TikTok: There and Back Again, iOS 18.3 Apple Intelligence by Default, Galaxy S25 Edge
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Every time I see y'all, I got the silk shirts on, jewelry, you know, looking real Miami. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. Big week. TikTok was banned for 16 hours and then it came back. Lots of news between them and what Trump is doing with executive orders. Plus, iOS 18.3 will be coming out soon. I put the release candidate on my phone because visual intelligence got a big upgrade.

but Apple intelligence is going to be hoisted on a bunch of people. Samsung unpacked with their Galaxy S25. Netflix is raising prices again and more. This episode is brought to you by HelloFresh and you, the members who support us directly.

I'm one of your hosts, Steven Robles. And joining me is my friend, Jason Aten, who is literally freezing right now. Jason, what was the temperature yesterday as we're recording? Well, I mean, I'm, whoa, I sound really bad, but I'm not freezing right now. It was, it was super freezing. I mean, it's 20, it's like 19 to 20 degrees today, but that is 35 degrees warmer than it was yesterday. Um,

And people don't think about like, so it was like negative 15 or so yesterday. And people think the difference between, you know, 20 degrees Fahrenheit versus negative 15 degrees Fahrenheit. They're both cold, right? But that is the difference between 45 degrees and 80 degrees. Think about that for a minute. Like that, that temperature difference is like,

Pretty substantial, and that's the difference between yesterday. It was so cold in here, I couldn't work in my office yesterday because the floor is not insulated well enough that it was like I was sitting on an ice rink. Oh my, that is crazy. I have not experienced those temperatures in a while. I'm down in Miami, which is why I'm in a different recording environment. It was cold here too, but like 50. Not cold.

Not in the negatives. Now, I think there's a 0% chance you're going to get the quote, but I had to pull a quote about Miami because that's where I am right now. And do you have any idea where that came from? I have no idea where it came from because I'm almost 100% sure that it did not come from a movie I've ever seen. Right, right. But if I had to guess, it feels...

Like it's got to be something like Fast and the Furious-ish or something like that. Like, I don't know. I have no idea. Jason, I don't know how you did that. That quote is from Too Fast, Too Furious.

Definitely a movie I've never seen, just to be honest. That is amazing. I was hoping you were going to say Fast and Furious. Wow. There you go. You did it. I'm in Miami, by the way, because I got a special invite to tour their new Apple store here in Miami World Center. And so I have a video up on my channel and I'm going to talk about it in the bonus episode because there's like behind the scenes that I want to talk about. And, you know, I don't know how many behind the scenes is like okay to talk about. So anyway.

There's a video up on my channel. I got to tour it. It's a beautiful new store. There's literally a garden on the roof, which is wild. And I learned a new word. Jason, tell me if you ever heard the word biophilic.

Have you ever heard that word? No. I mean, I heard you say it on the video and that's it. I've never heard it before. I've never heard that word before. Biophilic with P-H-I-L-I-C apparently, but it means like architecture that's designed with being like harmony with environment and buildings and stuff. So yeah, biophilic. It's a biophilic building. It's

So there you go. That's going to be our new tagline, a biophilic podcast. That is not, that is not a homophone. Is that what the, was that when you say like a word that sounds like what it means that I don't even know what that word sounds like. It sounds like it's like probiotic. It's like a thing you would eat to try to ward off cancer or something. It doesn't sound like probiotic. You got the homonyms, the hit, the hot, nevermind. All right. Anyway, we got one five-star review shout out Bluey HK from the UK better

Battery percentage on points to Jason. Blue dots on, though, point to me. Pencil facing down, which I don't know if BlueyHK... The only one that matters. I think that means your orientation. But you can hold an iPad in various orientations, I'm just saying. So anyway, we have to talk about TikTok. It's been a wild rollercoaster of a week for a variety of reasons. But last Saturday, it was Saturday night, the TikTok ban was supposed to go into effect Sunday, January 19th.

And come Saturday night, it was like 1030. I was literally watching TikToks with my family because I save funny ones to show the family. And pretty soon, one time I went to open it and Saturday night, boom. So sorry, TikTok isn't available right now. And this message popped up on everyone's devices here in the US if they tried to open TikTok Saturday evening. Now,

It was interesting. Part of this message was, we are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned. Now, an important point, I think, this message. The ban was supposed to go in the 19th.

Apple and Google removed it from their app stores, which it is still not there. You can't download TikTok if you've never downloaded it before, or if you upgrade your iPhone, you can't download TikTok right now. It's not in the Apple Store, App Store, or Google Play Store.

But this part was clearly done by TikTok themselves. I mean, that's fair to say. Like shutting down the app for those in the U.S. Saturday night, that was not some U.S. government imposition. That was TikTok basically shutting it down. Yeah, and they were doing it just to make people mad. Literally the only reason for them to do it at that point because the law had not gone into effect and nobody had shut off any of their services at that point. Right, and we had talked about the possibility of

Well, once it goes into effect, it might still be that the app functions. It just might be like an unupdated app, like on an old iPad or iPhone. It just would slowly stop working over time. But that wasn't the case. TikTok preemptively, which they said, we talked about last week, they were going to take it down if the ban wasn't delayed by the Supreme Court. So then Sunday, like 16 hours later, I believe, Sunday afternoon, everyone says TikTok is back. And there's a message here.

Thanks for your patience. As a result of President Trump's efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S. You continue to create, share, and discover all the things you love on TikTok. Two things are interesting here. Number one, this happened on Sunday, January 19th. Trump was not president yet. He got inaugurated January 20th. So TikTok's saying President Trump did something even though he's not president yet. That is a very curious message to see on TikTok. And come Monday...

Once Trump was inaugurated, he did sign, I think the total was 18,000 executive orders. That's not the actual number, but he signed a lot of executive orders. It's close to that. It's close to that. But one of the things that he signed was Trump, one of his executive orders was delaying the enforcement of the ban, which the language gets really dicey when you see some of these headlines or even hearing how Trump might talk about this.

He did not reverse the ban or change the law. The executive order delayed enforcement of the ban for 75 days. And so there's 75 days where this issue will be revisited, or it could be revisited earlier, and we'll have to see what may or may not change then. But right now, TikTok, if you had it on your phone, you can use it like normal. CapCut, which took longer to come back, you can use CapCut again.

But, and that was, that was interesting. I had a lot of people reach out and not realizing CapCut was TikTok like that. CapCut was made by TikTok is owned by the same company. And people were like, I had projects I was editing. I had like, how do I get these back? And I'm like, I'm sorry, you can't, you just have to wait, I guess, to see what happens. But there's that. And I don't want to hear, I want to hear your, your thoughts in a second, because this is just wild.

Apple has an article on their website, a support article, talking about the availability of TikTok and apps by ByteDance, which also included Marvel Snap. Apparently, I had no idea. So that was all. Yeah, they were the publisher. Yeah, one of their companies was the publisher of Marvel Snap. Right, exactly. But notably, again, even now, we're almost a week later, Apple is not going to reinstate these apps into the App Store. So you're not going to be able to download them.

And again, they make it clear, like in this article, and I'll put all the links to these in the show notes, it's that it is unknown what will happen law-wise, what will change or go backwards or whatever. So Apple's just like, we're not putting them in the App Store until we find out what's going on. So...

That's all that happened. I find this to be such a bizarre timeline. Those messages that the TikTok app showed users, I mean, just so strange. Obviously, Trump must have spoken to ByteDance or the CEO or something. I don't know, Jason. Tell me, what are you thinking?

Well, I mean, the CEO of TikTok was at the inauguration the next day, I guess. So maybe they were making plans and they just sort of had this. This is this is weird. I just want to say we were right that it was going to the ban was going to stay into effect. That was that was we were right about that. Listen, this whole thing is just a circus. But anyone who's surprised the Supreme Court upheld the law that Congress passed, that

It's just not paying close enough attention because, I mean, you can disagree and at least half of the people in this country disagree with most of the things that the Supreme Court does, one way or the other, right? That's fair. You can disagree with them. They do actually take their job pretty seriously and they do not care about who's coming to the inauguration. So this kind of thing, that was the least surprising part of the whole thing is that the Supreme Court upheld the law. Trump's executive order, weird, right?

It's, you know, in the law, there is a provision that if a sale is in progress, that the president can delay this for 90 days. But that is not what President Trump triggered. President Trump just signed an executive order telling the Justice Department don't enforce the law against any of the entities. By the way, those entities are Apple, Google, Oracle, Acme, I think is the CDN. Like that's who we're talking about here. We're not, it's not TikTok or ByteDance. Like that's not.

they're not, they're not subject to any penalties because they just exist. And it's the other organization, you know, other companies that could be penalized under this. But you notice importantly, Oracle clearly is serving up tick tock again. Right? So they're, they're like, cool, we'll just take Trump's word for it. Who's not,

Apple and Google, they're not playing games. They're not like your magic words with a pen make me feel better about this whole situation. They're like, no, there's a law and the fines are huge for them if they were to not comply with it. And the only way to get around this at some point is to change this law completely.

And I don't think even as favorable as the House of Representatives is going to be to Trump that they're going to overturn this law because they for real meant it when they said this is a national security threat. And I don't even think so. What's going to be the most interesting? This is not a politics podcast, but for one second, just entertain to yourself. It's going to be real interesting to watch. Does Trump really want to push this?

if the Republicans in the House of Representatives and in the Senate are not going to be behind him. Like that could be a really interesting dynamic that we've really never seen in a Trump presidency before. And because the Speaker of the House was like, this is a law. You can't just wave away a law just by like magic words or whatever. So the flip side of that is if Trump just decides they're not going to enforce this law,

Can anyone do anything about that? Right? Because theoretically, Congress would be the only people who could say, we passed a law, you have to enforce it. And just as I said that Congress doesn't seem inclined that they would want to change their mind about it, I don't know that that extends to the point where they would sue the executive branch to enforce it. So my point is,

It's still banned and we have no idea what's going to happen, Steven. I downloaded TikTok to my phone on Saturday just so that I could see all the messages because people were posting about them and it was so ridiculous. And I was actually somewhat glad that I did only because...

I, my high school age daughter was telling me about all day on, on Friday was like, people are just freaking out. Like this is going to get banned. What's going to happen after the Supreme court declined to overturn the thing. And she's like, people are going crazy about this. And my kids don't even have Tik TOK, at least that I know of.

But several of her friends deleted TikTok on Saturday when it went dark. And then they couldn't get it back. And now they're even more angry. Well, and yeah. I mean, if someone upgrades your phone, upgrade your iPad, if you have it installed there, you can't get it either.

This is so bizarre. I've heard and seen reports of like maybe TikTok will sell a percentage ownership to a US company or person. I've seen the name Elon Musk thrown around. I don't know the viability or possibility of that. Is that even a thing that could happen? I feel like

Correct me if I'm wrong, but when it comes to anti-competitive behavior, the DOJ here in the States already has an eye on Meta and Google wanting to break up Google. They've already sued Apple. That case is pending. I can't imagine they would allow TikTok, this massive social media network, to be sold even in part to another social media network owner.

Does that, is that even possible? I mean, I guess I don't, is anything possible? I, the law does not say that the U S government, if the U S government owns 50%, then it's cool. Um,

That's not what the law says. The law says that it has to be divested of, it cannot be owned by a Chinese company. So like, what does that really mean? I don't know. Like if the U S owns 50%, like again, the question is who can enforce this? The people who can enforce right now, the person in charge of the people who will enforce this is the guy who's like, let's make a deal. And that is an important thing to understand is that we talked about this before. This is just going to be very transactional. Like what kind of a deal can we make? And I think more than the principle, again, I don't say this,

in a good way or a bad way about president Trump more than the principle of the thing. Because remember all of this started because he wanted to ban it. Right. Whatever. Seven years, six years ago. Yeah. Whatever.

I think more than the principal, what he really wants is the deal. He enjoys being in the position where he holds other people's fate in his hands and he gets to use that in order to make a deal. So do I think... Listen, I think that the most likely outcome to this... The most likely outcome is that eventually TikTok just has to go away. Because I don't think China wants to give up control. I think that's the most likely outcome. I think a second close one...

is that an American tech company will buy TikTok or that a group of investors will buy it because they seem to be coming out of the woodwork to buy TikTok, right? They seem to be everywhere. They're just random guys walking on Washington D streets right now, like waving dollar bills at the White House. Like I want to buy TikTok. I want to buy TikTok. Ready to write a check. It is so bizarre. The last thing I'll say, last episode, you, I think eloquently talked about

the transactional nature of this administration i can i can knock it out of my head and as i saw those messages on tiktok saturday when it was went dark and talking about we're working with trump and then sunday when it came back saying thanks trump exclamation point it just yeah the the idea of transactional was it was strong it was strong with this one yep anyway

The last hilarious thing out of this was CapCut. Everybody freaking out because they couldn't access CapCut meta over here. Oh my gosh. Instagram announced, didn't release, this is not an app you could download, but they announced edits, an Instagram app. Hilarious. They're saying it's expected March 13th, which is my birthday, by the way. You can get me the edits app for my birthday. Thank you. I got you.

So, so funny. After last week's conversation, literally the two of us last week talking about Mark Zuckerberg calling out Apple for not being innovative and not inventing anything. Meta is over here literally command seeing, command V-ing an edits app to capitalize on CapCut's going dark.

This is just hilarious. Yeah. When you just think of Mark Zuckerberg's philosophy of resource allocation, it's literally look around at the biggest dumpster fire and figure out how quickly can we make a dumpster that's not on fire? Like that's literally like his entire strategy. But I will tell you like CapCut, it's killer feature. You can disagree with me if you want, but in my mind, it's killer feature is

It is better than any other app, including Final Cut, Premiere, whatever, at taking a horizontal video and making it a vertical video while following the subject. It does that better than just about anything. And so if edits, whatever Instagram's edits app will do that, then fine. I am platform agnostic. I don't really care. I just want one thing that will do that for me.

because Final Cut will like, there's a convoluted way you can do it, but the tracking is just not nearly as good. That is like the kill. And it makes sense that, that TikTok would have an app that does that better than anyone, because there's a lot of horizontal video out in the world. Yeah.

And none of it works on TikTok, right? Like, and so anyway, motivated to make it. And I also thought I saw Wesley Hilliard writing an Apple insider and John Gruber linked to his article being like Apple clips. That is a thing and used to be a thing. And it's like, yeah, Apple, Apple released that at the perfect time, but made like,

like the worst app for that. Like they, they, if they would have like made that actually a great app, but again, like what,

It's not tied to an ecosystem or social media platform that they own. So maybe it's not like direct benefit, but they made a thing. I think you can still download the clips app. Did you ever play around with it? Also, did they ever talk about it once? I have never heard a person with an apple.com email address. Talk about the clips app. Not one time. I would, I'm actually wondering right now, I'm going to the app store. I'm searching for clips. I feel like one of the weirdest thing was like, it was square.

By default, it wanted things to be-- - Oh, I have it. - Oh yeah, here we go. - I do have that app still. - I have it here. Let's see, when was the last time it was updated? It was updated eight months ago for stability and performance improvements. And then a year ago, it was right there.

Apple had it that you could, you could have made stuff. But anyway, wait, can I say one more TikTok thing? We talked about opportunism and how opportunistic Mark Zuckerberg is. I should have put this in there. Did you see what I posted? I from carrot weather. Oh yeah. So on, on Saturday, carrot weather updated their app so that the little snarky message says you're just checking the weather because TikTok is gone. And I thought that was so perfect. It was so good. It

It just made me happy. I forget his name. But yes, that developer is on point. Mr. Carrot. He's doing a good job. Mr. Carrot. That's not his name. Mr. Carrot. So I was not on the beta train, Jason. I was not doing the betas. And then I saw iOS 18.3 was in release candidate phase. And I'm like, that's not really a beta. I mean, it's basically the version that comes out to everybody. So I upgraded, as you do.

And I, while you're traveling, literally while I was traveling, I started the update on the train that took from Orlando to Miami. Uh,

18.3 visual intelligence is actually going to be what apple advertised it to be at dub dub basically that you can point your visual intelligence phone at a dog and it will tell you the breed of the dog and you can point it at a concert poster with a date on it and it will like suggest adding that date to your calendar and i tried it it does work you can identify dogs and you can do the dates i

I haven't done plants yet. I'm actually, I thought about going outside to try and identify plants, but I'm in the middle of downtown Miami. If only you were somewhere close to a biophilic building with lots of plants that you could... Jason, genius. I'm literally getting a step outside and go biophilic identify whatever's around the Apple store. A bunch of trees. There's a lot of foliage. So anyway, but yeah, so visual intelligence is going to be better.

But some other things changed about Apple Intelligence in 18.3. One, summarize notifications. It's going to be off for news and entertainment apps because it keeps messing up the headlines.

And also, those summaries are going to be in italicized text, which when I updated to 18.3, I started getting those italicized text notifications. It looks so weird on the lock screen. I did not like it. I didn't appreciate it. But it's because those summaries has been in the news and how you have stated, you keep tweeting, you have images literally in our Notion document of terrible New York Times articles. It's not doing well. It's not summarizing it. But also...

Finally, in 18.3, you're not going to be able to... You'll have to opt out of Apple Intelligence if you want. It's going to be on by default, which is the first time. Because ever since Apple Intelligence was there, you would have to go into the settings and actually enable it. I actually had a friend call me the other day. He literally called me and said, what is Apple Intelligence? I don't know what it is, and I'm afraid to turn it on. Jason, I literally went all the way back to like, listen...

here's what an LLM is. Here's Chet. I explained the whole thing. And I mean, I told him, you know, listen, turn it on even just for the summaries, not notification summaries, like article summaries in Safari. But anyway, you're not going to have to turn it on because it's going to be on by default. You have some strong feelings about this, Jason.

Yeah, I just, well, as a general rule, don't think that companies should put this sort of thing on by default. And I heard John Syracuse talking about like eventually these are just going to be features. And I agree. And at that point, they will be just part of the operating system. There won't be like an extra tab for do you want to turn this on? Do you want to not turn it on? Because it's still in beta too. There's like a beta tag on it.

Yeah, that's the thing. They're still calling it a beta and it's bad. Like these features are bad. They're just not good features right now. I can't, I'm trying to think of like in the visual intelligence thing. I think it was, I heard Stephen Hackett yesterday say, uh,

You know what else you could do besides pointing your phone at the dog to find out what breed it is? Just ask the guy at the other end of the leash. Listen, what kind of dog is that? When you walk up to the tree, just ask the tree. What kind of tree are you? That's all you have to do. I think that's a slightly different use case. But it identifies plants too. That's what I'm saying. It now identifies plants. There you go. Yeah. And there's a lot of apps that do that. And that's great. But I feel like... I just think that for the most part, these things are...

They're just not quite ready for mass use and the fact that Apple's having to turn some of them off. The example I put in our notes is the New York Times has summarized an article that says the morning of the inauguration, before President Trump was President Trump, it said Trump pardons five family members, which here's the problem with that summary. That's actually not a bonkers possible headline summary. It's just that that's not what happened. President Biden had just...

pardoned five family members it's like Trump pardoned five family members and then he was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States it's like I feel like there's something wrong with that summary I can't quite put my finger on what it is although my favorite summary was when Sam Altman told me that he was proud of me or whatever it says something like that's not what happened I have to show this one on screen because these are X notifications it says Ben Thompson reposted about Stargate Sam Altman complimented you how did it even get that

How did he even because Sam Altman. Okay. So this was Sam Altman's reply to Elon Musk about Stargate. Cause Elon Musk was like, they don't actually have the money or something like that. And we can talk about that later. If we get to it, Sam Altman responded, basically saying, you know, you are one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time to Elon Musk in the chain. But because the word says you Apple's notification summary is like, well, clearly they're talking. It's like, is new a proper noun?

It's like complimented you, not me personally. Like you is the name. That's my daughter, our oldest daughter. When she was a kid, like she was two years old. She thought her name was you. If you asked her, what is your name? She'd say you. And we could not figure out what is wrong with you. And then we realized it's because all we ever say to her is I love you. You are so cute. Do you want this? And so she thought her name was you. And apparently Apple intelligence has the mind of a two year old. And then you said you go to your room. Yeah. You. Yeah. No. Yeah.

Yeah, that's those summaries are amazing. Anyway, I, I guess it's good that they stopped the news and entertainment summaries. I, well, anyway, I don't know. We'll see. They just shouldn't have shipped the new, they just shouldn't ship those, the notification summaries. Yeah. And I'm not saying the problem is it is not clear. Like some of the replies that I got were from people saying, well, this will get better. It's fine. Whatever.

I don't know that that's true. And I don't think that the people who know a lot more about LLMs are sure that it's actually going to get better. Like it's just a function of the way that they work. It's not clear. Like I wonder if someone at Apple right now is trying to find a way to hard code some parameters that'll say like never push

a summary that says, you know, president something, something like, you know what I mean? Like there's gotta be, because you could just, you can move markets and cause national security problems. Well, I wonder too, if one of the issues being that Apple grouping summaries and then summarizing a grouping of summaries, like that's, or it groups notifications and then it's summarizing the groups. Like that's an issue. I imagine if it just summarized individual notifications, you would get less confusing wording, right?

But then also, what is the point? Because notifications can't be that long anyway. They're only one or two. Also, what is a headline if it's not a summary of an article? And you know what a fun game you can play? Seriously, listeners, this is actually genuinely a fun game to play.

You pull up a news grouping of headlines that it has a notification summary and just tap on it. So it shows you all of the things and swipe away like two of them and then go back and click show less and it'll go back to a summary and it'll be a different summary. Oh, just read different, different notification summaries as you change the group. If you, if you delete something, then that takes it out of it. And it's actually kind of a fun game you can play. Jesus says he doesn't have time to watch half the things I say to watch, but he's over here playing around.

dismissing individual notifications. It's for the work, man. I got to do this for my job. Yeah, you do it for your job. Okay. I actually have to try that, though. That's kind of interesting. So anyway, I got 18.3 on here. Also, can I just say, I've talked to a lot of people. People reply on social media like, there's so many bugs still in iOS. Do you ever get this, Jason? And if any of our listeners and viewers get this, I'd love to know. Where autocorrect just doesn't, it's not on. It's just off.

Has that ever happened to you? My problem is that it's too much on. It's auto-correcting things that I did not ask for. I'll be texting someone. I'm literally in the messages app. And all of a sudden, auto-correct is just not working. And so I have to hyper-focus on the letters I'm tapping because...

because if I just type like I normally type, it's gibberish because autocorrect is not doing it, which A, is super troublesome because I'm like, am I really not hitting any of these letters? How is autocorrect when it's working that good? But B, why is it not on right now? And I'll go into settings and I'll go into keyboard and autocorrect is on. All the settings are fine, but for some reason, it's just not working. Screen time has been even more buggy for me and my kids. I don't know about yours, but like,

you know, website access will just like, yeah, just get whatever you want. You know, sometimes it just disables. I have a theory that the screen time team is a bunch of 17 year olds that the entire development team are just teenagers. It's like the Swift bootcamp or whatever. They're like, listen, why don't you guys work on some, uh, some screen time settings. Uh, it's like asking the inmates to design the security system at the jail. Basically. Yeah.

Jason did not just compare our kids to inmates. Just want to clear that up. Okay. I mean, kind of did, but...

Anyway, let's thank our sponsor this week. I don't have anything else to say about that. This episode is brought to you by HelloFresh. And I'm excited because I actually have a picture of the meals I made of HelloFresh. I am not a cook. I don't know why. Anyway, I don't cook. Disclaimer. I don't cook. But HelloFresh makes it possible. Listen, with HelloFresh, you get FarmFresh pre-purchased

pre-portioned ingredients and seasonal recipes delivered right to your doorstep. Skip the trip to the grocery store. Jason, it's so cold where Jason, he can't even go to the grocery store without literally freezing to death. He has a, oh, you know, the temperature of a Tom Tom? This is a Star Wars joke. No. It's lukewarm. No.

Anyway, listen, you can count on HelloFresh to make home cooking easy, fun, and affordable. I think I messed up that joke. I'm just bracing myself for the thousand comments. Also, that's my least favorite scene of any of the Star Wars movies, just to be clear. It's kind of gross. Anyway, but HelloFresh, not a tauntaun, is America's number one meal kit. Also, if you're tired of figuring out what's for dinner night after night, especially on busy weekdays, get dinner done easy thanks to HelloFresh.

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I don't think I've ever made pasta in my life. And I made pasta for the first time and it was wonderful. And it's all thanks to HelloFresh. Did you make any HelloFresh things?

We did. We had some Southwestern beef. It was like a pasta. This is going to sound like not as appetizing, but it was like a goulashy type thing. I don't know if that's a good way of calling it, but it's like goulash, but it tasted like a wet burrito. And the thing is, I was very, very sick. And so I wasn't going to... I do most of the cooking in our... Well, that's not a fair thing to say. My wife does a lot of cooking and she's actually good at it. She doesn't think that she's good at it.

But generally, if we want to make something complicated, she'll ask me to do it. I spent time working in restaurants. And so I just, anyway, she'll be like, this is your responsibility to do now. But I couldn't do that because I was sick. And she loved the fact that it was so easy to just follow the card and the recipe. And I love the fact that I couldn't taste anything that day. And yet it even tasted good. Like it was the first thing I could actually taste that day. It was that good. Amazing.

HelloFresh also will bring your taste back. No, that's not a promise they make, but HelloFresh, I can cook, anyone can cook, Ratatouille. So get up to 10 free meals and a free high-protein item for life at HelloFresh.com slash Primary10FM. That link's in the show notes. You can just click it there. One item per box with active subscription. Free meals applied as discount on first box. New subscribers only. Varies by plan. But that's up to 10 free meals.

That's up to 10 free HelloFresh meals. Just go to HelloFresh.com slash Primary10FM. A thanks to HelloFresh for sponsoring this episode, America's number one meal kit. I was glad I was able to make something. I proved to my family that I can cook. I can follow directions, you know what I mean? If you can follow directions, you can do it. You can do it. That's great. Samsung Unpacked. Neither of us are there.

I'm in Miami. You're in freezing in Michigan. But they announced some things. This one I think is just funny. I just want to throw this out there first. This is like the budget vision pro, I guess. This is Samsung's VR headset. This is Project Wuhan. And this is a Samsung's headset.

I mean, this looks like the very early renders and concepts of Apple Vision Pro like two years ago. I think Ian Zelbo probably made those for, I forget what it was, 9to5Mac or MacRumors, but this looks hilarious. There's no videos or reviews of it because it's not something that reviewers could use right now, but come on.

I mean, come on. I don't know. It looks funny. Yeah, I wonder where they got the inspiration. It's hard to quite figure it out. Command-C, Command-V. Copy-paste is strong here and at Meta. But Samsung also announced their entire Galaxy S25 lineup. The Galaxy S25 Ultra, which is their flagship phone, I watched MKBHD's video on it, and this is the Verge's article I put in the show notes. Really similar to last year's model. There's an upgraded ultra-wide camera and...

some slight design changes to make corners less sharp. But even MKBHD was like, this is almost indistinguishable. Which is interesting. That pretty minimal upgrades year over year. But...

They did announce the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge, and this is Samsung's hyper-thin phone. Now, there was no reviews on this like MKBHD did on the S25 Ultra. I think this will probably be coming soon, but super-thin phone. I think this is the year, Jason, of the thin phones. I don't know. Battery's got to be half a day. I don't know why. Is that a thing? I don't know. I'm curious. Why?

I mean, it looks cool. It looks cool that it's that thin. Like, sure. But the battery life, man, I don't know. I do want... But this... Also, I mean, if Samsung's doing this now, I feel like the rumors about an iPhone 17 Air may be a little more legitimate. They might be happening. But...

I don't know. I don't know if I would go for this. I mean, it can't be like the flagship phone for these companies because it just doesn't have the space for like the same camera systems and things like that. So I don't know. We'll see. I don't know. I just don't know if it makes, it's fine. Like everyone gets all excited about the, the iPhone 17 air or whatever. I just, I think like battery, all of it, just give me, I don't want a thin device that I have to stick a MagSafe battery in the back of just to like go to,

pick up kids from soccer. It just seems like, I don't know. Is this a phone? I got it. It's, it's a phone that's meant to always be plugged in.

Oh, that's nice. They're bringing back the landmine. You got to have it plugged in all the time for the battery. It actually doesn't have... Well, that's the thing. It doesn't have a battery. It's just got like... It's got a battery to keep the clock going. That's it. You get always on display with the clock. I don't know. We'll see when the reviews actually come out about it. I will say I have my... I'm traveling, so I have my whole setup here. I have my Belkin 2-in-1 that I bring with me when I travel. And I think the... I must have like...

not had my phone on there or something was like preventing it from making like full contact with the charger and when i woke up this morning back of my phone was hot i think it was hot because i think there was probably like a gap there tripped me out a little bit i'm like maybe i should plug this thing i don't know yeah you know i had this experience that's this is totally unrelated but you made me think about this i've been meaning to say this for a while now

Are you about to make a confession? No, I got that. What was the car mount mag safe thing that you suggested? I got one of those for Christmas. Yes, sir. There you go. Okay, I got one of those for Christmas. And I have a, I think it's either like a moment or something in a different vehicle that doesn't charge. It just clicks. Yeah. And it seems like in concept that all of these things make sense to just clip them onto the vents, right? It's in a convenient place that you can snap something to.

The problem is it occurs to me that none of those devices were designed in a place like Michigan where in the winter you have to blast your heat constantly in your car or else you can't drive. And guess what the phone says after about two minutes of heating the car charging stopped until it returns to normal temperature. And I'm like, what, what, what, what's wrong with the temperature? I'm like, Oh yeah, I'm blasting 80 degree air at the back of this thing. So like,

I'm starting to feel like maybe that wasn't the best design choice and it must've been made by like, you know, the joke is that no one in Apple ever goes outside when it's raining or when it's cold or whatever. Right. So they don't actually design features that for anyone who doesn't live in 65 degree weather year round, I'm thinking that these car access for people, it's the same thing. See in Florida, it's a feature because I have the air conditioning blowing 90% of the time. So it cools the phone down no matter what. And I will, I will say it was just,

Just a side note, my car, you know, I recently got a different car a few months ago with the heated seats. I've never had heated seats before in anything.

It's pretty nice. I do like the heated seats. I imagine you wear one of the things out. Do you know what the best thing is? No, listen, you know what the best thing, well, first of all, the nice thing about heated seats in an electric car is they're on instantly, right? Like it's just, you get in the car and it's, but, and my wife makes fun of me and the kids actually think this is kind of crazy too. The best combination, and I know this is going to sound absurd. I want to, people can leave this comment. I already know what's coming. Heated seats on with the air conditioning blasting. I can totally get it. I totally get it.

No, I totally get it. I mean, I will, it's like, you know, when you want to have a blanket at home, sometimes you lower the temperature a little bit so you could use a blanket.

Like it makes sense. It totally makes sense to me. It's amazing. It's amazing. I mean, I think, yeah, it's totally fine. I haven't tried that yet. I don't even know how to do that on my, oh no, I guess you just turn the heat seats on and crank down the temperature. Just turn the air conditioning on. I'm new to that. I had a 2011 Kia Soul for like 10 years, okay? I'm still getting used to it. But anyway, if you're a Netflix subscriber, which still I pay for it, I'm not sure why, but they just hiked their prices up again.

For all the plans. Now costs $89. The top plan, I think it was like $23 and now it's $25 or $26. And then all the tiers went up. And it's like, I don't even know if there's outrage anymore. I think people are just like, yeah, whatever. We're just doing it. And I guess it's fun. Whatever. I don't know. But you wrote this article about it. Tell me about it. Well, the thing is they reported that they added 19 million subscribers. They're over 300 million subscribers for the first time. They had a record quarter. Yeah.

And they're like, so you know what we're going to do? Because we're not reporting subscriber numbers anymore after this. This is it. Last time we're going out with a bang and then we're raising prices because for a long time, Netflix's primary measure of success and of growth and performance was adding subscribers. And then they had a great huge quarter when COVID started.

I don't mean that in a morbid way, but people couldn't go to the movies, so they all signed up for Netflix. And then that kind of growth is hard to sustain. So eventually they're like, we're not going to report subscribers anymore. So we have to report something different. And they're going to report primarily revenue and profitability. And so they're just going to keep raising prices. And I think that at some point, they're going to be like, people, they have not reached that point where people are like, this is just not worth it. We've canceled Netflix.

and then we resubscribed for like a month and then we canceled it again because we just weren't it wasn't worth paying for but i think for the most part netflix is just going to keep turning that dial little by little and they may lose some people but it's fine because they're not reporting subscriber numbers anymore so if you lose a million or two million people but everyone who stays is paying two dollars more you just you just made up for it all i guess i was wondering you know as a

company like publicly traded like that, how can you not report that number? But I guess they'll still report revenue and profits. So, yeah. So I mean, Apple doesn't report how many iPhone units they sell. Like companies can decide what they want to, but yes, they have to publish their revenue. They have to publish their income statement and their balance sheet. And there's certain things that are required by law. But other than that, they can just be like, you know, cause Apple breaks down its revenue and,

by these broad categories. But companies, that's not like by law that you have to. It's like there is a threshold at which a business unit has to be reported separately because of its significance to the bottom line or whatever. That's not a quote. I just made that all up. But anyway, they don't have to report subscribers. It's just the only reason that... Well, here's a reason why people were reporting subscriber growth. And this is why most of the other streaming services report it.

Because it's a number that's going up. Right. And the reality is none of them were making money. So those numbers look bad. So you're not going to be like, we lost $3.2 billion this quarter. Instead, you're going to be like, we are not yet profitable, but we continue adding subscribers at a, you know, a 17% rate or whatever. That sounds good. And people are great. Eventually you'll figure out how to make money. And it turns out that so far Netflix is basically the only one that figured out how to make money off of subscribers.

And I did see, apparently the Tyson-Paul fight did actually garner a number of new subscribers to the platform, which I think makes sense. I'm curious if they do more sports, live sports, if that will garner it.

I was listening to the verge cast where David Pierce was talking about sports streaming packages. And I forget who was on the show with him, but basically like if you had wanted to watch every NFL game this season, you had to have paid $800 in streaming costs for all the different services because the games are so fractured. So like CBS and some on Fox and Netflix had two of them on Christmas day. And it just like,

We are worse now than we were with cable. People always... 100%. People say like, oh, we're getting back to the cable days. Like, no, we're way past that. Like, this is way worse. Yeah, we're way worse than the cable days. Like, it's cheaper to just go in person to every NFL game. Like, it would just make it be easier. It's cheaper to go to the Super Bowl than pay for all the football streaming games. That's probably not true. But it's so weird. And I do... I'm looking at all my streaming services because I...

Now, I have everything on my Apple Card. I don't know how you do this, but the Apple Card will actually do a good job of telling you what are recurring charges. And so you can see all the subscription services in one place. The Apple Card just gives that to you as a filtered search. And I'm like, I don't want to pay for Netflix anymore. I really don't watch anything on there. I just haven't finished The Crown yet, and I've been saying that for over a year. And I'm like, if I could just buy it on Blu-ray, I will rip them.

and watch it on Plex. I would rather do that, but I don't think I can get to last season. You know what you could do? You know what you could do? What's that? You could go into your Netflix account. Yes. And there's a button, and it just says cancel membership. And you could click it. It takes two clicks. I wrote an article about this, by the way, Stephen. And then just guess what? They won't bill your card anymore. And then at some point, you'll sit down in the future and be like, I really want to watch The Crown. You just open your account again. You go back to that button, and you click resubscribe, and you watch The Crown. Yeah.

And then when you're done, you click cancel again. Like you are not obligated to keep paying for Netflix until you decide to finish the crown. Like this is the worst sunk cost fallacy I've ever seen someone go through. That's pretty deep. That's pretty deep. Well, I also, I will sometimes on a Friday, we'll open the app to see, is there anything here that I want to watch? And then after 20 minutes of scrolling, I think, no, there's not anything I want to watch. And it's not worth it. I want to watch that back to work. Is that what it's called? Is that the Cameron Diaz, Jamie Fox?

Fox movie? Maybe. Oh, you know what? We did use it the other day for Nate Bargatze. Back in action. Sorry. Oh, back in action. Nate Bargatze's on Netflix. I like his specials. Anyway. Is that a chalk artist guy who paints on the sidewalk? Nate? Oh, that's Baranowski. Never mind. I'm just kidding. That's Nathan's Hot Dogs. Hey, Nate.

He's at Disney. He did a 3D Hulk the other day. It was pretty amazing. He just sent us a text message, actually. But anyway. Why is he? He knows we record now. He wants us to answer live on air. He'll have to stay tuned for the bonus episode. He's asking about AirPod Pro sizes. Should we? No.

Okay, never mind. We'll answer that later. One last thing before we get to our personal tech segment, which is this iPad mini that's powering the hotel room I'm in. You put this article in here, so I'll let you get in trouble instead of me. But what is this? This is what, the Kiss the Ring segment? Is that the kissing? Okay, so the short background on this is Elon Musk, Sam Altman, used to be Buds. They sort of co-founded...

Open AI way back in the day, Elon Musk left. He now has his own XAI, I think is what it's called. Yep. And he's trying to turn Twitter slash X into this, whatever it doesn't, that, that part's not as interesting, but the guys used to get along. They don't get along. Elon Musk is actively suing Sam Altman right now.

And, uh, Elon Musk also of note gave what $250 million to get president Trump reelected and used his platform at every opportunity to get president Trump reelected. And it turns out that on his first day as president, president Trump announces a massive initiative called Stargate, which is an investment over, I don't know what the time period is, but a $500 billion to build AI infrastructure here in the United States. Um,

This is sort of related to OpenAI and Microsoft sort of drifting apart. OpenAI is trying to build up their own AI infrastructure. And Trump seeing a good opportunity to take credit for something that he didn't have a lot to do with. Again, I'm not bashing him. I'm just simply saying this has been in works for a little while and had nothing to do with him. They announced it and Elon Musk's not happy. Elon Musk, who notably has a West Wing office and email address,

is really not happy that his not good friend, Sam Altman, is right in the mix of this. And so they've been going back and forth online about a little bit of fighting over who gets to be BFFs with the new administration the most. And I can understand if you're Elon Musk. Like, Elon Musk...

has put a lot of effort into becoming Trump's good friend, right? And I imagine that he is expecting something because he's also very transactional. And I don't think that what he was expecting would be that his biggest competitor would be getting the first big deal

governmental tech announcement and and so he's not very happy about it you know because if you think about it like most of his most of musk's businesses depend either on a lack of government regulation or directly on government contracts right so so you know spacex entirely dependent on government contracts also one of the most successful

of the last couple generations in terms of what they've been able to do. Great. So like that's not knocking the company, but Tesla became a thing mostly because of like EV tax credits and that kind of thing. And so he's feeling a little bit sour. Interesting. Yeah, this is the interesting one. I went with this TechCrunch article in the show notes and there's a back and forth between Elon and Sam. This is a, I have one question though. Whenever Sam Altman tweets,

It's all lowercase. He doesn't even capitalize the beginning of his sentences. Do you think he has disabled autocorrect or autocapitalization so he can do this? Or does he literally delete the first capital letter every time he types so he can have a lowercase? What do you think? Well, I think he definitely has it. Because my teenagers have it turned off. Autocapitalization? Teenagers don't use... Yeah, teenagers don't use capitalization at all. What? Do your teenagers...

Yeah. Like my kids literally have it turned off because they do not want to use capitalization. They don't want to use capitalization. There have been times. No, they don't want to. Why? It's not cool to use capital letters. It's not cool? Listen, I don't make these rules. I'm just explaining to you. Is it Skippity Ohio Riz to use capital letters? I'm so sorry. I don't even know what you said. I'm so sorry I even said that on air. What? I thought for a second that you had a stroke. I don't know. Wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Why is it uncool to use capital letters? I am a writer. I'm not saying it's uncool to use capital letters. I'm a big fan of grammar and punctuation in all of its forms. You're literally a writer. I'm just saying. What? I don't understand, Jason. I know. But also- There have been times when my daughter will hand me her phone because say she wanted to reach out to a college coach or something like that. And she's like, hey, would you just help me? And I'll try to type something. And I'm like-

What is wrong with your phone? Why won't it? Why does it not understand that if there's a period, the next letter should be capitalized? She's like, yeah, I turned that off. I'm like, well, turn it on and you're never going to college. You, you turn it on. Yeah. Hey, you, it's the same one. A hundred percent. Well, but what, but Sam Altman is not a teenager. I don't understand. I,

I don't understand why. Okay, that's a fair point. I just, I don't know. I think he's explained it at some point. I just don't have the energy to find out. That's weird. Anyway, yeah, watching these billionaires go tit for tat on social media, we're in 2025. I think they think it feels casual and hip.

Casual and hip. Okay. Anyway, personal take. Oh, you know what? Well, no, never mind. I was going to say what you thought of the new redesigned Tesla Model Y, but I feel like that's going to get a wave of comments, no matter what you say. We can say that. We can talk about that another time. I'm happy to. Okay. Have you seen it? Did you see the new design? Yeah, and I don't mind comments. Oh, no, I know that. I know that. Anyway, I want to talk about my hotel room. So I'm staying at this...

I think it's called a citizen. I've never heard of it. Wait, is this our personal tech section? Personal tech, yeah, personal tech. Okay, we're in personal tech. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What, you got something for personal tech? No, no, no, I just, I didn't, I wanted to make sure that that was the section that we're in. Yeah, chapter marker. Yeah, chapter marker, yeah. Okay. So I'm in this hotel and like,

It's a very bizarre room. It's very narrow. I almost feel like I'm in a ship hole. But it's nice. It's a nice room. But... Wait a second. What word did you just say? A ship hole. Like H-U-L-L. Okay, super now. I thought it sounded like you said. Well, I got a little stuffy nose. So...

I don't know what it sounded like on your end. Hey, Severus, Steven doesn't usually say bad words. It's the only reason I didn't think he said he was an asshole. Hole. Hole. Anyway, so I walked into this room and there's an iPad mini. This is an iPad mini, what, 5? Like an actual iPad mini. Oh, you can't even update that anymore. And I know this because my wife has one and it won't update. It's a home button iPad mini with lightning.

It feels so much larger than the iPad mini I have at home because, you know, it has the chin and the forehead or whatever. But this is how you control the entire room. Like if you, because when I first walked in, it was a little warm as you do, you turn down the air and I was looking for the thermostat on the wall. No, no, no, no. You do it here on the iPad, but also it's kind of annoying because you can't see the temperature.

It just has a warm and cool slider. And even when you slide that, it doesn't show you a temperature. It's just like, yeah, it'll get cooler. It's cooling down right now. Like, yeah, it can get warmer, but like it won't, it doesn't give you a temperature, which I feel like,

Maybe it's like a battery percentage thing. I don't know. Steven, that is unacceptable behavior by this hotel. I didn't like that. You could turn the TV on and off from the iPad. That's like a little toggle at the top. And it tells you if it's on or off. So see, that gives you some indication. It probably has a battery percentage indicator too, but they will not tell you what temperature it is. It doesn't tell you the temperature. It also has smart lights. So you can literally like...

change the colors of the lights in the bathroom. That's the only place where there's colored lighting. So if you want your bathroom to be purple or blue, you could do that. That's definitely where you need the colored lighting is in the bathroom. You could turn the whole lights on or off. And even you can raise and lower curtains. They have blackout blinds that you can raise and lower. And they also have like a day curtain.

You can do all of this from the iPad. You even, this is not an ad for the hotel. I wouldn't even suggest staying here, but you even, you even like, uh, you order your cleaning. You're like the, yeah. Cleaning services from the iPad. Anyway, I'm all about, as anyone, our listeners and viewers probably know, I'm all about the smart home.

I think I like dumb hotel rooms. I think I like dumb rooms that just have light switches and a thermostat. And also, it came with this weird doll. I'm not going to go back and grab it. But it came with this raggedy-looking doll. Weird doll? I guess I have to grab it now. Hold on.

Steven's staying in a hostel, actually. I don't know. It's an Airbnb. He's just camping out in somebody's spare bedroom. I chose to stay here because it's the closest to the Apple store. It's like super close. But anyway, this thing was on the bed when I got here.

I don't know what it is. Do you think the hotel owns that or do you think that that just got accidentally left behind by whoever rented that room before you? No, no. There's one of these by the front desk and it has like a little story behind it. I have not read it, but it's a weird dog because it has no nose or mouth. It's just two black dots for eyes.

I guess a red hair type thing. Anyway, I forgot to take this off the bed last night when I got into bed, and so I just kicked it off, and it's been laying on the floor ever since. But yeah, this was staring at me when I walked into this hotel room. I don't know what this is. But you couldn't see it because there's no light switches, so you had no idea how to turn on the lights in the room. I don't understand. Anyway, I'll try to make that the chapter art for those listening in the podcast. Anyway, smart hotel room. I don't think I prefer it. I like lowering the curtains. That's about it.

But anyway, smartest hotel I've ever been in. It's also, I don't know, I'll have to send you a picture. It's a weird place. But the reason I was here was because I was visiting an Apple store, and I wanted to talk about that in the bonus episode because it was an interesting experience. Oh, I have two things. I want to tease it for the bonus episode. One, for this store opening in Miami, I guess they normally give totes for new store openings. Is it like a little bag or something? Have you ever gotten one of those? Mm-hmm.

Not at a new store opening, no. Well, this one. They're doing picnic blankets. This is a picnic blanket.

And so they're giving that out. I'm going to tell you right now, that thing is useful. I have one that says WWDC on it and we actually used it lots of times. Well, I'm excited. I'm going to open it at home with my family. This was exciting for me. I know this is not a big deal maybe for other people, but first time I got an Apple media badge and that's, yeah, it's really fun. It's a nice media badge too. Like it's nice, colorful. This is like indented, embossed. I don't know what the right word is for it, but like textured. Yep.

You have a bunch of them, right? You probably have like a collection of these. I got one right here from WWDC. Right. It has your name on it though, right? Six other ones over there. No, they don't have your names.

Although it doesn't have your names? Oh, no? None of the Apple ones have your names. Oh, okay, okay. Well, anyway, but I will treasure that. It was really fun. But anyway, I want to talk about the behind-the-scenes experience because it was kind of funny. So we're going to do that in the bonus episode. So here's what you do. You go to primarytech.fm, click bonus episodes. You can support the show. You get the whole back catalog of bonus episodes. Plus you get an ad-free version of the show. You can also support us on Apple Podcasts. But there you don't get chapters. Not my fault. That's Apple.

You can also watch the show at youtube.com slash at primary tech show. That links to the show notes as well. You can see the bizarre doll that is in my hotel room. And you can also just watch all the past episodes there. And if you want, you can leave us a five-star rating and review in Apple Podcasts. We're a five-star show still, almost 300 ratings. And so we'd love to cross that 300 mark soon. So if you haven't yet, we'd appreciate that as well. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time.