Nintendo Switch 2 Specs and Pre-Order, iOS 18.4 Features, Amazon Bids to Acquire TikTok
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If I'm gonna get busted, it's not gonna be by a guy like that. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. This week, iOS 18.4 came out. Info about the Nintendo Switch 2 and how you can pre-order it, what they're doing to prevent scalpers. Tariffs is probably gonna make your Apple products more expensive later this year. Jason reviewed the Sigma BF camera, and we have a bunch of other news.

This episode is brought to you by Notion, which we're using right now for our show notes, and you, the members who support us directly. I'm one of your hosts, Steven Robles, obviously joining from a different location if you're watching us on YouTube.

But I have here my friend Jason Aten at his usual location. How's it going, Jason? - I'm good. You're like so discombobulated today and I love it. - I'm a little discombobulated. I'm in a hotel room, I'm using a different mic, and my hand's cramping, but I'm trying my best not to move it at all. - You got your XM4. - This is a Shure MV6, by the way. - No, I'm talking about your headphones. - Oh, I have my XM5s 'cause I'm using wired headphones, that's right.

And I have my MacBook Air. This is the first podcast I've recorded on this. And I have no screen real estate. So I can only see one thing at a time. I'm either looking at you, I'm looking at the movie quote, or I'm looking at Notion. It's one of the three. That's great. So yeah, the movie was Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Thank you. Yes. Because, at least what Google told me, because I've actually never seen that movie. You can berate me about that later. I guess that movie takes place in Chicago, according to Google. You...

For a guy with a movie podcast, your anthology of the movies you haven't seen is pretty big. I mean, maybe, but Ferris Bueller's Day Off is like 19. It came out the year I was born. So I was zero when that movie came out. And I don't think there was like, you know what I mean? It was like right before me. Yeah.

yeah they but you know there was a period of your life where dvds were invented and there was stores you could go to and you could borrow the dvds and stuff like that and actually probably you have a library anyway my point is there's 1700 streaming services right now and i bet you that this one is like there's i bet you there's a cable channel that just plays it day all day a cable today it's like a christmas story

even in the middle of whatever month we're in i don't even know what month it is right now april we're in april i mean we are now in april we're in april i'm in chicago time change is not that i mean it's an hour different it's not actually a month different between us yeah i went through a time a wormhole coming i'm in chicago because i'm at podcast movement conference and i'm the closest to you i've probably ever been uh when traveling you're just a few hours away

I'm in Chicago. Yeah, normally if we're closer than this, it's because I came to Florida. That's right. That's right. But then we don't record. We only go to First Watch and we have brunch. That's true. We have breakfast. Yeah, that's right. But yeah, so I'm here and so recording and yeah, I'll post a picture of my behind the scenes, like my setup here. I got my Osmo as my webcam, my MV6.

Anyway, I don't know what's happening. Hopefully we're going to get through this. We're going to get through this together. I'm just happy because this is the first time we've recorded when my video looks better than yours. Yeah, it does. It definitely does. I'm using the portrait mode of the built-in Mac because apparently the Mac wants you to do something with reactions. And anyway, we're going to talk about that. The annoying pop-up. I want us to use a five-star review shout-outs. We did get... I'm sorry to everyone who has been trying so hard to get us back to a five-star review. Show.

We did have one one-star rating this past week. And, you know, I'm not going to call them out. But it was apparently they felt like we were too political during our signal discussion. And I just want to say...

When there is news that has to do with tech and the Venn diagram of politics crosses over, I mean, we can't avoid it. You have to talk about it. And there's even a couple of topics today where the, you know, whatever choices or things are done here in the United States. Again, this is strictly United States usually and the EU talking about, you know, their laws. We got to talk about it.

And like tariffs are probably going to make products more expensive. And so that's like tech news and it matters because people usually buy tech stuff. And so, you know, if that offends you, I'm not gonna say we're sorry, but just, we try to keep it as, as unbiased as possible, just sharing the news. And then maybe our thoughts on what it means for users and customers and things like that. But anyway.

That's all I want to say. Yeah, let me just say one thing about that. Yeah. Stephen was going to try to skip right over this. No, no, no. I knew you were going to say something. First, I actually want to give credit to the person who left us that review because they didn't just leave us a one-star rating. Right. They actually wrote a review. They did. Which means they put their name on it. So I do appreciate that. That is much better than people who just try to snipe you with one-star ratings and then just leave it there. So that's great. But I will just echo what Stephen said. I think that we have done a pretty good job of...

of not getting political about things, but it is, it just, it's just impossible nowadays to talk about, uh,

what we talk about and not have it cross over into an area where some people are going to just, no matter, it doesn't matter which side you find yourself on. You're going to hear what we say and think, Oh, they're on the other side. And I promise you that if you think that you've figured out which side either of us are on, you're probably actually wrong. And it's really just, and it's really not trying to, you know, if, if we genuinely think a decision is bad from either side, I feel like we should be able to say that and say like, this is probably a bad law.

We talk about the EU Digital Markets Act and the whole web browser choice screen. We talked about it on the show, and I think we both agreed that was a silly decision and it's not a good user experience. That's just sharing how we feel about it, and no one gave us a one-star review for that. But, you know, man.

So anyway, that's that. But we have a bunch of five-star reviews because they're still trying to help us out. So Mark Kras from Sri Lanka, international listener. That's awesome. Titan73 from the USA. She recently discovered us and is binging the back catalog. That's dedication because that's old news, but we appreciate it. We do appreciate it. That's awesome. But we also do like personal second stuff that might be evergreen. So that's cool. Pineapple667.

And this is, I want all of these. Battery, oh no, battery percentage on, you want that. But Apple pencil towards volume buttons, phone and dominant hand pocket, dots on. So I'll take the three out of four. That's good. DubZXN2 from the USA, PBN Jason. This is not you, right?

You didn't do this. No, no, I promise. Okay, good. Because they said we're their favorite tech podcast. So thank you for that. I mean, that part's true. I also think this is my favorite. Very good. And then Greeny 24 from the USA. They bought a Blu-ray drive that I recommended and they're ripping away. So that's, yeah, that's fun.

doing that too all right let's do a actually follow-up we don't need to do like follow-up follow-up let's do we've literally never done i don't think we've ever done follow-ups we'll do quick one follow-up and you talked about the sigma bf camera in our bonus episode just for subscribers and paying members but you now posted a review on ink.com so i'll put that link in the show notes but yeah nice picture what did you now wait a minute would you take the picture of the bf camera with that's

That's the question. I was hoping somebody would ask about that because in all of the pictures, so in all of the pictures I took with the Sigma BF, I indicated shot with the Sigma BF. So people would know. Yeah, I just shot those with my Nikon D6 II. Okay. Z6 II, excuse me. But I did not put that in the article. It's actually kind of meta when you're writing a review about a camera because you have to take pictures of the camera with a different camera. Yeah, exactly. So some of the pictures in your article are not going to be about the...

are not going to be taken by the camera. So anyway, it was, yeah. So I just, we talked about this on the, on our bonus episode last week. And so I just wanted to, I published the review this morning. I will say I was impressed with this camera. I actually think that if someone is looking for something better,

that is more capable than an iPhone, but you just aren't interested in getting into like a full fledged system. I think this is a pretty reasonable option. It's very portable. It's small enough. It is a little heavier than you might expect from a camera of this size because a lot of the cameras that are this size are made out of some aluminum and mostly plastic. But it's great. The pictures are

like fantastic. It has a couple of film simulation modes that are very good. They're not quite on the same level as the Fuji, but yeah, I, I think it was a lot of fun. It was delightful. I was up front with my headline. I thought it was going to be ridiculous. And mostly that was because I didn't think it could hold up to scrutiny for how, how photographers actually use cameras. Um,

And I put in my review, I said, the ultimate test of any camera is how does it handle an energetic toddler? And I don't, we don't have any of those in our house anymore. So I actually recruited some, some friends of ours and we recorded and I went and did a family shoot with them just like I would like any other type of things. And it was in the, I wanted to know like, how does it handle different lighting conditions in autofocus? And it was spot on.

The photos look amazing. You know, obviously we already talked about it and we shared those pictures early. So if you support the show, you already saw those, but we'll check out the link. I am tempted by this camera, even though I have no reason to have it just because it looks so cool, but you probably won't be able to get it. And before anyone asks, I didn't really do any video testing with it. Cause one, I don't do much in the way of video. And two, I,

uh it doesn't have an internal camera or uh internal microphone at all so you'd have to attach something to it and so i just i didn't i skipped that part so don't don't ask me about video so how's the uh no just kidding so b-roll it's like a b-roll camera basically like no audio maybe just has a usbc for data so you could plug in like yeah you could j.i mic stuff to it you could do that i just i didn't care yeah yeah

Well, very cool. Well, that article is in the show notes. Also, this is not follow-up, but I wanted to mention the Sofa app. If you're not familiar, I love the Sofa app. It's by a singular developer. It is a great app for keeping track of movies you want to watch or have watched, books, games. I actually use it as my, like, what movies is on the list that we want to watch as a family or individually? Well, is that it?

podcasts of support into the sofa app and it's actually it looks like a pretty decent podcast player just came out yesterday so i haven't had a chance to check it out but uh primary technology is actually featured in a lot of the images so you actually see us like the up next and you'll see the artwork somewhere but it looks really cool i'm going to play around with it but if you wanted to test out another podcast app and just use sofa for like saving movies you want to watch or whatever that's a

pretty significant update and i loved it before and so i'm gonna be doing a video comparing this with like other newer podcast apps because there's been a lot of new ones recently so be on the lookout for that but pretty cool do you use sofa no it's good i might give it a try but i just don't really have a spot for it in my life what do you don't do that thing where i like want to pin movies to watch later or something so do you have any place where you like a note or whatever we're like oh yeah i want to watch that movie sometime

No, we usually sit down in front of the computer, open every streaming app, go through the catalog, and then go to bed. And then go to bed. We spent three hours and we couldn't find anything. See, that's why you use an app like Sofa, so you don't do that. You hear a movie or you remember an old movie that you saw as a kid and now you want to show your kids. That's what I used to have. I put them in there. All right. Just say you should try it out. iOS 18.4 came out earlier this week for everyone. It's publicly available.

I'll put a link to my video about it where I go about all the features. I say 15 new features. One of those features is the volume icon in the control center changes to blue when you drag the volume up and down, which is not really a huge feature, but you're being generous calling it a feature. But there's like visual intelligence is now on the iPhone 15 Pro. So if you had a 15 Pro and you wanted to try that, you could do it. Plus you can map visual intelligence to the

action button or in a control center widget. There's ambient music features. The news plus recipes is probably one of the bigger

features or something that you could try. You have to be subscribed to Apple News Plus or have it in your like Apple One bundle. But it's pretty cool feature. You can like it gives you the ingredients, the cook time. You can browse by categories and then you can even like set timers while you're reading the recipe. There's like a cook button and you can say, let's cook it and it'll go into like this reader mode. And then you can like set timers just by tapping it in the instructions, which is pretty cool. So I'll put a link to my video in the show notes, but it's fun.

I don't know if I'll use it, but... If any of my PR friends at Apple listen to our podcast, I would like to talk to the product person for this recipes thing because I still can't figure out why it's a part of News Plus. I feel like they wanted it to be part of under a paywall somewhere. And then where else would you put it? They wouldn't want to do a standalone app.

because standalone apps are usually free, like the Apple invites. Except for the, they just did one, the invites app. Like most of those features are part of iCloud plus. Right. But you could download it for free. And so like, it would be a pretty bad experience if like you had to definitely give you downloaded the food plus app. And it just said, subscribe.

I feel like that's against. Yeah, but maybe I think Apple could figure out the freemium thing where it's like you get to look at this stuff, but if you want the timers and the step-by-step and add them to your shopping list, you have to pay. Or you don't get the ingredients. Are you kidding me? You get half the ingredient list and then it's blurred out.

in fact now i'm thinking that was the original plan that tim cook came up with and someone was like dude let's just stick it in news plus stick it in news plus yeah it is not worth the grief and it's kind of weird to get to you have to go to like this the magnifying glass tab and then go and then there's like the food plus section it's not even like one of the main tabs on the bottom so so when you say the magnifying glass tab is that the search tab is that what you mean okay i'd

I didn't know if it actually said search or browse. And so I didn't want to like, it's the owner. See, it's not, it's the following. Following. See, that's why I didn't, that's why I wanted to do this. So following is the tab and then it's under food. So it's a little bit hidden, but see, that's why. And by under food, I don't even, oh, you know what? I probably have it up.

That's why I'm like, I don't even see it in there, but that's, I probably haven't updated my phone yet. Update your phone. That's another reason to update your phone, which you wrote an article about this one feature actually didn't cover in my video is a, it's one of the best features yet. According to this ink.com article, why don't you tell me about the feature since I didn't, let me be clear. No,

this is this is tricky because it is tangentially an ios 18.4 feature in the sense that your iphone has to have ios 18.4 on it but it's actually a mac os 15 15.4 yeah feature where now if you buy a new mac and you didn't have a mac before you can use your phone to set up your mac in the same way that you could previously use your phone to set up a phone or use your mac to set up a mac and it will log into your apple account i

I think that's what we call it now. Your Apple account. It's your Apple ID, iCloud, MobileMe account. That's what it's called. Yes, it's your .Mac ID account. Anyway,

That thing, you just log into that and it will copy that information over. It'll start downloading all your iCloud data, like your photos. If you use iCloud to store stuff, iCloud Drive, it'll start doing that. And that way, when you download apps, it will sync all that stuff with iCloud as well. I think this is smart. And the reason I call it one of its best features yet is I think that this is the type of feature that is easy to overlook anywhere.

but does the thing that Apple does best, which is just make your computer work the way that it should work. And if you have spent years setting up iPhones by just bringing them close together or a watch, the fact that you can now do that on your Mac is I think really streamlines at it. And it's also super good for Apple because now think about the number of like students who have iPhones and Chromebooks.

and they're about to go off to college, and they're like, can I throw the Chromebook away, please? I need a Mac. But they don't have, they can't use Migration Assistant to go from a different Mac, but now you can literally have all of your stuff right there. And I compared it, the list of things like continuity camera, universal clipboard, sidecar, those types of things that are just like,

that are baked in when you're a part of the entire ecosystem that... The real reason I can't switch to Windows isn't because of some Linux kernel or whatever, like the Unix kernel. It's those types of features that really make using your computer easy. 100%. I have a nothing phone 3A. I've flashed it on this podcast a couple times. And I was like...

I want to use this for a full weekend, put my iPhone in a drawer so I can really give it a go. And I could say, what is it like to use this phone full time? And so I started doing that. And then I sat down and we were going to watch something. And I went to go to the Apple TV remote on my phone. And I was like, oh, wait a minute.

I can't do that from the Android phone. And like, I can't control my smart home from here. And it was like just the minutes in, there was already too much friction to be like, well, let me just get my iPhone. So it's all those, like you're saying, those continuity features where it's like, and then, and then,

I think there are apps maybe like that you do universal clipboard from Android to Windows. I'm not sure. I feel like I don't know if I would trust them, but all of that, it's just quality of life. They're great features. Yeah. Now, maybe, maybe, not to get political...

maybe we're gonna have to see apple like open up some of these features to third party i don't know didn't do you remember the doj is literally suing over like i know the apple watch and airpods and that kind of stuff yeah so we'll see is this a fever dream or do you also remember when facetime was announced with the iphone 4 that steve jobs said they were going to open source it

And they were going to make it available for other platforms. It wasn't that, didn't he say that? I think you're right. I, I don't know why, like whatever happened, they, they, you know, they, they promised that they were going to do that.

I'm guessing the reason that they didn't is that one, none of the other platforms cared, right? Like they didn't want to. Sure. Because you can now sort of like use FaceTime, but it's still Apple software. Yeah, exactly. There's no FaceTime app on it. It doesn't work with Google Meet. Right. Right. I think it was just a no one reads books anymore moment where it was like, you know, this, but then that.

So anyway, that was a cool feature. The set up with your iPhone. It's kind of like how setting up a new Apple TV, you can like hold your iPhone close to it and you know, does all that. But there's another feature. This is not a, not a feature. This is a bug and it is the worst. And it is this message reaction. And this is like all over the internet now where anytime your camera or any camera or you open your, you know, meeting software, we're using Riverside. Anytime the camera's accessed, Mac OS pops up this thing and,

telling you to turn on reactions, which is a bad idea because then you're just going to get a thumbs up during a very serious meeting or something, or you're going to send fireworks as you're being laid off. Yeah. Let me explain what happened here. Okay.

It was WWDC, what, like 2022, 2023? I can't remember which year it was. When they rolled out these reactions features. And I actually thought it was pretty cool at the time. The problem was this was still when a lot of things were happening on Zoom, for example. And you might show up to a memorial service on Zoom. And suddenly you're scratching your brow with your thumb up and fireworks go off or something. Lasers. It just...

Or you're in like this. Yeah. There's reports of people like in therapy and like, you know, the, in the therapist, like does this just to like, is an encouraging thing. And it was a bad thing. So Apple made it so that the third party software like zoom or Google meet or whatever could by default deactivate reactions. So the, the software can decide that. So zoom just decided, okay,

nope we're turning it off same thing here is like riverside is like no well let's not have reactions on you can go back and turn them on you can click on the little thing and turn them on right so someone at apple thought it was important to put up a notification to tell you that this feature you don't care about has been turned off by the software you're using and that you should turn it back on by clicking on the little green thing

And you're looking at this and you're like, well, I just want the notification to go away. So what do you do, Steven? You click the X. If you want a notification away, what would you do? You click the X. It's right there. If there's an X there, you would click on the X. But Steven, what would happen if you clicked on that X? Now, I mean, you're looking at the picture. Nothing will happen because it's a photograph. But guess what? In the real notification, the X doesn't.

nothing it's so annoying literally does nothing you can click on it like i watched one of my kids click on it for like three minutes the other day and i'm like just click on the green and then it goes away which is and then it goes away so weird you know what's really weird if you click on the green uh camera camera yeah it doesn't bring down the drop down menu it just makes the notification go away like

This is like, first of all, the notification should not exist. No one needs this. No one needs to know that Zoom or Brave has turned off reactions. What is the worst thing that's going to happen? You're going to be sitting in the meeting and you're going to do a thumbs... Wait, you got your reactions on, bro. No, I just did a manual thumbs down. Okay. But like...

Like no one has ever like been sitting in a meeting, did a thumbs up and was disappointed. The reactions didn't go off. And if you did, it was just because you're being goofy and you just go do what you just did. Exactly. No one needs a notification, but if it's going to be there, Apple, you have to, you have to fix this. If you have not noticed, like it has been trending on threads and Reddit and Twitter and people are just mad about this. Yeah. Yeah. But here, here's a,

There you go. If you're watching on YouTube, I just put fireworks on. And I texted you back in December and I was like, what the heck is going on? Why is this happening? You did. And you would have been the first. You would have been the first in the wave to notice this. I know. I should have written about it then. But anyway, yeah, it's annoying. Hopefully, I guess 15.4.1 maybe. We'll see if that comes out soon. But yeah, it's annoying. Now, what's not annoying, Nintendo.

Nintendo Switch 2. I know we don't talk a lot about video games on this podcast, but I'm excited about the Switch 2 because I'm a Smash Bros. fan. I'm a long-time Nintendo fan. There's some interesting things. The Switch 2 is more expensive. First of all, I think it's $150 more than the previous model. It's going to be $450 more

It is still an LCD screen, so it's not OLED like the Switch OLED. The Switch OLED. It's kind of weird. It's 1080p resolution on the actual Switch, but then when you put it in the dock, you do finally get 4K out of a Nintendo Switch, which has not been the case. The old Switch, even in the dock, was 1080p. So we finally got 4K. There's more internal storage, 256 gigabytes, and there's a bunch of new accessories that...

Nintendo is going to release with this, but notably one of them is a camera. And so you can buy this camera, it's called the Switch 2 camera for $50, connects via USB-C. You can also just connect a USB-C webcam

It says that some work with it in the fine print. So you don't necessarily have to buy Nintendo's, although it has seemingly a nice little stand or whatever, but you can use your own USB-C stand. But there's a couple of interesting things. One, they're introducing game chat. It's actually going to be a button on the Switch controllers to interact with other players. And this has been something that Nintendo hasn't really done to, you know, to talk to other players through this kind of stuff. I don't even know in Fortnite if that was a thing. Yeah.

If you played Fortnite on the Switch, but I guess there's going to be more interaction with online friends or other gamers. And the pre-order process is really interesting. So they're trying to cut down on scalpers and stuff. And so you have to basically like sign in with your Nintendo online account if you want to try and get on the early pre-orders. And when you sign in, you show what interest you have in what model.

And you'll only be able to pre-order if you have something like, I think it was 70 something played hours on your Nintendo Switch online account. So they're going to check how many hours you've actually played on the Switch. And only if you've actually played, can you even pre-order the Switch 2, which...

I mean, it seems like a pretty genius way to limit the amount of scalping you can do on this. And I'm concerned because my son's been playing on his PlayStation more than the Switch, so hopefully we have that many hours. I don't know if we do. I think it's 50 hours, but yeah, that is still really interesting. It's like, if you haven't been... I'm going to write about this, but if you're not a big enough fan, we won't take your money and give you this thing. Exactly. Which, again, of all the game systems, again, I don't do this very often, but

The Nintendo Switch, I remember the Wii, when the Wii came out, Nintendo game consoles are just notoriously hard to get on launch day. Because, you know, I don't know if there's been pre-orders on past game systems, but it's just people go nuts. And they just buy it and then people buy multiple to then scalp it. Then you can get, you know, Switch on eBay for $1,000 when it really only cost $300.

news. So I totally get why they're doing that. And I guess you'll only, if you sign up, so I actually did this. I signed up with my Nintendo online account so I can hopefully pre-order it. I believe April 9th will be the first wave of

pre-orders or something like that if you do this early sign up but you only have 72 hours Nintendo's gonna send you an email letting you pre-order it and you only have 72 hours to respond and then you lose that pre-order status and then you'll have to just see if you can get one on launch day which is in June I believe so yeah Nintendo's really doing it but Switch 2 and the game the Joy-Cons can actually turn into mice which is

Which is super weird. Do you remember, Steven, when people were scalping the Vision Pro for like five grand shortly after launch because you couldn't get those either? That's... Wow. I do remember that now. If you bought one for more money than $3,500, I want to hear from you. I want to hear from you.

I want to know how you feel about that. They feel bad. I can tell you that. But if you were one of the geniuses, because right now if you buy one on eBay, it's like 40 bucks and throw in a box of Wheaties and I'll send it to you. So it's so bad. All right. So we do have to talk about, I'm going to save it for after the break. I want to mention tariffs, mention...

So who's interested in buying TikTok? And we'll talk a little bit about AI and things like that. But before we get to the break, Jason had one other follow-up article. Last week, we talked about the Tell All meta book. And now you've written a thing. So if you don't want to read the book, you can go read Jason's article. Yeah, I did the work for you. I read the whole thing. And I just summarized the four most surprising leadership lessons that you could get out of that book. And basically, it's just like, don't be a bad person.

I feel like that's leadership and life. I feel like, right? Yeah. That's everything. That's everything. Evergreen principle. Don't be a jerk. That's all you got to do. All right. We'll link that article in the show notes too. And check it out. All right. Let's thank today's sponsor, which is Notion. We've been using Notion this entire time because it powers the show notes for every episode of Primary Technology. Keeps us organized. Jason and I collaborating on that. And Jason's like, he does pro level stuff. He uses like the AI technology.

He'll put a transcript in there and ask it to summarize it. He does all the things. I'm not even reading from the script right now. I'm just telling you how we use Notion. I actually recently did a webinar with Notion and Riverside. I don't know if I can say that. But anyway, yeah. I mean, it was a public webinar. It's fine. But listen, Notion.

Why do I love Notion? Again, for all the reasons I just stated. It can be your document and project management. I did video planning in there using the Kanban style boards. Love all of that. And again, the power of AI built right into Notion. Notion combines your notes, docs, and projects in one space. It's simple, beautifully designed. And then again, you can leverage the power of AI across all

All of that that you put in there. Put your transcripts in there. Put long form text. And then you can ask Notion AI to summarize or expand or give you ideas based on what you have in the app. And the fully integrated Notion AI helps you work faster, write better, and think bigger doing tasks that normally take you hours in just seconds. So save time and write faster by letting Notion AI handle that first draft, jumpstart a brainstorm, or turn your messy notes into something fun.

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Thanks to Notion for sponsoring this episode. Now we're going to talk about something politically related, tangentially political. All right, so everybody relax. Just hold up. Not going to be long. But the bottom line is Trump announced a bunch of tariffs yesterday, sweeping tariffs across multiple countries, including China, where many products come from, Apple products.

46% tariff for Vietnam, which we talked about on a past episode. The M4 MacBook Air, which I'm using right now to record this episode, came from Vietnam. And so this laptop, in a couple days, would have had a tariff applied to it as Apple tried to bring it over into the United States. So there's sweeping tariffs. Not sure what this means for other countries and how they will respond. But I do think, I mean...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but pretty guaranteed, like things are likely to get more expensive. Correct? Well, that's the point of tariffs is to make things more expensive. Thank you. No, no. I mean, like for real, like the whole point of a tariff is you charge a tax on an imported good. Right. The theory is that it incentivizes companies to instead make those goods in the United States instead of making them overseas. Right.

And but of course, like the problem with that is that like you can't just randomly start making MacBook Airs in the United States. You have to have a factory. So you have to build a factory. So you have to do all those things. So in the meantime, if you add I think Vietnam is like, I don't know, 64 percent or it's like 40 some percent tariff that they've added to those goods.

That price is going to have to get added because if a MacBook Air selling price is $1,000, 46% for VNO, if the MacBook Air is $1,000, that's a $460 tariff on that. I promise you Apple's not going to eat that cost, right? There's just no way. And so that price will get passed on to consumers.

There's obviously the possibility that the administration can offer exemptions for certain things. There's some talk about the whole, like China, the tariffs have gotten extremely high because what was announced yesterday is on top of like the 20% that was already offered there. And it's like, well, maybe we lower the tariffs if you're willing to sell TikTok or something like that. Like there is, no, I mean, like I'm not even, that's the kind of thing that's happening right now is these kinds of negotiations.

this tank, the stock market is not responding well to this because the cost of all of these things is going to go up in a way that neither the companies nor consumers can absorb. So you can just imagine if everything that Apple imports goes up by 46%, people will just stop buying Apple stuff. And that's not good for Apple's shareholders because it's not, you know what I mean? And so this, this has got some very real impact on like,

the stuff that we all buy. I just put in my pre-order or my register, my interest for this switch because I'm like, well, can we get it before the tariffs? No, you can't. No, you can't. I mean, it's not going to work that way. So it's going to be, it's going to be,

one interesting to see how these companies decide to handle this some of them are probably going to be able to find ways to be somewhat exempt like apple has done a very good job of this in the past but again like this is pretty across the board and um and it's just it's going to be really difficult i think one of the prevailing mentalities is like

most other companies, I mean, most other countries, excuse me, charge pretty significant tariffs on goods coming from the United States, which disadvantages us producers of these products. Right. And so by adding a tariff on the imported version, it's meant to sort of balance that out so that it incentivizes like, fine, you're going to charge us a tariff. Then we will disadvantage your producers. If you're going to try to import them here. And the hope is like,

The whole point of a trade war is somebody will eventually be like, you know, okay, fine, I give. And then you can deescalate it. The question is like, well, when is that part going to happen? Because until then, things are just going to be very expensive. I'm curious. Do you think Apple will raise any prices before the new iPhone comes out in September? Or will they wait for that new product cycle to possibly increase prices further?

like with the new phone okay i think one apple has incredibly smart people trying to figure that question out right two so i think there's a couple possibilities i think what has made all of this difficult is that if you remember so when i said the thing about the tick tock sale i actually mean that quite seriously i think that there is a view inside the administration

that tariffs can be used as a negotiating position. If you don't do this thing we want, then we're going to put this tariff on your goods. And so that's actually a valid negotiating position. If you need a country to do a thing, so for example, with Canada and Mexico, the argument was we're going to put tariffs on your goods unless you do something to stop the flow of narcotics into our country across the border.

I don't know if any of that stuff is true, but like that was the argument. Okay. I'm not passing judgment. I'm not being political. I'm just explaining what happened. That's what happened. Yeah. I just want to be clear. And so, but then like on day one, they were like delayed. Right. And then they were reduced and then they were this. And then there's, so I think what's hard for some of the companies is it's like, we actually don't know. Do we take it seriously or not? Is this a real thing? And it makes it very hard to plan because,

Because if you don't know if the tariffs are actually going to go into effect, then you don't know like how do we adjust our prices? So I'm sure there are actuaries at Apple that are figuring all of these things out and trying to decide like what the prices should be. I think A, it's likely that when the next round of whatever a product is that comes out,

that it could be more expensive. The other thing is, I think that there are going to be cases, and I don't know if this is true with Apple, because Apple is so large at scale and it would be pretty devastating to them, both as a brand and as a business. But I think we're going to start to see companies that are like, actually that thousand dollar MacBook Air is now $1,300. That would stink.

Well, we'll see the tariffs go into effect like in days. Like this is not something that's like weeks from once away. Yeah. The first round goes into effect in like less than a week. Yeah. I'm trying to see here in the verge article, but yeah, it's like less, less than a week. So anyway, we'll see. We'll see what happens to the prices of things. Also, like you just mentioned the, the Tik TOK, will someone buy Tik TOK? This has been a long time coming where the administration, Trump administration delayed this Tik TOK ban and,

If you remember that TikTok went dark for like half a day or like six hours or whatever, then it came back because this, this was delayed, but we're still running up on the deadline where there's a law that has passed that TikTok needs to change or dive, you know, needs to divest and have a different, like a U S owner or some, at least stakeholder. I'm not exactly sure what the requirement is, but companies are making bids to buy TikTok. And we have funded,

pontificated in the past what U.S. companies might be interested in. Apparently, Amazon is

is very interested in buying TikTok. Others include technology giant Oracle and Blackstone, the private equity firm. You might have heard that name elsewhere. And there's weird deals where it might be multiple investors that will then buy part of TikTok. And so they'll be not just owned by one like Amazon, but there'll be multiple stakeholders.

So curious again, and this, and this ban, I think again, it's just like days away, uh, which, so something has to happen on the Saturday, Saturday deadline that TikTok has to change its ownership structure. So we'll see. I mean, is it, is it possible the administration can delay it again or does it actually have to happen right now?

Is it possible? I guess anything's possible. Let me just do the quick recap on this if you don't mind. Yeah, please. There was a law passed a little over a year. It was like April 24th of last year. I mean, that's when it was signed.

by Joe Biden was president at the time that said that TikTok had to, they listed them as a company, you know, as a company that was controlled by a foreign adversary. So the law says essentially that they cannot be owned by any, any, their owners can't be controlled by a foreign adversary, which is China in this case. So it has to have an American owner.

Okay. What that actually means, maybe it's up to some interpretation. Could you just have a bunch of American investors pump a bunch of money into TikTok? And so now they have 50.1% of it. And now is it American owned? That's not, I don't think what the law means. It's like, it has to have an American owner. It has to be owned by a company in the U.S.,

And so it is weird that they're now talking about like they may have to delay things again because the current delay, the 75 day delay, because this law went into effect on January 19th and the Supreme Court upheld it.

The current delay was just Trump saying to the Department of Justice, don't enforce this law for 75 days. Like there was actually no mechanism in the law for the delay that is currently happening. The only delay that was allowed was a 90 day delay to finalize a deal. But there was no deal in place at the time. Right. So this was just literally a letter from Donald Trump to the Department of Justice and then the Department of the Attorney General writing a letter to Apple and Google saying it's cool if you put it in the App Store.

Right. Because if you remember, Google and Apple had taken it out of the app store and it was out of the app store for like more than a month. Yeah. And it is back now.

So what happens on Saturday? I think that unless there's an actual deal, it's no longer going to be available in the App Store, right? And we could be in a situation again where all of the content on TikTok is served up, I think mostly by Oracle and potentially AWS as well. Those companies will be prohibited from doing that. So now you asked, is it possible they could delay it again? Under the law, no. There is no legal mechanism to do that.

I'm not entirely sure if that matters, right? Because at this point, like... No, no. And again, I'm not trying to be political, but I think we've seen that it doesn't really seem to matter because it's like...

if, if the department of justice, who is the people who would enforce the law are told by the president, don't enforce the law. It doesn't really matter what the law says, right? This is going to keep up, but you are going to have companies at some point like Apple and Google heard me like, you got to figure this out because we can't keep living in this limbo because they would be exposing themselves to enormous liability down the road for continuing to break the law. And I don't think that they want to do that. So I don't, I don't know. Like,

actually makes sense, but it sounds like according to the New York times that no one's taking it seriously. Right? Like the other company that's put in a bid is app loving, which they like monetize apps. They're like a giant ad marketplace and app discovery and analytics and all that kind of stuff. And they're like a hundred billion dollar company. Like they could probably, I think it's,

They want to buy it and they want, I think it's Steve Wynn, the casino guy who is going to like help finance it or whatever. So there's, there are some things that are happening, but it's, it's so funny to me that it all happens at the last minute. It's like, you've had a year, right? Like a year to figure this out. And it just, you cannot whip up a, you cannot whip up a deal like this over a weekend. It just doesn't work that way. This will be honest though. This was me in college. I had all semester to write the paper. I was not writing it until two days before.

Yeah, but the paper didn't cost you $80 billion. I mean, no, like you need lawyers and banks and merger analysts and consultants. And you got to figure out like, how do I make a business case? Because no matter what company buys this, they're going to get sued by shareholders. Like that's the board is going to get sued. Like that's a hundred percent guarantee. Like it's just going to happen. Like that's just the cost of doing business. So you have to have all of your ducks in a row. So that's why I say like companies like Apple and Google, uh,

They take this kind of thing very seriously because no matter what the Department of Justice says, they may not prosecute you for this. You're going to have like they're accountable to the board of directors is accountable to shareholders and they don't want to be sued. Right. Like they don't want to be held liable for, you know, securities fraud because you ignored a federal law that says you can't do this thing. And now like it's just it gets complicated. It's complicated. Well, we'll see what happens on Saturday. Please no. Please no one start reviews.

I'm just telling you what, I'm just telling you guys the truth. It's not, it's not political. I think we should say not to be political, but then be something totally unrelated. Like not to be political, but visual intelligence. It is not what it's great. No, it's good. All right. Well, a couple of the quick pieces of news, and then I want to, uh,

Get on to Jason for his travel accessory article on Inc.com. Which I thought was the most benign, safe article I've literally ever written. It's not a huge... Steven has a problem with that. Well, two things. But anyway, we'll talk about it in a second. We'll talk about it in a second. Elon Musk announced on X that his AI company, XAI, has acquired X, the social media platform, in an all-stock transaction. So now they are one company.

I've not seen any changes in terms of service or really any articles. I don't think about what this might mean for content on X and training the models. But curious acquisition. Talk to me about this. Because I asked you, what does this actually mean?

Do I keep posting to X? What's going on? Now the reality is X has been sharing all of its content with XAI anyway. Let me say one thing. We can talk about ChatGPT and the Studio Ghibli thing in a second, but anything I post online anywhere, I assume will be

I mean, ChatGPT, you can ask it anything and it will answer you. It has been trained on everything. And so, yeah. - Okay, well, let me just say something about that really quickly. There is a difference between asking ChatGPT a question and having it be able to find information on the internet because it has a search capability. That doesn't mean that the model was trained on that information.

Right. Those are two separate and distinct things. The model training is sort of how it processes that and understands it. And there's a lot of knowledge that goes into that, but that is meant to like

form the way that the model works, which is separate from if I publish something today and you ask Chet GPT about it, it's going to be able to find the article and it's going to be able to summarize it for you, but it wasn't trained on it. But when you ask Chet GPT, write something in the style of Jason Aten, if it can do it, that lends itself to, like it was actually ingested a bunch of your work

Probably. So that's the only way I could do that. Pretty good. Pretty likely. Pretty likely. And even, I feel this even earlier, ChachiPT days, MKBHD made a video where he asked ChachiPT to write an intro to the video in his style and it did it and it knew how to do it. So it was clearly trained on at least his YouTube videos, likely, but

All of YouTube, most of YouTube. I mean, not only that, but what didn't he ask Sora to make a video? Yes. YouTuber and his plan is planned. Yeah, exactly. So it's like clearly you're not just searching right now and doing that. Like you have been trained because I was like generating images. So anyway. Okay. So the XAI thing. So this is another thing that's interesting because what does it actually mean?

Very little, except for to the essentially what they're going to do is create a holding company that will own both of those two companies, XAI and X. The reason that this happened is because it allows Elon Musk to assign valuations to the two companies as they formed a combined company. Can you just imagine the negotiation between the two companies, which, by the way, are the same group of people?

Normally, this is like an adversarial process where two companies that are going to merge decide what the valuation of each would be because that determines which percentage of stock will be owned by each group's investors and shareholders. But it's literally like the same six people sitting around a table and they're like, okay, so now for X, what do we think? And the reason for doing it is that it is...

much, much, much, much easier right now for XAI to raise money than it would be for X to raise money. Now it's not about like X has been able to raise some money, uh,

in the recent like months because people look at X and they're like, well, right now because of like Elon Musk's connection, he had like, it's a value. There's value there. So they're able to do that. But in the longterm, it's, it's grok, it's X AI. That's where the money's going to be. And this makes it easier to do that. And it makes it a lot cleaner and simpler for them to just funnel all of that content directly from X into those types of things. And so this is much more of a, this is a thing that happened on paper, right?

But really, the thing that happened on paper is essentially just cleaning up some stuff that was already going to basically be happening anyway. Okay. Thank you for that. Thank you. All right. I wasn't sure if we should talk about this in depth. I might save this because I want to develop more thoughts about it. But we mentioned the whole Chachapiti 4.0 image generation last week and the Studio Ghibli phase and all of that. So I don't think I want to rehash it. I want to kind of see where it goes from here.

But I want to talk about Jason's travel article instead. So I want to go right to that.

So we'll see. Great. We will save this and I need to develop more thoughts about it because we were talking to our friend Nate about artistry and work and all that kind of stuff. Who is a fantastic artist. That's why we're talking to him. Amazing artist. I should see if it could generate 3D chalk art in the style of Nate Baranowski. We'll see. Well, the thing about that is it could generate a photo you could post on Instagram of it, but it can't actually put it on the sidewalk like he does. That's a good point.

His job is safe. That's a good point. That is a good point. All right, so here's our personal take. Jason had a travel article here. I saw it come up in my RSS. 11 travel tech gear essentials and accessories. You have some very good recommendations here. I would make the same recommendations. I have two quibbles, okay? The first, as you talk about the accessories in this article, like the Anker Nano 3-in-1 Power Bank,

Where do I click to go to that thing? Where's the link? You don't know how to Google it? You want people to do this. You're going to copy and paste it. You're going to send it over here. Oh, now which one were you talking about? There's 18 different products over here.

what is that what is all this listen as as a youtuber as someone who does a lot of affiliate links link link the thing just like some of them actually are if you scroll up to the top i think some of them actually are i think you have the plug book charger you have a link there but the that's the only link the belkin magsafe mount the crucial x9 portable ssd

AirPods Pro 2 you have linked, but this probably... Probably one of my stories. I just saw an ad. Yeah, it was just to another one of your stories. The Timbuk2, I was like, oh, no, there's no link there. Yeah, there are. So there was a little bit of a technical glitch on there should be photos with some of these. I will get that cleaned up. Oh, I see.

So anyway, that was a, I didn't know you just wanted to edit my article. I thought you actually wanted to talk about the actual choices that I made. There was one. Well, there is one choice I want to talk about specifically. I mean, no, no, all this stuff is great. I mean, uh, I like the, you know, the anchor three and ones, the, the plug bug has fine. My eyes. That's good. I like the tech bags. I'm still like, I wanted to, is this the Timbuk two in the picture on the left? No, no, that's the Bellroy tech. Okay. That's Timbuk two is the actual back. Okay. Right. Right. So I, I, I want that Bellroy tech pouch. The,

The one that I actually have issue with, it is the Native Union Active Power Bank. Now, this is only because I have reviewed 1,000 MagSafe battery packs. And I actually have the Native Union one as well. So it's a 5,000 mAh battery. And you will see on all these battery descriptions that it can charge your iPhone up to 15 watts.

That is false. When it's wirelessly, it will never get up to 15 watts. No 5,000 milliamp hour battery can charge that fast. Often, if you read like the fine print, these brands say you can charge up to 15 or 20 watts if you connect with a USB-C cable. Yeah, that's great. Right, but it is not wireless. And so I think just editorially...

you should mention that it has to be with the usbc cable if you want to charge that fast otherwise it's like five watts or at the most seven and a half watts which the native union one isn't even chi two it's like chi one so it's like it's like super slow charging it does get pretty warm but i would just i would not recommend this one to people because i would recommend the anchor chi 2

I should, I don't know. I didn't pull this up. Uh, 10,000 milliamp hour battery pack because that one actually charges like pretty fast. Like it'll charge between 11, 12, 13 Watts. And it is still pretty slim. I know slim is important. Uh,

But it is the one that I recommend. I actually have it with me here at the conference because it's the best. But this is the one that I would recommend there. But that's the only one I really have it with. It's literally two. It's literally two.

It doesn't get as hot. It is literally two of them. Faster capacity. Hold on. This entire time, I have been muting myself when I have to switch hands because my hands are cramping. Anyway, listen. Yes, it is thicker. No, no, no. It's not thicker. It is two. Literally, look at the difference. Look at the difference. If you're going to carry an extra battery, that is not that big of a difference to throw it in a bag. It is not that big of a deal. It's two. I mean, I have both of them, but... See, okay, but listen.

Faster charging, doesn't get as hot, more capacity. The Anchor Chi 2 is a better option. If you're bringing a battery, it's because you need to charge stuff. And the native one gets warm. Have you actually used the native one? All the time. I use it all the time. Doesn't it get warm? It's fantastic. It's made out of metal. When it gets warm, it's because it's cooling.

It's because it's conductive cooling. No, I call BS. No, I don't know what I just said, but my point is like, no, I stand by this decision. I mean, I love this Anker one, but it is literally like the weight of three of them. Okay. I actually, so there's someone at the conference here from Apple.

And he was using the Apple MagSafe battery pack still. Look at how little. Yeah, it's thin. It's just it gets hot, barely any capacity, and charges glacially slow. No problem. Anyway, this guy from Apple, he had the Apple MagSafe battery pack. And I was like, bro.

It's lightning. It charges slow. And I said, get the anchor one. He was like, no, I don't want to do that. I want to use apples. And he was like, if this one runs out, I have a second one. He had two Apple MagSafe battery packs in his pocket so he could keep his phone charged. I'm like, if you're going to carry two of those, now you've totally undid the whole weight and thickness argument. What are you even holding up? What is that? Oh, that's perfect. This is perfect. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. He's old. This is the nomad, uh, like the tiny USB-C cable thing. Yeah. I don't even know what it's called. Keep it in there. It's the emergency cable is what it is. Yeah. I mean, yeah, sure. Is that how you do it though? Or do you know? I've never done that in my life except for right now. So,

but also i don't care how fast it's charging because i'm not playing video games on my phone while i'm traveling trying to like keep this thing like my phone it charges my phone faster than my charge is depleting that's all it needs to do it's fair but it's yeah that's literally the only thing i need a battery charger to do and i would much rather have the slim because i want to be able to like i i hate the idea of taking this and putting this into my pocket sure okay that's fine so

So for the use case that I'm using, I want to just be like, okay, shoot. I need to slap a battery on this because I've been traveling all day and I just need to be able to get to the hotel room. So I'm going to put this on there and not have to even think about it or worry about it. Or I frequently will use this like if I'm at a kid's sporting thing and I'm taking video, which does consume the battery mostly because your screen is on. The video itself is...

fine but it's like the screen being on and if you're outdoors you have to have your screen at full brightness so i can put this thing on there and essentially like if my phone is at 40 it'll just stay at 40 for the rest of the day right right like and that's that's exactly what i want i just got like three hours of 40 sure well when your readers start emailing you saying my this battery burned a hole in my pocket you let me know it's not that's it's

It doesn't get that hot. It gets warm, though. That was the only one I would take issue with. And I get if you want something thin, I guess. And listen, this is a great battery pack. I love it. The only thing I wanted to put on there, but it's not really a travel accessory. Hang on. If Jason's reaching around. This one's better. This Anker one is much, much, much better because this is the one that's part of this two-in-one charger that I have on my desk. Oh, right, right, right. And it is comparatively...

it's probably the same thinness as the as the magsafe one and it's just a little taller sure right but compare like it's if you just i i hesitate to put these things back to back to back i mean they're magnets but anyway like when you compare those things i i this is probably my but

But I don't think you can just buy this. That's why it comes with the two-in-one charger. The Anker does have a standalone that they sell directly through Apple that's like that, but it's not as good. It's 5,000 million hours. It gets really hot. I did a review on it. It's not good. But anyway. This one is really good. This is probably actually what I would recommend, and then you can just put it on your desk when you're sitting at your desk. All right. Well, I guess that's fine.

I like recommending ones that are good. And just to be clear, I don't not recommend this one. I love it. And if I'm traveling for a long time, I'll probably just take them both. But the nice thing about this Native Union one is I'm willing to compromise a little bit of charging speed for the super lightweight and small form factor. Because if I'm traveling, that's what I care about. Very good. Okay. That's all. That's all I wanted to bother you about.

It's just the battery. I got to go back and add photos and links. Link your stuff. Do all that stuff. You should do affiliate links. Oh, you can't, but you can't. I don't know if Inc. has affiliate links for some things, but I don't. I'll send you my affiliate links. You can put them in your article. How about that? I don't know that that will work either. Yeah, don't do that.

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