790: Wandering Around The Verge, with David Pierce
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Hello and welcome to Mac Power Users. My name is Stephen Hackett. I'm joined as always by my friend and yours, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, Stephen. How are you doing today? I am great, David. How are you? Excellent. And looking forward to another fun show of Mac Power Users. And today we have a guest.

We do. You're not the only David this week, so we were just talking about this. It's going to be confusing. But we are joined by David Pierce from The Verge. Hello, David Pierce. Hello. I've decided, I was being nice about this before, but I've decided there can only be one David. And we will fight it out over the course of this episode. Okay.

I don't know what that looks like, but I'm very upset about it and it's happening. Okay, so if we're going to choose weapons, I choose AppleScript. How's that? Ooh, all right, I lose. I'm out. We had a good run. Nice knowing you. Okay, thanks for coming, everybody, today. See you next time.

Before we get in to talking with David about his work at The Verge and how much RAM you should have in your Mac and so many other things, a little housekeeping. WWDC has been announced for the week of June 9th. So we, of course, will be covering all of the stuff coming out of WWDC, iOS, macOS, redesigned hardware. Who knows what's going to happen, but we're looking forward to that.

And on More Power Users, the ad-free longer version of the show that we do each and every week, we're going to be talking about how AI and search are on a bit of a collision course. Pierce wrote this great thing at The Verge several months ago about that. And David Sparks, already confusing, has been playing with some of these tools. And so we're going to get into that for members. I think, Stephen, for WWDC this year, the big announcement

Write this down. So, you know, everybody knows I said it first. Hover iMac. Just think about it. What is that? Is it just like floats? Yeah. It's already pretty thin. Yeah. Hover iMac. Everybody's going to get it. Get the big iMac, but it's going to hover. Okay, we're already off the rails. I had a conversation with somebody just last week. They have a 27-inch iMac, and they're at the point where they can't update the software. They're stuck on like Ventura or something. Yeah.

And they're like, I went to go buy a new big iMac and I discovered they don't make them anymore. And I'm sure y'all have both had this experience where then you have to like break the bad news of like, oh, Apple gave up on that. And yeah, good luck picking from any other Mac plus a display. My in-laws went through exactly that thing. And it was awful because for like,

Two years, every time I would go see my in-laws, my father-in-law would be like, so any news on the 27-inch iMac? And I went from over the course of 18 months, really, from they have to update it, right? It's probably going to happen. Give it time. I don't know what they're waiting for, but it'll come to like literally having to sit him down and be like, I'm so sorry. It's not happening. And your 2009 iMac was...

will never be replaced. And so I wound up buying them. They got a Mac mini and a keyboard and a monitor and a webcam, and they are like 12% less happy with their computing setup than they were before. And it is just the best it can be. And it's, it's honestly sort of sad. I loved that computer. Yeah. I mean, the Mac mini is a great computer, but it's not an all in one. And you know, I guess you could gaff tape it to the back of a Dell screen or something. Right. Yeah.

Not that. Just tell them it's an iMac. And they'll say, well, that looks kind of weird. Well, Apple's getting this new modular thing. So no, gaff tape is, this is Apple gaff tape. It's not just any gaff tape. Right, it's like gaff tape, but it's eight times as expensive. And I think that would go over well, I think. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, David Pierce, you are the editor-at-large of The Verge, and I've been following your stuff for a long time. You host The Verge cast twice a week, which, I mean, I do two weekly shows, but doing the same show twice a week seems exhausting. You do this great thing, if people aren't familiar, on the Tuesday episodes, where you...

introduce the show, but you're just like doing something. So this morning after dropping kids off at school, I pressed play on the most recent episode. You're talking about Roomba and how this company's in trouble. And you're like talking about how you're covering up LEDs and all the things in your home office, which is just, I love it. The introductions are fantastic. But I'd love to hear a bit about how you got into tech journalism and some of your background with that stuff.

Sure. So I should just say first that there is a not small contingent of the Verge cast audience that absolutely hates those intros, just hates them with a fiery passion. And so to everyone listening to this saying, no, don't be nice to him about the intros. Just know that I know. And also, they're never going to stop. And I'm so sorry. My tech journalism story is...

Sort of odd. I basically got into it when I was in college. I really liked writing and I really like technology and I did some writing for my school newspaper and stuff like that. But I one winter break out of the blue emailed David Pogue, who was at the time the New York Times tech columnist and was basically like, I don't.

need any money. I don't need anything from you. I just, you seem like you have an interesting job. I live right down the street. He happened to be like 15 minutes away from where I lived. And if you ever need anything, I'm happy to help. Like if you just want somebody to get you coffee every morning and see how you work, I'd love to. And he has never told me why, but he said he got these emails all the time and for some reason responded to mine. And so I went and

And basically, I went to his house and I didn't realize this until much later, but he set it up as like an elaborate meet and greet where we like hung out for a few minutes. We talked. He knew I was a fan. And then he had to go to tennis. So he just like built himself an out just like a Saturday afternoon. He went to play tennis. But on his way out, he was like, oh, I...

uh, broke my Xbox. It doesn't work for some reason. Uh, can you fix it? And I don't know anything about how to fix Xboxes, but I was like, sure. Uh, so while he was at tennis, I sat in his living room and fixed his Xbox. Um, and then he came back and basically I spent the rest of winter break, just like hanging out with him, doing things he needed to do and then worked with him, uh,

Let's see, off and on for a year and a half, working on book stuff and column stuff and all the things he was working on at the time. And...

I essentially owe my entire career to him and to people he introduced me to. I met Joanna Stern through him. She did a couple of videos with him that are very funny and that I've promised I will never share with other people, but everybody should Google them. They're delightful. I met her through him and she hired me at The Verge. I got an internship at Wired because David Polk vouched for me. He, for absolutely no reason, was kind to me and kind of brought me into this world and

It's just kind of been off and running ever since. That's awesome. It's amazing how sometimes in life we just kind of find ourselves in places and then things just take a turn that maybe you didn't see coming. Yeah, I've become a huge proponent of cold emails as a result. I think I write a pretty good cold email. It's also part of what I do for a living is reach out to people who don't know me and have no reason to talk to me. But that has happened to me so many times where people who had no business...

being kind to me or taking chances on me have. And so the advice I give to people all the time is like it, all it costs you is an email and you'd be surprised how much good can come out of it. And I've also tried to pay that forward whenever I can to people because there are a lot of people out there. Makes sense.

So your current role at The Verge is editor at large. And I've got a journalism background, but even I like struggled right in my head around this title. Like in my mind, you are just like walking around doing things and like swoop in, you swoop out editor at large. You have like a big rubber stamp you put on things. Tell us a little bit about your day to day responsibilities at The Verge.

That is so upsettingly accurate that I almost don't know how to respond. It's, uh, editor at large, many places is, is a relatively senior person who is not like a full-time manager in the newsroom. Right. So you'll, you'll see a lot of editors at large who like used to be, uh,

editor-in-chief or had some other big job and now want more of a sort of individual contributor job so they'll go out and their job is in part to like be fancy and go to conferences and write big stories and that kind of thing but you don't have a ton of sort of minute to minute management role inside of the newsroom yeah it always sounds like that's the job you get right before they put you out to pasture right a hundred percent and that is i assume what's happening to me um

That six months from now, someone will look at me and be like, you've passed your prime. It's time to go. And that'll be that for me. But my role essentially is...

Kind of what you said, I just sort of wander around The Verge. When I came back to The Verge, which was just shy of three years ago, the task given to me was basically like come play with the toys that we have, right? The Verge is a big platform with lots of different things that we can do. We have lots of really interesting technology. We're part of this bigger company. We make videos, we make podcasts. And it was just... They wanted somebody who would just come and sort of...

do things with the audience. Uh, I, I've, I was at the verge at the very beginning. And so like the, the verge community is my people and, uh,

they were just like, come do stuff. And so a lot of that has been podcasting. A lot of that has been writing. I do some kind of management stuff inside of the newsroom, helping decide what we cover and how and what we're thinking about and all of that. But we have an amazing team who spends much more time and energy doing that than I do. And I just get to try and find places I can be useful, which is occasionally helpful.

Crazy making because there are days you wake up and it's like, what is my job? Do I actually have a job here? But it's mostly really fun. How big is The Verge now? Oh, that's a good question. I think we're, I would say, man, I'm going to be so wrong and this is going to be so embarrassing. Somewhere in the range of like 50 people are kind of on our editorial team making stuff all the time.

I remember when y'all started it, it was, I think it was before Relay was around, but like we were already doing the podcast and writing thing. It's like all my favorite people were leaving where they worked. And it was like, oh, something is happening over there. But I mean, I guess in the 10 years since, I mean, it really has been a success. So congratulations. Yeah.

Thank you. It's been really interesting. So I was there at the beginning when it was like a bunch of us in one room with absolutely no idea what we were doing. And then I left for a while and went and had a bunch of other jobs and then came back. And the extent to which...

it had like become a real company was so fascinating, right? Because now Vox Media is very big and owns lots of other publications. They acquired New York Magazine and that whole company, they acquired Group 9. So I came back and like had a full day of HR orientation. Whereas the first time I joined The Verge, somebody was just like, here's your laptop. Your first story is due in 25 minutes. And it was just, it was a sort of fascinating difference. And yet The Verge, like the thing we make still feels very much like it did

you know, 13 years ago. And I think that's really cool. That is really cool. The thing I like that you bring David to it is I feel like you're curious, you bring a curiosity and the stories you pursue, they often overlap with my curiosity. I just think that you've got a real good sense for things that people interested in technology want to hear about. So I understand why they brought you back because you bring a very unique voice and a

I'm really happy that you're there and they're giving you the freedom to do what you want. I appreciate that. Thank you. You are the reason I started using Mac Whisper just to pick a random thing you wrote about very recently. No kidding. And I owe that entirely to you. And I love that app and use it every single day. It's a pretty good app. Yeah. You and I are both like deep productivity app nerds in our souls. And I feel a forever kinship with you because of that.

Mac Whisperer is fun too because it's like the only thing in my workflow is like, oh, this makes my Apple Silicon MacBook Pro work hard. You know, like just browsing in a bunch of Safari tabs is like, I don't need this laptop. You know, I could do this on a much cheaper machine. But then you fire up Mac Whisperer. It's like, oh, this is punishing this laptop. Transcribing with 40 cores. Let's go.

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So David, tell us about your gear. You're on the Mac Power users. What are you using? Sure. So I would say I use almost entirely Apple gear and I have sort of a sliding scale of satisfaction with it. So my current gear is I'm right now on an M4 Mac mini, which I bought last fall and love to bits. I have an iPhone 16.

Which I've been a pro user forever, but I downgraded to the 16 to get the blue color. It was the best decision ever. I don't know.

I love this phone unlike any phone I've ever had, and it is entirely because it is blue. And I don't know what that says about me, but there it is. Yeah, I want to make fun of you, but if they made an orange one, I'm not sure I wouldn't follow you right down that path. Yeah, like it's also the only phone I've had in many, many years that I don't have in a case. Like it just feels good to use this phone, and there's not enough of that in gadgets right now. Yeah.

Let's see, I have... I'm a big iPad user, but I'm also the Verge's designated reviewer of iPads. So I don't have an iPad so much as I have all of the iPads. Like I have...

Six iPads sitting here on my desk right now for various testing reasons. Well, put a pin in that. I want to talk about that because you have a unique perspective that a lot of our listeners don't. So we're going to talk about that. My perspective has changed a bit, actually, from the most recent review that I am doing. And I'm excited to talk about it.

All right. Um, I also have an Apple watch, uh, series eight, I believe. Um, it is the gadget I am most eager to replace out of everything that I have. And I would love to replace it with something that is not an Apple watch, but here we are. Um, I have a, I have a variety of headphones around, including a pair of AirPods. Um,

I have a Mac or I have a MacBook air and one that is my like work issued computer that I work from home. So I don't use it very often, except when I travel, that thing probably needs an upgrade, but I think I have to break it before they'll upgrade it. So see what happens there. That can be arranged. Yeah. Yeah. Right. It's like, Oh no, I spilled an entire bottle of Coca-Cola on my laptop. It's just, it's, I need a day to do that. You know what I mean? And it'll happen. Um,

I think that's it. That's kind of the, that's sort of my daily gear setup right now. So on the Mac, so you've, you're using the Mac mini at your desk, but you said you don't use the, the MacBook air much. Do you use the iPad? I mean, what do you do when you're not at your desk to get work done?

Well, the goal increasingly is to not do as much work when I'm not at my desk. I think part of the reason I really gravitated to the Mac mini is I've really come to like the idea of my computer as a place more than just sort of a thing I have with me all the time. And I go back and forth. I spent a long time having a MacBook that I would dock when I would sit down and it would go into the mouse and keyboard and monitor, but then I could take it with me everywhere. But

because I work at home, I don't,

end the workday. I don't have a shutdown ritual. I don't have a commute that I can use to sort of decompress as I get home. And the one way I have tried to combat that is like my computer lives where it lives, right? It's in the basement, which is where I get my work done. It's where I am all day. And when I leave the basement and go upstairs to be with my family, my computer and thus my work stays here. And it's not a perfect system, but it is, it has actually, I think, been really important for me.

Yeah, I get it. I've been going through that as I had an option to upgrade, ultimately decided not to. But I thought about, like, do I want the laptop to go with me and

one thing that really resonates is I've got a special room that I do work in and maybe that should be the only place I do that work. Yeah. And I think it really depends. I mean, I, for a long time, you know, when, when I was going into an office every day, the idea of having two different machines was so annoying that I just used my laptop for everything. And, uh, there was a time in my job where I traveled a lot more for work. And so like, there will probably come a time where I become a laptop person again. Uh, but,

But for this phase, having a sort of big, beautiful setup that I can then walk away from at the end of the day has been very nice. Now, if you don't want an Apple Watch, what do you want to upgrade it with? I actually want to downgrade it. And I can't find a good way to do so. I think what I've really realized is the...

The connectivity piece of an Apple Watch doesn't do much for me. Like getting notifications and getting phone calls and all that kind of stuff is not all that useful just because I have my phone with me all the time. And that's probably bad. I could probably stand up my phone with me less, but I just have it all the time. And so really all the watch does in most cases is it lights up two things instead of one thing. Yeah.

what I really want out of a smartwatch is much simpler than that, right? I want music and podcasts so that I can like be out in the world and have either just be able to control them without taking my phone out of my pocket or backpack or actually be able to do it locally on the watch. I want...

basic fitness stuff. Uh, for me, the, the, the sort of beginning and end of it is like step tracking, I think is really useful. All the rest of it is stuff I get really into and then stop caring about and then get really into and then stop caring about. But it's what the watch offers. If fitness wise is way overkill for what I'm actually doing and interested in. Uh,

And then I wanted to tell the time and that's about it. Like I'm actually the, I'm sure you guys saw this, but the, the pebble is coming back. And I think that is actually something I'm very excited about. I don't love the design of the pebble, but the feature set of it, I think is very close to what I'm looking for. It's, it's a bunch of sort of simple controls for things that you don't want to have to pull out your phone to do.

And that's kind of it. And I think I can, if I really sat here for an afternoon and mucked around in the watch app and on the watch settings, which sounds like torture, I could probably get the Apple Watch closer to that for my needs. But what I really want is just this thing, but with twice the battery and like half the functionality.

Yeah. You could really dumb down an Apple watch if you wanted, like turn off all notifications and things like that. But I almost, if I was in your shoes, I would maybe just order a $30 Timex and a step counter and go at that for a month and see if that's good enough. That might be the answer. There's a, there's a Casio, uh, the one of their G shocks that does that. And I really like it. I just don't like the way it looks.

But there are an increasing number of those very basic smartwatches out there, like the sort of hybrid smartwatch. Withings makes one that people always recommend that I should probably try again. I used a Withings watch for a while and it was pretty finicky and kind of hit or miss and I eventually gave up on it. But people like those. So I think things like this are out there. But then the problem all those have is they don't have...

the sort of seamless integration into a lot of the Apple-y stuff that the Apple Watch does. And where I get hung up is I really like being able to do things like rewind my podcast 15 seconds or skip to the next track on Spotify from my wrist. And there's just nothing else that gets quite to that point. Yeah. Well, maybe the EU will do you a solid. And I mean, it seems like they're going to make Apple open up some of the smartwatch stuff, but that's going to take some time, I think.

Yeah, that one's actually very funny because right as the new Pebbles were coming out, that was also being announced. It was like the next day. I was like, well, that's a really good timing for you. Seriously. And yeah, and I think that fight is coming in a real way for Apple on a lot of fronts. But that one, I think, is the one that as a user, I am particularly interested in is can I get some of that Apple Watch sort of simplicity and connectivity approach?

From a different watch. Yeah. We'll see. The thing that locks, locks a lot of us in the Apple watch, frankly, is the health stuff. I mean, when you get to a certain age and you have friends that start dying from heart attacks and you're like, you know what? Maybe I just will have a permanent heart monitor on my wrist. You know that there is a,

There's a benefit you get. But boy, if I were you and I was going the analog route, I think I would be in trouble because I would want a fancy watch. And that's why I don't even think about it. I don't let myself think about that stuff. There have been a couple of times in my life where...

That I have gotten dangerously close to becoming a watch guy. And the good news is I don't have enough money to be a watch guy. So this is sort of a solved problem for me. But I had, you know, at one of my old jobs, I had a boss who was in like a watch club where...

basically the price of admission was you had to bring a fancy watch, but then you, you sort of traded fancy watches with all these other people who had fancy watches. And so you got to wear each other's watches and try new things. And I was like, that sounds like the dream. I just need a $20,000 watch. If only, if only I had that just sitting around. You really need two kidneys. That's the question. Yeah. So I want to get back to this iPad thing though, because we constantly hear from listeners that are struggling. Like,

do I get the mini? Do I get the 12.9 inch one? Do I get the pro? Do I get the air? I mean, Apple really has a lot of products available in the iPad lineup. I mean, it's such a, it's such a strange lineup. Like the hardware is so killer and they've got every angle covered in the software is, is not so much, but, but for people listening, um,

What's your advice to folks when they come to you and say, I want to get an iPad, being somebody who has daily access to all of them? I think the answer I would give is to be really, really ruthlessly honest about what you are actually going to do on your iPad.

I have certainly been guilty in the past of a thing that I think lots of people are guilty of is looking at all the things the iPad can do and being like, oh, I'm going to do all of them. I am going to become the kind of person who takes handwritten notes in notability. And I'm going to get really into video editing now that I can use Final Cut on the iPad. And wouldn't it be cool if I started editing all of my podcasts in Logic instead of on the computer? And

All of these different things that the iPad can do is how you lead up the road towards the iPad Pro. And the iPad Pro is amazing. And if you buy it, you will be so happy with it because it is just a fabulous piece of hardware. But I think in most people's heart of hearts and certainly in mine, what I actually do on the iPad is like read books, watch movies and do crossword puzzles.

That is 97.5% of my iPad usage in real life. And...

The more I have come to understand that, the more I'm like, okay, what I actually care about now is maybe I should spend more money on storage if that's a thing that I care about. Maybe I should spend more money on cellular so that I can do the stuff out of the house that I want to do because that's actually more sort of accruative to my experience than having more processing power that I'm not making any use of. Yeah.

That's also price is very important, right? I think it's easy. And certainly my case is somebody who has every single one of these sitting on my desk.

to forget about the fact that these things range from $349 to like two grand, you can spend so much money on an iPad. But as soon as you understand, like, okay, here's a set of things I actually need to do. And for some people, those things are intense and serious and require more hardware. And I think the change of heart that I've had reviewing this new set of iPads is I think,

The step from the base iPad to the air is much easier than I expected. But I would guess that in terms of what do I actually need from my device, there's basically no one who needs an iPad Pro. If you want one and can afford it, get it, you'll love it. But hardly anyone needs one. Yeah.

And then the mini, I think is different. You're either an iPad mini person or you're not. And I feel like that is like, I would just look you in the face and be like, do you like the iPad mini? And if you say yes, get an iPad mini. And if you don't, I feel like the iPad just begs for aspiration, right? When you get it, you're like, you're right. You'd like the slab of glass is going to become my portal to the world. You know, like the 2001 space odyssey guy sitting there. Right. But yeah,

I think for so many people, the aspirations are never quite met. Totally. I was listening to your recent episode with Matt Gemmel about all of this stuff. And I loved the way he was talking about the iPad as like, it is a device that asks a lot of you. And it feels amazing and it's cool and it has the magic pane of glass thing going for it. But

you have to work the way the iPad does. And it actually requires a lot of you. And in turn, it gives you some stuff, right? I think the pen input is really powerful. The thing where you can dock it into a keyboard and then pick it up and sit with it is really powerful. The flip side of that is you are going to have to change how you do just about everything in order to suit the way the iPad wants you to. And at least for me,

That trade becomes really hard to make for things that I like a do all day and be need to do for work. The idea of reinventing my workflow just to be able to use this new device at my job where I have to do things all day is just different. Right. And so that that has always been the hard part for me is I have really gravitated to an iPad for things like.

games and for things like web browsing and sort of the like leisure activity comes really naturally to me on an iPad. But every time I sit down and I'm like, I am going to get stuff done on an iPad. It just annoys me because it makes me change the way I do things. Yeah. So do you tell people to start with the air or the basic? So until until this week, I would have told almost everybody that

To start with the basic iPad. And I think you can step up pretty easily from there, right? The base to the air, I think, is all about what is your most intense app?

Um, if you know the answer off the top of your head, there's a decent chance you need an air. And if you don't, there's a decent chance you don't, um, and accessories, right? The air has access to the newest Apple pencil and a drastically better keyboard situation than anything you'll get on the base iPad. So if any of that stuff is important to you, easy jump to the air. Um, but I've been reviewing the new base iPad. I have a yellow one sitting here right in front of me. And, um,

It's further behind on the performance curve than the base iPad usually is. Like I do a bunch of benchmarking and benchmarking I think is

only occasionally useful, but in this, in this case has been really illuminating. Uh, and I'm sort of spoiling a review I'm about to file. Uh, but basically the, the single core performance of the base iPad is very close to the single core performance of the M3 Air, right? Like as a, as a single core doing one thing at a time device, they're very close. And when it comes to multi-core CPU and GPU, the Air just absolutely destroys it.

Uh, and so you get to the point where it's like, okay, am I doing anything that looks like high end gaming? Am I doing anything that looks like AI even, I mean, this thing doesn't support Apple intelligence, which I think right now is not a problem, but if you think it's going to be a problem, it's

It just, there's your answer right there. But there, there is a whole sort of high end of stuff you want to do on an iPad, which includes things like good handwriting apps, like apps like notability and good notes are like intense graphical apps. And, and,

For all that kind of stuff, which I think is only going to become more and more important to people's workflows, the base iPad is going to get pretty bad pretty fast. And so I think I would still tell most people to look at the base iPad first, but I think my ceiling for at what point should you jump to the air is much lower than it has been in the past. Interesting.

Okay, I promised you in our preparation for this, I was going to talk about this. You are a Mac mini user. I think you're our first guest with the new M4, the little adorable Mac mini that I just want just to have as an object on my desk, not even as a computer. It's like, put googly eyes on it and take it to the park, you know, show beautiful things in the world.

It deserves that. It does. It's so cute. It does. But on the Verge cast for a long time, you have had some opinions about how much RAM people should get in a Mac. And over the last several months, Apple has bumped everything up to 16 gigabytes as the base model, which is long overdue. And I guess...

That's the best thing to come out of Apple intelligence so far, I think is more memory. Totally agree. And all the computers. So when it was time for you to get a Mac mini, what did you do? I have, I think it's the full base model Mac mini. It's 16 gigs of Ram, 256 gigs of storage,

That's basically, it's the M4. It is the cheapest M4 they would tell me, which in part was I needed a computer that day and it was just the one that they had in stock. But I also think it's plenty of computer. I think my, I have two beliefs about RAM and I believe them both and they are maybe somewhat contradictory. One is that I think for most people's computer uses today,

Eight gigs of RAM is enough. I still I still believe that thing. Number two is the very first thing on your new computer that you should upgrade is the RAM. It is it is the most performance enhancing thing for a person buying a computer like more storage is great. Faster chips are great. If you want your computer to just instantly feel better, it's RAM.

So I think both of those things are true. And every tech nerd I know has yelled at me that eight gigs of RAM is not enough. And I understand that it's not enough, but it also is and it's fine.

But that said, I think we're in a spot again where we are as things like AI become more part of people's workflows and as things become more demanding on your local computer, which I think is really good. Like we're in this push back from everything being cloud computing down to more things are happening on my machine. That makes RAM all the more important. So I think I'm with you that the single best solution

change Apple has made around AI is upgrading all of the RAM. I probably should have gotten 24 on the Mac Mini, but I also just, frankly, I upgrade my computer every couple of years, both for what I do for work and just because I'm a lunatic. And I didn't worry about it too, too much.

I think all that's about right. It was much harder in the eight gigabyte days to tell somebody like, oh, you can just walk in an Apple store and buy just what they have on the shelf. Like you said, you need a machine. You just got the base one. It meets your needs. And it's just so nice as somebody, I think all three of us are this person, like people ask you what they should upgrade to. It's like, just go buy a MacBook Air. Just go buy a Mac mini and you will be fine. And that's really nice because it's been a long time that there hasn't been like caveats to that.

Yeah, completely. I think the thing that I always used to have to say to people is they're like, oh, what laptop should I buy? And I'm like, okay, well, you should probably just buy the MacBook Air. But that comes with this series of other things that I have to tell you about which MacBook Air you want. And you're right. Now it's just like walk into the store, just yell MacBook Air out loud until somebody hands you one and you'll be golden, which I think is awesome. And the lineup has in some ways gotten more confusing as Apple has added more and more things to it. But also...

You can't go wrong anymore. And I think that's pretty great. Yeah. Now I just desperately want to go computer shopping with you. Except the storage. I still think the storage is too low. That's fair. I mean, my sense of it is that if you're a person who deals a lot in multimedia of various kinds, you should upgrade. But I think in general...

A, Apple is so stupid about how it prices storage that I almost feel bad telling people to upgrade the storage because it's like, hi, I would like you to spend $200 to get $10 worth of storage. And that's somehow a good deal. But I do think you're right that that's after RAM. The other thing I tell people to get is like, if you want a computer that will last longer and feel better, more storage will get there because there just is nothing more annoying than getting those messages about almost running out of storage.

And I'm glad they got it down to the $999 price, but 256 gigabytes, you know, just... We hear from so many listeners on this show over the years who the trouble with their Mac was they're out of storage. And they buy a new one not because the old one doesn't work anymore, but just because they need more storage. And that...

I do wish that they got 512 into that 999, but I always want more from Apple, so what can I say? 512 to me would be the number that I think very few people would hit the ceiling. And if you're a multi-terabyte person like David, I know you're an eight-terabyte person, which I think is madness in the best possible way. Yes. And I love this for you, but...

I think 512 is sort of in the 16 gigs of RAM thing where it would just be, I wouldn't have to ask you any follow-up questions, right? Like either you already know that's not enough or you're never going to have to worry about it. And I think I love that about 16 gigs of RAM. And I agree with you about 512. It would be really nice.

That David, that big eight terabyte drive. It's it is a weight around my neck as much as it is a good thing. How full is it? Like what, what percentage of the eight terabytes have you used? I just went through and audited it and I got it from like 7.5 down to six. So I'm at six now. Even that is very impressive. I make like hundreds of videos a year between the field guides and the labs. So like that's fair.

We make a lot of stuff here. And I was just telling Steven, it's just so nice having everything in one place. But it's really not that hard anymore, especially with the new M4s. Well, I'm not sure. Do you have Thunderbolt 5 on that Mac Mini? I don't think you do. No. But on the new MacBook Pro and Mac Studios, you get Thunderbolt 5. So you can really get a lot cheaper, very fast storage.

Yeah, I think on that front, especially having good external storage, I think is both a better and a cheaper option. And the Mac Mini does have one Thunderbolt 5 if you buy the fancier one that I did not.

And now I look at longingly sometimes. Yeah, that happens. I get it. I do think that Apple with the Mac is going to have the same issue they have with the iPad where they're going to last a really long time. The Apple Silicon Age is giving us kind of iPad-like reliability on the Mac. Yep. I'm very curious to see how this plays out over the next several years.

Yeah, I mean, it's a problem for Apple and it is wonderful for people who want to buy computers. I think the average lifespan of your laptop, I think, has never been longer. And I think that's awesome.

So that's your hardware. I want to talk a little bit about software. I know you are like us and that you like trying a bunch of different notes apps and task managers. And but you're also somebody who works with a pretty big team. And that's where I kind of want to start.

I, for better or for worse, basically have merged like personal and work notes and tasks and it's all in the same email client. And I just basically just on the weekends ignore the work stuff. How separated out do you want to be with your like your personal information, your work information? How do you manage that? And what's some of the software that you rely on to to get stuff done?

I gave up on separating any of that stuff a really long time ago. I think in part because...

you're one person and it's the same number of hours in a day. So I actually think like work life balance is good, but the idea that those are wholly separate things that you should manage separately, I just kind of don't buy the premise for at least for my own uses. But also it's, it's just been impractical for me. Like having one system that is in one place that I can check is more like

sanity saving to me than not seeing my work tasks on the weekend. And that's just kind of where I've landed. My system, on the other hand, is ever-changing and thus completely chaotic. So I can run you through the tools I use now and just sort of day-to-day life if that's of interest. Okay. So for work stuff, we use Google Docs for everything. We have...

We have Airtable that the company uses. I hate Airtable with a fiery passion, but it is very powerful for what it does. And so we use that for some stuff. But for like day to day writing and editing and a lot of the work that we do as a team, it all lives in Google Docs. I could not do my job in any meaningful way without Google Docs.

And personally, all of my notes and tasks and everything are in an app called NotePlan. I don't know if you guys know this app, but I love it to pieces. And it's this rare and very hard to find combination. And I know it's hard to find because I've been looking for it forever of good notes.

powerful note taking features, calendar integration, and like first class to do list stuff. So I it is just the app I opened that shows me everything going on. And I can write and write down notes on everything. It integrates with the iOS and Apple reminders stuff. So I can see the list of reminders. And I can also use reminders as an input system to get into there. But

but no plan is just where my life lives. Um, the one I, I, I switched constantly. So there's like a non-zero chance by the time this publishes, I will be using something else. But, um,

I switch around a lot. Like I've used obsidian many times, which I think has a lot of really interesting features. I go in and out of notion all the time. I think notion is a like perfect piece of software, but I just kind of hate using it. There's a craft I think is, is beautiful and up to some really interesting stuff. Yeah. There are, there are a million others out there just like it. I've tried to use things as a note taking app a bunch of times and almost got there a few times, but it's always just missing little bits of stuff. But yeah,

Note plan for me, it's that combination of it's a very good task manager. It's a very good free form note taker that also stores all of your notes as text files, which is really important to me. And it has calendar integration so I can just open the app and see what's going on in my life. That has been the thing that worked.

We did a whole show on no plan a few months ago because it is a great app. And like, I only let myself switch major productivity apps in the week between Christmas and new years. It's like a little rule I have because otherwise I would do it way more often. Um,

And I came within an inch of just dropping everything into note plan and running the whole thing out of note plan last December. I mean, I agree. It is an excellent application. I really recommend it. And in a couple of recent updates, the developer has started to put in front matter stuff, which is basically like you can use text files or you can add text.

metadata to text files that lets you organize them and move stuff around. And so I now have been able to build like a full on Kanban board just out of my notes that I can use to track the progress of different stories and projects I'm working on all the way through and I can sort them and I can manage them like a database, but it's still just a bunch of text files. And it is like,

If ever there was an app that just understood me, it feels like it's NotePlan. Yeah, well, you mentioned Obsidian. I feel like NotePlan is kind of a pretty more limited version of Obsidian. The big thing that Obsidian had for the long time was DataView, like the plugin where you can really customize it. I actually wrote the NotePlan guy and said, look, this is the one thing I do in Obsidian that you don't do.

And it seems like over the last six months, he's just creeping towards that. They're adding Kanban. They're adding Front Matter. I mean, this app is definitely one to watch. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And I think Obsidian is great and I think has done a lot of things really right, both sort of philosophically and just inside of the app. The thing that kills me about Obsidian is it's not a good app.

uh, task management tool. It is just a bunch of text files and you can do a bunch of really wacky things with plugins to kind of make it a task app. But for me, it's like, if, if I want to open my task manager and input a task and you give me a like six field form to fill out, we've failed. That's just not, that's just not what works for me. And, uh, note plan, I think is just very clever about how to make all of that stuff work.

You mentioned reminders, Apple reminders. And that's something that I've switched to every summer for like three or four years. I'm like, this is the year the beta has the last thing I need. And this is the year that it's stuck. Now, I'm currently using GoodTask as a different front end on the Mac because it has some automation stuff I really like.

But it's this has been a running theme for us that Apple's productivity apps, notes, calendar reminders, even like free form to a degree. Like they've really honed in and focused on those the last few years where it used to be like, yeah, this is great for the masses. But like I as a power user, like this is not this is not enough for me. But that's that's changed in a big way, I think.

Yeah, I kind of hate that you said that because I've been debating switching back to reminders. Because there are just a few things that it has access to by virtue of being an Apple system. Like, its integration with Siri, where you can just ask it to remind you things, is so much better than any other task integration where you have to remember the phrase to say...

make sure you say it correctly like i don't know if y'all have had this experience but i used to do this for a long time yeah and every time i would try to use siri to address to do this it would fail 60 of the time because to do this is a weird word and siri just couldn't make sense of it and that was eventually the reason i i churned out because that is the best task input system i've ever found is just voice it's another thing i use my smartwatch for a lot um

And so I keep wanting to go back to Reminders just because it is so easy to get stuff into it that I want to use it more. And you're right that Apple has done a much better job of integrating it with Calendar. It's become a much more powerful app itself. Like it's actually a useful thing to be inside of the Reminders app and move stuff around and organize things. It's a very good app. For me, the challenge is just I really want

My tasks and information about my tasks to live next to each other. And that's the thing that reminders doesn't really do well for me is like, I want to be able to remind myself that I need to do something and then take a bunch of notes on that thing as I'm doing it. And that just doesn't quite feel right to me inside of reminders yet. But maybe I need to try it again, because it does have a lot going for it.

Well, if you're using note plan, you already said it, you know, no pen has reminders integration and no plan is where you keep all your notes on that thing. So you kind of had the best of both worlds with the setup you've got. Yeah. That's, that's really where I've landed. Yeah. And, but, but then reminders can kind of be, then you got to decide because no plan can also run your tasks for you, or you can just use reminder. You can offload that to reminders. It's integrated well enough. Yeah.

Yeah, totally. Steven, do you use the app Remind Me Faster?

I do. It is so great. Is it as good as everybody says? Yeah, it is because you can just like very quickly enter a task. My big problem with reminders and what kept me on Todoist for so long was that natural language processing, right? It's like I can just type a thing and like drop a pound sign here, an asterisk there, and it just knows where it should go. And Remind Me Faster basically brings that experience to Apple Reminders.

All right, I'm gonna have to give it a try. Because I that's that was my exact experience too, is trying to type a task into the reminders app. Yeah, it's not great. And having something like remind me faster if it if it does the thing it says it's going to do well, which is that kind of super powerful natural language stuff.

That's a big deal. It's odd that Apple doesn't have that natively. I've always thought that was strange. It's good. And then on the Mac, there's an app called InstaRemind, which is basically the same thing, but like it lives in the menu bar. Remind Me Faster will run on the Mac, but it's, you know, it's an iOS app. But that's...

The key for me with remind me faster on the iPhone in particular is that I have it in control center. So I can just like swipe down and hit a big button. I made it a big button in control. So it's like, bam, you know, it's like here, here's, here's the fastest way to, uh, to get a reminder. And it's, it's pretty great. Yeah. That's a good idea. I like that a lot. So you said Google docs is the foundation of what you do. Do you also use Google calendar?

We use Google Calendar, but I use Notion Calendar. This is another thing I switch all the time. I was a longtime Fantastical believer. I still think that app's great. It's just it got a little heavy and sort of fussy for my taste. And I think Notion Calendar is simple and straightforward and exactly the way that I need it to be.

The Google Calendar web app, I think, is actually really powerful. It's just hideous. And so I don't like using it. And I use the Apple Calendar sometimes. But again, it's missing a few sort of simple kinds of features that I've gotten really used to. So for me, Notion Calendar is actually serving me really, really well. It does a really nice job of integrating with Google. So it does the things like...

If I'm looking to see what time works in a bunch of people's calendars, Fantastical and a lot of other third party systems, at least for me, have always been kind of wonky with that stuff. But being able to, you know, map time and see openings and stuff like that is great inside of Notion Calendar. And at least for me, that's kind of the most sophisticated thing I do in my calendar. And so it has served me really well.

And imagine with your kind of public profile that you get a lot of email. What's your relationship with email and how do you deal with it?

About a year ago, maybe a little longer, I finally gave up on being an inbox zero kind of person. And it has been both very freeing and truly awful because it still stresses me out. It's just that I forced myself not to do anything about it. I use MimeStream for email, an app that I really love and have been using since it was like a very early beta. And it is just...

the most straightforward, simple, fast, useful, good Gmail client that I need it to be. Uh, it's, it's great. And I cannot recommend it enough. I'm dying for the iOS version. Like, come on. Me too. I'm dying for fast mail integration. We had that guy on the show and I, I pestered him on it. I think he'll never come back on the show. Yeah. You scared Neil off. You're like fast mail. And then he just left the call. No, it was great. No, Neil's awesome. Uh,

It's great. And what's so fascinating about MimeStream in particular, I think Notion Calendar to a lesser degree is like they're building on really powerful tools.

Like you said, Google Calendar on the web is really powerful. It does lots of stuff. Gmail on the web is like, I mean, it does so many things. Yeah. But using them isn't very nice, right? Like I don't want to go to a browser tab to check my email. And so MimeStream like adopts some of the best stuff out of Gmail online.

But makes it really like Mac native and fast. And my favorite feature, you can in Mindstream, you can set your preference to use Gmail shortcuts or Apple Mail shortcuts. It's like whichever one you're used to, like you can use either one. It kind of blends them together in a weird way. And that sort of corner of software development is fascinating.

Yeah, it's a really interesting one because there's a part of me that has real mixed feelings about that because I think you look at the idea of MimeStream as saying, okay, we're not going to build on top of the open standards that exist to make email big and beautiful and open and accessible to everybody. We're just going to plug into the Gmail API, which is correct and I think makes it a better product, but also makes it

kind of a less good thing for the world of email, if that makes sense. But then what I'm actually after in my day-to-day life is a very fast thing that has really good Gmail search. And the only way to do that, it turns out, is to plug into the Gmail API. And so I think, do I love open standards and people who want open standards to work? And do I think it's slightly worrisome that Gmail has completely taken over the email universe? Sure. And yet, here we are.

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Okay, one thing that I was looking forward to you being on was your coverage is much broader than ours. Like we focus on Apple and like what people do with their Apple tech. But at The Verge, y'all are covering all sorts of stuff. I mean, smart home, Microsoft, Google, you have a huge staff covering lots of things. And so I kind of wanted to get your take on Apple as it as seen through the lens of like the rest of the world.

right now uh apple i think is in a very complicated situation in lots of different ways with developers and regulators you have apple intelligence but then you have apple silicon like all these sort of like good things and bad things mixed together um so i kind of want to do what the kids call you ready for this the kids called a vibe check i looked it up my high school daughter told me what it means uh

How do you think Apple is stacking up in some of these important areas right now? And if, you know, WBC around the corner, like what do you want to see them do to maybe make some improvements in these areas? That's a tough question. It's weird. There's really no company like Apple right now in the sense that it is both so clearly in a commanding lead in so many places. And yet I kind of think the vibes are bad. I think...

You look at a bunch of the things that Apple has done recently, particularly in hardware, right? Apple Silicon, unbelievable achievement. That company is so far ahead of its competitors in so many meaningful ways, and that's going to continue to pay off for a long time. The iPad is essentially without competition. The smartphone world, I think, has gotten less interesting over time just by virtue of what it is. I don't really think that's Apple's fault. I think it's just...

smartphones are appliances now and we should probably treat them as such. So in sort of every meaningful way, like I would love for Apple to do bigger, wilder, more inventive things. And I think I would love to talk about the fact that I think Apple to some extent has lost its sense of taste and willing to experiment. But all that is, I think, the strength of the company. But then it seems like

Apple is not perceived to be on the same side as the rest of the tech world, which it was for a long time. I mean, you mentioned developers. I think the overwhelming feeling about Apple from developers for so, so long was that this was a company that gave developers good tools and gave them stuff to work with. And it was huge platforms on which to publish. And people built iOS apps. Like I write this newsletter that is just...

basically a long list of links of like cool things and apps and stuff. And the number one piece of feedback I get from people is why don't you include more Android and Windows apps? And my response is always because there aren't any. People build for Apple devices on purpose. And there are a bunch of really interesting reasons for that. But at the same time,

developers I talked to over and over, especially over the last year or so, have started to feel like they are a cog in Apple's machine or that they are being taken advantage of somehow, not that they are what Apple believes is the future of their platforms, right? And that is a shift that Apple's going to have to get away from. There's this sense that every time I do anything on my phone, Apple wants 30% of it. And Apple feels like it deserves that because it made the phone. And

I think if I'm a developer...

The idea that I'm now running a business minus my 30% just because it's on an iPhone, I can see why that would feel bad. And there are lots of businesses that don't work as a result. And then you have regulators who are saying, well, okay, Apple built all this stuff and has refused to give anyone else access to any of it. And Apple is saying, well, yeah, it's because we built it. And I think there are actually reasonable arguments on both sides of that, but there is this sense that

That Apple was a company that made good things because it wanted to make good things because it believed good things should exist in the world. And I think Apple has lost that in a pretty powerful way. And I think like if you talk about the vibe check, that's the vibe that to me has most shifted. That Apple was like the bastion of all things great about technology for so long. And whether that was deserved or earned or not, that was its reputation for so long.

And if that's not gone, it's slipping pretty aggressively. And I think once that starts to slip, it's pretty hard to get back. It feels to me like so many of these decisions were so avoidable. Like to shift gears to the App Store a little bit. Like they could have done so many things at so many points along the way to not end up where world governments are like, hey, y'all, you got to open this up. And they seem to pick some pretty funny options

Hills to die on. And I think that's one reason the Apple intelligence news, you know, as we're recording this just last week, right? The news breaks that the new fancy app intense AI Siri is not coming until quote next year, which like, don't even know what that means. And then they pull a leader, a pull a leadership change over the Siri team, which apparently was like not in the software organization, but like off to the side, which is very strange. Like, I don't know.

I don't know what's going on there. But I think a lot of people are, I think rightfully kind of looking at these things like, guys, like there were so many points along the way you could have made a different choice. Yeah, it's tough. I think we're at a place with Apple, but also with the tech industry as a whole, where I think

We're seeing what happens when money becomes the thing. And it feels sort of reductive to say that, right? Like these are huge companies. These are the biggest companies in the history of the world. Of course, making money is important to them. But I think there's always this tension between you want your company to make as much money as possible.

You want your users to be happy. And then you have this sort of internal sense of what is good and right and kind of your own taste. And I think...

For whatever you want to say about Steve Jobs, that was a man who ran on his own taste, right? And he believed strongly in what he believed in, and Apple, in large part, followed from that. And then if you care about what users ask you for and money, you make a set of really different decisions, right? And then I think...

especially now where we're in an era where all of these companies are being asked every single day, what's your growth plan? How do you get bigger? You look at Apple and you've made the most successful thing in the history of consumer electronics. And all investors ask you is like, what's the next iPhone?

it's a tough spot to be in, right? And that's where you start to say, we're going to give people what they ask us for, which is like multitasking on the iPad because that'll change everything. And we're going to give investors what they ask for, which is a bunch of buzzwordy AI things. And I think there is a real sense that

There may not be that kind of governing sense of taste. And here's what we care about inside of Apple anymore. And that doesn't have to be the only thing, but if you don't have it, it'd be, it's very hard to sort of continue to hue back to it. And so you end up in Apple's case, it's really easy to measure what makes you more money. And it's really hard to measure all the other stuff. And I think given long enough, the people who have the charts that show how they make more money are,

tend to win unless you have somebody or somebody's or a company culture that lets you avoid that. It's just very hard not to go down that road. And I think it's a bummer. And we're seeing a lot of it in tech right now. Well, I mean, it's always the problem when you have a stock and you have to report every 90 days about whether you made more money. So everybody thinks on a 90-day window. And that goes down all the different paths of the company until you get to the

The guy at the Apple store says, we're no longer giving you free potato chips because there's a stock at the end of this chain, way at the top, and we can't spend that money now. And you see it in all sorts of ways. But I think you're right. Historically, Apple kind of didn't care. I mean, Steve Jobs did a lot of things that a 90-day window didn't make sense. And I'm not sure you've got that influence there anymore.

Yeah, I think that's right. And I'm, you know, I think part of it is certainly Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive. Part of it is, I think, broader cultural shifts. But it's very clear that there is something inside of that company where, and again, this is true in a lot of tech, where the person who used to be in the room saying, we're going to do this because we're going to do this, goes away. And when that person stops winning the fight...

a lot of things start to change. And this has actually been a really fun reporting task over the years is hearing stories that people tell. Like, I'll just give you an example. I wrote a story about Google Reader a year or so ago, basically trying to get to the bottom of like, what happened to Google Reader? There's this RSS reader that had these big, huge ambitions that actually sound a lot like what everyone is trying to build on the internet. Now,

So why didn't this thing work? And one of the biggest things that killed Google Reader is that they lost the person who was in executive meetings who loved Google Reader. And it was as simple as that. When there's somebody in the room who will fight for it because they like it and think it's important and valuable, things stay alive. And as soon as that person leaves or gets promoted or finds some other priority that becomes the thing that they're going to spend their capital to fight for, things die.

And I always want it to be more complicated than that. And the longer I spend in this industry talking to people about it, the more I realize it often is just that simple. If you have someone sufficiently powerful who believes in something, it'll happen. And when that person goes away, things change really fast and often not in ways that are good for products that I like.

The big story lately is Siri because of the Apple announcement and the management change. But there's a piece of this that I don't think gets enough coverage, and it's that Siri has sucked for 10 years. Yes. And how was it that Apple, as a point of pride, five or 10 years ago, didn't say, this isn't good enough for us, and let's do whatever it takes to make it better? I mean, now they're in trouble because they've waited this long.

But there's a part of me that wishes, well, why didn't you guys fix this before the word AI was the darling of Wall Street? I do know Apple knew Siri sucked. And I think there was a really funny...

sort of transition inside of Apple where Siri just started to come up less and less at keynotes and stuff. And it was like, they would just go years without mentioning Siri at all as a feature that existed. And then all of a sudden it was like, oh, AI is here. We're going to suddenly remember that Siri exists. And I have no particularly interesting reporting on this inside of Apple, but my running theory on this, because this seems to be what happened a lot of places, is that

Chat GPT came out in late 2022. I remember because I went on parental leave three days later and then came back and Chat GPT had like taken over the universe and I just missed it entirely. And it was so good and so much better than anything anybody had seen before that everybody just immediately assumed that we were on this incredible linear path and everything was going to be 10 times as good forever.

you know, every year forever. Everybody talked about the scaling laws and how Moore's law was going to apply and that this stuff was just on a linear path to being amazing really quickly. And we are just so clearly running into how wrong that assumption was that all of these products that were like, we're just going to sit on top of a model and we're going to benefit from how good they are and how good they're getting. And everything is going to be amazing so quickly because look how fast this stuff is improving.

is just running into walls with that over and over and over again. But you have to say AI out loud 20 times in your investor call or they'll tank your stock. Like that's just the world we're in right now. If you want to raise money, you put AI in your pitch deck. And if you want your stock to go up, you talk about AI on your earnings calls.

And if you don't do that, they will punish you. And so for Apple, like at some point, even last year by WWDC, the impression was that Apple was way behind on AI. So they have to come out with this big swing or there are huge business risks. And what I don't know is whether Apple knew at that time

that it wasn't any good and it wasn't ready. I don't know the answer and I sincerely hope somebody figures it out because it sure knows now. But to your point, it absolutely should have known a year ago that this stuff wasn't any good and it wasn't going to be any good anytime soon. Jason Snell over on Upgrade and Six Colors made a really interesting point, I think last week or the week before, that when you're building features on top of LLMs, it's sort of really different than other software development. Like you can't,

go in and make the llm better right to a degree it's going to do what it's going to do and you can build mitigations and we've seen that in prompt engineering like if i can find the link i'll put in the show notes but someone like reverse engineered what some of apple's prompt engineering was for their writing tools and it's like you have to pre-load your request with all these things to like get the llm where you want it to be and how you want it to act and you

I just, I can't help but think Apple maybe misjudged that and they thought that they could work faster or more efficiently than they've been able to. Yeah. And it's actually a funny Apple-y moment because Apple is the company that for so long has

has succeeded by putting better user interfaces on top of those things, right? Like Apple is the company that shows up and figures out how to use these complicated technologies. Yeah. Uh, and it turns out we're just not at the point where the underlying technology is good enough that it matters, right? You're, you're, you're putting lipstick on a pig and Siri has been bad for a long time. I just activated Siri again and I'm sorry to anyone I have done that to during the show. Uh,

But it is not, it's not up to the point where even the base technology is good enough that we can really start thinking about mainstream products for it. And I think everybody assumed it would get there really fast. And instead it's turning out sort of like self-driving cars, which is like, it gets pretty good and pretty exciting quickly. And then the actual path is from this is neat to this is everywhere. And that path takes 10 times as long as anybody expected.

Because we got to the this is neat phase really quickly. Like, ChatGPT just launched us into the this is neat phase. And I think what everyone is seeing is that the climb to this works for everyone in lots of places and every edge case and everything. That is a long, long, long road. Yeah. I found this article to be in the show notes. I'm just going to read the prompt for the smart reply feature in mail because...

It's incredible. This is what you have to do to get it to do the job that it's doing. Quote, you are a helpful mail assistant, which can help identify relevant questions from a given mail and a short reply snippet. Given a mail and the reply snippet, ask relevant questions, which are explicitly asked in the mail. The answer to those questions will be selected by the recipient, which will help reduce hallucination and drafting the response. Please output top question. And it goes like, it goes on and on and on, like another paragraph.

And that's kind of what I mean. Like this sort of technology, like it is fundamentally different than where we've seen...

Apple software development in the past. And you're totally right. Apple, I think at its best is taking a complicated computer problem and make it really easy for normal people to handle and to do right. Think about like search in the photos app, right? A really hard problem. They got to scan all these images. They got to figure out what's in them. They have to do all this semantic indexing and all this stuff. Right.

But I'm just on my phone. I'm looking for my kid dressed up as like Santa. I can just like type my kid's name and Santa. And like, there are like eight photos and it has found it. And that's great. And that's like, it's overused, but like, that's the, I'm doing giant air quotes with my whole body. Like that's the magical experience Apple wants to deliver. Yeah. And they just haven't been able to do that with Siri. And so far like AI and LLM technology has not been the key to fix that for them.

Yeah, and it's a really interesting example, actually, because that, to me, might be the only truly quote-unquote magical mainstream thing

piece of this, right? And I think what everybody assumed Apple would do with Apple intelligence was figure out what it's for, right? Like you said, that's the thing Apple's really, really good at is saying like, okay, how are you supposed to use this thing? And so the fact that Apple came in and was like, okay, the best thing it can do is like, slightly rewrite your emails to be friendlier or summarize your notifications so that they don't make any sense is, is

either Apple has lost its touch or we just are not at the point where you can make great products out of this. And I think the Siri idea strikes me as clearly the right one, right? Like this should be a thing that can go. It has all of your information. It has all of your context. It has all of your apps. It's logged into everything. It can go execute on your behalf. That's a really powerful idea. That is the idea that everybody in the AI industry believes is the thing.

It's just not ready. It's not ready anywhere. It's not even Apple's fault that it's not ready. It's just not ready. And so Apple's confidence that it could figure out both the use cases and the underlying technology, I think has been totally destroyed by the underlying technology. And yet Apple is still in the catbird seat if they can figure this out, because they're the one company that we actually trust with private data.

And they also could put themselves in the traffic cop seat to all the other ones. You know, like they could, if you look at the model they have and it worked, they would be able to be an AI applied to your actual email text and you would trust it.

But you also, if you need to go outside to a, you know, a pioneer style LLM, they could be the party that decides which one you go to. I mean, I feel like there is a win for them in this if they are technically competent to make it happen. I guess that's the question now, isn't it? Yeah. No, I think that's exactly right. And the...

position that Apple is in a because it has this super ubiquitous assistant that even if everybody thinks it sucks at least everybody's aware it exists which I think is not nothing there is a bit of a reputation hole that serious to get out of but it is it's there it's in front of you people know how to access it and use it I've probably triggered it 30 times in the last 10 minutes and

And yeah, Apple as the routing mechanism can be very powerful. We've already heard reporting and rumors that it might be attached to Gemini in the same way that it's attached to ChatGPT now, that it could be involved with lots of other models. Like Craig Federighi said last year that part of the plan is to be

kind of a routing system between all of these different models, which could be really cool. Again, I think the ideas here are good. They just don't work. And I think if Apple had come out and said, we're working on this, you know, cool new AI powered virtual assistant, we think it's going to be awesome. We can't wait to tell you more about it. This is the future. Like what Google does at IO every year, right? Which is essentially show off a bunch of science projects. That would have been fine. But instead,

Apple acted like the thing was done and started making iPhone ads, including the feature that didn't exist and is not going to for a long time. And so it's like, it's not the lie, it's the coverup. You know what I mean? It just felt, that's the part that felt disingenuous to me, not this is the idea that we're working on. I think it's a cool idea. It's just, don't tell me you've finished the job and that you've shipped the job when you so clearly haven't.

The advertising to me is almost the worst part of this is like, OK, like the feature didn't get here on time. It's complicated. Like I can understand that. But putting it on billboards before it existed, like that's the more troublesome failure to me.

Completely agree. The whole thing is really, really ugly from Apple. And its whole marketing for everything for the last nine months has been about Apple intelligence. And I sincerely believe that there is not one single Apple product that you should buy because of Apple intelligence. And I don't think you should make any purchasing decisions, any...

Spec decisions, I don't think you should care one lick right now about Apple intelligence. And yet, it's the only thing Apple wants to talk about. And the only feature of Apple intelligence that most people are going to be interested in is that next gen Siri, and that's not coming anytime soon. So I totally agree. Like, I feel like customers have been essentially lied to for pushing a year now.

Okay, we like to wrap up with some favorite apps and services, maybe some things that we didn't get a chance to talk about previously. And you've got two workout apps in here, one of which I've heard of, the other I have not. But these are, especially Fantasy Hike, incredible looking. So what's up with Bend and Fantasy Hike?

Okay, so as I mentioned, I am a person who is not interested in really intense workout tracking kinds of stuff. But what I have found is these two apps that I actually enjoy using that are also useful...

but also forcing functions for me to exercise more. The one is Bend, which is just a stretching app. It's super simple. It recommends you set up a reminder every day. It sends you a reminder. It's like, hey, time to bend. And then it just has you do some stretches. You can set kinds of stretches. You can set duration. And for me, it's just like having a little notification that just pops up and is like, do this five minute long stretch. Amazing. And I do it almost every time because it is five minutes because it tells me to on my phone.

Cannot recommend it enough. The other one is Fantasy Hike, which I learned about thanks to my colleague V Song, who is just a true like exercise app menace. And she uses all the really intense ones. But she fell in love with this app called Fantasy Hike, which is just a walking tracker that is very clearly based on Lord of the Rings. It's like

copyright free Lord of the Rings, everything. And the whole shtick is you start a quest and you have to walk the length of your quest and you run into different friends along the way. You can track your progress, but essentially all it does is update you as you do interesting things along your walk. And what happens is

as you get these updates, is it starts to make you want to walk more. And it doesn't yell at you for not walking enough. It doesn't incentivize you to walk more, except in very small ways. But it's just like, I am on this adventure. And the more I walk, the further I will get in my adventure. And that is weirdly perfectly tuned to what works for me as a motivational tool. So I'll get a thing that's just like, you know, you've walked 84 of your 1700 mile journey and you've just encountered something

some, you know, Hobbit you've never heard of. And I opened the app and it shows me this beautiful sort of timeline of me walking and shows me where I am. And it makes me want to walk more. And I have 1700 more miles to do. It's amazing. I cannot recommend it enough. I love this app. I'm totally going to start using this. I've started doing a thing. We on Monday mornings, me and a couple of friends, we call it Disney rucking.

And we load our backpacks with heavy stuff and we show up at the Disneyland parking structure at 7 a.m. And we walk like everywhere around the resort. Like, and then we usually end in Batuu for lunch and then walk back. Yesterday I did seven miles on it and I'm having so much fun. But this is like an element of that. I need the Lord of the Rings mile tracking as part of this. Yeah, those two things would go perfectly together. Did you ever use the app Zombies Run?

Yeah, but I didn't like the idea of being chased by zombies. This is much more my speed. Yeah, this is that, but much lower stakes. I definitely agree with that. That's really good. And hobbits don't run, they walk. I like this. That's right. It's a very quiet app, and it took me a little while to...

kind of understand its appeal. I would just do my normal day and every once in a while it'd be like, you've walked some, but then as soon as I started, like you can review the adventure and sort of scroll back and see all the things that you've met. It really, like I am, I am eager to get where I'm going now that I've started using it. And I think that's, that's been exactly what I needed. What else is on your list? Um, have you guys watched the show? The day of the jackal?

I have not. I read the book by Frederick Forsyth when I was a kid, but did they make a show out of it now? They did make a show out of it. It came out, I think, very early this year. It was on Peacock. And a thing I should probably say at the beginning here is I'm like a full-on sucker for super spy anything. Most of the leisure reading I do is some version of either...

you know, super spy gone rogue or like reluctant cop brought into adventure to save the world. That's like, that's the genre I live inside of. Um, and so I've read, uh, just to name two series that everyone listening to this should read, uh, the gray man series of books, uh, and the orphan X series of books. There's like 10 of each one and they are spectacular. Can I recommend them enough? Uh, but the day of the jackal, they made the show. It's, it's like a nine or 10 episode mini series. Uh,

Eddie Redmayne is the star and he is basically an incredibly good accomplished assassin. One thing I've learned about myself over the years is I really like watching people be really good at their jobs. Like,

I don't know if you guys have ever seen the videos on YouTube. There's this whole genre of YouTube video that is like producer shows you how they made a song. And I absolutely love those things because you just see somebody's mind sort of fully at work and watch them do something they are exceptional at. And yeah,

I have found I will watch almost any version of that. That's like somebody who is very good at something being very good at that thing is endlessly watchable to me. And that's what the Day of the Jackal is. It's like, it's beautifully shot. It's really interesting. There's huge high stakes about technology and transparency in the future, but it is like fundamentally about an assassin who is really, really good at his job. And that is so much fun to watch.

Do you like Cold War fiction too, or is it just the super spy? I like some Cold War fiction. I read a lot of Tom Clancy stuff for a long time and kind of tapped out on Cold War stuff. So I needed a break from some of that for a while, but I will eventually get back into it because there is a real low techness to a lot of that that I really like. Now everybody is like,

you know, making movies and books about hackers and weird technology stuff. And that was, those were just like men trudging through the mud. And I, I like those stories a lot too. Yeah. John Gardner made some good stuff for cold war. I'll send you some links. There's some good ones out there. John Laker raised Tinker Taylor soldier spies. You saw the starting point. Yeah. Yeah.

The problem with a lot of the current stuff for people like us is like you're watching like a hacker scene. You're like, that's not how that works. You know, it's like you're not you're making up words. You're showing CSS on the screen as you hack the government. Yeah. And there's a certain amount of it that's like you would actually just Google that and you'd be fine. Like this is not you're making this complicated and it doesn't need to be. But it's OK. I just I just push past that. Yeah.

We talked about InstaRemind earlier, but you have an app on here called Instant Notion, which I'm not familiar with. What does it do? Okay, so my running theory about productivity tools is that capture is like 85% of the game and almost no one does it well. That if I can quickly get something out of my head and into my system...

It actually matters less what my system is because it's just, that's where I'll put things. That's very important. So instant notion is an app that I found that is a lot like the way you describe something like, uh, remind me faster, uh,

but for Notion specifically, and you connect it to one specific Notion database and just start hammering stuff into that database. And so you open it up, it presents you a blank text box field. And then I think it's all of the tags you have available in that database. And so like I have it set up in two ways. One is I have a database that is just

like an inbox of stuff. Notion is where I do a lot of story tracking. That's all moving to note plan now that it has the Kanban front matter stuff. But Notion is where I've kept like a giant board slash calendar slash list of all of the stuff that I'm working on. And so I have one plugged into that and I have one plugged into just like a notes inbox for all stuff that will end up going into various stories. And with this, you just open it up

It gives you a blank field and a cursor. You type the thing you want to type. You tap on whatever tags you want, and it poof, appears in the database. And that has solved the most frustrating thing about Notion for me, which is that Notion is just devastatingly slow, especially the more you use it, the slower it gets, which I hate. And it is the thing that makes me keep churning out of Notion, which has all the features I want.

but it's just sort of slow and clunky to use. This makes getting stuff into Notion just vastly faster and has become an app I use all the time now. Whenever I have a story idea, it used to have to go into some other system I could input into faster, and then I'd have to move it into Notion. And now I can just open Instant Notion, type the story idea, and boom, it goes into the right column with the right tags in my story database. And that is life-changing.

And one last entry here caught my eye. I was scrolling through this. I was like, wait a second. One of these things is not like the others. And that's the SodaStream. So we got a lot of software. We got some media. And you're making your own fizzy water.

Okay, I put this on the list because I bought a SodaStream yesterday and I have some regrets slash feelings about it. And I just need to talk them through with you guys. So thank you for coming to my therapy situation. Are either of you fizzy water people? Yes, I am. But with an asterisk. What's the asterisk?

I got kidney stones years ago and the doctor told me I can't drink as much fizzy water. So now it's a specialty thing for me. I don't drink it all the time. It's like a treat. And always put lime and lemon in them. I'm just telling you for your own body's sake. Oh, interesting. Add some acid. Add some acid. That's both good taste advice and good life advice. I appreciate that. So I drink what is probably an inappropriate and eventually problematic amount of seltzer. And

For years, what we did was I just like, you know, buy a giant thing of cans at Costco and the cans accumulate on my desk and then I throw them all away and whatever. And,

This is, I think, the third time in my adult life that I have bought a SodaStream aiming to replace that both for, you know, environmental reasons, but also it's like it's cheaper if I just make all this stuff myself. The problem is SodaStream still requires you to change out the canister, which means you either have to go somewhere or you have to get stuff mailed in, which is just a lot of friction that doesn't exist when I want to open a can of seltzer in my room. Yeah.

It's also proprietary, which is the thing that I'm really trying to sort through. There are a lot of other things out there now that use more standardized CO2 systems. So you can just sort of go replace them anywhere like you do like a propane tank for your grill or whatever. But SodaStream is very much its own thing.

It's stuff is cheaper as a result. It's a real like razor and blades situation where I got a soda stream cheaper because I know I'm getting hosed on the CO2 canisters. Yeah. But I don't know. I bought this thing on sale at Target sort of on an impulse. This is the third time I've used it. The seltzer is delicious. Yeah.

But I don't know. Part of me also feels like I should have just gone the true hacker way and drilled a hole into my sink and plugged it and rigged up an actual carbonation system like a true DIY person. No, you shouldn't. You should not do that. Okay, good. I appreciate that. Your spouse comes home and be like, what have you done? What?

Well, so the problem is she is all in on seltzer as much as I am. So she would encourage this until I destroyed our kitchen. And then she would be like, what do you mean? I never told you to do that. So she's a real enabler of my bad impulses. My favorite thing about the soda stream is you can just overcarbonate. Just like whatever they tell you to stop, just hit it a couple more times. Just go all the way. That's how you make a bomb. It sounds like...

I did spill pretty aggressively the first time I made it because it was like, it's like pull the lever three to five times. And I was like, what if I do it like eight or nine times? And then it turns out it's, it is delicious, but it's also a giant mess.

David, thank you so much for coming on the show. We're both big fans of all the great stuff you're doing. And I really meant what I said at the beginning. You have such great interests and curiosity over at The Verge. I read almost every story you write. In fact, we're going to be talking about one today in more power users that grew out of something you wrote over at The Verge today.

We are the Mac Power Users. You can find us at relay.fm. If you want to sign up for more Power Users, the extended ad-free version of the show, you can do it right there. I want to thank our sponsors today, 1Password and Dev & Think. David, where should people go to keep up with what you're doing? The two best places are probably theverge.com. It's a very good website. We like it a lot. And The Verge Cast. If you're a person who likes podcasts, listen to The Verge Cast. All right. Thanks again, everybody, for listening, and we'll see you next time.