You Can Now Airbnb More than Travel, Galaxy S25 Edge, M4 Max Mac Studio Review
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We'll prepare and serve with flair, a culinary cabaret. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. Lots of news this week. Jason was actually at the Airbnb event where they announced a big app redesign, but also offering experiences and adding a ton of features into Airbnb. We're going to talk about that. iOS 18.5 came out with a really important screen time feature. Apple Maps gets new information like from Michelin star restaurants.

There was an Android redesign coming up, Galaxy S25 Edge is out there, and a ton more. This episode is brought to you by the Insta360 X5 camera and 1Password, and you, the members who support us directly. I'm one of your hosts, Stephen Robles, and as always, joined by Jason Aiton. How's it going, Jason? I'm a little bit jet-lagged, I'm not going to lie, but I'm here. You were in LA, what, like yesterday? Yeah.

I got back yesterday, yeah. Wow, that's wild. But you saw Chance the Rapper, right? I did. Hung out with Chance. You hung out with Chance the Rapper. You have, I don't know, some weeks you're the most interesting man in the world. I mean, you go to the F1 race. I have the weirdest job. I just keep texting you. I have the weirdest job. I just get pictures of random celebrities and Jason not taking selfies with them, just taking pictures of them like...

It's a paparazzi. I don't do... It's such an interesting dynamic at stuff like this because we'll talk about it, but there are a lot of celebrities at that event. I just don't because it feels like it's hard to interview someone and be treated seriously and then be like, oh, by the way, can I get a selfie? It's just... Whereas you see all these influencers and the YouTubers and they're like, screw it, give me a selfie, man. I need to get this on my channel. I don't know. You met an actor...

You can't say who you met at the F1 race, right? Is that kind of against? I probably, I mean, there were a lot of famous people. That's all I'm going to say. There were a lot of famous people. One famous person in particular, you said you met and I told my kids and they were like,

how did he not get a selfie from this person? And I said, I know, I don't know. In that situation, in fairness, it was darker than the midnight. Like it was very dark in that place. It was at a, it was at a restaurant called Delilah, which is fantastic. Uh, I don't know if it's, it was Miami and it's like restaurant slash nightclub happening at the same time. It was loud and it was dark. Um,

I won't reveal who it was, but let me just say, if I was there meeting that person, I would have been the guy to turn on the flash on my iPhone and just someone said, please take a selfie. We're going back to the early 2000s and just flash everything, right? I don't care if it's blurry, if there's like light streaks across, I want a selfie.

uh anyway do you have any idea where the quote might be from today oh oh we did that don't we we still do this thing uh culinary flair uh culinary cabaret we'll prepare and serve with flair a culinary cabaret oh yeah i mean it's gotta be beauty and the beast nailed it nailed it uh you know i thought airbnb be our guest i thought that was a apropos germane as you do i like how your brain works steven thank you i appreciate that

All right. You were at the Airbnb event, so I want to talk about that. But also, we have a five-star review from Mexico, JerMSMZ, because he loves the show. Battery percentage. He turned the battery percentage off during a recent trip and confidently says that they despise it. Yeah. So he will be turning battery percentage back on, but phone in dominant pocket. There you go. Jason wins on that one. Another thanks to John Gruber for being on the show last week. That was super fun. First time I've ever podcast with him. And

Yeah, just think we're coming on that episodes in the feed and on YouTube. And yeah, we got we were in the top 50 shows last week, likely due to John Gruber's guest appearance. So thanks for listening. Thanks for watching and welcome back. If you listen to that episode, you're like, you know what? I'm gonna check these guys out one more time. We appreciate it. Yeah, he did. He had a busy week. He was on Dakota the same week he he was on. That's right. And then I don't know if I didn't say this on the show, but I did finally subscribe to dithering.

is uh his podcast and so i am listening to that now it is a very good show 15 minutes in and out it's great the only complaint i have about that is i liked it better when it's three times a week because it was three times when they started it was three times a week he and it's only twice a week now but it's only a 15 minute show and it's him and ben thompson and and i really yeah i like that it's a good show they're uh they're smart people but speaking of multiple times a week

Our survey, which we've been going a couple weeks, I want to still put it in the show notes one last time, but it seems far and away people want a daily podcast with summary of the news, the tech news of the day, as a member benefit. And so I am hyping myself up to do this, to do it. I want to make sure I can sustain it. And I'm looking to launch that very soon. And so thanks for all taking the survey. I'll put a survey one more time in the show notes.

And if you are not currently a member and we're asking what benefit would prompt you to support the show and we would love to hear from you. And so that'll be one of the first links in the show notes. So are we just charging people like $5 a month to vote in the survey? No, no. Anybody, that's the thing. Anybody can take the survey because it needs to be. So they don't actually have to commit because you just said we're asking people what it would take to get them to sign up. And it's like, well, how about if you answer the survey, we'll sign you up. What would it take to get you in this car today? All right.

All right, so the big Airbnb event, I'm going to hand it to Jason in a second because he was there, but not only has Airbnb redesigned their app, they have now offered things called experiences and more, where not only can you book a place to stay, whether you're in a city or wherever, but if you want to have a sushi chef come to your Airbnb and prepare something, you can do that, or even book experiences in the town, like go to a

with someone that's actually going to give you a tour, like really trying to be an all-in-one vacation or trip resource. So not only where you stay, but also what you do. And I'll put a link to Jason's article in ink because he was there. And Brian Chesky, have you interviewed him before? Twice, actually. I've done two podcast interviews. Okay, all right. So tell me, what was it like being at the event? I saw a lot of YouTubers there, a lot of press. What was it like?

Uh, so, well, okay. So like the meta discussion, what it's like to be there. They do a good job. They definitely wanted a lot of attention on this. And this is a pretty, you know, pretty big update for Airbnb. They do these releases twice a year, essentially. And this was their summer release. They did an event. They invited a bunch of people to LA for this and they invited a lot of, there's a lot of, a lot of names you'd recognize that were there at the event. Um,

Um, and Brian just, I mean, it was not a very long, I have to say like a half an hour, maybe, um, got on stage, talked through all this stuff in it, but it had very, very like

Steve Jobs live keynote vibes to it. Like it was the same, it was that kind of thing. And so they, there was really, you could break it down into essentially three categories. They released a new app. So they're just on its own. The app got a redesign and the point is like out now. Yep. Yep. Yep. The point of the redesign was to enable all these other things that they are, are rolling out these services and experiences. But even just if you didn't care about any of that, the app actually got quite a bit better. Here's,

And you can tell like Brian Chesky is not a tech founder. He's a designer, right? Like he'll tell you that like he, he went to Rhode Island school of design. He is, he was, he's not a coder. He's not like that.

That's just not his thing. He cares a lot about the experience design and the overall design. And that really comes through in the app. Also, you know, Johnny Ive is doing stuff for them. So there's a lot of Johnny Ive fingerprints all over this thing. And Johnny Ive was there. Johnny Ive was there. Yep. Johnny Ive was there. Angela Ahrens, who used to be the head of retail, was there. She's on the board. And so...

But the other things that the kind of the headline features were services and experiences. Now experiences, they actually rolled out a while ago and nobody cared. Just like that didn't work. This is different now, but the services is kind of like, you know, Airbnb looked at their, their weakness is if you book a hotel, there's, you can get room service. They might have a restaurant, they might have breakfast, they might have a gym or a spa, but,

And so Airbnb is basically allowing you now to book all those things. You mentioned like you can book a chef, right? And in a lot of cities, I think the services are rolling out to like 260 cities right now. And it's like, I need to book a photographer or makeup artist or a chef or prepared meals or,

I think there's 10 categories right now that you can book along with your stay. And one of the interesting things that Airbnb did is you can actually book those things even if you didn't book a house, right? So you, Steven, in Tampa, I don't actually know if Tampa's a city, but let's just pretend for a second that it is, could just book a chef to come to your house even if you didn't book a house.

even though you're not staying at an Airbnb, you're just staying at Steven's house, right? Like, so you can book these things even if you're not traveling. So I actually, I just went to the Airbnb website experiences nearby. You can do this right now. And yeah, you can do all of those experiences. Now I was talking about, we were still talking about services first of all, but that's okay. Like, so the second piece are, yes, you can book these experiences. And the idea of the experiences is,

You know, if you go to Paris or you go somewhere, you might look up like a travel blog, top things you should do. And you discover that everybody who went to town that day looked up the same travel blog and everyone's there. Right. And so it's kind of like this is the touristy version.

Well, what Airbnb is rolling out are, it's kind of like visit the cities like the locals do. So you might be, you can book an experience where you go and you do a ramen tasting with a Michelin star chef in Tokyo. Or you could tour the Cathedral of Notre Dame with one of the architects to help restore it.

Or you might, one of the experiences might be like touring a museum with a paint restoration expert or something like that. Like there's just all these different cool experiences. And then within the experiences, they have these things called Airbnb originals. And this is where it gets weird and kind of wild. Because for example, the list of things they rolled out for Airbnb originals

are like go throw a football with Patrick Mahomes and then have Kansas city barbecue with him afterwards or get glammed up with Sabrina, Sabrina Carpenter, or there's just all of these, or there was like, they should have put you in that experience. I wanted to see. Now there were a number of experiences that they took people on while I was there. And one of them was yoga. And I was super thankful that they did not put me in very, very thankful. Um,

Yeah. So yeah, the one that I ended up doing that they sent us on was a listening party with Chance the Rapper. So it was this sort of interactive, there's sort of this like light experience. I'm not going to do good enough explaining it. Very cool. They, you kind of spent some time doing it and then you listen to this. I think most of them were unreleased songs and then he took questions, talked to everybody about it. So that was very cool. But the point of these Airbnb originals, the reason I said it gets kind of weird is

I don't know how much availability Patrick Mahomes has to have people come over and throw a football with him. It doesn't feel like that's the kind of thing that he's going to do a lot of. So maybe this is just marketing. There was one with Megan Thee Stallion. So it's like, I don't know how...

I don't know how much it's not. I don't want to say it's not real. I'm just saying like, that's not scalable, right? No, only a small number of people are going to do it. And I was trying to compare, I was looking at the cameo. Are you familiar with the cameo app, that service where you can pay somebody to say like happy birthday or whatever like that, or good job on that test. You, you didn't fail. Good job. But you look at the list of, of celebs that are in there.

And the person, the person I met in Miami, not on that list. Right. None of the people who are at this Airbnb are on the cameo app. It's like, these are people who were like doing really well 20 years ago. And it's like, maybe I'll take 50 bucks to make a quick video to send to somebody. But the most of the people you would want to send your kid to,

happy birthday like tony hawk is not on there if your kid's into skateboarding right like so i was trying to figure out like the people who have the bandwidth to be interacting with fans on a regular basis are on the cameo app and they're not famous anymore the people that airbnb got to do this i'm like i don't know how much how much of a thing this is actually going to

I'm sorry. When you mentioned Cameo, I was a little distracted because I was very curious. Who's on Cameo right now? Because apparently YouTubers is a category that you can filter by. And yeah. I don't know who any of those people are.

uh i've seen this guy on tiktok he's like a workout guy i actually i really like this guy he does like but he's a firefighter and he does he reenacts basically wild like 911 calls that he's done let's see his mkbhd on here no no that's what i'm saying like the jason ayton he's not on there anymore i don't think any of these guys are you so anyway i you know it's

It makes sense it's the next step for a company like Airbnb because I have booked some Airbnbs in the past and you do feel a little bit like on your own as opposed to when you go to a hotel and you have all the whatever amenities even if it's just like a restaurant. I'm curious the cost of some of these like is this going to be...

Cost effective. So like you could do a, so they tried to, they're trying to keep that at a reasonable price point. So for example, you could do a chef for 50 bucks a person, personal chef for 50 bucks a person for a family of six seems kind of expensive to me. Like I'm like, ah, man, I could just, you know, go to Chick-fil-A and it does not cost me 50 bucks a person. But also like if you're the type of family that that would be a enjoyable experience to have a personal chef come like that's, you're not paying for the food at that point. You're paying for the experience.

And I just looked, apparently here in Tampa, one of the, you can book this, a private dining with award-winning chef. This is Chef Brittany, 10 years of experience. $120 a guest for handmade pasta experience, but it looks like maybe you'll make your own, like she'll walk you through making your pasta. Or $140 per guest for La Genesee.

I don't know what that is. I don't think I'm fancy enough for that, but... I don't know either, but I am going to be honest that paying $120 a guest and you have to make your own pasta doesn't actually feel like a great... Maybe she's making the pasta for you. I will come to your house and you make your own food.

Jason, you should be on this Airbnb experience and listen, I'll come to your house and I'll show you how to make some pasta. I will. And I'm going to do like tech support. So when you come to an Airbnb somewhere and you need to like set the wifi doesn't work, you can just call me and I'm going to just come to the Airbnb and be like, unplug it and plug it. This is fascinating. You know,

no no this is all live right like the experience yeah so some of the airbnb originals are like coming in the future kind of thing um the other thing i was going to just mention so a part of their app redesign and i actually think this could be the most interesting long-term thing for airbnb

So I interviewed Jay Carney, who's like their head of policy and communications. He was Barack Obama's press secretary, and then he was the head of communications for Amazon for like seven years. So he's a pretty savvy guy. He's been in the Silicon Valley for a while. And I just asked him, like, do you expect this to be as big of a business as people...

renting out their house. Right. And, and the reality is probably not, except there is a limit to the number of hosts that they can have on their platform that

just in terms of like there's there's a limit to the number of people who own houses there's but this is a multiplying factor for how many different people they can get onto the platform to do other things and one of the interesting things that they did is in the new app they basically so if you they're rolling out messaging right

And they're kind of building in a social network into the app. And I'm always super skeptical because everybody wants to build a social network into an app. But what they did is let's say that you go on this like ramen tasting in Tokyo and you and your wife go and there's six other people that are there.

you get put into essentially like in your profile, you could go back to that experience and now you can stay connected to those people. You can share photos from that event. You can message them in the Airbnb app, all of it's happening right there. And I actually think that that's kind of cool because the kind of relationship you would build with people on an experience like that is different. It's, you don't necessarily want to give them all your phone number, right? Like it's not like handing out your iMessage.

But I do think that that is actually going to be a powerful thing for people. It's like shared experiences create connections that you wouldn't otherwise have. And just to be able to continue that, I think that there might be something there. It feels like the first social feature that's actually social. Most of the time, a social network is just people broadcasting things and then other people maybe replying, but interaction. But to actually...

have had an experience with some people in person, hopefully something that you enjoyed doing. And obviously whoever you were with does these kinds of things. Yeah. I mean, that, that kind of makes sense. And it's social in the sense that you actually had a real world experience with these people. These are not just people who you friended on Facebook because you were scrolling through profiles and you're like, Oh, I'm not a person like that. Yeah.

Wait, wait, wait. You just scroll around? I have not added a friend on Facebook in 10 years. I'll be honest, every time I get a friend request on Facebook, I'm like, are we still really doing that? I assume it's spam. I just assume it's spam. Even if it's someone I completely recognize, it's their profile picture. I'm like, this is probably spam. I'm like, I'm 45. My friend list is set. Don't talk to me. I don't need any more friends. The door is closed. Okay. The gate is down. Boom.

But one thing you had said before we started recording and I saw others on social media who were at the Airbnb event say is Apple really needs to go back to in-person, on-stage presentations. And Apple, I think, is one of the last holdouts since COVID to continue the video event. Google I.O. is next week and the last couple Google I.O.s have been live people on stage doing live demos, Microsoft events, live people on stage doing demos.

Even the Amazon echo event recently live people on stage. And so even after this, the Airbnb one where Brian Chesky was on stage again, Mark Zuckerberg, he's on stage whenever they have announced stuff recently. I think it's time. Do you think it's time? Apple go back to live. Yeah. And I mean, they do in person events, obviously like WWC is an in-person event, but it's not a live event. I mean, Tim Cook will come out and be like, good morning. And then, you know, we're so excited that you're here. And then we watch a video. It's the same thing that everybody else can see. It's not like, it's,

I think Apple does the pre-recorded thing better than anybody did. And so I think it's going to be real hard for them because they are so...

so invested in controlling the story and the narrative. And the thing is, they don't have anyone, even Craig Federighi. They don't have anyone who is as good at the live event as Steve Jobs. Craig Federighi is close though, because Craig has done a lot of live demos. He's still not nearly as good overall at the thing that Steve Jobs was like.

Craig Federighi is good. He's got a great personality, very charismatic. John Ternes, very charismatic, like very good. But they do not, we're watching them on a video. And I've seen Federighi live at different interviews. Last two years ago, maybe it was, he did the live interview with like Justine and a couple, and John Gianandrea and stuff. He's good, but it's just not as natural as Steve Jobs. And Steve Jobs just had a different level of,

charisma and personality in Tim Cook definitely is not that in a lot of the presenters that Apple uses are not like that. So I think you would see less of them. I think you would see like three or four people on the stage, but I think that it is like even Google IO that I'm going to next week is mostly a live event, right? Like, so everyone else has gone back to, I've, I just think, you know, the demos that Apple used to do,

Like last year when they were doing Apple intelligence and the semantic index for the assistant, uh,

I think maybe that would have had a natural filter because they wouldn't have been able to demo some things on stage. And so maybe this year it would make, it would almost be a proof, proof of legitimacy. I don't know, like go back to some live demos. I feel like they could even mix and match some things, you know, do like a live intro, live announcements for iOS, live demos. But then maybe when you go to Johnny Cerugie down in the basement talking about the chips, you know, show a video of Johnny Cerugie, you know, that's fine.

Or if you want to talk about watchOS and... What is it? Kevin... Who's the watchOS guy? He used to be at Adobe. Kevin Lynch? Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah, Kevin... If you're going to have Kevin Lynch on a beach somewhere because he's talking about Apple Watch and diving in the water, do that. But I think doing some live demos... I don't think it's going to be this year, but it will...

again, bring back, I think, some legitimacy and like, oh, okay, yeah, let's show this stuff off live. And I think Craig Federico could do it. There's probably a lot of people inside Apple. I feel like there's probably some charismatic. And no one will ever be Steve Jobs. Although, I don't know, maybe that's not...

uh accurate to say maybe maybe there'll be someone that's careful i mean brian chesky is pretty good like brian chesky had the same kind of a vibe yeah there's a point in time i'm like i wonder if he's available for a job i don't know like but brian chesky's but brian chesky is all is different like i feel like he has an intensity that i don't know it works for him because i've listened to a lot of podcasts you know he's been on decoder a couple times obviously you've interviewed him

I feel like it's a different vibe than Apple. And I mean, I would argue though that his overall approach to products and his, his, the way he tells the story about them is closer to Steve jobs than probably anybody at Apple currently. Okay. All right. Well, and it was one of the things I thought that was really funny is he's like, I'm going to pull up an iPhone now. And he's like, so this is a real life demo. Like,

almost like he said yeah he actually said that oh shoot now it was interesting because he went back to the demo several times now he could have been picking up different phones that's entirely possible i didn't pay that close of attention but every time he did it so for the services then for the experiences and then to talk about the profiles and stuff like the recent searches was slightly different

So I'm like, maybe he was picking up a different phone each time, right? Because it was like, oh, now we're going to go to Tokyo. And Tokyo showed up in the recent searches thing. So there was something going on there. It wasn't exact. Maybe it was different VPNs. No, I guess what I'm saying is like, I watched your last...

and the only thing that showed up there was Paris. And now all of a sudden, Tokyo is one of your recent searches. So I'm like, is there someone else somewhere logged into your Airbnb account? And when you put the phone down, searches for Tokyo, so it'll appear at the top, which is, I guess, entirely possible. But either way, they pulled it off very well.

See, but that's also the kind of magic. I mean, I still love hearing the stories about, like, the original iPhone demo and, like, the phone call just, like, hanging by a thread, you know? And it just barely made it through demo. But also, like, pinch to zoom. Doing that demo live on stage was huge. And even, like, cover flow, which some people are, like, still bringing back. I don't know. Some of those things that just...

That's what plays really well live. And it probably would feel less weird to applaud at someone demoing on stage than a video, right? Because no one applauds at the videos, right? Like when there's an announcement at WWDC. It depends on what's happening. The calculator app. Did people applaud when they announced the calculator for the iPad? I think people were pretty excited. Okay, all right. I mean, more excited than they were when they realized there weren't going to be apps on the Vision Pro.

What do you mean app? I mean, is Netflix on there yet? Oh, well, YouTube, YouTube still. Oh, I'm glad you said that because we do have a, some vision OS 3.0 rumors. I just want to touch on later, but you still use it every day. Pretty much. I mean, I didn't still, here's the thing. I don't take it when I'm traveling. So I feel a little bit disingenuous thing, which is insane, which is as the old Stephen. I have never, I travel a lot more than you and I've never, ever seen a human being with a vision pro, uh,

on an airplane. Have you ever seen a human? Have you ever seen another human being with a vision pro period outside of California? But what? No, but what you're saying though, is that people should be wearing them on planes that I'm saying no one does that except for YouTubers. The, the people, the, the Venn diagram of people who make YouTube videos and people who are willing to wear a vision pro on a plane is a one circle. I saw a video yesterday. I think it was from, you can't even argue with that.

Well, I saw it from the Washington Post and they were saying like, here are the five gadgets you need when you travel. And the dude was like, I fly five straight days a year, like 130 hours. And he basically said AirPods Pro, AirPods Max. He had an Anker charger. He said this and that. And then I was waiting to see if he was going to say the Vision Pro or something else. And he talked about the X-Real glasses, which just look like weird glasses that have the screen in between. And those are the ones he recommended. And those are basically just like a display for your computer, right?

Yes, but just way more discreet than a vision pro. Yeah. Yeah. And, and also, sorry, last I know, and then we'll move on to iOS and Apple maps and stuff. Did you see the prices, right? Vision pro thing. Yeah. Nobody knows how much that thing costs. There was this. So it was a recent prices, right? Episode.

And they had the Vision Pro and all the contestants guessed like $1,000. I think the most someone guessed was like $1,200. And then what's his face? Is it Drew? What is his name? But I think Apple seeded that question as market research. They wanted to know what do people actually think this thing should cost?

$1,000. I think it was brilliant. If you think about it that way, it was pretty brilliant. Yeah, that is pretty good. All right, real quick. I was 18.5 came out earlier this week for everyone. You got updates on all your devices. All my home pods are still stuck in limbo. So that's usually what happens. Then I was update, which is cool, but one feature, which I think is good. And it's just nice that to know that Apple has not forgotten that screen time exists. This is the, hold on. This is the best thing Apple has introduced. Uh,

Yes. In like five years. Well, and because screen time hasn't changed in five years. No, but Steven, I have to write about this. I was listening to some podcast. I don't know what one it was. And they just said like, oh, and this thing happened. And I took out my AirPods and I just yelled at my daughter. You are so busted because we have one child who...

Who has been, she's been good lately, but we have a child who was very good at getting around screen time. It's not hard. It's totally just the honor system, whether or not this thing works or not. And now she'll. So this, so this update, basically there is a settings toggle in screen time, but it's on by default when you update to iOS 18.5, where if you have a child device,

and screen time is enabled and you're managing screen time from your account, if they put in the screen time passcode, you'll get a notification on your device that the screen time passcode was used on that named of device. Now there's a lot of things that would be nice to have in this kind of notification, like rather than just say the device name, actually say the iCloud account.

because a lot of my kids devices are just like ipad 3 or just like iphone 2 so that would be nice it also does not send you a notification if they put it in incorrectly so if they tried to put in the screen time passcode but it failed you don't get a notification you don't know that which again if you have a child who's trying like a dozen times a day and just failing then maybe it's good you don't get that notification but if they put it in successfully you

you will get notified that they put it in, which then reveals that they know the screen time passcode. And what you thought was secret is not anymore. So nice addition. I'm glad it's there, but also hopefully they do more with screen time. I still wish, I don't know if you still feel this way,

Ever since screen time app requests and other requests have gone, went into messages. It's just been not great. And I'm, uh, we, I advocated for a long time on the Apple insider show. And then here for a standalone password app. And we did finally get it. We have a standalone password app. Now I'm going to begin advocating or continue for a standalone screen time app. One, because there's a ton of settings in the screen time stuff that's buried in the settings app.

And most parents have no idea how to manage it. That's why I have videos from four years ago that still do really well because I explained that whole process. It should be a standalone app. This way, notifications that have to do with screen time can all be managed in that one app. The request from different your kids or whoever else is in screen time. So standalone screen time app, hopefully iOS 19 or 20. Steven, do you know how many times I try to go in and like set up elements on my kids' phone?

and a few hours later i open instagram and have to put in my own password because i realized i just set the limits on my own account because it's so confusing sometimes confusing but do you know what this basically so i this is the best feature apple has done for screen time maybe ever but do you realize that what this just means is we can't figure out how to make it better so we're just gonna let you know yeah i mean it's still really bad when it comes to sometimes the restrictions just turn off you know like your web restrictions it's just like i know you can just access and it

And again, thankfully, I mean, my kids are like, hey, I can access every website ever, just so you know. So, yeah. But at least we know Apple has not forgotten about the feature. So that's... We just can't fix it. Screw it. We'll just tell you when your kids are doing stuff. Yeah, exactly.

And also Apple announced a couple of other things. We'll talk about the accessibility features in a little bit. But Apple added more information to maps, including Michelin guides and things from the Infatuation and Golf Digest. I'd never heard of the Infatuation. Apparently that's a thing.

But you can look at the Michelin guides right now. It's available just in select cities. So this is not something where it's going to show you Michelin restaurants in every city, which I mean, there are not Michelin restaurants in every city. That was, that was one of the points that I made to Airbnb. I was like, there are no Michelin starred chefs in Michigan. So who's coming to my house to do this dinner for me? Chance the rapper. Chance the rapper is just doing all the, he's just going to bring Kit Kats over. Yeah.

That's how I had to explain to my wife who Chance the Rapper was. I had to show her the Kit Kat ad that he did. Do you remember? She doesn't listen to a lot of Chance the Rapper, but as soon as I showed her that Kit Kat, I wonder how much he got paid for that because all the money. This is what the guide looks like. This is Miami, which is the only city in Florida that has it, but you can browse Michelin star restaurants and see it on maps. That's pretty much it.

But at least they're doing something like they're making this product better. And the reason is because there's a very good alternative out there, which is made by Google. Although to be fair, Apple maps is overall user interface, but,

a hundred billion times better than google maps because google maps you open it and you're like i think that there's a map underneath all of these ads but i can't actually find it i know i know and that i posted a anyway yeah i agree i will say i went through the car wash yesterday and the person was saying hey we're doing a survey and it's a competition we're trying to like

See which attendant gets the most surveys. And it would mean a lot if you did it. So I was like, okay, cool, I'll do it. So what they gave me was a business card with their name on it and a QR code. And I expected the QR code to go to like a form or something. Scanning the QR code sent you straight to the business listing in Google Maps.

And what they wanted you to do was leave a rating in Google Maps for their business. And while Apple has come a long way and they still have the weird Yelp integration. So like when you see a star rating in Apple Maps, it's really just Yelp. And you can do the thumbs up, thumbs down. And sometimes for restaurants or businesses, you'll see like Apple's percentage rating there.

Google Maps is still the de facto when it comes to like businesses that want reviews so other people will come to that business or go eat at that restaurant. Google Maps still has a stranglehold on that part of the ecosystem. And I don't know.

I don't know what Apple can do. It just needs to buy Yelp if it needs to like, yeah, because it incentivizes you. Like if I'll search for a restaurant and maps and maybe get directions to it, sometimes I'll see something in maps that says like, Hey, why don't you rate this or let us know how your experience was. But it's obviously not garnering the same amount of data as Google maps. And like, like you're saying, I see on social media and a lot of people say they prefer Apple maps now to Google maps with the UI and design. But,

But when it comes to business information, it's still not.

Not there. Well, and if you think about it, it's because all of these small businesses are a workspace. And so the integrations are already there. Apple has this. Apple has Apple Business Connect. I bet you that 85% of small businesses have no idea that it exists because you can go in. You're right. By default, Apple will just show you like Yelp photos of stuff, but you don't have to have that. You can go in and upload your own photos as a small business. It's just most small businesses don't know that.

There was actually a business that I frequented. And whenever you try to search for it in Apple maps, it would send you to the wrong place because they weren't listed in Apple maps and Google maps obviously would tell you where they were. And I would tell the owner like, Hey, I can help you get on. Like this is free. You can just go to this website and you can list your business and Apple maps and then people can find you and they'd be like, okay, yeah, we'll do that. Didn't do it for years. Uh, I think eventually, I don't know if

Apple Maps did it. I don't know what happened, but eventually they got them. They thought you were trying to sell them something. Maybe. I'm not trying to sell you anything. We're going to talk about Google announcing a bunch of Android features, and they also announced something about watchOS, which I feel like shows how right you were about something that you've set up. I'm taking my points. Yeah, you're going to take your point when we get to that. And also, they had a big redesign. That's a little tongue-in-cheek. We're going to talk about that, too. But before we do, we have a couple sponsors to thank this week. YouTube.

You, all the members who support us directly, thank you. You're just going to get right over to the next chapter. But, which you can support the show, $5 a month, $50 a year, directly on Apple Podcasts or at join.primarytech.fm. You get ad-free bonus episodes and soon daily episodes. But we want to thank our sponsors. The first one being Insta360's X5 camera. Have you ever seen those videos on social media where people are doing like skiing or carpooling?

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at store.insta360.com. For more information, be sure to check out the links below. Our thanks to Insta360 for sponsoring this episode and our friends at 1Password. You know, as I was thinking about the 1Password ad and extended access management, did you ever have in like elementary school or whatever, like the wooden block when you had to go to the bathroom or whatever?

the hall pass you're talking about the hall pass yeah the hall pass do you remember that you ever had the wooden thing yeah well i mean yeah i remember that i remember like they just have some weird like kitchen spoon thing that you'd be like here this is the hall pass like basically it's like you put a thing but you have to attach it to something large that no one can steal because it's like yeah yes exactly well and that's what that's what i feel like when a company gives their employees a device and they say yeah use it for all your work stuff but then it's

hamstrung by all the weird IT stuff and lockdowns. It's basically like saying you got to have this big old wooden hall pass every time you want to do something. Like you got to ask the teacher, give me the block and then I can walk down the hall. I don't know if it's a perfect analogy, but I'm going with it. It's a thing. It is a thing. It is an analogy, but there's a better way to do that, which is 1Password Extended Access Management.

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That's one password.com slash primary tech. And that link is in our show notes as well. And thanks to one password for sponsoring this episode. So Google had a bunch of announcements this week having to do with Android, where OS, they still have Google IO next week. We're going to hear even more stuff next week, but they did like a pre event. I don't know. What do they, I mean, it's just, it was just, here's what we know. All they're going to talk about next week is Gemini. Oh,

Oh my word. We're going to have to do a word. Don't do a drinking game. Every time they say, Jim and I take a drink. Cause you will die. You'll probably, you'll be over before the event begins. But I mean, that makes sense. I get it. Like that's especially because Google Gemini is, it's out there. Like it's farther ahead in a lot of ways. Gemini, I think is what is a 2.5 is probably the best model for a lot of things right now. And, and,

Google's certainly able to do some things that our friends in Cupertino have not figured out. Before we even talk about watchOS 9 and the Android redesign, Google rebranded. It's the G logo. They didn't rebrand. They just tweaked the logo. No, no, no. This is a totally different brand. This used to be the old G logo with the hard lines in between each color. And what they did, I think BasicAppleGuy said this, they

They basically selected that layer and turned on the Gaussian blur and blurred the colors together. So now it's kind of a gradient. Yeah. I mean, courageous. Well, actually, here's the thing. We've, you and I had this conversation recently. I am opposed to companies tweaking their logos because they don't really need to. The only exception I will say to that is, and this was actually, I was, I was thinking about the, I don't know if you, um,

if you listen to the atp member episodes but they they um um the game system one but they tier ranked a bunch of company logos right and you go back in time and you look at like microsoft's logo pepsi's logo all these different companies logos and they do signify different periods of the company and google is definitely entering a new period of this company right

right in a lot of ways it may not like they may not have chrome in two years like who knows what's happening like they may be licensing their search deal or their search data here soon

In that sense, I actually think they handled it pretty well because they basically just took the same logo and they just tweaked it. It's like, it's not a different font. It's not different colors. It's not a different shape. It's just, yeah. So what you're saying is being against rebranding as a whole, Apple should have never rebranded. So hold on though. There's a difference between a rebrand and changing your logo, your logo and your brand. I just want to be clear about the difference. I know I'm being very, you know, pedantic about this, but yeah,

I definitely don't think that was a good logo, the original Apple logo, just to be honest. Honestly, that Isaac Newton is epic. I mean, not as a logo. It is a fantastic piece of art. It is a terrible logo. It's art. But, you know, Apple did rebrand because it was originally Apple Computer Inc. And I think it was around 2007 or 8. They rebranded to just Apple Inc. But that, I mean...

I assume you would be okay with that. I mean, that made sense. But I get, I mean, so that was, it was, they did it when they, I think they did it the same day they announced the iPhone. I'm pretty sure. Cause it was, I think it was like 2007 when they changed it to Apple Inc because it was like, we're no longer just a computer company. Right. Because they literally, it was January, 2007. Yeah. Right. But,

Again, well, whatever. I don't want to argue about what it means to rebrand. But changing that name from Apple Inc. Like a rebrand is when Netflix decided that the mail order DVD things was going to be called Quickster.

Do you remember those days? It did not last very long. I had DVDs. I did have the DVD. They changed their mind very quickly, which is a theme we're going to get to here in a little while. But that's... I mean, anyway, whatever. Yeah, I think Apple... When Apple changed from Apple Computer to Apple... That's like when AT&T changed from...

whatever american telegraph and telecommunications which everyone just abbreviated as at&t and now they're like actually the name is ma bell they should have rebranded as ma bell that would have been that would have been it so google did also announce thing changes to android specifically redesign or a new design language which doesn't feel like this happens every other year where android's like we have a new look fresh new coat of paint and you know

It's fine. They're trying to reach the younger demographic, what is it, Gen Z? Because the iPhone still has such a mind space, at least here in the US, when it comes to teenagers and around that age. So Google is hoping that this Android coat of paint will be attractive to younger demographics.

It still looks pretty Android to me. It's fine. You know, I have a Pixel that I, you know, I pull it out every once in a while just to see what it's doing. But I also have, and I still have yet to make a video about this. I need to do it. The Nothing 3a. And I will just say when it comes to like interesting ideas and kind of like fun whatevers, I kind of like what Nothing has done besides what Apple or what Google has done with Android. But anyway,

I don't know. A little different. Well, and the important thing about Material 3 is it's not just Google's design language for how it presents things. It's sort of its customization layer and how it allows people. And I don't think that we could argue that Google isn't doing a better job with Android of that than Apple, right? I mean, Apple is like...

Oh yeah, 100%. Google is so far... Android is so far ahead of iOS in that particular aspect. And I think it's like...

Take, for example, the fact that you can't put the clock where you want on your phone. And I'm not saying that those things are important. I'm just saying you can't make the – like it is so far ahead. You can't put stuff in the middle. It is so far ahead of that. And so for people who that is important, Android does a very good job of that. I mean, on Apple, it's like you can have three widgets on your lock screen and they only go here. Whereas Google is like, YOLO, do what you want. It's fine.

Yeah, and they also allow you to change your font and people make it look horrendous. But, you know, if you want to do that. I'm not saying that what people do with it is going to be good. I'm just suggesting that if that's the thing that you care about, that's what this is for. Well, it's even like icon packs. I don't know if Google does this with Android.

proper like the vanilla version of android but on the nothing phone there's actually an option to just give it an icon pack and then select that icon pack and it would just change all the icons in one step where i made an elaborate shortcut to try and do that which is still cumbersome and a pain in the neck so even in that regard you know if you want to do custom icons on iphone it is an hours long process you it really needs to be a labor of love because you really want custom icons

But yeah, yeah, Android does that. There's a reason Widget Smith was the most popular app in the universe for a period of time, and it's because finally you could do things that you could never do before. It is true. But there was also another thing they announced, which this is a huge point for Jason. Wear OS 6, which is Google's wearable operating system, is going to bring Google Gemini AI to the watch market.

and you've been saying this for a long time. I mean, I haven't said anything. I didn't even know Google made a watch, but I have been saying that the watch, it's not true. I did know that Google made a watch, but that the watch is the device. That's where these things, if you're going to talk to a device that you're wearing, you don't need a pin. You don't need a rabbit that goes in your pocket or whatever. Like just the watch, just make it the watch. And I think the, don't you think like the Apple watch series 10 and the ultra two should be capable of doing?

It definitely should be. I mean, it feels plenty fast, even if it is just communicating with your phone, which it was saying in the Verge article, the watch does need Wi-Fi or LTE. Like, it is not using some on-device model. No, yeah. But most people's watches are either connected to their phone or connected to the Internet. Right.

We've solved that problem. Just make it so that I can chat at my wrist. I don't even have my watch on. That's really weird. Anyway, talk to my wrist and have it do its thing. Yeah. Which did you know, I actually saw, I'm going to do a video on this. Did you know for setting a timer, if you have the raise to speak enabled on your Apple Watch, you can literally just say a time and it will set a timer for that time. You don't have to say set a timer. Did you know that? I believe that that's true. But I just...

No, I did not know that. Five minutes. All I did was say five minutes. Look at that. All I did was say five minutes to my Apple Watch and it started a five minute timer. I didn't know you could do that. And do you know what Apple does better than Google in this regard? That when you say set a timer for a blank amount of time, once it figures it out, it takes it a couple seconds, but it starts the timer based on when you told it to do it. Whereas if you set a timer on a Google device, you're like...

Hey Google, set a timer for five minutes. Oh, I can hold, I can drop a marker to mute that.

Or maybe not. Maybe I'll just let everybody's Google just set timer. So now it's telling me I'm going to set a timer for five minutes and now the timer has started and now everything's boiled over. Your muffins are burnt. This is not useful. But anyway, it can't be. So Apple's already doing this. If you pick up your phone and you're like, ask chat GPT what the weather's going to be like tomorrow. My phone isn't doing anything. It's already sending it to the cloud anyway. So why can't my watch do that?

Yeah, that would be nice. I'm for it. I'm for it. One other Android-y thing before I want to talk about the iOS 19 accessibility features. The Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge is out there in the wild. I'll link to MKBHD's video. He didn't call it a full review. He was just kind of talking about first impressions because it looks like they just got it. But Samsung is first to the thin phone revolution, I guess.

And we're expecting to see the iPhone 17 air soon as well. He has concerns, like he said in the video about battery life, which you would think from a very thin phone, but it's also like in kind of like a mid tier. He said it's kind of in between the Samsung galaxy S 25 plus and the pro. So it kind of has like slightly better features than the base model, but it's a very thin, it's a very thin phone.

We'll see if people like it. I feel like we're now entering our skinny jeans phase of phones. So does that mean we eventually end up with really baggy, you know, high-waisted? I'm just saying, like, the mom... Are we going to go to mom jeans eventually? No, we're going to go to bell-bottoms, where just the bottom of phones are super wide. Or maybe reverse bell-bottoms. Skinny jeans came after bell-bottoms. I'm just saying. Everything goes for a full circle. It's just weird that... Why is your speaker still listening to you?

Was that a home pod or your home pod? I don't even know what was talking to me. Jason's Jason's assistants are becoming sent. You're going to be, they're going to get, they're going to take a, so anyway, it's out there. We'll see what actual full reviews say about it, but the thin phone, the thin phones are here. Do we want them? I don't, I don't think I want, are you buying a thin phone next year? This year? I mean, I'm going to buy one to make a video, but it's probably not going to be the one I use. That's my full-time phone. I'm still on the fence. I don't know if I'm going to go pro or pro max this year. I don't know.

You have a Pro Max now, right? I have a Pro Max right now. Very large. Better battery life. Also, because I make all the videos, the screen's bigger. Anyway, we'll see. We'll see. Speaking of things that everybody gets, though, for their next iPhone. iOS 19, in the last, I think it's been the last three or four years, Apple has done, because...

World Accessibility Day is May 15th. Actually, today, I think, as we're recording. And so Apple announces new accessibility features ahead of WWDC, and they've done it again this year with iOS 19. They have a really fun video about some of these significant features coming in iOS 19. Accessibility nutrition labels. So if you recall, if you go in the App Store, there's the privacy nutrition labels talking about what data apps will take from you if you install the app and use it.

Well, now there's going to be accessibility nutrition labels telling you what it supports, like voiceover, reduced motion, things like that. So that's a welcome addition. Also, a new magnifier on Mac, which you can either use your phone and point it towards like a book or something, and it will show you magnified text digitally live on the Mac, which is really cool. I mean, that's super fun. So you get that.

There's a new Braille experience. And when I posted about this, there was some confusion because people were like, how is the iPhone going to do Braille on its display? And it's not exactly the case. It's, it can work together with Braille displays. So like external devices, but it's also going to have ways to input things in Braille. I'm really sorry because I have no experience with this, but I'm not sure what the exact terminology is, but Braille screen input is,

with a connected braille device and braille access where users can quickly take notes in braille format and perform calculations using Nemeth Braille, a braille code often used in classrooms for math and science. So support for those things. That's super cool. Accessibility reader. This is super fun too because if you have a PDF on your iPhone, maybe in the Files app, depending on how that PDF is formatted, you can't really like

enlarge the text like you would with an Apple book or like in Safari. And so accessibility reader is going to take things like a PDF or other files and basically give you like a reader mode. Yep. But for that, and you can make the text larger, change the contrast, the colors, I think even speak it, which is very cool. Live captions on Apple watch. If you've not ever used live captions, I've done videos on this in the past. It's an amazing feature where basically you, you turn it on and,

And if someone's speaking to you, it's going to transcribe what they're saying in real time. And it's pretty good. You could do it on your phone now with iOS 18. Well, it's going to be coming to the watch, which feels like an even more accessible device to have that kind of feature on it. Love that. Enhanced view with Apple Vision Pro, which I think three people will be able to use, and Jason when he wears it every morning. But that's cool. You can basically magnify things in the real world.

and you know make it large in apple vision pro that's super fun and there's a bunch of other smaller additions uh things like vehicle motion cues will be added to the mac better eye tracking head tracking personal voice which i'm did you ever try personal voice did you ever train the personal voice i did not

So personal voice is one of the best Apple videos. I think that happened recently where, you know, if you if someone was losing the ability to speak, they could train the iPhone to then do text to voice in your voice. And it's supposed to sound like you now personal voice to train it. Previously, you had to read 150 statements.

and it did not sound very good. Like it did not sound like me. And I have an 11 Labs professional voice trained on my recordings. And then I did the personal voice on iPhone. The iPhone version doesn't sound anything like me, especially compared to 11 Labs. So I'm curious if it will actually get better at what it sounds like, but they've reduced the training necessary. So rather than 150 phrases that you have to read, there's just 10 phrases that you can speak and it will supposedly train it based on that. So that's cool.

And the last thing I think, just an interesting point in this Apple Newsroom article, as they were talking about accessibility, at the very bottom, Apple shared its own little shortcut. It talked about the shortcuts app, and they made a shortcut called Hold That Thought. And it's a shortcut that prompts users to capture and recall information in a note so interruptions don't derail their flow. And you can download it now from the Apple News article, and it runs on Mac and iPhone.

I asked Matthew Castanelli to give a quick review and he said it's actually pretty good. Works well. So, uh, Apple, they're making shortcuts now. They're getting, uh, their competition now. They've made one in the last 10 years. That's very anti-competitive of them. That's all right. I'm, I'm down for the competition. Go ahead, Apple. Let's, let's bring it on. Bring on whatever shortcuts you want to make.

That's cool. And then now also, did you see the sound therapy stuff that came out? Yes. I didn't have a lot of time to dig into it, but it was interesting that this came out at a time related to when I went to that listening party thing because a large part of that was this partnership that he did with

which I don't exactly know what Chromosonic is, except for that we went into this room and there was music playing and there was all of this light and

And the frequencies of the music changed the lighting. And then the lighting also changed the music. Like there was this, and so it was like this 20 minute experience that was designed to help you like relax or whatever based on all this. And so I'm like, Oh, I know exactly what, otherwise I would have read this and I would have like, I have no idea what they're talking about, but I'm like, Oh no, I've, I've experienced sort of the, and it's a, it's kind of like remixes of some songs, but then it's basically just Apple music playlists. Like you could just add these playlists to your Apple music and try it out.

So curious to see if anybody's done that. I don't know. Have you ever tried the Endel app? No. Endel is like this supposedly an app that tries to predict what kind of atmospheric music will help you focus or give you energy. I've done it a couple of times. Like it's interesting, but yeah. Every time I put on music,

to help me focus, it just makes me tired. What are you putting on? Sabrina Carpenter? That does not make me tired. No, I'm just saying like, because the music that, I'm weird, because I'm just, that's just a true statement, period. But like, I just would rather listen to normal music to help me focus because it just puts me, like, but if I'm going to, I think what happens is if I'm listening to something that someone else thinks should help me focus, now I'm thinking more about the music.

And then it makes me like helping me focus, but it's like, this is not what I would normally be listening to. So it's different and it's weird. And now I just want to go to sleep.

Okay. All right. That's a, yeah. Okay. Yeah. We'll move on. A vision OS three. There's some rumors coming out. There's a, there's a ton of rumors coming out about like the iPhone 18 and the iPhone 19. Can I just say, let me just ask you real quick, Jason, do you feel like there's been a rumor timeline inflation in recent years where I feel like rumors used to just focus on the iPhone that's coming out this year?

And then in the last couple of years, it's been like, well, here's rumors about not the iPhone 17, but the iPhone 18 coming out next year. And now we're talking about like Apple's product lineup in 2027. Like it's literally been articles that Mark Gurman is talking about in Bloomberg. Yeah. Have we gotten a timeline inflation? Wasn't the headline like 2027 is going to be a real big year for Apple? Yes. Yes. That is literally it. What? That's two years from now. What is that? Why do we have this inflation? Is it just like...

There's not enough Apple news right now. And so people are talking about 2020. I don't, I feel like I can't, I can't really put my mind on why someone would leak that information unless it's to be intentional on Apple's behalf. Because it's like, you could see a scenario where the, some executive is like, we need the world to know that we're still doing some things over here, even though we're in the middle of getting like,

or we're going to lose search. We're going to lose $20 billion from search. We're going to use $10 billion from the app store because of all this stuff that's happening. But 2027, it's going to be a real big year. So you all just sit tight and give us some time. Two years. I don't know. It just feels like we have a timeline inflation. I don't know. Okay. Well, Vision OS 3, supposedly this is a rumor. It's going to let you scroll

scroll using just your eyes. So rather than having to, you know, do the pinch and swipe up in the floating in the air, you can just scroll by looking, I guess. I don't know if I like that because my eyes need to move around the screen in order to consume what's on it, but I don't necessarily want the screen to move because

Like this just makes me feel like I'm going to throw up. Maybe it's just like, maybe it's like a half squint. You know what I mean? Like you open, you look with your whole eyeballs and that just, you look around and then you squint halfway and then you can, it's going to be really good analogy season. It's, I still think, I don't know if you said this or someone, but like it, it is weird how in the vision pro your eyes, which are typically a strictly input device now become a output device and controller. And it's, it's a, it can be a little weird. It can be a little weird.

All right. Two quick things. And then we're going to get to personal tech, which is my new computer. But you had an article about a Google that's being really annoying in Safari. And is this talking about like the pop-up, like every time you search in Safari? Yeah, I should have included that little, I should have, I'll add a little screenshot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just ridiculous. Every single time you want to do a search and it's like,

Would you like to continue this in the Google app? And then the button says continue, which is selected or stay in browser. So if you just click continue, what you think you should be doing is like, just don't do anything different. Just let me make my search and do my thing. But if you click that, it will open the Google app if you have it installed or take you to download the Google app. And I put this together with the whole...

Google was very emphatic that searches are not down, even though Eddie Q went on the stand and tossed him underneath the bus and then backed it up a few times when it said that, you know, searches in Safari are down and Google's like, but, but, but, but that's because people are using the Google app. And I'm like, well, no kidding, because you just keep putting people into the Google app when they try to do searches in Safari and

And also Google, like if you think about it, I don't know the details of the revenue sharing that they have for the search deal. But of course, Google wants you to use the Google app because if it monetizes them in there, probably it's not paying Apple a commission on those because they're no longer happening in Safari. That is true. I'm a little tired of Google search, I'll be honest. And last week we talked about what if an AI was an option as a default search engine. And I feel like when I search in just the Safari application,

address bar on my phone, I'm getting Google's AI overview 90% of the time anyway. And I feel like if I could change that to like chat GPT web search, I might switch now because I'm like, I'm already getting AI results. I'm just getting Google's AI results.

I would say 30% of the time it's inaccurate. Like I was asking it, I was searching last night. I was trying to build a shortcut for somebody in my community and I was trying to find if it was possible. And the AI overview just basically lied to me. Like it said, yeah, yeah, yeah. You could do that. You just do this, this and that. And I'm like, you can't do that. So I'm, I'm close. I'm like, maybe, I don't know. On your iPhone, do you use chat GPT search though? Yes. Well, I use chat GPT. So here's the thing.

I wish there was a way for me to go and like, cause in chat GPT, I can see exactly how often I'm using it. Cause there's just a list of all of the things I used it for. Right. So I can basically think, I wish they were timestamped, but I can basically figure out how often I'm using it. And for almost everything, I'm now just using chat GPT. Not, I don't even, I'm just going to the app. I'm not even using the chat GPT search integration and brave anymore. And it's,

It is. We've gotten to a point like, you know, when it first came out and you'd ask it, like write a bio for Steven Robles. And it's like, he was born on a farm in West Virginia and worked in the coal mines and then traveled the ocean for six years. And then, yeah, like you just make stuff. It's like, that sounds so cool. I want that life, but it's not actually mine.

I was trying to fix a chainsaw the other day, Steven, and I couldn't figure out why the, what was happening. And I thought that the hand, the, the chain break was engaged, but I couldn't quite figure out how to make it work because anyway, so I took it off and I just took, I just took a photo of the inside of the cover. Literally. I just took a photo and I just said, what is wrong with this?

No kidding. That was the question. And ChatGPT said, it appears as though the chain break is engaged. Would you like me to tell you how to fix this? And I said, yes. And it gave me all of the steps and none of it made sense to me. And then it said, do you want me to give you a diagram? And I said, yes.

And no kidding, it gave me a diagram of what to do. Now, it's still... I'm sending you a picture of this diagram that ChatGPT made for me. And I'm going to send you the picture that I sent to... I can't because I can't drag that right now. But anyway, I...

I was like, this is incredible. How in the world did ChatGPT do this? And then I did the thing that you do because I'm like, I actually need a YouTube video of somebody fixing this for me. Right, right, right. But at least now I knew what I was looking for. Right? Yeah, exactly. And so, I mean, like ChatGPT, just from a photo that said what – how did it know, Stephen? If I sent a photo of something and it could tell –

I mean, some of those labels are not exactly like that doesn't matter though. Like it did the thing and it took my photo and it knew instantly like, yeah, it looks like your little, that, that long screw thing or that long spring thing right there. It's like, it looks like that's engaged. I'm like, how does it know?

I will say the rotate clockwise, the arrow I think is backwards, but it is, it is. There's plenty of things that are not exactly correct, but, but if it gets you, but if it gets you 90% of the way there, you know, even knowing what to search or the term that you need, you know, it's, it comes a long way. But if I can take a photo of something that's not working and just say, why is, what is wrong with this?

And it can actually look at the photo and it knows what it is. And it can tell that there's a problem. I didn't say the chain won't work. I didn't say this is a chainsaw that I took the cover off of. I just said, what is wrong with this? That's listen, that's wild. I'll give you that. All right. Last thing before we talk about my M4 Max studio, there was a company that did rebrand again.

H B O, which is a part of Warner brothers discovery. It's now, uh, it's, it's back to HBO, the streaming service. They've changed the name. You know, this HBO was originally HBO and then it was HBO go. And then it was HBO now. And then they made it, they combined them all and they made them to be on max, but they kept the HBO go app around for a while. Yep. And then they just, they just made it all max when they merged with discovery. And, uh,

Because they thought that HBO would be not a good name to have in an app where they also had like, you know, whatever Discovery has. Is it HGTV and all that kind of stuff they didn't want? Yeah, stuff like that. And then they were like, actually, HBO was the most valuable brand that we had. We should put it in the name of everything, please. So silly. I saw a couple of people online being like, did HBO just do this for the internet memes? Yeah.

And I'm almost inclined to believe that theory. Like maybe this was the best marketing move ever because all everybody's doing is talking about HBO and Max. But also it's just really kind of really. It's pretty bad. My thing was like, this is the smartest thing that they've ever done. It's real bad if the smartest thing you ever did is just reversing the stupidest thing you've ever done. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. All right. So now it's back to HBO Max.

Yeah. I think, I think they should really just go full circle and just call it HBO. I don't understand why there is more though. Like that would be like, like Disney plus is not just Disney. You've got ESPN stuff in there. You got Hulu stuff. So call it HBO plus HBO plus. Okay. But the reason they didn't do HBO plus is because everybody else's streaming service is plus. I actually think that the max is like, that part is fine. No,

meaning adding that as the adjective. Sure. It was when they, it's like you have a name of a brand and then you add an adjective to it to signify that this is like the better version or whatever. Yeah. And they just took away the brand and just left the adjective. And it's like, what is max? What? It's just, it's the most things. It's the most of what? Yeah. We don't know. The, the, the pro max HBO pro max plus pro max plus HBO max up mag ultra. Anyway,

Speaking of Max's and Ultras, I've been recording this entire episode on my new, brand spanking new, Mac Studio. M4 Max, Mac Studio. It's going to be funny. I'm going to make this video. You'll hear about it here first because I'm going to make a video about this versus my M1 Max, Mac Studio. But I'm going to hold up the M1 Max at the intro and be like, I just got an M4 Max. Then I'll be like, just kidding. This is the M1 Max. But it literally looks exactly the same. There's no way you could tell the difference from the outside.

And I think hopefully that'll be fine. But Stephen, also, can I just say a thing? I want you to talk about this. I just want to tell our listeners, you should not buy a brand new computer and then do a podcast. It's not a good idea. I did. No, no, no. I wouldn't have done it, but it came in Tuesday. So I had a whole day. Okay. Listen, let me listen. Here's how it happened. Okay. I got it on Tuesday. I was on the fence. Migration assistant or set up from scratch.

And I was very close to doing migration assistant. And then I started looking at my applications folder and I said, Hey, I have all these Adobe apps installed that I haven't used in a year or two years. I don't want any Adobe anything. And I know it's going to, there's a bunch of stuff in my library folder, Adobe support applications, but I don't want any of that. I know I could install it, but I know those, those files, they just hide. They're hidden over there in the library. You know, you know what I'm talking about? They're just there.

So I didn't want to install Zoom. I haven't used Zoom in forever because we use Riverside. Yes, I work for Riverside. But I haven't used Zoom in forever. Apple uses WebEx, so I don't need Zoom there. If I ever need to use Zoom, I think I can do Zoom in a browser. I don't think you need the actual app. I'm not going to install Zoom. And there was other little apps where I was like, I don't use that anymore. I was like, all right, I'm doing a clean slate.

I will say start to finish, like logging into my Apple ID to being ready to go, except for enabling screen sharing in Brave, which caused me to have to restart it just for this podcast. Two hours. Two hours was it. Two hours, logged into my Apple ID, installed all the apps, installed things like Audio Hijack, everything from the Mac App Store, logged into everything. Two hours starting from scratch, and it was basically just like my other one and ready to go.

And one, because I basically keep everything in iCloud Drive, so I don't really have to move any files over. Most of my apps are from the App Store, so that's great. And the other apps like Hazel, Text Expander, Audio Hijack. I already made a video about all the apps I install on a Mac. I'll find that to link in the show notes. But super fast. And now I have this computer. People are asking me about the specs. Listen.

A, I'm trading in my M1 Mac, so I saved a little bit there. But I did go all the way M4 Macs. And by all the way, I mean 128 gigabytes of unified memory and 8 terabyte SSD. Now listen, I know everybody's saying the 8 terabyte is the most expensive upgrade. Yes, I could use external hard drives for everything. I already use it for my Final Cut Pro footage. I know all of that. Here's why I want 8 terabytes. My old Mac Studio was 2 terabytes.

I was already like three quarters full and I had the iCloud photo library optimizing Mac storage. So I didn't have the downloads, the originals downloaded. If I were to download the originals, it's about a terabyte for my iCloud photo library. So obviously I couldn't do it on my old Mac studio. I could have gone to four terabyte SSD

And then I would have been at like two and a half terabytes of full and then like one and a half terabytes free for the next however many years. And it's like, you can, you can't upgrade this. I just, I'd never want to think about this. So I went all the way and I did the eight terabyte and I've, and the one checkbox I've never checked on a Mac that I always wanted to do. I will post a little video, the download originals of my photo library to my Mac. I did it.

It's very nice. It all downloaded overnight. And then the next day, Wednesday, my entire iCloud photo library was downloaded. My mail was all downloaded. My messages, everything synced and it was ready to go. And it's wonderful. Now, I did do some tests. Here's the thing.

M chips are very good. I don't know if you know that, Jason. I heard. Even the M1 chips are still very good. So I started doing side-by-side tests. I did exports in Compressor of my videos. I did transcriptions using Transcriptionist and seeing how long those took. It is definitely faster. The M4 Max does all the tasks faster.

The problem is a lot of my tasks are not like hour-long videos. They're like 10-minute or 15-minute videos. So I'm saving like two to three minutes on an export, which is not significant.

And I would say if you were trying to like, if you do the kind of videos I do, like upgrading even from an M1 to an M4 is not usually significant. But I want to do some bigger tasks. Like I want to find the longest YouTube video I can find and try to transcribe that and see how it goes with each. And also like encode an hour long video, which is something that I'll do periodically from Final Cut and then time that because I imagine there'll be a larger difference there.

But obviously it's very fast. And yeah, I mean, I have now all the SSD. I'm like Thanos. I can finally rest. I have a lot of thoughts. But the first thing I will say, if you want a good test, and I just did this recently. So I downloaded, while I was in Miami...

Berkshire Hathaway had their annual meeting and I watched part of it and I was thinking about writing about something and I wanted to know what they might have said about a couple things and much easier than searching through every article on the internet to find out if they happen to include a quote about this particular topic I just downloaded the whole thing it's like six hours long put it in whisper transcription okay and whisper allows you to choose the model and if you use one of the large models it'll give you speaker identification which is just a really helpful thing

But they take a lot longer, as you can imagine. In a six-hour video, you can imagine it will take a while to transcribe. I did convert it to audio first. So I opened it in QuickTime, just exported the audio, and just dumped that in there just for the size of the file. And it took on an M4 Pro MacBook Pro –

It probably took about 25 minutes to do the transcription and then to go back through and do the speaker identification. Okay. So it does those two things in two different steps in the large, in the large model. And then I was, so I did what I needed to do and whatever. And I was like, I wonder how long that would have taken them for MacBook air.

So I did it on there and it took about 45 minutes and that's just an M4 to an M4 Pro. So there is like a real difference when you start getting into that kind of thing. But you're right. Exporting from Final Cut, it's optimized on every Apple Silicon. Like there's a specific media encoder that's designed just to do that. You're not even like touching the CPU, like to do that kind of thing. But if you were having to compile code all the time because you had to see, did this thing work? Yeah.

how does it run? That's where those, you know, even if you're like, you go from 40 seconds to 15 seconds, it's like, I can now fix it right now and I can run it right now and I can do those things. And those are repetitive. If you're like, I'm making a 15 minute video and exporting it, this there's zero benefit. Like it's just, it's not, I'm not important. It's yeah. I mean, it's literally saving me two to three minutes, but there are my process is,

I will typically be exporting a video in Compressor and transcribing the audio and also making my thumbnail in Pixelmator. Like I'm doing all of that simultaneously. When I do that on my M4 Air, it chokes. Like it does start actually like

getting unusable like i can't really make changes in pixel mater because it's trying to export in the background and trying to transcribe and my m1 max was able to do that pretty handily i don't know and so that's another test i need to do like let me export transcribe and edit in pixel mater and see how that affects the times and uh and i'll do it but i'm also gonna i'm gonna download that six hour berkshire hathaway thing and transcribe it and see and see how that does but anyway yeah

I have it though. I mean, it's, I have all the SSD space now. I should not, I mean, honestly, I should not buy a computer now for 10 years. I'm not saying I won't. I'm saying I probably shouldn't. Right. I don't, I really don't think I need to. And that SSD is insanely expensive, like as an upgrade. But I also, you know, I was in a position this year to be able to do this and I've never maxed out a configuration on a Mac. Like I've just never been able to, nor,

feel like i should have or whatever and so and i you could go up to the m3 ultra but i didn't want the m3 i wanted the m4 and so because the three is the lower number that's the reason honestly yes yes that but also i even again from my workflows i knew that the m3 ultra was i mean what i have now is overkill and the m3 ultra would be even more overkill what you had last week was was maybe not overkill but was plenty yeah what i had last week was good but

I never have to think about Ram or SSD space again. So I don't know. It's, it's fun to have. It's, it's, it's just going to sit here as another block of aluminum. And, uh, yeah, there you go. And ports, I have to say Mac studio ports undefeated. I use every, I use every port.

And it's wonderful. Every single one. Now, I just want to say for our listeners, you should not do what Steven did. And I don't mean by all the RAM and the SSD. I'm just going to say for most people, Migration Assistant is the way to go because it does put everything the way you need. And, you know, it does not take very long to Migration Assistant. I think you could have done Migration Assistant and deleted everything from Adobe. Yeah.

And it would have still taken you less time because it's real fast to do that. But I just don't trust the... Like, I have Hazel looking through all the files to see if anything else was installed. I just don't... What do you think Adobe is going to do if some little tiny thing of it gets stuck in there? So what? What's it going to do? I don't want it in there. I just don't want it in there. Let me know in the community. Let me know on social media. If you identify with my desire to not... I just don't want it in there. That's fair. I'm saying the trade-off is...

We go to record a podcast and it's like, oh shoot, now I can't share my screen without restarting. But that's a mission critical thing. I feel like that would have been the case either way. I feel like I would have to give it permissions. But I did do the thing where I had my old Mac studio on a display over here with the system settings. And I was literally going pane by pane just to make sure all the settings matched. Like mouse tracking speed, my screensaver, timeout settings, all that kind of stuff. That's amazing.

anyway uh it's enjoyable i'm gonna do a video on it so uh that'll be on my personal youtube but we're gonna go talk about bonus content i want to talk about microphone that i bought and already returned i see i don't keep everything i've returned some things especially when i don't need them uh i think just microphones so far in my experience the only thing you get and then return are microphones i've returned some chargers that i've used in a video and not uh no i do have more here i

I got these were sent to me, though. I got this anchor one that's like also has a nightlight. And then I have this. This one I've actually been wanting to try for a while. This is like a four in one charger. And so we didn't do it. Anyway, we're going to go record a bonus episode. You can subscribe and listen to our entire back catalog of bonus episodes, including John Gruber's Preferences Lightning Round. That was our bonus episode last week.

so you can support the show at join.primarytech.fm when you do it there you get chapters even in the ad-free version of the episode but you can also support us in apple podcast they just trip out my chapters and there's nothing i can do about it but anyway you can support us either way and let us know in that survey uh what member benefit if you've already taken it thank you so much for doing that if you haven't taken it we'd love to hear from you and thank you for support leave us a five-star rating and review an apple podcast if you haven't yet trying

Trying to get to 1,000 there in the next year, we'll say. And you can also watch the show on YouTube, youtube.com slash at Primary Tech Show. Thanks, everybody, for watching and listening. We'll catch you next time.