OpenAI Social Network, iPadOS 19 to FINALLY Transform iPad, Apple Ads Are Getting Weird
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And remember, an elephant never forgets. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. This week is iPadOS 19 finally gonna make the iPad more Mac-like? Plus, OpenAI is considering building a social network. ChatGPT 4.1 was announced. New video generations in Google's AI tools. Apple ads is now a thing. Where's that gonna go? And FTC versus Meta, some things that have come out in the court case. Meta doesn't know how to redact their own documents.

This episode is brought to you by 1Password and you, the members, who support us directly. I'm one of your hosts, Stephen Robles, and joining me, as always, is my good friend, Jason Aiton. How's it going, Jason? It's good. I'm dealing with a rogue hard drive that's making loud noises right now, so I'm trying to unmount it and unplug it. Disc utility. Why is there a leaf blower in my office? What is happening right now?

I will say I finally have run into the issue where if I right-click a drive that's on my desktop, the eject and erase is right next to each other. We had this conversation. I think it's ridiculous. We did. And I hide my drives on my Mac Studio, so I didn't have that issue. But on my MacBook Air...

I have not hidden them. And every time I go to eject them, I'm like, oh, I might erase it by accident, which is not a good feature. And yes, before you all respond, I know there's like multiple steps to that, but I still think it's a real bad thing to put those things next to each other. It's just scary. Also both start with the same letter. Exactly. Yeah. Erase. Anyway, you know where the quote was from? It was a little vague, but I said, and remember an elephant never...

forgets you know what movie that might be from i don't know i mean elephant what how many movies do i know that have elephants in them there's dumbo but i don't think the dump i don't think it's dumbo is it a disney movie yes yes it is jungle book show's over yes

It's the Jungle Book. If you had not said that it was a Disney movie, I was going to guess Jumanji, but I don't know why. No, no, no. This is ridiculous. Jason, your percentage win on this is ridiculous. I have four children. I have seen all the Disney movies all the time. I mean, so have I. But I mean, that's pretty impressive. Yes, it was from the Jungle Book.

All right. We have some five-star review shoutouts. Mikhail Klimovich from Czech Republic. Thank you for that. Tristan James from the USA and Dylan Wade all gave us five-star reviews in Apple Podcasts. We are a solid 4.9-star podcast here in the US. So thank you all. Maybe one day, maybe one day we'll get to one star. Maybe when we have a thousand reviews in Apple Podcasts, which is doable if everyone were to review us in Apple Podcasts. I'm looking forward to it.

We have some exciting news this week. We're going to talk about all the AI stuff. We're going to talk about Apple and iPadOS 19. Two housekeeping things. One, if you want to get an ad-free version of this show and our bonus episodes, which come out every week, we have a new link, which gets you there even faster. You can go to join.primarytech.fm.

I set up that subdomain yesterday. You're welcome. Run, run to that and support. There's, we were looking at the numbers earlier and there's, there's a bunch of you that support us and we really appreciate it and would encourage you. I'm going to put a link in the show notes directly to a poll. That's going to be in our circle community. And this poll is going to be asking what additional benefits might you enjoy from a primary technology paid membership? And we're going to throw out some ideas in that poll and,

And Jason and I were just talking before the show, and there's going to be some great benefits. And, you know, just let us know. Let us know what you would like to see, read, hear. And that's going to help, I don't know, point us in the direction to go because we want to build this thing. We want to offer more content. Capital C. I'm still not crazy about using that word, but that's what it is, right? We make content. I mean, it does have a bad rap, but literally that's what it is. That's literally...

I want to talk about OpenAI and all the social network stuff, but one quick question. I'm curious. What's phone AI?

case are you using right now? At this very moment? Well, you know, the one that you're using every day. I have gone back to, I go back and forth between the Sudi back and the Nomad leather case. Oh, the Nomad leather case. The Nomad leather back I will never use again because it started breaking in weird ways. Yeah, I don't like that one. I was curious because I'd been using the Ryan London leather case. It has a wonderful patina on it right now. It's the grossest thing I've ever seen.

I wanted to show that on camera. But anyway, I was curious because I also have gone back to the Suti. You copied mine! I had this first. I had these backs first. This is the Suti back. I made a whole video about it. Anyway, I went back to the Suti back as well, and I enjoy it. I think it's a nice compromise between the two. Although, I was at a concert the other day, one of my wife's orchestra concerts. I had this instead of my Brian Linden case.

And the phone slid out of my hand and the floor was concrete and there was a slope. And so my phone just slid two rows forward and hit some lady's foot, which she graciously picked it up and gave it to me. But I did. Yeah, I don't think you can see it on camera, but there is a slight crack now all the way up here in the top corner. I don't know if you can. You can't even see it on camera. We can just see your fingernails. That's it, Stephen. Sorry, I tried to manicure them earlier. But anyway, there's a slight crack.

definitely not enough for apple care which that was my other quiz maybe we should save this for a bonus episode but like what level of cracking do you then just i don't know but mine because of that look at you can see that nice scratching is happening and i think it's because i think it's just because of sliding like not having a lip bottom lip yeah the case at the top or bottom that is because i have the same thing at the very top exactly like you can't what is it rubbing on then

I don't just my jeans, I guess. I don't like right there at the top. See all that scratching. Yeah.

So I've been tempted to just throw it out of the car window a couple times. Not actually Apple, not actually. I don't know how this screen shattered. Listen. I have no information. It was dropped. You just have to say it dropped. You don't know whether or not it was on purpose or not. That's true. If you have AppleCare+, they will take your $29 and replace that screen as many times as you want. Except for when it's scratched. Yeah, if it's just a minor scratch, they won't do it anymore. But anyway. This is more than minor. Actually...

I'm kind of hoping it scratches a little bit more because then I won't have to drop it because if it were to interfere with face ID, I think they would replace it. Oh yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. So I'll be, yeah, hang on. Let me get a key real quick and see what I can do. Just a hammer and nail it right in the middle.

All right, there was a bunch of AI news we have to talk about. I think the biggest news- Do you mean the news was generated by AI? No, no, no, no. Just checking. No, no. OpenAI. This was a big scoop by Kylie Robinson, who she scooped a bunch of AI stuff this past year for The Verge. I think she just joined The Verge last year, and then she announced she's leaving. Kylie Robinson, she didn't say where she's going, but she's leaving The Verge already. So this is like her last scoop, I guess, on staff.

But OpenAI is building a social network. Apparently, Sam Altman, the CEO, has been giving, I don't know if it's test builds or just giving previews to people asking for their feedback around Silicon Valley. And this was actually something that he teased on X saying, oh, we should just build a social network after Elon Musk merged XAI and X. So I think this is fascinating. I'm curious what you think a social network by OpenAI would actually look like

I do think there could be some benefits, but this is also going to put OpenAI in direct competition with X, where you have X and XAI, now actually one company. You could have JETGPT and then whatever the social network is called. Do we need another social network? I don't know.

But I think it could be interesting. So I don't know. What do you think this could look like or what would be the benefit? There are literally no benefits. I don't know about that. Now, they said it could be. Yes, because what we really need in the world right now is another social network. Come on.

No, no, no. Okay. What space would this fill other than a place for people to more quickly dump their AI generated garbage? I mean, right now it's a little complicated because you have to copy and paste the garbage from chat GPT into X or threads or blue sky and

This would be more convenient because they could just integrate a button that says post slop to open AI.x or whatever. I mean, I don't understand what we are not. We are no longer in the phase of I understand why they would want to do it because it's a whole bunch more content they can use to train stuff. Like, great. Yeah, totally makes sense. I don't understand. We are no longer in the phase of humanity when we need new social networks.

Am I wrong? I'm going to play reverse devil's advocate, I guess. So you agree with me? No. Oh, right. No. So just devil's advocate. Okay. So I do not think we need another like feed based short form text or image social network for sure. But, and this is going to come up in our personal tech segment. We're going to have like a lightning round personal tech. I have talked to several people just this week.

who I would not have thought used ChatGPT to the extent that they do. And they just like just power users, just using it all the time. And I don't know if you remember when the custom GPTs launched two years ago. I'm not sure when that was. There was a moment where everybody was like building custom GPTs and then wanting to share them. They'll share their links. There's like a custom GPT store.

And now even recently, like last couple of nights ago, I was telling somebody about deep research. You now converted me to believing deep research is amazing. And so now I'm trying to tell other people, so it's passing it on. And this person had never used deep research, but they use ChatGPT all the time. And so I did a prompt and I was going to send it to them to show like, here's what it can do. I didn't realize you can actually, there's like a share button on the prompt. Like when you do something and you have all the, ChatGPT gives you all the stuff, you can

You can literally hit a share button and share a link to that conversation.

And so in that moment, I was like, you know, it might be interesting if people wanted to share their prompts or different results they got from ChatGPT that were actually good or like the action figure meme that has happened in the last week where everyone's generating an image of themselves packaged as an action figure. Full disclosure, I did it. I didn't like what it looked like, so I stopped. I didn't do it. I didn't post it. But...

Something like that, you see it and you're like, well, I could go try to find the prompt to make myself into an action figure. Or if there was a social type

feed or some place where you can go like, oh, here's the prompts that everybody's using to make these. Let me start a conversation in my own chat, JPT, using this thing. Maybe there could be some kind of communal sharing, whatever. That's not necessarily a social network, but almost more like a Reddit-ish, you know, people posting prompts and results. I don't know.

that's the only thing i thought if only there was like a site like reddit listen where people could share that sort of things it's gonna be the new reddit i don't understand yeah i don't think that i just like i know why this is attractive to open ai sure i just don't understand why they i mean other than a hedge like so what probably happens is companies look at in chad gpt's case this is

almost certainly true. If your growth engine is powered by something like say X or Twitter at the time, right? Then you, and that's where you find many of your users. They come to you through these distribution channels and suddenly that distribution channel has its own competitor, which means that you are less likely to be able to get the same kind of future growth from that. You think, well, then I need to create that. And I feel like

That ignores the fact that you're talking about a social platform that has hundreds of millions of users where people are already doing this. You cannot recreate that from scratch. Like ChatGPT was the fastest growing consumer product tech product ever, right? But they do have the user base. That's the thing. Like the install base for ChatGPT, it's been like the number one app in the app stores for weeks or months or whatever. And so when it comes to hundreds of millions of users, like they actually already have that.

And if like just having the chat GPT account now means like there's now a social tab in your chat GPT app, like they have the users. Sure. And they have users for a thing that is not like the other thing.

Right? True. I mean, there are like other apps that might be really highly downloaded that are also not going to translate very well to becoming a social app. But think about Instagram and threads. One of the reasons why the threads growth was exponential at the beginning was that direct Instagram integration where like one tap and you're on threads with your account. Right. Well, there's a billion people using Instagram and they got something like

100 million people to use threads. Right. So that's a 10% conversion rate with all of the dials turned to 11 of show threads everywhere, show threads, like do this,

you know, all of these sort of dark patterns. And if, if Chad GBT has 200 million, then that's 20 million at the same conversion rate. That is not an effective 400 million. Fine. That's 40 million. That's not an effective competitor. Right. Nowadays, 40 million is nothing on a social platform. Also, I guess my point is simply that,

Okay, so what are the most popular Macs? Macs right now says it's the second most... This can't possibly be true, but I guess this is not a ranking list. Are you talking about streaming service Macs? No, yeah, but I'm just saying it's just popular iPhone apps. Macs is not going to launch an effective social platform. No, no, no, I get it. Neither is Zoom, by the way. Zoom is on this list too. Zoom had a bad day anyway. But my point is just because you are... Is Zoom already a social network though? Just because you... I guess by the literal definition...

It's not a network. Well, its network didn't work at all this week. Anyway, my point is just because you have a large user base does not mean that you have a large...

Like Duolingo. Duolingo has a massive user base. If they launched a social network, I mean, they do sort of have social. What does that mean? I just don't think it's, one of these things is not like the other. And I just don't think that people are going to, what you're describing is more like, yeah, a forum board to post stuff. And that's what I'm saying. I don't think it's going to be a feed-based thing, but some kind of social aspect where maybe you even have like friends that, you know, you can quickly share your,

your latest prompt or whatever, or like, Hey, here's a meme for studio Ghibli and you're probably breaking copyright, but nobody cares. You know, something, something like that. But yeah, Google is by the way, the number three most downloaded free app. How has the social network thing worked for them? Google plus buddy. I'm just, I'm just saying, and I think also the reason I'm convinced this won't work. And the reason is the incentives are completely misaligned.

The only reason OpenAI wants this is for distribution and for training data. And there's no one like, yes, we're happy to have chat GPT our training data because we're just talking to it. Right. Right. But we don't need another reason to give them training data. And if what you're trying to do is get people to post content, like I just, I don't see the incentives being aligned to make that. Well, I think even if it's just a place where Sam Altman can now announce things, that's not X. I think he's going to do it just so he can have,

another platform because like he doesn't do it on threads or blue sky or anything he doesn't on x because there's 400 million people on there and that's how they it's like the best free megaphone for doing that kind of stuff if he only if he just wants to announce it to the chat gpt users he could literally just put the prompt in chat gpt there's nothing stopping them from doing that these are a little flag at the top of the app i mean apple does a really good job of that open the settings app see what they want to tell you about today we're gonna talk about apple ads in a second so

All right, well, let's jam through the other chat GPT news. GPT 4.1.

has been debuted. I haven't seen it in my ChatGPT apps just yet, but it's the successor of ChatGPT 4.0. Multimodal supposedly has even larger context window, higher token ceiling and all that kind of stuff. So you should, if you're at least on the plus or pro plan, you should see 4.1 pretty soon. And another feature, this is available to, I believe, again, plus and pro users. But ChatGPT, you can now toggle on

the remember or at least refer to all my past chats as context for my future prompts. So before there was like a memory feature where you can tell ChatGPT like, hey, remember that I live in Florida or whatever. And it will remember those key aspects that you specifically tell it. But now you can actually toggle on remember everything and it can look across all your past chat history as context.

And so like I see people like on social media be like, tell me my three blind spots as a person. And it refers to all their past chats. And I guess sometimes Chachi Batiste says valuable things.

But it can now remember everything. I mean, if you're asking chat GPT for your three blind spots, number one is that you're asking a large language model and giving it all of your information. Could be a blind spot. Also, just because it's able to refer to all your past chats, is that really the same thing as memory? It's the same. Well, it's just... All it means is that they enlarge the token window so they can just shove all of that information in every time you ask it something. Right. That's...

Is that memory? I mean, I understand. I just think it's funny how they're trying to give these humanoid characteristics when it's really like all it's doing is... Yeah, it's really thinking.

It's just processing tokens, man. If you want to think that that's what it means in your brain, but I, yeah, you did miss the most important open AI news of the entire week, which is that Sam Altman went on Twitter and said, how about we fix our model naming by this summer? And everyone gets a few more months to make fun of us, which we very much deserve until then. That was pretty good. That was pretty good. That's self-awareness. That's pretty good. Also other quick AI news before we get to Apple. Yeah.

Anthropic is working on a voice AI that you can speak to. So it's going to be launching that. So Claude will be able, you'll be able to talk to Claude. Uh, the mode options are mellow, airy and buttery. Everyone needs, everyone needs a buttery voice assistant to talk to. I don't know if I want the buttery voice, but buttery. Is that like Morgan Freeman voice? I don't, I don't know. He's not buttery. He's his, uh, gravitas. That's the gravitas voice. So what's a buttery?

Buttery is Matthew McConaughey. Maybe Matthew McConaughey is buttery. I would say he's gravelly. Sure, gravelly. Okay. Sorry, this is a weird conversation. This is going to be the bonus content that we're going to be offering. Steven Robles is buttery. Oh, thank you. Your voice. Well, this is getting weird. Okay. Also, last AI news.

Google rolls out an AI video generator. So if you're on Gemini Advanced, you can generate some videos. It seems like they did not generate enough frames in all these videos. They're all pretty jittery. But yeah, you can now generate video there as well. And I don't know. I'm less optimistic about our future with AI-generated video and ads and social media. Speaking about social networks and AI, like,

Listen, I think people are losing discernment. I think there is a demographic difference between who can discern this stuff and who cannot. Sometimes it's age, sometimes it's just what world people live in. Are they tech-minded or whatever? But I'm just concerned that I'm going to get way more links to Facebook posts from family and friends being like, did you see this? And I'm going to have to be like, that's AI. And then I have to somehow convince them that it's AI. Yeah.

You have to convince them that you're not the conspiracy theorist, right? I am not AI butter. Okay. I'm not. It's not. I think that we, we do live in a weird time though. I mean, what you just mentioned is true. That's, that's unfortunate that we have to spend all that energy, but,

But as someone who covers AI, we live in a weird time because every time you write a story about a new feature being released, you have to save that story. And about a week later, you have to do a find and replace and change everywhere you put OpenAI and then put Google's name and then do the same thing back and forth. And then sometimes you insert Anthropic instead because it's all the same stuff. They're all just doing the same thing. But you know what you never find and replace with?

Buttery? Apple intelligence. Apple intelligence. Sorry. That's true. I mean, it's true. That's true. We're going to cover that too in a second. All right. Speaking of Apple, let's talk about some Apple news real quick. I just want to share, I have the USB-C AirPods Max and the iOS 18.4 update, which came out a couple of weeks ago, brought lossless audio. And so I did this video, I don't know if you saw it, where I did a blind test about whether or not I can hear the difference between lossless and not.

And it was very complicated tests to try and get to lossless and not, but my wife would basically like play a track, whether it's plugged in with USB-C or not. And I would try to guess whether it was lossless. You can watch the whole video. I'll link it in the show notes. But bottom line is I could not tell the difference. And I was sad. I was disappointed in myself. And then there were some comments from people were like, well, you know, it depends on the track and all this like, listen.

Bottom line, I don't think lossless as a feature is a reason to upgrade to the new ones. But I did also test latency. So like if you want to use these wirelessly and edit in like final cutter logic, that is noticeably improved over the lightning versions. But anyway, that's max. First of all, yes, I can't believe you bought those, but I mean, it can Apple send me these to review full disclosure. Okay, good. So I got to send them back. I do feel better. Thank goodness. But I do. I feel like.

I don't understand the...

Not yours, but the obsession with this because, I mean, lossless just means uncompressed, right? Like that's literally what it means is there's no data loss to compression. Compression is a graduated scale, right? So even the, so the best, the difference between lossless, no compression and the best compression that we're talking about the difference between shooting 12 bit and 14 bit raw at this point, no human can tell the difference looking at those. Right. And also like you really get into the audio file stuff and people will be like, well, if it's not a flack file,

It's not whatever. And even the lossless, like I forget the exact numbers, but Apple said, you know, this is capable of lossless up to whatever data rate and the lossless tracks you get in Apple music are not at that level. Like they're, they're less, you know what I mean? Like it's just, it's not that high. So, you know, it's, I don't know. I,

I cannot tell the difference. You said you're sad. I guess what I was going to say is actually what's good about that is the fact that the streaming music that you're listening to must be pretty good quality. You can't tell the difference. It is really good. The streaming quality is that good. So anyway, that was the AirPods Max. Trigger warning. If you're watching on YouTube, you're about to see some feet. Okay. I'm just letting you know. Jason, you too. I don't know if you saw this ad or not. I have no idea what's about to happen. Okay. Well, this was...

Apple literally released a whole commercial about nanotexture. Did you see this commercial? The guy with the laptop? I did not, but now I'm going to have to write about this. Just wait. This entire commercial is a guy shirtless sitting on a beach chair on some roof in a city.

Half the ad is just sun glares off buildings and him working on his MacBook Pro. And it's a nanotexture ad. I don't know, but I think this is the worst thing they've ever made. Maybe the Mother Nature video was close. That was pretty bad. I still stand by. I didn't like the crush ad. I know people have mixed opinions on it.

I think the crush ad was tone deaf, but it didn't make me want to throw up. Listen to a trigger warning for those listening as well. I'm going to put, I'm going to make the chapter artwork, the dude's feet in the opening shot. But I, I, I, I was very curious to see Apple make an ad like this. It didn't, it didn't seem, uh, I don't know. Apple like, but it didn't seem necessary. The word is necessary. Um,

Here's why I say that. Nano texture on a MacBook Pro is such an insanely good feature. You didn't have to do that. You could have just like... There are so many ways you could have shown it off.

And honestly, I wonder like that ad, there are probably some people who think it's brilliant, but I think it's going to turn more people off to nanotexture. It's a pretty niche feature too. Like most people buy MacBook Air, which there's no nanotexture option. Sure. And if you're getting a MacBook Pro, you probably already know that nanotexture is an option and whether you want it or not, it seems like a weird feature to advertise. Everyone who buys a MacBook Pro should buy it with nanotexture.

Well, I don't know if I agree with that. Everyone, if you're buying it, you should buy it. I promise. Well, first of all, I wanted to check the comments on this, and Apple turned off the comments, which might be telling. Just throwing that out there. I would say I have a nanotexture iMac, which is an Apple review. Not the same thing. I brought it outside, though. I brought it outside. But even inside, the contrast, the color richness...

I'm a glossy screen guy. I want the glossy for the best colors, the darkest blacks.

I want it. It's not OLED. The iMac screen is 15 years old. Even between my studio display and that iMac next to each other, I could see the difference with my eyeballs. Right. But you know that the MacBook Pro is about a trillion times better display than that iMac. That iMac is literally the worst quality display that Apple makes on a Mac. Worst quality. Yeah.

okay that's fair so i'm just saying like that is you there's no there's zero comparison that you can make the macbook pro nanotexture amazing it's better than the ipad and the ipad has oled and you can get it with the nanotexture the problem there is like the bezel is not nanotextured which i understand why it's not because you don't need to nanotexture the bezel like you're not looking at any content there but i'm serious the nanotexture display on the macbook pro is the yes everyone should get it

Well, I guess I can't really speak to it because I have not had one. I've looked at it in the store, but that's not the same. I've not used it. So we'll see. But I've been loving my MacBook Air so much. I don't know if I'll ever go back to a MacBook Pro. And that's fair. I would buy one on a MacBook Air in a heartbeat. And if they put it on there, I would say the same thing. Everyone should buy it.

Interesting. Well, I also think the ad is interesting also because people like Parker Ortolani, he's been sharing pictures of all like the billboards around New York and like all the Apple intelligence billboards have now been taken down and Apple is advertising other features, even just like iPhone 16 pro camera and stuff, which is like.

not old, but obviously it's like there's been other products since then. And so, you know, we got this shirtless guy in a lawn chair, nanotexture instead of Apple intelligence. So there you go. That's what Apple did. They're like, you're going to, you're going to give us a hard time about this. We'll show you. We're going to send you this and say, you don't want Snoop dog hocking Apple intelligence on T-Mobile. We're going to give you this instead. Listen, that Snoop dog Apple intelligence thing was pushed hard. Yeah.

I heard it on like a ton of podcasts on TV. I think it was during the Superbowl too. It might've been there, but the Olympics, was it the Olympics? Yes. Yeah. Because it was everywhere. Yeah. It was every, it was everywhere. So,

Speaking of ads, though, I find this interesting. Apple sells ads, if you didn't know, and it basically was Apple search ads. So if you were a developer with an app and you wanted to pay to have your app higher in search results in the App Store, that was something you could pay Apple to run a promoted search result for your app. And that's why when you search sometimes for apps,

There's like the blue banner at the top that's showing an app that's paid for the ad. Well, Apple rebranded its search ads business to just Apple ads, which is curious because that rebranding seems to imply that maybe there will be ads outside of search that people will be able to pay for. Maybe that's Apple News. Maybe that's something else.

So curious, again, no actual announcement or change in what Apple is offering, but just curious that now it's just Apple ads and who knows, Apple TV plus could be a place where that's, you know, available. Cause I think right now, like if you were a company, let's say Apple,

an OWC and you want it to advertise your external drives. I don't think that there's any kind of self, uh, serve program where you can like put in a commercial on Apple TV plus, like you probably have to work with Apple directly and maybe have some kind of connection there. And there's only ads. I think I'm like MLB Friday night, right? That's the only place where there might be ads. I mean, there's a lot of ads for other Apple shows, but,

but well, yeah, but that's what you're talking about, but ads for other things. And so this could be the foray into more advertising on Apple services like TV plus and more services revenue for Apple. So you think we'll see more ads? You think we'll see more?

Apple's ad product is so bad. The Apple news ones seem a little weird, right? I don't understand why they spent all that effort to hide distracting items in Safari. So Apple will let you hide other people's ads. Oh, a hundred percent. Even though there's sometimes good ads.

But then you open the Apple News app and it's toe fungus everywhere. It's worse than that ad that they should. It's like terrible stuff. I don't know if I've had toe fungus. Hold on. Let me let's see. It's just it is the literal worst quality ad product that has ever been made. I don't know about that. I mean, the ad, the punch the monkey ads in the early days of the Internet. Those are pretty bad.

I'm going to Apple news plus, because I'm just curious what kind of, what's the first ad that I see? Well, that, that article didn't have any ads.

Do you really see toe fungus ads in there? I did for a long time. Okay, here's one. I even checked my toes to make sure there wasn't... I'm not even talking about the video one, but look at this quality of this ad is like garbage in the middle of this thing. I mean... And then you see the same ad 16 times in the same article. It's like we ran out of inventory. What is this, Steven? No, no, no. It's supposed to look like a New Yorker comic, but it's not. It's just some...

random no this listen this is the kind of quality ads i see in apple news okay you're ready and this what's the link between aging and your pillowcase exactly thank you or or the seniors are eligible for a bathroom remodel what what is this i don't know what's more triggering that shot of the bathroom where the dude in the lawn chair who charges the most for car insurance and it's like people going on like what do they do where are those people going

I almost said something very political, but. No, no, no, no. Not to get. I'm not going to. No, no, not to get political, but maybe that's why Apple ads is now a thing because now they can get better. Who's living in this slum that they need his bathroom remodeled. I think you just burn it down and move. Like, man, this is the worst. Apple ads is going to fix it all. It'll just fix it all. Those are Apple ads. I know. I know.

But anyway, okay. I want to talk about iPad and the possible iPad OS 19 that's going to solve all the iPad woes. That's a little sarcastic there. Hold on though. I have to ask one last question. Oh, yes. I'm sorry. This ad, I'm never going to be able to sleep again. Do you think it's, here's what I think. Do you think it's possible that Tim Cook doesn't actually know that

that these ads exist and that when the revenue shows up, someone's just like, ah, yeah, don't worry about that, Tim. It's just some money that we found somewhere and they don't tell him how bad this is. Here's how it goes. Tim Cook, he opens Apple news. He says, what in the world, where did this? And then someone just slides a piece of paper with the profit of what all the ads from Apple news makes. And then he's like, oh yeah. Okay. It's like 17 cents.

This is such a small niche thing for them. That's why the ads are so bad is because like no one is actually. Anyway, I'm sorry. I know you were trying to move on, but I don't understand how a company like Apple. Anyway, I think.

We're going to touch on this because for some reason, you know, I think all the companies know that we release an episode on Thursday because then everybody drops news on Friday. I don't know if you know that. Thanks guys. You know what I mean? I think that's what everybody that's, they just look at, they're looking at primary technology and say, listen, they go on Thursdays. Let's do the bad news on Friday. So we know how we see the game everyone's playing. But one of the things is that information article, which had a bunch of behind the scenes and, um,

supposedly, you know, people who worked at Apple previously in the AI and the Dingus team, the Hey Dingus. And that came out last Friday. And there were some interesting tidbits about leadership and how that works within Apple. So we're going to get to that too. And I think that kind of maybe plays into this ad thing as well. But iPadOS 19 coming up next. But before we do, I want to thank today's sponsor, which is 1Password and 1Password Extended Access Management.

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thanks to 1Password for sponsoring this episode. All right, let's talk about iPadOS 19. This was a report again from Gurman, where his Power On newsletter comes out on Sundays. This was news from last Sunday, but Mark Gurman saying that iPadOS 19 this year at DubDub is going to be a big upgrade. Quoting from Gurman's article here in the 9to5Mac article, Gurman says, I'm told that

that this year's upgrade will focus on productivity, multitasking, and app window management, with an eye on the device operating more like a Mac. It's been a long time coming with iPad Power users pleading with Apple to make the tablet more powerful. Now,

I just want to say productivity, multitasking and app window management. I feel like that's been every iPad OS update for the last six years, right? Yeah. I feel like he might be getting some hopes up because if you just read that, I'm told this year's upgrade will focus on productivity, multitasking and app window management. And you hear those things and people are like, yes, it's about time. And then it's like the last time they focused on productivity, multitasking and app window management, we got stage manager. Right. Exactly.

Which everyone hates and wants them to change. And then, so I don't, I, what do you, are you optimistic? Here's the thing. I love my iPad. I edit the audio version of this show in fair ride on my iPad. I recently did a video about the 20 best iPad apps of all time. There's great apps on the iPad. The iPad has been held back for years on a few key things.

One is that window management is not one of them. Let me just say that. Like, I don't think having better window management or having a more macOS-like UI is the answer. Like, the way the iPad functions, even if you're just full-screening and split-screening apps, honestly, I think it's fine. The issue is when a power user has, like I do here, an M4 iPad Pro, which is the same processor that's in my MacBook Air and the iMac out there,

is if I want to connect a USB microphone or audio interface and actually select my audio input versus audio output, you can't do that because the iPad doesn't give you just that granular control of audio input output. Or I feel like Apple has said that the iPad has a desktop class browser for like five years.

And it's just not because whenever I try to go edit a Squarespace site on my iPad, it's broken. And so Safari on the iPad is not Safari on a desktop, meaning the Mac. So and if they hadn't said it, it wouldn't be as big of a deal. But because Apple said desktop class apps, desktop class Safari.

Then it's like, well, where are the desktop class features? Because I don't see them there. And even things like an app like Audio Hijack, which we're using right now to record our audio, can't run on the iPad because it does not have access outside of the sandbox to those kinds of things. And so I don't think the sandboxing is ever going to go away. I think apps are still going to function. But giving users more controls, whether it's audio input output,

whether it's like a clipboard manager, like you can't have clipboard manager apps on iPad. So is that more Mac OS like? Probably not because that's another sandboxed limitation. Like the only reason you can have a clipboard manager on a Mac is because those apps can run in the background and it's not sandboxed like it is on iPad OS. So I think we probably will get some new window management features and it's not going to actually drastically change the actual function of the iPad OS.

And so I'm not optimistic, but I'm always hopeful. Always hopeful. Is that a thing? Not optimistic, but hopeful. What if they... I think the definition of optimism is like positively hopeful, but...

No, I'm sticking with it. I'm sticking with it. But I, so let's assume for a minute that they were going to do all the things that people think that they would want. Would that actually be a better outcome? I don't know because there is like the sliding scale of if you add 10% of the Mac features,

Let's say you get audio input output. Maybe you even get like video, which you can do video and just kind of, but let's say you get 10% of those features. There's immediately going to be another level of users. That's like, oh yeah, that's great. But I can't do X, Y, and Z that I can do on my Mac.

And so I don't know if Apple can really win here as far as like adding enough features that some power users are placated, but not all power users. So I feel like I'm not sure what they can do there, but I would love to see iPadOS in general, uh,

actually be a different operating system than iOS. You know, for a long time, iPhone and iPad both ran what was named iOS. They ran the exact same operating system. And then Apple changed iPad. I think it was when stage manager was released to be a different operating system again, which is iPadOS. And so I'm like, if you're going to make it different, then make it different, you know, call it something different, somehow make it function different.

but I know they're not going to do like third-party app, you know, outside of the app store installs. So I'm not sure like what technically is possible, but yeah, I don't know. So I'm not sure. Yeah. I mean, I think Apple brought this on themselves because they ran that. What's a computer ad to basically positioning the iPad is like,

the next coming of the Macintosh or whatever. I don't even know. Like, but let me, let me just do a double, you know, reverse double advocates on you and just like, I don't even know. I don't, I don't quite understand the obsession people have with not just letting the iPad be the iPad. Like why does the iPad need to be the Mac? We have the Mac in, I got, I can kind of understand the ideal of like, well, what if I only want to have one device that does everything? Um,

But one device that does everything never really works out as well as we think that it will because it doesn't do everything as well. Like foldable devices. Oh, you got a big screen, you get a little screen. They're not good at either of those things. When it's a little screen, it's chunky. When it's a big screen, it's like actually you don't get that much more video window space anyway. You got a line down the middle. Yeah, and it's like a worse everything. So I don't – it's heavier, whatever. So I don't even – I don't really – but I genuinely don't fully understand. Like the iPad actually – there are things they should try to solve. For example –

The 11-inch iPad is the perfect iPad, the Pro. I agree. It's the perfect iPad. For once, we agree on something. But it's terrible if what you want to do is use it as a computer because the Magic Keyboard is too small. I mean, it's usable. Don't get me wrong. Right, right, right. As someone who writes lots of words every day, it is not a big enough keyboard to do that on a regular basis. It's also heavy and thick. Well, that's what I was going to get to. So then you have the 13-inch iPad Pro.

Which is actually kind of crappy as an iPad because it's like you're holding, you know...

I don't know, an airplane wing in your hands to try to do stuff, but then you put it in that magic keyboard and it's amazing as a laptop replacement, but it weighs as much as a MacBook Pro. It's like there's no scenario where you can make this good at that. And so I believe wholeheartedly the 11-inch iPad Pro, that's the best iPad. It's not necessarily the best one for all people because you don't know, a lot of people don't need it, but that's why I don't get the 13-inch iPad Air. It's like, what are we doing? Big screen, great, but it's anyway...

So I don't know why people... I know Apple brought it on themselves by positioning the iPad in that way, but I think Apple has made it pretty clear. They're like, oops, just kidding. Actually, the Mac is amazing. Here's more MacBook Airs that can literally do things that you never thought you'd be able to do on a computer under $1,000. I don't know, Stephen. Why are we here? No, I think I agree. Personally...

I'm good with what the iPad does. And I guess I'm not necessarily looking for like, it would be nice to when I'm traveling to use the iPad to record. But honestly, like with the M with the MacBook Air now, I'm like, that's such a perfect device when I'm away from the studio and it does all the things.

I don't need the iPad to do that. Like I have the Mac. Maybe it's people want to touch screen Mac or maybe because people want to use the Apple pencil in other ways. I don't know. I think the reason why I did that, that video, the 20 best iPad apps of all time is because there are like when the iPad is good, it's amazing.

Like when I show people how I edit podcasts on iPad, they're like blown away. And they're like, that's amazing. And that is a key, like the Apple pencil is a key part of that workflow and the app ferrite, which is a third party app. So like you can make great third party apps and then other great,

What are tablet-specific use cases? Procreate for someone who's drawing. Maybe that's why they would want the 13-inch iPad Pro for that use case. And I do think for some people, like my mom, she has the 13-inch iPad Pro because the iPad Air didn't exist when she got it. And that is her computer.

And so like for some people, you know, if an iPad can be your computer because that's just your use cases, like great, get the big one, throw it in a keyboard case and you're good to go. Uh, digital sheet music. The tablet is uniquely positioned. It's better than a Mac and Mac book at that because you can put it on a music stand. You can get the bigger screen. It has four scores, an amazing app. You can do things like blink to turn pages. Like it's amazing at that. And so I think when the iPad is used as a tablet, uh,

I think it's great, and it actually doesn't need much more. Like digital sheet music, my podcast editing, Procreate, it doesn't need better window management. All of those use cases, you want one thing on the screen at a time, and you just use the pencil or you do whatever. So I guess I'm convincing myself that maybe it doesn't need more macOS-like features, and I don't know what those features would be anyway. And I think it's largely a...

a problem of possibility because we were like, well, it has an M4 in it. It has 16 gigs of Ram and a two terabyte hard drive. Right. So does my MacBook air. Why can't they do the same things? And I'm like, because they're different products. Like they, they, they're, there's a lot of things different about them. And the operating system is probably the main one that,

Could conceivably Apple just make an iPad that runs Mac OS? Maybe, but like it wouldn't be as good at running Mac OS. Like there's just no scenario and Apple's not going to make two versions of Mac OS and the version that would run on an iPad would not be as good on your Mac. And if you want to know how Mac OS would be on an iPad, download the screens app, VNC into a Mac that you already own and try to control that. It's not, it's not easy nor good. So yeah,

We'll see. I mean, Apple, they add stuff every year. I feel like last year that what they added was like math and the calculator app. So we'll see. We'll see what they do this year. So adding stuff there is doing a lot of work in that sentence because they added, you're right. They added math and they added a calculator app and you can do math. That's right. In the calculator app. Do you, do you use your, what do you use your iPad for? Well, I added a podcast every week. So fair, right. That's a

big one. I use it for a lot of reading and research when I get what I'll often be doing during the day is collecting a bunch of like research, clipping it and that kind of stuff. But it's a lot easier for me to sit down and read that on the iPad because for a lot of reasons, one, I can sit in a comfy chair, just read. I use it when I travel for like YouTube videos.

whatever Disney plus the Apple TV. That's where I binge watched most of severance and, uh, shrinking. No, not shrinking. Cause that the studio, sorry, um, is, is on there. And that weird show I watched hijacked that was really good. But I, it was, I enjoyed it. Uh, the only, not to sidetrack too much. My only beef with that show is the whole premise is he's this insanely amazing corporate negotiator. Yeah.

And he does almost no negotiating in this entire show. He does some talking. I only made it halfway through the season. So in my mind, it's good. I liked it. It was super entertaining. One of those shows that like, it's just better not to think about that stuff. Just enjoy it. It's like one of the Ryan Reynolds movies on Netflix. It's just like, this is fun. Yeah, very true.

All right, well, we'll see. We're only a couple months away from Dubbed. Less than two months away. So we will see what they reveal. I want to touch on this. You've probably heard it talked about on other podcasts and written about, but the information report talking about the Apple intelligence failing and the Hey Dingus team and all of that.

There's a bunch of like pull quotes that you can get things like Apple's AI ML group was dubbed aimless internally by employees, which is not great. There was some like infighting about people on the AI ML team being able to take vacations or leave early or weird things like that. Craig Federighi hired AI ML employees to join his team, maybe because John Jan Jan Andrea's team was not doing well.

Overall, just like reading this stuff, hearing people talk about it, it sounded like there was just a major dysfunction when it comes to the hey, dingus and Apple intelligence teams and dysfunction like just corporate structure leadership dysfunction. And if you've ever worked a corporate job, you like work in a big company, you know probably exactly what this is like, where you have like infighting between teams, you have people saying no from one manager. And so they'll go around to try and get a yes from a different manager and

It sounds like a lot of that happened in this team. And maybe that was some of leadership failings from John Gianandrea. Maybe it was something else, but that's why they're restructuring the whole thing. And little, I wouldn't say fascinating, but, you know, the peek behind the curtain about maybe why Apple intelligence has not gone up. And one of the key pieces of information that was fascinating during the dub dub announcement last year for Apple intelligence was

When they showed the example of Apple intelligence in a message conversation, pulling the flight from the mother, finding out where they're going to lunch and getting directions and doing all of that. So the semantic index stuff, there were people on the Hey Dingus team that were shocked that they showed that in the event, either because it was not ready, even close to being ready, or it was something that they didn't even know was being worked on.

And so that, again, is just kind of a failing of communication within the organization and leadership and all that kind of stuff. So that was telling. And, you know, it's going to be a while now because I forget his name, but the Apple Vision Pro guy has come over. You remember his name? Mike Rockwell. Mike Rockwell. Mike Rockwell. He's now going to be in charge of Apple Intelligence. But again, it's going to take a while. Like, I don't even know if they can announce stuff at DubDub. I mean, maybe they'll announce stuff even if it's not even close to being ready or worked on. Anyway.

Anyway, it's interesting. Look, I'll link the Mac rumors article where they have some pull quotes. The information article is behind a paywall, but you can read the whole thing there. I think the real issue here, I'm sure there was some like corporate dysfunction or drama or whatever. That's just the way it works. Like you can't have a company the size of Apple without having some of that kind of whatever, especially at that level. And for, but I think what happened here is that when John Gianandrea was hired away from Google, uh,

He's sort of a superstar in his field. But there was no chat GPT really at the time. And he was initially brought in, I believe, to improve search in Siri.

Right? Because when he was hired, the thought was like, oh, is Apple going to build a search engine to compete with Google? Oh, that is true. I remember that. No, $20 billion. We're good. You guys can be the search engine. It's cool. We don't want to compete. We'll just take him. Can we just have him? Right. Have him come over. And the stuff that he was working on was not...

generative AI chatbots. That was not the thing that he was hired to do. And so all of the people he hired, all of the stuff that went into that when he was brought into Apple was for one particular purpose. And then chat GPT happened and like open AI dropped a chat GPT nuclear bomb in the middle of like all of the tech industry.

Right. And so the, the skills and leadership and whatever that he had was all of a sudden it's like, now we have to make Siri compete with this. We have to have Apple intelligence. We have to do all this stuff. That's a very different thing. Cause what you're essentially asking is fix a product and make a new product. And instead of,

figure out like you've, you've seen his team release all of these white papers, right? All of this kind of stuff. They are the team to my understanding that kind of came up with the private cloud compute thing. It's like this idea of hierarchy where certain tasks can be handled on device. Other tasks require going to the private cloud compute. And then beyond that stuff goes to chat, TPT or whatever, like that whole stuff, like it,

as far as I understand, like that's, they came up with that model. And I think that that makes sense because a device like an iPhone is always going to be limited by memory and in that kind of capacity stuff. So it's not like they were just morons wandering around apple park, not knowing like where the exits were. It's just that they were, that team was built to do a different thing. And this is what happens. I think in companies, it's sort of this sunk cost fallacy. They were moving in this direction and,

When ChatGPT came out, no one knew if this was like the new direction or just a flash in the pan. Like, was this just a cool thing that happened for a very short amount of time? Turns out, no. Turns out it's a bigger deal than anyone thought. There's hundreds of billions of dollars just flying around everywhere to like try to build out, you know, buy NVIDIA GPUs and build out, you know, server farms and do all this kind of stuff. And the team that was...

to do one thing was not capable of doing the other thing. And if there was any leadership dysfunction, it was waiting too long to recognize that, no, we need to make a change to do this because you just look at like, you guys were tasked to do one thing. The, the, the Dingus team was doing a different, like they were built to do a different thing, right? That team in, in, and it was never very good at the thing it was built to do, but it was definitely not designed to do this. But you look at it and you're like, well, okay, so,

We're going to have to start from scratch. In the meantime, let's leave the thing alone and like, well, let's just add a couple of features to it. We'll make an interface with Ted GPT. We'll add a cool new animation. We'll like make these quality of life improvements. If you want to call them that, uh,

And then eventually we'll get to a point where we can like hot swap one for the other. But you can't break all of people's shortcuts and routines and all these. It is a very complicated problem. And I just think that if there was any dysfunction, it was not recognizing that the group of people that you handed it to were incredibly capable and incredibly talented at thing A and we need them to do something completely different.

It would be like asking John Ternus to, to be like redesign iOS for iOS 19, like incredible engineer, not his sweet spot. Or like Johnny Cerugie to redesign iPadOS. Right. We want him making the chips. I mean, it'd be a sweet demo, but,

but i just feel like you know if you don't you don't have luke on my history who i guess is not actually the cfo anymore but you don't have him coming in and like wiring up chips either like what that was the other thing in the information article it talked about how tim cook seems to be conflict averse like don't bring him conflicts and i think you know back to we were talking about apple ads and maybe this team like

Yeah, you want your high-level leaders, your senior vice presidents, to be able to handle conflicts and diffuse them themselves. But when something is going so poorly, there likely does need to be a moment where the leader, the CEO, steps in and actually changes things. And maybe that just needed to happen earlier rather than later. And Tim Cook, I still think,

I mean, he is the COO. He's the CEO, but he's a COO. You know what I mean? Like his bread and butter, like his competence, his expertise is that operating revenue profit, like all of that. And so how could it maybe been handled different by a different leader that was more like in the people kind of thing rather than in the numbers kind of thing. But,

Yeah. I mean, in Tim Cook, he's like pretty, you say he's conflict averse. If you just remember the last major conflict, it was when he fired Scott Forstall. Like, so he probably has some PTSD from, he would prefer to not be fostering those types of competitive rivalries.

And just like you guys, you guys are like, we're paying you millions of dollars a year. You should be able to work this stuff out. I'm sure he's savage in like a negotiation though. I'm sure he's had lots of negotiations with like factories and fabs and all that stuff. Like he's probably a monster there.

Sure. That's conflict of a sort. But he doesn't want personality conflicts where two of his leaders are coming to him and they're like, we don't agree. We can't get along. We think each other is at fault and you figure it out. He's like, I got too much to do. He's in his office wearing his Apple Vision Pro for that vanity. Listen, I'm too busy approving Apple News Plus ads in my Vision Pro. Yeah.

I have real things to do. Listen, I don't have time for this. I have to use every single one of our products every day. Every day. The Apple Watch SE, the Apple Watch Series 10, the Ultra 2, the MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro, the iMac, the Mac Mini, every single one. Imagine this is all lined up along a wall. If you don't know the context is in some interview, Tim Cook was like, I use every Apple product every day.

And so it's like just along the wall, he's got the base model iPad. He's got the iPad mini, the iPad air. What do you think he uses the Mac pro for? Honestly? Oh, it's good. Maybe he just like has a, he has one final cut project just sitting there. And every day he just says, render. I just figured maybe it was like how they air conditioned his room because it's the only, basically the only one with a real fan in it anymore. Yeah.

Or maybe heats, maybe heats. Maybe they have that thing just chomping away at something. Cranking away at AI. They're doing Apple intelligence on that thing. That's here's the, this is the rumor. Apple intelligence is running on a single Mac pro in Tim Cook's office. That's why. That's definitely what it is. That's definitely what it is. Okay. Let's jam through a couple of things and get to our personal tech. There was a bunch of a tariff back and forth last week and how it has now ended up is that smartphones and computers are now exempt from the latest tariffs. And so, uh,

iPhone prices looks like they will go up or Mac prices for now. Except for the Trump says that they're coming. They might be, they might still be just going into a different bucket. He's like, they're definitely coming. Nobody's getting away from this. Yes. The court customs and border protection issued a list of products that are exempt from the, uh, retaliatory reciprocal tariffs, but they're coming. We've, they've actually opened an investigation now into semiconductors. And not only do they plan to tariff,

semiconductors but all the downstream products so the bottom line is we still have no friggin idea what's gonna happen that's the news and i just i just need to for a second talk about the cnn page because now that i'm taking a closer look at it yeah i'll link this page but i don't know if this is going to change so you can go over to youtube.com slash head primary tech show go to this time this chapter and see i just need to read some of the words on this page

Because in the top middle, there's a fear and greed index. I don't ever spend time on CNN business, but apparently it's a contrast between what is driving the market right now. Right. Greed, which is we see an opportunity and a bunch of people are trying to pounce on the opportunity and fear, which is we're selling everything because we don't know what's going to happen. So is greed the positive side of this?

speedometer um greed means the numbers go up oh okay okay fear usually means the numbers are going down well right now we're at a 19 apparently and which is extreme fear extreme fear is driving the u.s market so that's right there at the top of cnn business by the way extreme fear probably not good for the market probably not good for the market which right to the left of that it's all red dow jones s&p and nasdaq is all down but then there's start the day here this is a banner at the top of the cnn page and it says trump

Trump administration ramps up attacks on Harvard. Island wide blackout hits Puerto Rico. Colossal squid captured on video. Like just look, are those things related? Like did the squid take out all of the power in Puerto Rico? That's exactly what I was. Trump blamed Harvard for it. Oh,

I was just glancing around this page. I was like blackout in Puerto Rico, colossal squid. What? And then right below that Taco Bell is bringing back a wildly popular. They're going to have squid tacos. Oh, that's the next thing I was going to say is like, and then under that Taco Bell bringing back a menu, what is happening on the CNN page? This is messing my, I can't even look at this anymore. Here's the thing.

The feeling you have right now is the way that everyone who has stuff on a boat from China feels right now. They have no idea what's going to happen. I was listening to the, I think it was the pivot podcast where Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway were talking about how like there are literally people who like sell furniture, have boats full of stuff. This, you know, let's say you have a hundred million dollars worth of stuff sitting on a boat somewhere.

You've paid for the stuff, but now you got to come up with $145 million to write a check to the US government just to get your stuff off of the boat. Right. It is just, it's insane. I know there's been like cars just sitting at ports so they don't have to import them yet. Trying to see what happens. Yeah, they're waiting to see if they can like, yeah, will this change? Yeah. Maybe this giant squid that caused an island wide blackout will save us all. Yeah.

If what you mean is take out the power of the entire country and reset, maybe. I don't know. Have we tried turning it off and back on? We should just unplug it and plug it back in and reboot it. That is CNN. I don't know what you're doing. Anyway, we need to mention the FTC and Meta. There's an antitrust lawsuit happening this week. Mark Zuckerberg is testifying. There's a bunch of news that came out of it. One is there was...

some redacted unlimited access to the Washington Post one of them I want to talk about this in our bonus episode because I need to know I need I think I need to finally start paying for some of these news websites and I need to know which I need to pay for so anyway I'm gonna link a bunch of paywalled stuff but then there's a verge article which may or may not be paywalled I don't know depending on your verge reading but there's been there were like slides or whatever that were supposed to be redacted

And if you didn't know, like if you just open a PDF and like preview on your Mac and just add some shapes on top of stuff, that's not actually redacting a document. And the content below those things is still available and can be seen. And so Meta, one of the biggest companies in the world, apparently doesn't know how to redact stuff.

Or do they? Well, that's the other thing. This could have been intentional. Hard to say. But this was one of the slides that actually is quoting one of Apple's director of product marketing, Ronak Shah, at least at the time of this data was taken. But this is talking about use case of messaging apps and iMessage and the data that's supposed to be redacted. There's actually a little graph and it shows like the most used messaging apps, I believe on iPhone.

Or at least like the percentage of devices. Yeah. Yeah. I think it was, I mean, it must be because messages is not on anything else. Right. So messages is like 88% of devices are being like used on devices in the, and I just found the next ones now to be interesting. So messages, 88% Instagram is second at 48% Facebook messenger under that WhatsApp under that and then Snapchat. So that's three meta messaging apps that are in the top five.

right under messages so by the way pro tip the way you should do this is you open the thing in preview you add your shapes and then you take a screenshot of that that's how you do it at least that's how you read that that's how you do it thank you you're welcome meta let me just help you out here there you go i will link to this is the article if you want to read kind of more alex heath put together kind of like the most interesting things that mark zuckerberg has said

During this court case, he's been there all week listening to it. There's a very funny picture of Mark Zuckerberg with sunglasses in the back of a car. You can go to the article just for that. But when asked about WhatsApp and Instagram and acquiring them, and one of Zuckerberg's reasons for acquiring WhatsApp was because he was worried about Apple and Google, specifically the app stores, quote unquote, messing with us. And so they thought it would be like a hedge against that. And...

this thing about acquiring Instagram during his testimony, Zuckerberg said he wasn't worried about Instagram competing with Facebook until it reached 1 billion users years later after he bought it, which it's like you bought it because it was clearly a competitor. But anyway, he's, he's trying to make it seem like, no, no, no. I just, you know, it wasn't a competitor. I just wanted to buy it. Well,

Well, let's okay. Here's what I want to say about this. I'll try to keep it very brief one and I'm gonna say something political Stephen. I'm sorry. Okay, this case is stupid also meta equally stupid like this is one of those things where no one looks good. I mean clearly like the best part of the reporting is how

It's just obvious that Mark Zuckerberg donated a million dollars to the inauguration and settled the case with the president for $25 million because he was hoping that Trump would overrule the FTC and agree to settle this case for $450 million. And the FTC is asking for like $30 billion. Those numbers are very far apart. And he's like bum-fuzzled into how this plan did not work for him. And it's like...

But I can understand why he's a little bit confused because it does sometimes seem as though like the way to get a deal for this kind of thing is to just like know the right people. And that honestly is true regardless of who's president. Like that's not even just a current administration thing. But this case is like the FTC approved Facebook buying Instagram and buying WhatsApp. And now they want to unwind it. So I feel like the whole thing is like nobody looks good.

nobody's going to come out a winner. I did hear an interesting point, which is that typically speaking, breakups like this are very uncommon because that's what they're asking for. They're asking for them to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp or at least Instagram. They're very uncommon, but when they do happen,

the, like the, the bells, the AT&T breakup, whatever, all of the companies involved are way better off now. And they increase the, the estimated shareholder value of Instagram alone is like $200 billion. You spin that off to its own company and it's an instant competitor to Tik TOK, to Facebook, to snap, to all these things. And it would be just fine. And shareholders would now have shares in meta and Instagram and be much richer and consumers would have more choice and

I don't think the government should be allowed to break up companies that they approved the mergers of, but also if they did, I like everyone would be like, fine. It's like, so it's very complicated. The only people who, the only people who wouldn't be fine are advertisers. So that's a lot of small businesses. So I don't want to like, I don't want to overlook that who are able to leverage the advantage of the ad network going into the different places. The counter argument to that is the ads might be less expensive because

because now you have a more competitive ad market. So it's, it's, it is very complicated. I think the case is dumb. I also think Mark Zuckerberg looks really bad. Okay. Thank you for that. Is that fair? Yeah, that's good. Is it political? If you're like, everybody's dumb, I don't know. You tell us, uh, leave us a five-star rating review and tell us if it is saying everybody's dumb. Is that too political?

I'm going to link your article too, Jason, before we get to our primary or personal take, which is Zoom. Zoom had an outage. Spotify also had an outage last week. But yeah, I don't use Zoom. Let me say this clearly. I use Riverside for all of my meeting needs.

Yeah, all of your meetings are on Riverside because you work for Riverside. That's exactly right. Full disclosure. I personally pay for this account, though, to record primary technology. Just wanted to be clear about that. Just saying. But yeah, Zoom had an outage, which is like what half of remote work runs on. Yeah, and I think what was kind of bananas about it is that apparently it was because of some domain name misconfiguration. The Zoom.us domain name was like...

I don't know. There's something complicated. It had to do with GoDaddy and some other company. They had a misconfiguration. That's the first mistake. Can I just say, I bought a few domains this past week. As you do, don't buy domains from GoDaddy. Hover's a good place. Hover.com. They've never sponsored me for anything, but I own 1,000 domains from Hover.com.

Well, the irony is that it doesn't matter. They could sponsor every single episode and you'd still be in the red with them probably. Probably. It doesn't even matter. .fm domains are expensive. $100 a year. Yeah.

But it was just this, they like, it was the stupidest thing and it, but it took out like everyone's zoom because you could, if you can't resolve the domain zoom.us, you can't, you can't resolve any zoom link. That was the genius of zoom was just, you could click on these links and you could just open it and that kind of thing. And so, but I, I wrote about it because I thought like you didn't even, you, you minimize that this was just a minor technical glitch. Um,

But if you were somebody who was hoping to have a job interview on a Zoom call or meeting with a potential new client as a salesperson and you couldn't have that meeting and you missed out, the impact is not negligible. It's like that is the worst case scenario for you. Yeah. Interview especially. That'd be terrible. Yeah. So Zoom. Listen, that's why everybody should use Riverside. But no, I was going to say WebEx. And I was like, no, I need to say Riverside.

contract job okay no no they don't actually sponsor this podcast but i don't we would prefer steven not lose his job sure that's good uh personal tech a few things one notion mail is out there and you can try it for free i have not tried notion mail but uh you did you've been trying yeah i tried it it's fine it's good i mean like the design is nice uh it's very notiony very notion only works with gmail accounts

That's not surprising because Notion Calendar also only works with... But Notion is quietly building up a competitor to everything. That's true. They're competing with Google Workspace. They're competing with Microsoft 365. They're competing with...

I don't know, like as a CRM next, we'll see what comes next. I mean, product management. I mean, it's product management. Sure, Asana. You can publish websites with it. So they are competing with all those things. So they are just quietly competing with basically everybody. So it is cool. I can't say this for sure, but I do think that you can only add

Like if you have in whatever you use to create your notion account, I think that's the only email address you can attach to it. I couldn't figure that out, but I mean the interface of it is nice. Like I like it. It's, it doesn't, I was able to add two inboxes. I don't believe there's any unified inbox. I'm looking at it right now. Sorry. That's why I'm doing this. So you see them separately, but that is, that's becoming more common. Like superhuman does it that way. I think there are,

benefits of

you know, separate inboxes because if you have a personal one and a work one, you can sort of focus what you're doing and that kind of thing. But it's nice. If you like this design language that notion uses, you'll like this. So I do like their design language. You can get the Mac app. Now the iOS app is coming soon. And I did see this one thing that made me like, which is that you can basically compose an email like you do in notion doing like forward slash and then different blocks and stuff. Yeah. That's kind of sweet. Oh,

honestly yeah that's pretty cool so anyway i i don't have a gmail account uh to try with it because i use fast mail but uh you don't even have a personal gmail account i do but i don't use it for email

I don't ever check the email. I mean, maybe you should. No, no, no, no. Okay. It's too far gone. It's too far gone. Like it's, it's gone away. Fat fast mail. I just renewed my fast mail subscription, not a sponsor, but I use fast mail. I wanted to talk about two. All right. Two quick things. I got my Instagram back. Uh, it finally let me change my birth date. I don't think anybody from meta actually helped me. I think just the statute of limitations passed and I was able to change my birthday again. So I have my Instagram account back. It's public. That's cool.

Uh, but also chat GPT. We talked about it earlier, but I've been talking to more and more people that just use chat GPT. And when I met a friend, I was a friend of the show, Fernando Silva, he's a YouTube creator at nine to five Mac. I actually met him for the first time in real life. We went to first watch Jason, because I guess that's the only place I meet internet friends. You cheater. I don't know where else to go. I was like, Oh, first watch. That's the only thing. Uh, but, uh,

He would tell me how he uses ChatGPT and it is wild. Like he gave me one example. I hope it's okay that I share, but he was trying to figure out like a pool heater. Like he was staying somewhere and there was like a pool heater equipment and he didn't know how to use it. So he pulls up ChatGPT, starts the camera and literally like,

asks ChatGPT how to turn on a pool heater and it walks him through it. It just tells him how to do it. That's just wild to me. Amazing. And there was another guy, I introduced him to ChatGPT months ago and I figured, you know, I'll probably never use it. And I talked to him last night. He's like, I use ChatGPT all the time, multiple times a day. I pay for the plus version. I use it for this, this and that. And it's just impressive to me

how quickly people can find value in very different use cases, but it just provides value in so many different areas. And as soon as someone finds a use case or has shown something that is impressive, like it catches on so quickly. And again, that's probably why it became the fastest growing product in history. So Stephen, I, the other day, um,

So on a Tesla, you can turn on sentry mode, which keeps the cameras on when you're not in the car. So it's like a security feature. You have all these cameras on the outside of the car and I keep trying to, when, when you turn on sentry mode on the screen, if someone approaches, it shows this giant pulsing red. It's actually terrifying. Uh,

I was going to... Have you seen this thing? Seen this eye? I know. I don't know if I've seen the eye. I was just looking really quickly to see. I can share this photo because there's... I won't dox myself. Oh, you mean on the screen? Yeah, on the screen. Have you ever seen what it looks like? I'm looking at images. I'll share these images now. There's a bunch of like... It's like half. It's actually...

It's actually terrifying. It's the 2001 Space Odyssey. It's terrifying. So I got into the car the other day and Sentry Mode was very much not on, but my wife had turned it on previously. So I walked in, I got in the car and it wouldn't go away. Like it just was sitting there and I'm like, what is happening to my car right now? So I pointed my camera at it and I literally just asked Chad GPT, what is this?

And it says this symbol in question is a circle icon with a vivid orange ring. This is the glowing eye indication that Tesla sentry mode is turned on. I was like,

That's exactly what it is. And then it says it tests the... It was a direct homage to HAL 9000, right? Whatever, whatever. And I was like, okay, how do I make it go away? And it's like the easiest way is just to do the reset, which you hold down the two buttons, the scroll wheels. You just hold them both down at the same time on your steering wheel for like 10 seconds and it just reboots the computer in the car and it went away. But yes, Chai TPT is so good at that sort of thing that you can just point it at stuff and be... And I didn't even have to say like...

what is the symbol what is the red thing like what i just literally pointed it at the screen and i said what is this and it it took care of for me yeah i need to i need to try more often in more places because i have a bunch of view cases like for my video and stuff in this podcast but yeah in real life situation i'll try more steven i use chad gpt more often than i use the vision pro which is that's saying something but but i use the vision pro every day i use the chad gpt

30 times a day. Yeah, that's wild. It's crazy. Anyway, lastly, find my, you had to find my story. I just want to say real quick. I dropped my AirPods pro two the other day in my bedroom, but they went flying as they do. You know, they just scatter in all directions. The actual pods, what I could see on the floor. I got that. The other one I could not find, but apparently if you go into the, find my app, I think this is just AirPods pro.

but you can actually just see individual buds if they're out of the case. And it will say, out of case, here's the bud. And you can have it make a sound, just the individual bud, which is cool. And you can do the proximity find my. It doesn't show you the arrow on screen, but it does show you just like the circle and how many feet away it is. And you can do that with just the individual buds or the AirPods Pro case. And I found the other bud. And I just want to say, find my. When it comes...

you know it's not something you use a lot or every day but when you need it it works it's good i i think it's fair to say that low-key find my is one of apple's best features that's ever released i think that when you judge it by the criteria of the it just works philosophy of like this thing just improves my life in such a simple way and it does it in such an intuitive way that i don't have to think about it now there's one drawback to find mine which is my problem that i had this morning which was

My office is, our listeners probably know, is a shed in our backyard. I'm sitting in a shed. So the house is like... It's a nice shed. Don't feel bad for Jason if you've never seen the video. I mean, you can see it. It's a very nice shed. It's a very nice shed. It's only a nice shed because I spent a lot of time and effort and money making it a nice shed. Yes, but...

It's not just like where the lawnmower is sitting over here and there's a weed whacker. You can't see any of that stuff. It's just right here. Five gallon buckets. That's not it at all. But I mean, it teeded. Anyway. But I couldn't find my keys. Right. So I locked this shed because there's a lot of stuff in here. I don't necessarily want people to come in and take. And I couldn't find my keys. And I was like, oh, yeah, there's an air tag on my key chain. Of course. So I opened the Find My app. And the only thing I don't love about Find My, and I understand why this is the case, is

the air tags do not update in the, in the background, right? They're not just constantly updating their location. So I opened the find my app and it tells me that my keys are in the car that I drove last night, but that my wife has already left the house with to,

to go to work and so there's about a 30 second period of time before they updated that i'm like oh my gosh i'm gonna have like i have to record a podcast in like 11 minutes i'm gonna have to drive to my wife's work i'm gonna have to get in the second set of keys to her car i'm going to get it and then all of a sudden it updated and it's like they're here at home and i was able to because it's an air tag i was able to do the directional thing and find them and i'm like great and then steven reminded me i actually have a second set of keys to my house

Did he show you the arrow on screen though? And appointed you for air tags. Yeah. Yeah. For the one, the one downside of the AirPods thing, by the way, is if your AirPods fall out into a laundry basket, uh,

That little beeping is not going to help. No, it becomes very difficult. They spend a lot of time wondering where, where is it? I just wish the arrow thing worked on more things like MacBook airs and pros vision pro even iPad, like put the arrow on screen for all of that. Not just like, it's about 20 feet away. Like point. How often do you lose your MacBook pro? I mean, never.

But that's the thing. The time you do, you would like to show you an arrow on screen. Okay, so the reason for the arrow is you might have lost it under a couch or in a couch cushion or in your cope. This happens to me, and it's actually really confusing because the coat closet in our hallway and our walk-in closet for the primary bedroom are back to back. There's a wall between them, right? But they're back to back. So the number of times that I'm looking for something...

And it's pointing me and I have to decide which side of the wall is it on because it's like a, it's about a hundred foot, not a hundred foot. It's like a 25 foot walk around that way, but it's just pointing right there. And I'm like, is it in a coat pocket or is it in my sweatshirt? And what is it? But yeah, the, but the, the reason for it is the, the, if it was your Mac, the point is get you in the right room and hopefully your eyeballs will just do the rest of the work. Or if it's an air pod, you need a little extra help or an air tag. But even, even like on the grand, like,

find my network deal you know what i mean it would be nice like there's no point to point directions to my wife's office to tell me like this is how you get that you can do that actually you can just be like oh yeah take me to that location that is anyway find my when it works it's great and it does work reliably most almost all the time yeah it's just just be aware there is a slight lag in the updating of air tags yeah that's right all right for our bonus episode this week i'm gonna ask jason about aliens

but I'm also going to ask him what news I should subscribe to.

I feel like those two things are more correlated than they should be. I think we need to get you some better news sources, Stephen. They are very connected as far as that. So that's going to be our bonus episode. We're going to record that now. If you would like to hear it, you can go to join.primarytech.fm, support the show. You get bonus episode every week, an ad-free version of the show, and there's going to be some future benefits, which we would love to hear from you. And so there's going to be a link in the show notes to take a poll and comment on it.

and ask what kind of benefits would you like to see from the membership. So those who pay already, these would be additional benefits. And for those who don't already subscribe, you would get all of this stuff. So links to all of that in the show notes, join.primarytech.fm to get the bonus episodes. And you can also watch the show on YouTube, youtube.com slash at primary tech show. You can also follow me and Jason on all the social networks, even chat GPT when that becomes an actual social network. Maybe we'll see. We'll put links to all that in the show notes. But yeah,

thanks for listening thank you for watching thank you for all those who support the show catch you next time