, right? Like you don't have to run the model on your computer. It's fine. You can let the people spending the $500 billion to build server farms, whatever that is, like let them do that and just send your query up. Like I told you this, like I got on a plane yesterday morning

When this announcement dropped, I typed into ChatGPT on my phone a query for deep research, shut my phone off into airplane mode, and when I opened my laptop up once Wi-Fi was available, it had done all the work. It did everything. None of my devices had to do anything. It's like, fine. I don't need 80 GPU cores and 512 gigs of unified memory. Although about the unified memory, I wanted to say one thing. I love this.

I love that Apple talks about it as having the most unified memory ever on a desktop computer, which, fine. It's also one-third of the RAM you used to be able to get on the Intel Mac Pro. Because you get 1.5 terabytes, right? Yes, but that was only RAM. It wasn't unified memories. It was not graphics memory. But I just think it is always interesting when they're like, how could we make this the best? Right?

we're going to call it this. It's unified memory, so this is the most unified memory that's ever been available on a personal computer. Well, no one else is doing this, which is a good thing. Because that means that all 512 gigs are available to the GPU when you want ChatGPT to do your homework.

Listen, and here's the last thing I'll say, because I was seriously considering, like, do I want to get something right now? And so I'm trying to read on their product pages and in the newsroom article the comparisons. And I don't know if it's just me, but the comparisons just seem so, like, I don't know how to think about it. So it says, the M3 Ultra delivers two times faster performance than an M4 Max, which

quote, in workloads that take advantage of high CPU and GPU core counts. Okay. But then they say things like this Mac Studio with M3 Ultra is 2.6 times faster than the M1 Ultra, 6.4 times faster than the 16-core Intel Xeon W-based Mac Pro. Okay. I guess if you still have that, or that's for Syracuse. That's what that's for.

And then it does, there's a four bullet points to say Mac studio with M three ultra enables. All right. What does it enable? 16.9 times faster token generation using an LLM with hundreds of billions of parameters. I don't think I do that. I think that was llama, but yes. Okay. Oh, okay. Okay. Oh, llama. Yeah. 2.6 times faster scene rendering and max on redshift. Do you know what that is? Have you ever heard of that? Have you ever seen those words before? Or could that have just been made up? I have seen max on redshift. Yeah.

I think it's a video application.

I don't know what it does. Scene rendering performance is what it does, Steven. That's what it says right there. But my point is, 1.1x faster base calling for DNA sequencing. This computer is not for you, friend. That's what I'm saying. The next one was DNA sequencing in Oxford Nanopore Minnow. I don't know what that is. Not real. I'm sure it is real. And then up to 1.4x faster 8K video rendering. I don't have an 8K camera. So, okay. That

That helps me. The M3 Ultra, as much as I would love to get one, it's not for me. It's not for me. I mean, it's sort of like saying this thing, if you buy a rocket, will power you to the moon. And you're like, well, I'm not going to the moon and I don't have a rocket, so I don't think I need this engine. I just want to go to Publix. Is this going to get to Publix faster? Will it help me? Yeah. No. It will. You'll get there way faster. I mean, I don't know. You can just... Anyway, but I don't... So, like, I just think it's kind of like... It doesn't matter. But my question for you is... Yes. Is the Mac Pro dead?

So this week, while early, feels like Apple was clearing the decks for DubDub. And Apple last DubDub, wait a minute, was it last DubDub?

They didn't release any hardware at last DubDub. Correct. Correct. The year before it was the Apple Vision Pro and the M2 Ultra. The 15 inch. Mac Studio. Well, the 15 inch MacBook Air, I think. Wasn't that at the year before at DubDub? Right. Yes. But I think the Apple Vision Pro year was also the M2 Ultra, Mac Pro, and Mac Studio or something like that. Anyway. Sure. Anyway.

So it seems like they're clearing the decks. What products do we have left that they would upgrade? They just updated the iMac. They updated the MacBook Pros with the M4 in the fall. We have the iPad Pro, which was the first device to get an M4 last year. So it could be the first device to get an M5, and that would be a yearly cycle if we see that before dub-dub. That doesn't feel likely to me. That's just the feeling there. So I don't think they're going to do that.

And then it's the Mac Pro and their displays. Like that's the other major hardware categories that they could update. WWDC is the time when Apple does the Mac Pro things. That was the 2019 Mac Pro. That was, I mean, it was less fanfare, but the Apple Silicon Mac Pro, the M2 was the first one there. Is it dead? No. Is it going to get an M3 Ultra or an M4 Ultra? I think is the question. I think we will see the Mac Pro refreshed.

I don't know if it's just going to be a press release mid-April or if it's going to be an announcement at DubDub. But I don't know. I don't think it's dead. But I just don't know where they're going to put it. What do you think? The thing that makes me think it could be dead is that 16 terabytes of storage. Because literally the only thing you can do in Mac Pro with all that space is stick fast storage. Because you can't use GPUs. You can use I.O. There's some I.O. stuff. Video components. Thunderbolt 5.

I'm pretty sure can handle all of that stuff, right? You don't need, I don't, I don't think there's any of that.

that would tap out Thunderbolt 5. I mean, there are cases like I've worked in places where I wanted a PCIe video card rather than a Thunderbolt cable between the video device and my computer. So I guess some people would prefer that. I'm sure Apple could very easily reason like, no, no, no, Thunderbolt enclosures all day. But I mean, is PCIe faster than Thunderbolt 5? Not that it's faster, but it's less points of failure in

In some people's minds. Like if you, let's say you had, uh, you had to ingest SDI video, like in a professional video situation, which is what I did.

Well, to do it with a Mac Studio, even the brand new one, I would need some kind of capture device, like a Blackmagic SDI to Thunderbolt capture device, and then the Thunderbolt will go to the Mac Studio. Now I'm introducing a device, which technically you could say is the same as a video card, and a Thunderbolt cable with two ends. And I know that seems like asinine, but

It's points of failure, like either end of that cable points of failure. So if I can literally screw in a card into a piece of like into my computer that has the SDI, you know, inputs right there on the back of the computer that screwed in, I close the computer and never open it again.

For certain use cases, that's just a more desirable setup than using a Thunderbolt enclosure. There's probably no reason for it. Speed-wise, there's no reason for it. It's strictly just a redundancy, less points of failure thing. Because I was just thinking like, you're still connecting an SDI cable to the back of that thing. And then the PCI and the Thunderbolt connection points are very different, but they're serving the same purpose. And so my thought is like,

I think it's clear that the Mac pro as the top desktop computer, right? That any human being would buy is gone, right? Like, cause the reason people would buy it is I want all those cores and I want to put GPUs in it. And like,

No offense to John Syracuse, but the reason he wants a Mac Pro is so he can put graphics cards in it and play Windows games. That's dead. That's not a thing. It's not going to happen. Do you think there's... I think the probability of Apple allowing third-party GPUs in any of its devices ever again is less than zero. That I agree with. And that, like you're saying, then obfuscates the need for a device that you can...

you can install third-party GPUs in. But they don't think so because you can get 512 gigs of unified memory in 80 GPU cores. And listen, I'm not arguing that that is for a...

If you're running video games that are optimized with CUDA for NVIDIA graphics cards, it doesn't matter what Apple does to Apple Silicon, but Apple's like, we don't care. That ship is sealed. Go buy yourself a $1,200 Asus gaming thing. Put all the stuff in your arm. Yeah, do what you want. Build your own PC. Yeah. Well, let's see. Let's take a differing point there. You say it's dead. Does that mean they're never going to update it again? Is that your prediction? I will say that I think it is...

More likely than not that they don't do anything with it. That it's just, why would you continue? I just don't understand. Like why does the studio exist? If you're going to do the Mac pro, I think at the very least they'll press release it and say, I'm three ultra. I think they'll at least do that. Except hear me out. Yes. Every time they do that, they just make more people mad. That is, that is true. That is true. Okay. Well,

So I'm just wondering, like at some point it's just not worth it anymore. And it is, it is odd that the last time we got the M2 Ultra, both computers were announced at the same time, the Mac studio and the Mac pro and the Mac pro was more expensive just because you had the slots, even

even though the exact same configuration also there was a lot of aluminum involved in that mac pro a lot of aluminum i saw one of them in person at wwc or whatever and i'm like that wow that's a beefy boy well apple store still has space yeah apple stores still have them on the tables i mean when i did that miami world store opening like world center opening they were mac pros on the tables but also are we gonna see okay last question then we'll move on are we are we ever going to see the displays updated are we gonna see displays

Dub dub, maybe. Ooh, I don't... So do you think... I think they do like a max... They do a studio display. Yeah. And then a studio display air. And then maybe... No, I don't know. Like, I just... I don't think they update that XDR. Like, what are they going to do? They're not going to make it... They can't make it an OLED. That's the only other thing you... And that would not be, I don't think, the right...

the right category of what they're trying to accomplish with that display. Like just make the studio display better. That's what I'm saying. I'm, I'm hoping, I don't know if this is going to happen. I'm hoping for an updated studio display at dub dub. I last, last thing promise. So if they, if they don't announce any macro or displays at dub dub, could it be Jason?

that they are wanting to have a redux on their vision announcement at dub dub and announce the next version of apple vision something like apple vision air might we see i mean if they announce the apple vision air they can't call it what if it was an apple vision mini and it was a monocle okay we're gonna move on i

I don't know. I'm just trying to think of like what is there for them to do. They're giving an Apple intelligence. It has an M2 in it. It's basically an iPad Pro on your face. So it's not going to get like an M2 Pro or an M3. It's like, you know, that's the other device, I guess, to get the M4 at some point. But I think for sure it would have gotten the M4 this year, except for they realize that A,

Nobody's buying them at this point, right? Yes. Okay. And B...

this isn't the final form factor and so the question is like there's i mean no one is tapping out their vision pro literally no one i use it every day super not tapping the thing out like i'm just i every day i wonder like why is there no dropbox app on this thing like it's useless to me without dropbox there's still no netflix still no youtube i don't care about that because i can well i know i know but still like but netflix in a browser on a device like that is

Like imagine having to use Dropbox. I might've just said Netflix, but imagine having to use Dropbox in a browser on your iPad. What would you even do? Literally nothing. Like, look, there's all my files. I can't do anything with them. I will say, so when I, I went for a briefing for the 16 E and it was at the Apple store mall at millennia, which is like their big flagship Orlando store mall at millennia is like the super fancy mall.

And I did talk to one of the staff there and they said the Mall at Millennia Apple Store leads in Apple Vision Pro sales in Florida. Leads in Apple Vision Pro sales. And I think it was like in the last month they sold like a dozen. So right up there with the Humane AI pen.

I still got mine on my desk right over here. No, I'm just saying like that was the rumor that I had heard. I have no idea if it's true. It was that they were sold like a dozen or two of them. So, you know, a lot of people trying them, lots of people trying them, even in the millennia store, people doing the demos, but not so. Maybe the vision pro demos are like the iPod. They're like the last, like the get people in the switchers, get people in the stores to try it out. And then you walk out with a Mac studio for $14,000.

or macbook air they just slide a sky blue macbook air next to you on that seat while you're in the apple vision pro you take it off you're like oh what's that that looks beautiful and also it's useful and there's software for it and it's only 9.99 would you like that yeah that's all right real quick uh lightning round i just want to mention i watched the i tried well tried to watch the oscars last weekend uh because you know it's the oscars i'm always curious to see what's happening

And I literally signed up for YouTube live TV just for this, which is basically what you told me to do. And I was like, maybe I'll keep this. No. $85 a month for YouTube live TV. I, for someone who does not watch live TV except twice a year. Yeah. And if you don't care about sports, it's just, it's not worth it. Yeah. And I was like, even the, the YouTube live TV app, I'm sure if you use it all the time, it makes total sense to you.

But I installed it for the first time after signing up. The Oscars are going. It was like, I was just trying to catch the best picture announcement. Like it was at the end of the stream. And so I opened the YouTube live TV app. I sign in and now the Oscars are playing in the background.

But then I also have like the screen is covered with other live channel options. It was like, here's NBC live and here's this live. And it's like, I just want to watch the Oscars that are like in the back. I just want to see what's happening. How do I get stuff? And so I hit the menu button on the Apple TV. It goes back to the menu menu. And so I'm looking at all my apps. I'm like, that's not, I don't want that. And so I try to go back in and I just sat there with stuff overlaid on top of the stream and,

And then eventually it went away like 10 to 15 seconds later. I was like, that's a little, uh, can we not do that? That's not how it's supposed to work. The crazy thing is I a hundred percent know what you mean. I never have the experience because I just motor memory know how to like get it. Right. But I couldn't explain it to you how. Well, Oh no, that's, that's what I finally figured out was I knew the Oscars were airing on ABC. And so I looked down in the channel listing to ABC, but it said American Idol.

on in the channel thing and it's like i don't know i like i don't want to watch american idol but eventually i just went and clicked on american idol and then it loaded the oscar stream because it was on it was the abc and i was like okay youtube live tv i'm not paying 85 for mislabeled channels oh sorry well it probably just means that we had gone long which if you were watching on hulu was a problem right because they just cut it off

They literally in the reason was they just someone typed in. This will be over at 1032 cut off stream. It's like that's not how live TV works. And also, have you ever watched the Oscars? Yeah, literally no one. I mean, they play so much music to get those people off stage and no one cares. These are people who are not used to be told being told no when they're in front of an audience. Right. Like they're just going to keep doing their thing. And it said they said, yeah, we're sorry about the bad experience. Sorry about that.

I wrote an apology form in there. I actually put in this what they should have said. Scroll all the way to the bottom. I wrote them. There you go. This is what they should have said.

We apologize to our customers who tuned in to watch the Academy Awards presentation. We failed to live up to the experience you expect. This is a good apology. You know what, Jason? You should be a writer. I should. You should be a writer. They should hire me to write apologies for companies that screw up. It's like what George Clooney did in Up in the Air, but just writing apologies for companies rather than buying. You know what? They could fly me all over just to apologize to people. I'd be fine with it. Because the thing about apologizing when you didn't do anything wrong is it cost you zero. It cost you zero.

Is that an industry? Listen, if anyone- Yeah, it's called PR. Literally, that's PR. That's the industry. Professional apologizers. PR. That's what it is. That's hilarious. The tariffs are happening. That's all I got for you because I haven't done a ton of research on the tariffs, but I did see this article from The Verge. Target and Best Buy are saying that prices are about to go up because of the tariffs. Things

Things that, you know, Target relies on produce from Mexico. So those might go up. Best Buy sources its products from Mexico and China. Those prices might go up. I find this just interesting in light of all the Apple stuff that was announced that prices either stayed the same or lowered. And I don't know. I'm curious what they're doing behind the scenes to mitigate any kind of tariff, whatever. Or if there's something, you know, deals behind the scenes. I don't know. But you might see prices go up on some things. Also, eggs are $1,000.

But that has nothing to do with tariffs because we don't import them from China. But there's other reasons. But eggs are very expensive. Every time I pull out the thing of eggs, my wife sends me a bill. Actually, Waffle House apparently added a 25 cent surcharge or something like that for every egg. I mean, they go through a lot of eggs, so I kind of understand. Yeah, the thing about the tariffs, I don't want to be political about it. I don't understand why...

Because this is like the sort of thing where it's like, I want to punish you, Steven. So I'm going to shoot myself in the foot, right? Like this is kind of what's happening here because, and I've heard that like part of the thing is like, well, you know, cause here's the thing. Our three largest trading partners, Mexico, Canada, China. Yeah. And that is where all the tariffs are being put. And I feel like your iPhones are going to start to get more expensive. Yeah.

you know, Apple has a lot of margin, but they can't absorb it forever. If that's the case. And, and, and the things that it seems like maybe would help to mitigate against the tariffs or things like, well, this will get them to build factories where they build cars more in the U S because a lot of cars are made in Mexico. The thing is, it takes a long time to like replace factories, right? Apple, despite the fact that Tim Cook has many times done grand openings for factories that were already open in order to like,

win over people who want that to happen it takes a really long time to do that and also if they build factories for the iphone in the u.s your iphone's still going to get more expensive because americans aren't going to work for three dollars a day or yeah anyway that might be coming and things are going to get more expensive unless you want to buy a base model ipad or macbook air

You should just buy them all now because actually there's a decent chance those might get more expensive too. Yeah, that's true. It is amazing that they lowered the price on both. I'm going to write about that. They lowered the price on both of those things as tariffs were about to happen. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. They're making up for it all in the 16E. There were articles that were written, the iPhone 16E is like the first tariff iPhone, which we'll see what happens with the 17 lineup in the fall. I think that'll be telling how that goes. But real quick, I wanted to do a memoriam quickly for Skype.

After its 21-year run, Microsoft is finally shutting it down. And I actually have fond memories of Skype because many, many, many of my

first years in podcasting was recording with Skype because that's just how you did it. There weren't other tools to do it. And I would run Ecamm live call recorder. Did you ever use that? Only when I recorded with you like one time we did. Yeah, we did. I was with the Apple insider podcast. I was using Skype and Ecamm call recorder. And it was, listen for the, at the time that it was a great tool. And I actually use this in the travel industry when I worked there and

speaking with international people and uh listen it was it was the thing for a long time and i have fond memories of it totally makes sense there's really no use for it now i mean microsoft teams is there riverside hello is for recording podcasts and other video content online so but yeah it's going to be going away you know sometimes when i see a story like this because i wrote about this and sometimes when i see a thing like this happen i like to imagine that

At some point in 2011, it was someone's job to knock on Steve Ballmer's door, who was the CEO of Microsoft at the time, and said, I have an idea. We should spend $8.5 billion on Skype. Now, I know that eBay bought them for $2.6 billion and had to write off $1.4 billion of that purchase because they couldn't figure out how to make it into a business. But we should pay three times that, and we should bring this thing in. And that's exactly what they did. They bought it.

after eBay, so eBay bought it, eBay had to write down a bunch of it, sold a bunch of it off to private investors. Um,

And then managed to sell it to Microsoft for like, this is their Microsoft's largest acquisition at the time. Now they've gone on to have LinkedIn was a lot bigger and Activision Blizzard was like way a lot bigger. But at the time this was their biggest acquisition. And I just think like, this is just like, it's been a, it's been a trip. It's like how, and I don't understand like, why didn't you just make the video function in teams called Skype? Like,

Like just take that break because it had a great brand. The brand web, it was a way better brand than it was ever a product. That is very, that is very fair. There was also like a strange, like sometimes you might have to pay a few cents if you want it to like call a phone number rather than a username. It was strange, but I didn't see your article. So I'm going to put your article in the show notes if you want to read about Skype and that'll be there.

Also, lastly, the UK, we've covered the... How many times? That's going to be the nickname for our podcast. Lastly. Also lastly. Also lastly. That's pretty good, actually. Before we get to our personal tech and bonus episode, we've been talking about the battle between the UK asking Apple to build a backdoor to advance data protection and iCloud encryption and the US's response to that last week. Well, now Apple is pushing back. Apparently...

Apple has filed an appeal with the Investigatory Powers Tribunal.

I don't know. I didn't know that was a thing. That sounds like a Marvel-like thing. You know what I mean? Is the Watcher in that? Plus Mr. Fantastic? I don't know. But apparently they deal with complaints about the unlawful intrusion of UK intelligence services and authorities. This was originally reported by the Financial Times. So Apple's fighting back. And I just want to know, Investigatory Powers Tribunal. Is that superheroes or not? That's all I want to know.

That's I don't that is the people who investigate this. It does actually sound like something from like X-Men. Right. This is definitely what they were trying to do to shut down the, you know, the mutant university or whatever. Charles Xavier school. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is part of the law was that the company can appeal to this. They can't not.

while they're appealing. So that's weird. That's probably why they pulled advanced data protection at the time to sort of buy themselves some time. Good. I'm glad Apple's appealing to this. I'm sure they're going to lose, but because the UK doesn't care, they're going to just do this thing and I don't know what's going to happen. And also in the Verge article, the UK government is still not confirming or denying the existence of the order, which is something. Which the interesting thing about that, so like play that out. Apple should just be like, oh, sweet. It doesn't exist. If you're not going to confirm that it exists, you can't like,

prosecute us for it because I think you have to confirm it in order to do that. That would by nature require sweet. We'll just, it's Schrodinger's letter. Schrodinger's encryption. Schrodinger's. Anyway. All right. I want to talk about the Sigma camera with you in the bonus episode because everyone's talking about it and you're a photographer and I want to get your, your take on it for our personal tech segment. Let's talk about browsers. Okay.

Browser. So exciting. Just think about how many browser tabs you're going to be able to have open if you put 512 gigs of unified memory in a Mac studio. That's a lot of browser tabs. That's a lot of browser tabs. I use Safari by default as my browser. I use Brave to record in Riverside because Safari doesn't have the APIs for that kind of stuff.

But I use Safari by default. I like Safari. I like tab groups, which I use for this podcast specifically. I'll even show you behind the scenes if you're watching youtube.com slash at primary tech show. Let's get to 2,000 subscribers over there. Go ahead and do that. But you'll see here in the left-hand column, I use Safari profiles. So I have a primary tech Safari profile because I can have different bookmarks, different default tabs open when I open a window in that profile. And then tab groups. You get different tab groups per profile.

And so look, I have every episode of primary technology in a tab group, which then allows me to copy all the links to the articles in this tab group. And then I run a shortcut that does our show notes every week. Somehow I knew that this conversation about Safari was going to end up talking about shortcuts. I just, I knew that was going to be the case. Cannot not. Cannot not. Listen, shortcuts helps me do all these things. You have a whole YouTube channel. You can talk about it. I will just say shortcuts.

safe area. I just wanted to mention, that's some of the many reasons I like Safari. I like the UI. Most of the time, it's very fast. Right before we recorded this episode today, I was trying to load all the websites that we were going to talk about. And I was on the last two. And for some reason, I kept pasting the link.

Hitting return. It did not load the page. Would not load the page. Close the tab. New tab. Nothing. Quit Safari. Open Safari. Try to load the page. Nothing. Safari was just gone. And you and I were literally talking here in Riverside. So like, okay, I know I have internet. Like the internet's not down. Right.

And you shared with me a troubling realization, something that I had suspected for a long time, but that iCloud private relay is the culprit of many issues in Safari. It has been. I've stopped using Safari. Like I have just, I mean, I will occasionally open it. I use Brave as my default, mostly because I have, there are several things I have to do, just like Riverside, that Chrome, you just have to be using a Chromium browser and I'll never use Chrome. So I'm using Brave because it's like...

The Chrome for people who care about their dignity. And so I just use Brave instead. It's fine. It always surprises me. I don't know. Listen, if you were playing a drinking game for how many times we say the word Syracuse, I'm sorry, because you're done. We're just trying to get him to notice us, apparently. No, no. He sees me on Mastodon. I'm not worried about that. But I know he uses Chrome, which is surprising because I understand in a lot of workplaces and people's jobs, you probably have to use Chrome by default.

I mean, all the other browsers are built on Chromium, but there were just news from several years ago about the passwords that get saved into Chrome and those being whatever used in weird ways. And so I don't prefer using Chrome either. I use Brave, and I'll use a Chromium browser all day, but not Chrome itself. But I really did prefer Safari, even for the weirdness sometimes where Squarespace will just not work very well in Safari because it's Safari-based.

or other weird things like not like you know it's very aggressive on blocking pop-ups and stuff so if there's ever a website that has a pop-up like allow permissions for a website to access your video like for WebEx right you know Safari can be kind of annoying with that kind of stuff but I still liked it and as for all the other reasons I have the extensions I like noir over picture like I have all the stuff but if you can't load a website in a browser that's a little problematic and I you advised me and that's what I've done now is

just to totally turn off iCloud private relay. But I mean, will it work now? It's okay. So I had this issue. Let me say one more thing about Brave because there's some people who are listening to this are going to be like, but isn't Brave the weird browser with all that crypto stuff? Yes. Just turn, you got to turn. If you download and install Brave, there's like six things you have to turn off. Just turn them all off. And then it's awesome. You got to just get rid of that stuff. And then it's fine. But it is like, I had had this experience already.

starting a couple of weeks ago where at some point during the day stuff would just randomly stop loading in, uh, in Safari. And I couldn't figure out what the problem was. I'd restart Safari. Nothing would work. I would restart my computer, uh,

And at some point, maybe it would start working again. I'm like, but this doesn't feel like the kind of thing I want to do every 15 minutes, right? Apple Silicon boots real fast, but I just don't have time for this, especially because I have another browser on my computer. I'll just use that instead. And at some point, it occurred to me, well, Brave is working. What is unique about Safari? And the only thing I could think of was iCloud Private Relay. And then I would go into the settings app when this was happening and

And it was, you, it was like grayed out. You could not toggle it on or off. And I'm like, Oh bingo, something's wrong. And so I started doing searching. None of the status pages for iCloud would say that there's any problem with private relay down detector. Wasn't saying anything. There was no Reddit current threads about it. And I realized, Oh, it's because nobody knows, like nobody would think that this is the thing. Also, probably they're not using Safari, but nobody knows what is going on. And so what I did was I rebooted my computer and,

I was then given the option to toggle off or on Safari, iCloud private relay, and I turned it off and I've not had a problem since then. And that is even when earlier before we recorded, I restarted my Mac. I went to settings, system settings, iCloud settings, private relay, and it showed as toggled off.

But it was because it was just unable to, it was not working. And so what happens is if you have it toggled on and it is not available, it eliminates all your browser activity. But, and, and it, it showed as toggled off even after I restarted my computer, but that was not correct. So I toggled it and then toggled it again. And then I got the pop-up that said, do you really want to turn off CloudPriority? I said, absolutely.

I would like to turn this off. Yes, please. I'd like to use the internet. Thank you. I'd like to use the internet. And I also have experienced this sometimes on my iPhone, even with iCloud private relay, where Safari will just like not be doing anything. And so it's a problem. I should, the right thing to do probably to file a feedback, but this is my method of feedback. I make a podcast. Yep. Hope Apple hears it. But if you have issues. I'm filing my version of a feedback. You're going to write an article about it.

So if you experienced issues with Safari, not loading stuff, it's probably because iCloud private relay and try disabling it. You might have to restart your computer first or your device, and then it's been working. And so I'm going to turn it off for now and we'll see what happens. But I still like Safari. I don't know. We'll see. Oh, I will say. And if you want to use another browser like Brave and you've gone all in on Apple passwords and

you can still get the extension for Brave on a Mac or Apple Passwords. And it just sits right there in the toolbar as an extension. You can authenticate. It's the funniest experience because you click the little extension and it asks for the six-digit password.

code and immediately shows you the six digit passcode almost like right on the same screen and it's like you can't see that it's like well it's because your mac is authenticated i know mac is giving you that six digit code for your browser yeah exactly but people are very confused about

It is a little confusing, but that's why it's because your browser brave is asking for the six digit code and your Mac is providing it, but it looks like it's happening in the same window and it's just kind of weird thing. But once you do that, then you can use Apple passwords, pass keys, everything in brave. That's what I do. I don't have brave or any other browser. Save my logins and passwords. I only do it without passwords and you can have that extension now on your Mac. So just do that if you're having issues, but weird. I call it private relay. So,

Anyway, the next tab in my browser that's loaded is about the BF camera from Sigma. Everybody's talking about it. It's like the Mac studio. I want it and have no use for it personally, but you're a photographer and I think you probably have thoughts on it.

I would like to hear that. I have thoughts. You have thoughts. So we're going to record a bonus episode. And here's what you do. I've had a lot of people reaching out recently who support the show and love the bonus episodes. So thank you for that. If you want to listen or watch the bonus episodes, support the show at primarytech.fm. Click bonus episodes. That goes through Memberful. And when you support the show there, you get chapters because Apple Podcasts will strip my chapters if you support us there. But you can get chapters over there. And I put the link to the bonus episode video in that feed.

And so if you support us on memberful, you get the bonus video, the bonus episode, plus you get the ad free version and all of that. And plus you're supporting the show and we really appreciate that. So support us there. Primary tech. FM click bonus episodes. If you really want, you can support us in Apple podcasts as well. And send me a message with a proof of life roof that you support us over there. And I have a way of helping you guys too. I've helped a lot of people. I have a little secret thing for the bonus episode videos. If you want that. So yeah,

appreciate your support if you haven't yet five star rating review an apple podcast let's try to get up to five stars overcome william gallagher leaving us one star reviews i would appreciate that and uh yeah thanks for watching thanks for listening we'll catch you next time