2025 Tech Predictions: Will Apple Finally Make Siri Good? OpenAI Bubble, and CES Preview!
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My father worked in profanity the way other artists might work in oils or clay. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. It's the first show of the year. It's 2025 and Apple talking about voice control in a magic mouse. Plus they missed their 2024 next gen CarPlay deadline. The U.S. Treasury was hacked. Trump is trying to save TikTok from the ban. We're going to talk a little bit about our 2025 predictions.

and the big CES preview and our travel bags. This episode is brought to you by Notion and you, the members who support us directly. I'm one of your hosts, Stephen Robles, and joining me for the first time since last year, Gahook.

Jason Aten. How's it going, Jason? It's good we made it a whole year. I have to quit now. No, no, no, no. We're in our next... I actually have to create a new folder in my Finder for 2025. It's amazing. We've done it. That's always like... We did it. The market... We did it. That's my mark of the next year is when I create the 2025 folders or whatever the next year is. It's like... Yeah. Do you do that? Do you arrange by years in some of your folders? Nope. Not... Well, I can't think of a single thing except for taxes. That's it. Just taxes. Just taxes.

And that will be 2024, not 2025. I use years because I have a folder for every episode where I have the episode artwork, the thumbnail. And so there's a bunch of things that I save for no reason. I'm a digital hoarder, I guess. But instead of having a folder with hundreds of folders, I designate by year. See, that just creates an extra layer you have to click through to get to what you're looking for. I love it. It's organization. Just...

scratches my brain and I just like it. But are the folders inside per episode labeled by date or by episode number? Episode number. Yeah, then that's pointless. Okay, listen, we didn't need to start the year off like this, Jason. Okay, you're already... Listen, what was the quote from? I'm done with Aval. Uh, Ralphie. It was Ralphie. It was Ralphie from A Christmas Story. I just want to say... My least favorite Christmas movie.

Listen, we watched the Christmas story. I think it was the first time I watched it all the way through. I know we're past Christmas, but we haven't recorded since before Christmas. We have a weird time gap here.

And I watched for the first time, I think, front to back with a bunch of family. And it was kind of fun in that group setting because there are lots of things to laugh at or whatever. But my question is, have you seen the sequel to A Christmas Story? We have seen both sequels. Wait, there's another sequel? There's A Christmas Story, basically. It's called A Christmas Story Christmas? Yeah, A Christmas Story Christmas. Where he's grown up. That's the third one. That's the third one? Yeah, there's actually a second one in between the two. Oh, I didn't know. Okay, well...

Apparently Apple TV doesn't think you should be recommended that second one because at the end of A Christmas Story, it just showed the 2022 A Christmas Story Christmas, which is Ralphie grown up. And so we actually watched it because we were like, let's see if it's good. I'm going to say I actually liked it. I'm just saying.

It was all right. Have you seen it? Yeah, we've seen both of the sequels because we are fully into it. But I guess there's actually, apparently there's another sequel called My Summer Story, which I don't actually know what that means. But Wikipedia is saying that there's a thing. I don't acknowledge any of these things. That's not canon is what you're saying? It's like Home Alone 3 and 4. Non-canonical. I mean, not only that, they're just bad movies. Exactly, exactly, exactly.

But Jason, it's crazy. It's 2025. I think we're in the future. Is this the future now, right? Are we finally in it? This is the future? I mean, every single breath you take is in the future. You just blew my mind. I think the episode's over right there. That's it. Wait a minute. I can't think about that. No, but like when, I feel like movies back in like the 80s and 90s, listen, we don't typically do as much small talk at the beginning, but it's the first one of the year. Okay. And we haven't talked in like 10 days. Okay.

I was going to make the joke. We haven't talked since last year. I'm sorry. I was a little bit more direct. I feel like when you watch movies when you were, well, at least when we were kids, like in the 90s, early 2000s, like you would see years like 2025, 2035. And it was always like, that's the future. It's so far out now. It's like, oh, here we are. 2025. Yeah.

What was the one end of the world movie, like 2012 or something like that? Well, that was because of the whole mind calendar thing. I've seen every disaster. And I love them all. Okay, anyway, let's do some five-star review shoutouts. There's a little bit of news, but then we should get into predictions. Jason had an article about what Apple needs to do in 2025. But what they really need to do is put voice control on the Magic Mouse. I don't think that's on my list.

No, it's not. But that is part of the news. All right. Five star reviews. SD travel from the U.S. percentage on dots off non-dominant pocket. He's all on your side. Dots off. I think it's the first or maybe the second person to say dots off and back button focus. I think SD travel is just adjacent to Stan. That's that's I'm here for it. That's fine. Exactly. Mike Kelly from the USA ice cubes and toilet. He said absolutely.

That was the whole title of the review. He didn't put any more context, so I assume that means he knows what you're talking about. Either that or apparently it's just a thing that they do. It's just a thing he does. When you have extra ice cubes and they get old and the thing, you just take them out and put them in the toilet. Actually, you could do that. You literally could do that. They're just water. I mean, you could do that. There's faster ways to get them to melt. Charles C. from the USA had a very nice thing to say about the show. Time Pilot from the USA. And then someone's literal name in their review was Primary Technology Fan.

And now, correct me, I don't know. I thought these names were based on your Apple ID or iCloud account. So if someone created an iCloud account with that as the name, just thank you. Yeah. That's one. I mean, if I had a t-shirt, I'd send it to you just for that. If that's really your iCloud name. But primary technology fan, and they didn't leave the rest of the name in the review. So I'm not sure what their actual name is, but they're from Switzerland. And so it was my favorite review because it just started with Jason is wrong. And that was all I needed to hear. I think by rule, if you live in Switzerland, you're not allowed to say stuff like that. You have to be neutral. Yeah.

You got to remain neutral. Come on. That's the whole, that's the whole stick. Sorry. No, no. So anyway, thank you for all those. Give us a, you could be the first five star reviews in a 2025. Cause these were all kind of left in 2024. Anyway, I'll leave his five star review. You get a shout out on the show, but let's, let's jam through some news and then we can get to our predictions and travel. Cause CES coming up, we're going to be going there. So Mark Gurman is out here with his newsletter, a power on saying that this year, possibly late this year, 2025, maybe 2026, uh,

Apple's going to redesign the Magic Mouse finally so the charging point, you don't have to put your mouse in the port. You don't have to put it in turtle mode to charge it, but also it's going to have voice control so you can shout at your Magic Mouse, I guess. Does it move on its own? Is it like a Roomba? It just mouses for you? I don't understand. What does this even mean? Apple Intelligence Magic Mouse. That's the killer product. That's the AI. Would you use it on a device that

I mean, does it have an M1 in it? I don't like, there's so many questions here, Steven. I don't understand. M1 Magic Mouse. What would you do? What would you need it for you to use it on a Mac that doesn't already have Apple Intel? Like this doesn't make sense. It's so this is German's quote, voice control in the new Magic Mouse wrote about this one makes sense in light of AI and the fact that Apple is on a decade plus cycle.

From what I've heard, big focus is ergonomics and gestures. You know, I wonder if in that MKBHD interview, when he asked Tim Cook about the Magic Mouse, Tim Cook finally realized it was still a product in their lineup. Yeah. And he goes back to the team and said, listen, we got to do something about this Magic Mouse. We got to do something about this thing. But honestly, though, I don't actually understand. This feels like the kind of thing where somebody whispered something to someone and then they got totally misconstrued. Because, Stephen, honestly.

Are they going to put Apple intelligence in the magic mouse before they put it in the Apple watch? No, this is like, come on. And like, I have imagined I'm using magic mouse right here. That's what, it's what I use. I can't imagine being like compute computer computer run, run a shortcut computer. How mad is everyone who has like a previous generation iPad air that doesn't run Apple intelligence going to be good.

How mad are you going to be if it's like you could just pick up a $99 Magic Mouse? I don't understand. It's very strange. I have no idea. Whatever. That's a Magic Mouse. And speaking of possible misses, but a real miss, Apple said next-gen CarPlay was supposed to debut in 2024. This is an article from The Verge, but you can also still go even right now. This is a live webpage for CarPlay on Apple's website. And under the next generation of CarPlay, which I think they showed off like...

two WWDCs ago? I think that's right. It was not this most recent one. Right. It was like 2023 they showed off this next-gen CarPlay where it would take over your entire dashboard including like speedometer and everything and it still says here as we record, what, January 2nd 2025, that the first car models will arrive in 2024. Spoiler, they didn't. They did not. I don't think so. I don't know of any vehicles that say that they're

supporting the next generation of carplay and i would be real surprised if it's gonna happen well here's the thing about this though steven i bet you that someone from apple would be like oh but actually the something something something technically does it just doesn't look anything like that it doesn't speak like i don't know but like yeah i would think they would have updated the web page then i mean i'm sure everybody was on holiday but maybe update the web page well we already know that they fired all the copy editors for the website we had this conversation a couple months ago when when they introduced like

16 lines of text to say that they put the M4 in the Mac. Come on. I thought, I thought the next gen car play that the only like preview was maybe an Aston Martin or something like that here. This is a car and driver article that I will include, but this was in 2023 December. Yep. So this was a year ago and it was that Aston Martin and Porsche, uh,

previewed that this next-gen CarPlay was going to happen, but then over the next year did nothing about it. So maybe technically if a carmaker announced that they're going to put it in there, then Apple can still be like, oh yeah, I mean it was 2024 when they said that. I don't know. I just think, I don't think that this is a product that needs to be in their lineup.

I don't think my 2011 Kia Soul is going to get next-gen CarPlay either. Neither is your Tesla, let's just be honest. It doesn't even have first-gen CarPlay. Whatever. No CarPlay. So that was that. Now, we were talking about changing to OpenAI for the next year. There was like an investor brief or something. The OpenAI board of directors shared a post talking about what is necessary for OpenAI in the coming years to continue advancement.

Basically saying they need ridiculous amounts of capital to continue succeeding. Basically on this promise that, listen, we're ahead and we'll stay ahead as long as you keep pumping money into open AI with what, what they're promising unclear, unclear,

But, and Gruber made this interesting comparison to Netscape and basically how Netscape went public super quickly. I think like two and a half years from like inception to actually being able to buy a stock of Netscape. And he's making the comparison to OpenAI, but OpenAI is still trying to transition to a for-profit company. I don't think we, correct me if I'm wrong, there's no official OpenAI

Open AI is now a profit company. It hasn't happened yet, right? Correct. And I think at least Elon Musk, for one, is suing them. And I think that possibly other, there's at least one state that's trying to prevent it. I think it was in California trying to prevent it from happening or something like that. Something like that, yeah. So it's still unclear when they'll be able to go and be for-profit company, which has to happen before an IPO publicly, initial public offering. That's the IPO when it goes on the stock market and things like that.

And so Gruber is basically saying like, it really feels like a bubble, specifically open AI because of these big promises. He does acknowledge like open AI right now currently offers like one of the best AI chatbots, which I would agree. I use it all the time. It's a good product, but the promise of how much better it can get that open AI is trying to make remains to be seen. And so maybe when we get to our predictions, we can talk about this, but it,

Does it feel like a bubble? I think it's anytime someone says we need an unimaginable sum of money. If you just look up what is an investment bubble, that is got to be the definition. And if it's not, it definitely should be the definition. But again, like this is, this is not surprising because we've talked about this a bunch of times on the show, like economics one-on-one let's not economics one-on-one. But the point is like companies at some point have to transition from a point where their primary activities are to encourage investors to give them money to

Two, their primary activity is trying to encourage consumers or customers to give them money. OpenAI is trying to get customers to give them money, and there's plenty of money coming in. I don't know. I think their run rate is like a billion dollars or something like that. That could be completely wrong. I'm just pulling that out of thin air. Let me ask Jeff. Their last investment was – their last round was $6.6 billion.

which was... But I'm just talking about their revenue, their actual customer revenue. So they're bringing in money, but it does take an astronomical sum of money to train these models. And then the other thing is the newest model that they released, which is what, 03? Yeah, I think it's 01 was...

There's a new model, O3. O1 was the reasoning. And then there's O3, which is their advanced reasoning model, which is not available publicly yet. But I think I was reading over the holiday that it takes something like $20 per query to do that. And it's like...

That's an astronomical amount of money just for like typing in. Can you show me how to change a spark plug in my car? Right. Like, or something like that. Like it's, it's reasoning, Jason, this is reasoning, but it's a, regardless of that, think about it. If you're Microsoft and you are selling access to this, but you're charging $30 a month,

This is not sustainable. And so the amount of money that they need to sort of build this sort of thing up and to try to bring in customers because what Chad GBT is the fastest growing tech product ever. And yet it still hasn't reached that critical threshold of having enough people giving them money to

to pay for the compute behind that. And I don't think the $200 a month pro subscription is going to be the answer to that. Because I see pictures or screenshots of people on social media canceling that, realizing I don't think this is getting me anything. Yeah, I don't think that that's going to be the solution. Just, yep. Not the solution. So I think we should make some open AI predictions as well when we get there. But also, this could be a short-term prediction. We'll see. Trump is...

petitioning the Supreme Court to stay the ban on TikTok, which goes into effect, or supposedly goes into effect January 19th. That's when it's scheduled, which is a day before his inauguration. So he is, uh,

I forget what it is, but he filed a brief with the court saying, you know, he believes that he alone has the negotiating power to fix this and make a deal with ByteDance or TikTok so it doesn't have to be banned. And so he's asking the Supreme Court to stay that. We'll see. Again, he's not president yet. The ban's supposed to go into effect January 19th. He's inaugurated January 20th. Yep. The next day. We'll see if it happens, but it's interesting. He, in his first...

or the last reelection, he was wanting to ban Tik TOK. He pushed for the Tik TOK ban. Uh, but now he is, you know, he says he is uniquely positioned to, uh, to understand why it's needed and why it shouldn't be banned. So we'll see. We have like two weeks. Yeah. It makes it hard to know what's going to happen because say whatever else you want to say about, uh,

incoming and former president Trump, he is extremely transactional, right? Because the whole reason that a TikTok ban was going to happen in the first place is that he was really mad at a bunch of teenagers who

Who went on TikTok and said, hey, you know what you should do? We should troll Trump by reserving all the tickets for one of his rallies and then no one show up. And that's exactly what happened. And then he thought like this is a national security threat because people didn't come to my rally. So we should ban it. And so they convinced Microsoft to buy it. And then that didn't happen. And then Oracle is running a server in Texas that is like... There's a children's museum where you can go and watch TikTok moderation happen. It's like a... That's like a real... Like there's some weird stuff going on. I don't think the Supreme Court is going to do this. I don't think they're going to...

to stay their decision because of the incoming president. Because here's the thing. Congress passed a law. The president signed the law. It goes into effect unless that law is unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court's not going to be like, well, the next guy might have a different opinion. There's a process for that. It's a there's a political process for changing those sorts of things. And I don't you know, the same people who voted to ban TikTok can't also be like, yeah, but the new guy should get a chance to decide on this just because he likes to talk now. So I don't see this like the Supreme Court is say what you want. You may not agree with other decisions, but.

they're nothing if not process driven right like they're not going to just be like oh there's a guy who might have a different opinion but that again like the pres the incoming president can't just ignore a law that bans tick tock it's like you just can't like anyway so you so we'll make this our first 2025 prediction so you think trump's uh petition for to stay

the ban will not go through and january 19th tick tock will go away here in the united states and go away with the biggest air quotes basically have to be taken out of the app stores and may not be able to access without a vpn things like that you think that's i don't think both of those things are necessarily connected because the supreme court is already hearing an appeal from tick tock so i think they could just tell trump you don't have standing like sorry you know go play golf yeah

But then they could also say that the law was unconstitutional for other reasons. I don't think the Supreme Court's going to do that. Let me be clear. I think that it's better than 50% chance that TikTok gets banned. I don't know what that means exactly, but I think there's a better than 50% chance that TikTok gets banned. I think there's like a 95% chance that the Supreme Court's not going to entertain Trump's motion. Okay. Well, I'm going to take the opposite. I think there is a...

Less than 50% chance that it gets banned. How much less? Because I'm like 50.7%, just to be clear. I'm going to say 40%. Okay. So we're not that far apart, just to be clear. I'm just taking a different stance so we can then say who was right. Okay, great. Yeah, I'm saying come January 1920.

I'm writing them down. So whatever episode is after that, he could say, Nope, I just wanted to know. I just wanted to record it for posterity. That's good. That's good. That's a, we are also recording, but yes, that I think TikTok is not like nothing will change.

I think everyone's going to be scrolling TikTok January 20th. So we'll see. All right. 40%. 40%. I'm 40% sure that they are not going to get banned. 40% sure. Okay. All right. We have to talk about how the US Treasury was hacked. Jason saying what Apple needs to do in 2025. An exploding cyber truck over in Las Vegas, which is also connected to where we're going this week or next week in CES. But before we do, I want to thank our friends at Notion.

This is one of like the, it's amazing that they're our first sponsor of the year. And it's one of the easiest sponsors because we're just, we use it. We're using it right now. We're just using it to record this episode and every episode of primary technology. This is where we do all of our show notes every week. There's a shared page. Me and Jason are in there posting links and articles and all of that and makes it easy to collaborate. It's,

free we're just collaborating just the two of us and so it's free for us to use plus you can use notion ai to do a bunch of stuff i'm not even reading from the script i'm just telling you what we do using notion every week to organize this show but notion also has the powerful ai tools and there's no shortage of ai tools out there we just talked about open ai being a huge one but a lot of times you have to switch back and forth even the chat gpt app you got a copy and paste text in there but

But when you're in Notion, everything is just right there. It can be in your workflow. And like I said, we use Notion all the time. Jason used it during our year-end review episode, trying to get it to summarize all the different pages. But Notion combines your notes, docs, and projects in one space. It's simple, beautifully designed. There's now shortcuts on the iPhone. That's not in script either. I'm just telling you, you can do shortcuts actions with Notion.

And again, everything syncs across all your devices with the Notion's app and on the Mac, iPhone, iPad. Notion is the one place to connect teams, tools, and knowledge so you're empowered to do your most meaningful work. And the fully integrated Notion AI helps you work faster, write better, and think bigger, doing tasks that normally take you hours in just seconds. Notion is used by over half of

of Fortune 500 companies, including Primary Technology. Not implying that we're a Fortune 500 company. Just tagging that in there at the end. And you can send less email, cancel more meetings, and save time searching for work all using Notion AI. So here's what you do. Try Notion for free when you go to notion.com slash primary technology. All lowercase letters. The link's also in the show notes below. Notion.com slash primary technology to try the powerful, easy-to-use Notion AI today.

When you use our link, you're supporting primary technology. So that's notion.com slash primary technology. We use it every week, literally for this show. Thanks to notion for sponsoring this episode. All right. The U S treasury was hacked based by, you got to say it like that. When you say that, how that, is that how that word is pronounced on podcast? It's hacked. Yeah, it's hacked. Uh, Chinese hackers, uh, they stole apparently unclassified documents in a major incident, but the U S treasury was breached and, uh,

Seems concerning, but also, I don't know. You might follow this stuff more than I do, but doesn't this happen periodically? There's a breach and something happens. Well, it's interesting when they say the US Treasury was hacked.

You're like, oh man, where's all the money? But it's not, that's not, this was not like Fort Knox. No. The gold repository was like broken into. It's not like Ocean's 11 job. Right. This is just not what you think. So yeah, it sounds like there was a third party software provider that notified them that a hacker had gained access to a security key, which basically would be the type of thing that would give you access to certain systems. And it allowed them to override some security protocols. And it's like,

I don't know. I don't think they've said exactly what was accessed, but this is the kind of thing where it's like, did you access some computers and you were reading someone's Outlook email? Or like, I mean, you know what I mean? It's like, and it does say, they did say that it is a, they were, they did access computers that involved end users. So that does make it sound like,

They were accessing computers that human beings were using as opposed to like servers that are keeping track of like your taxes or something. I don't know. Like, and so it's, it is certainly concerning, but I have to imagine that the U S treasury is one of the highest, uh,

potential threat targets if for no other reason than it is where your tax records are stored which are supposed to be kept confidential but you can certainly imagine that if you're like a Chinese government operative having access to people to like specific people not like you and me I don't think they care about our taxes Stephen like if someone from China wants them come I got them in my Dropbox I'll share the link right now it's really not that

exciting like it's really like what do you care but there are people for whom their taxes could be more problematic right certain charitable deductions that they may you know contributions that they make whatever sources of income that they don't really want to talk about necessarily like maybe they're not illegal but they could just be embarrassing it's what i'm trying to say right and so you can imagine that that's the kind of thing that people would want again i'm not suggesting that what they were going after were tax returns i'm just saying that's one of the reasons why the treasury is probably a pretty high threat target and so right yeah

Okay. Higher than my 2024 folder of primary technology. Which you would think would be a really high target, except for we've made them all publicly available in a feed on the internet. So you can just listen.

And I don't save the raw files, so it was literally just the edited MP3. You don't have to ask Steven's computer for this. No, you just download it from the RSS feed. There was also a Cybertruck. So CES Las Vegas, we're going there soon. We're going to talk about our travel bags very soon in the personal tech segment. In front of Trump's Hotel in Las Vegas, there was a Cybertruck that quote-unquote exploded. Actually, there was a video you can watch. It's not like the truck blew up, exploded, but there were some explosions in the truck. There was a fire.

It happened right in front of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas. And it seemed like

maybe purposeful. It was not that the truck battery or anything mechanical in the Cybertruck went wrong and that caused the explosion or fire, but there was some fireworks, gasoline canisters, fuel, camp fuel canisters, and large firework mortars found in the truck bed. And apparently that was attached to a detonation system. And that's what the driver detonated. So, and here's a look, you're watching the,

little video clip of the truck on fire in front of the hotel. But one person did die. Several were injured. And so that's unfortunate. Weird. Just kind of a weird thing. Yeah, it is very weird. I mean, the person who died was the person that was the driver of the truck. And so it's very strange because yeah, the problematic narrative here is like, oh, like a cyber truck exploded. It must have been, you know, that dangerous battery, but it had nothing to do with the battery. Like, and it's, by the way, this would have been a lot worse if that battery had exploded. Like,

Like it's got a pretty big battery in there and that. Yeah. But it is sort of a weird, like we don't know anything. The FBI is investigating it as a potential act of terrorism. The fact that it was a cyber truck parked in front of Trump's hotel makes you feel like there's probably something going on there. And then the fact that it was loaded with fireworks, it,

It was like loaded with explosives. It was detonated. Like this is, this is super unfortunate. I thought what was kind of interesting. And I think that we're going to like hear more about this is that the, both the cyber truck and then the truck that was used in new Orleans for the attack there were both rented on the app Turo. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it's like a peer to peer. It's like Airbnb for cars essentially kind of thing. And maybe that means nothing because like,

if what you wanted to do is rent a car to do something terrible you might not want to go to enterprise like because they're going to take a lot more of your information or whatever and so yeah i think it's kind of it's kind of weird and it's weird that this stuff is happening at the same time they may not be related at all but but the other thing that's interesting is it's just like our news media i think a big it's a big deal when a car explodes in front of a hotel especially a hotel in vegas especially the one that has the trump's name on it but i also think it's just a sign of like

Cyber truck explodes is a much bigger headline than Kia Soul explodes outside of Tampa. Which I don't think any Kia Soul has ever exploded. Probably true. Kudos to my old car. They just die a quiet death along the side of the road. It is sitting in the back over here. But yeah, the Turo app, if you're not familiar, it's basically...

the Airbnb, but for rental cars, meaning private owners can put their cars up to be rented and you can book it and use it as a rental car, but you're dealing with a private owner rather than a company like Enterprise. And so apparently the Cybertruck was rented in Colorado, driven to Las Vegas. They actually could follow the track that it took because it had to charge. So there's all these records of where this truck was charging and things like that. So that is true. I didn't realize the

the new Orleans truck also, which if you didn't hear that news, there was a, it was called a terrorist attack, but I think they're still investigating the motive behind it. But there was a pickup truck that drove into a crowd in new Orleans. And I didn't realize that that was also a Turo rental, which is interesting. Have you ever used Turo? I thought about it. I downloaded the app and I looked at it and I was like,

I don't know. I just, I didn't feel like, I don't know. I didn't really have a good reason to use Turo. And I was just like, I just go with the things I know I'll use enterprise or whatever, but have you, yeah, we used it one time and it was on a trip with my daughter and the person was like an hour and a half late and it was pretty disappointing. Hmm. So,

So is that like they'll bring it to you? Yeah. So they were supposed to like meet us at the airport kind of thing. And there's supposed to be two vehicles, you know, and they, the driver of the one gets into the other one and leaves and leaves us the first one. And they were like an hour and a half late. And then they made us like walk to long-term parking. It was anyway, I'm not, it's probably not Turo's fault. It was just like, it's hard to recommend because it was not a great, you know, you walk up to the Hertz counter and,

and generally speaking as long as they have cars although i've had some bad experiences we can talk about about hertz another time i don't do hertz i'm an enterprise guy you know hertz was the company that was like reporting its own vehicles stolen when like they just lost people would like extend their rentals and they would like lose track of it and so then they call the police and report them stolen and people the police would show up at the people's houses in the middle of the night and like repo the cars and like arrest them and it's like

What? What are we doing? No, no, thank you. No, I try. Honestly, I just believe that I can just Uber anywhere, even if it's like the middle of nowhere. So I never even, I don't think really about renting cars very much. Really? Anyway, I mean, I've, I've Ubered in other countries. I've Ubered. Yeah. Uh, just pretty much any city I've ever been to in the U S you know,

major cities obviously you can uber but even like here in lakeland florida you can uber yeah or lyft they're both available and that's like a small town not metropolitan at all and i hailed an uber so i could drop my car off at a mechanic and get home yeah it's like it's just they're just i i just believe they're everywhere do you do you feel like i think it depends so like when we went to arizona for our daughter's soccer tournament we were gonna be it's like 35 minutes away

From the airport? No, from the hotel. The hotel and the airport were very close, but then we had to drive like 35 minutes. That's not an Uber ride that you want to take and try to find one back and stuff like that. And we were going to be doing multiple things. So at some point, if you can rent a car for $100 a day, that's probably going to be a better deal if you're going to be doing a lot of trips. But if I go to New York or especially in other countries, no, I would. Well, first of all, I'd never rent a car in another country. Like, no chance. Right. So just a little.

little backstory at, I used to work for a travel company and me and the CEO, we were in Germany and we were doing stuff or maybe it was the UK. It was one of the two.

And he arranged a car because we were driving around to like different touristy sites. And it was my job to take photos and video and then do marketing things after that. And he asked me, he was like, do you want to drive? And it was in the UK because I would have to have driven on the left side of the road. And I was like, no, I don't think so. I don't think I want to try this today because there's a lot of roundabouts. And I have to do the roundabout the opposite way. I don't even know how that works. So now I'm good. I'm just fine.

Speaking of roundabouts, Stephen, I watched a video yesterday. I think it was a BBC video on YouTube because this is what happens when you click on one video. It shows you everything. This happened. I want to ask you this later, but I watched one of your videos about the travel 2-in-1 chargers, the MagSafe alternatives, and I kid you not, my entire feed was just people wanting to tell me about these things. I'm like, no, I already got the answers. Thank you very much. But my friend Stephen had the perfect video. Anyway, we'll talk about that later. But there is an underwater...

in the Faroe Islands. So the Faroe Islands are like north of the UK towards Iceland, like out there in the middle of nowhere. They're part of Denmark, I believe. And they built this system of underwater tunnels to connect all the islands, right? Because it used to be that the only way you could get between the islands, it's kind of like Hawaii. It's not like Hawaii, but it's sort of like Hawaii. And so they built all these underwater tunnels. And in one point, there is a roundabout where two tunnels connect. And I just think that that is the most interesting

amazingly bananas thing I've ever heard of. I just found a picture. I have to show this. This is amazing. This is like the ice hotel or whatever in that country that I like want to see one day. That's exactly underwater, underwater, underwater roundabout, the world's first undersea roundabout. Wow. That's slightly terrifying, but amazing. Isn't that amazing?

Here's where it connects. Whoa. I love it. Anyway, sorry for derailing, but I felt like this was worth it. I'm just sharing the random news. That's terrifying. I like it. This...

This dude, you're not watching. Just watch this clip just to see the pic. I'll use this as the chapter art. I'll make a special chapter for the Faroe Island. You gotta warn people. This is a... Woo! It's a terrifying picture. This is the guy that greets you into this underwater roundabout just to make you feel safe. He's the guy that collects the tolls. You gotta pay that guy or you cannot go. Yeah, he's the troll guy on the Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Yep. What is your name? What is... Anyway. Anyway.

Okay. Netflix on Christmas day. And then we'll get to our predictions and such. Right. I'd watched the Tyson fight on Netflix or at least tried to. And I've told myself I wanted to try and watch the football games are happening at Christmas day to judge the streaming. That totally forgot. Totally forgot. There were football games happening on Netflix Christmas day on the live stream, but you watched it and you even wrote about it. So what, uh, how'd that go? Yeah. Well, I mean, they definitely did not have the problems they had on the Tyson fight. Everyone who was worried, like they figured it out.

I don't know if they just bought more HP servers at Best Buy, stuck them in a rack somewhere. But they got it because that's how it works, right? They switched to Mac Minis. There's a bunch of Mac Minis sitting in a rack. Yeah, that's super not how it works. But they figured it out. They managed to pull it off. Both games, I guess there were some people that said that at the beginning of the first game that they may have had a couple of just short glitches or whatever. But by the time that game was going, it was great. And the one thing that's kind of cool about this, if you think about it,

I saw someone complaining about the Apple Sports app because it is so fast to update that it is generally updating faster than even your wire in the ground cable TV. Because most people don't think that you're, you know, if you have Xfinity cable, you think like that's literally real time. But there's probably a two or three or four second delay. Like that's just like physics or whatever. It's probably not physics, but it's just something.

Yeah, physics. Something. Signal, cable. Yeah. But if you're watching on YouTube TV, we're used to the fact that it's probably going to be like 35 to 40 seconds behind because that's just kind of the way that kind of thing works. And that's fine. It doesn't really matter to us. We're just watching it. But it does mean you probably don't want to be scrolling on X or Twitter or something like that while you're watching because you might get spoiled. Although people were real mad that the Apple Sports app is faster than actual just live television. Right? But when you're watching the games on Netflix...

There's no live over-the-air or cable version of that game. The only way to watch that was on Netflix. So everyone was kind of on an even par. Technically, it was probably a minute behind the actual game, but everyone was a minute behind. So to us, it was the same. Anyway, they pulled it off. It was very good. The thing I thought was especially interesting is that they managed to create a pretty...

They knew what they were doing when they asked Beyonce to show up in Houston, Texas to play music from her new album live for the first... She hasn't done a concert tour on those songs. This is the first time she's ever played them. It's a country album. She's in Houston, Texas, which is her hometown. I mean, Houston got smoked, so that was bad, but...

She's in her hometown. It was a, it was a fantastic concert. You know, she had a post Malone and what's his name? Shabuzy was there. And then her daughter was in the, the dance troupe or whatever. That's not what you call it probably. But anyway, the dance troupe, but anyway, one of her backup dancers or whatever. And the whole thing that came off like very well. And what was, what was wild about it is like Netflix bet a lot of money on Christmas day football. Um,

And I think it was worth every penny. I think the 11 minute Beyonce show for them was probably worth every penny that they paid. Sure. Because they created sort of a halftime show.

moment that it felt as big a deal as like the Super Bowl. Okay. Well, that's great. Yeah. All right. All right. So Netflix now doing the live thing. I will say that the streaming thing is funny. It's a challenge now New Year's Eve if you try to watch the ball drop because we were watching on it was Hulu live TV my

My father-in-law pays for that. And so we were trying to find, we, we did the Ryan Seacrest. Yeah. ABC. ABC. Yeah. And like, I kept going out and refreshing it a couple of times just to make sure it's like at the latest moment possible. But when it would got to like 1158 on the TV with the ball about to start dropping, uh,

My son with his Apple watch is like, it's midnight. Same. Our youngest son was, so we weren't quite that far off. It was like maybe 13 seconds off and he's counting down and we're like, you be quiet. Stop talking. You are done. And everyone else was like, we're just going to pretend that we're going to go on the TV. He's like, no, it's already midnight. And we're like, it doesn't matter.

I was trying to tell everyone like, listen, we're just going to make this the time. Like just everyone, let's look at the ball drop and let's all just be on the same page. And then like, I think it was both my sons. They were like, Hey, Hey, happy new year. So like all of these parents are talking about how the thing you do now is you just could, like if you have young kids, you just can show them last year's ball drop at like nine 15 or something. And they won't know the difference. Those parents apparently do not have children with Apple watches because if they have an Apple watch, they are, they are so independent. You don't even understand. Yeah.

Well, I think, you know, once it hits new year, at least for that evening, maybe the next morning you have that notification on the Apple Watch. The fireworks. It says happy new year. You get the fireworks. With the fireworks. I feel like it tapped me maybe at midnight. I can't remember. I wasn't wearing my Apple Watch, but when I put it on the next morning, I did get the fireworks. You did get it. Okay. Yeah. I post a little video on social media, but it's a nice little, little thing. It says happy new year with your first name. Yeah. Anyway.

Streaming has ruined New Year's Eve. That's, that's the, I don't think it's the streaming that ruined New Year's Eve. It's, it's people giving up the time. I don't know my favorite New Year's Eve show. I don't even, I'm assuming they still do it, but it's the, what is it? Anderson Cooper. And what's his name? His buddy, Andy or whatever. No, what's his name?

some of our listeners. No, it's not. But anyway, it's, but they're both completely hammered. And so we can't watch it with our kids. Like you say, you don't watch it. We can't. Yeah, no, we can't CNN new year, new year's Eve live. And no, it's Andy and Anderson. Yeah. I was right. You made me second guess myself.

Anyway, but they're absolutely hilarious, mostly because Andy Cohen is hilarious. Anderson Cooper's drunk and laughing at Andy Cohen the whole time. And it's just, it is worth watching, but you can't watch it with kids. Let's just say that. It's all you need. It's all you need. All right, let's do some predictions, and we'll kick it off with your article. Okay. Saying what Apple needs to do in 2025, which is make a HomePod with a screen. No, that's not what you said. Listen. Listen.

I'm so mad about this. I had to write about it finally. Cause I, you hear all these people talking about like, yeah, all the products Apple's going to make. I don't, I think the one thing that they have to do is they have to fix the Siri experience or they have to deliver the experience that they promise. And if they had not made a promise and they had not changed that stupid glowy interface that appears when you activate the voice assistant, I don't think it'd be as big of a deal.

I think that the Snoop Dogg commercials, all that stuff talking about Apple intelligence, fine. That you can, you can argue that that was just like, it's not false marketing, but it's certainly like slightly misleading because people are like, well, this isn't all that different or whatever. But I think like the one thing people actually want is, um,

To say to what was the example I even used in the article? I can't even remember, but like to be able to like talk to it and have it do things on your behalf to have it to like say to your iPhone, you know, like find out what my flight lands and reserve an Uber to my hotel. Like that's such a simple thing to be like, that is the killer application. And in theory should absolutely be able to do all of those things because it has access to all of that information. But right now it can't. And part of the reason it can't is the fact that like,

Like third-party apps like Uber, for example, have no motivation to interact with Siri, right? Because they want you to open the app to book the thing, to do whatever. So it means Apple is probably going to have to like fork over some money or figure out the economics of this or do some kind of thing to incentivize apps to be a part of it. And that is just not Apple style. But I think, I personally think that making this happen, I argued that it was a bigger deal than the iPhone 17. I know a lot of people will,

argue with me on that yes apple's going to release apple the iphone 17 before they do this because there are just hundreds of billions of dollars that depend on it across the economy right from manufacturing jobs to third party people who make cases to whatever like i get it like there's the first sentence of the article is like there's literally nothing more certain in tech than apple in september is going to release a new phone yes it's going to happen right even during covet it happened

right they did it a month late but it's still gonna happen but i just think that they have got to fix siri so so i mean i agree i also think you know we had listeners with varying opinions about the photos app some people agree with your and i think my feeling that the redesign is not great maybe you had stronger words for it it was bad there's some people who feel like

No, no, it is good. You just have to get used to it. All I know is what I see on like TikTok and social media from non-techie people that nobody likes it. Everyone's basically like saying Apple put it back. And there's even just like I saw one post where someone was like, where are my favorites?

And I totally get it because it's like, it is honestly, I don't know. I don't know where your favorites are. It could be in a bunch of different places. It'll be at a different place depending on the time of the day. And when your phone thinks that you might want to see a certain thing, it will show you a different version. And then even like someone asked me on, um, in a YouTube comment, cause I was making shortcuts and you could, you used to be able to make a shortcut that just opened a photos album and,

where you just press the shortcut and it'll open that direct album. And because of the photos redesign, and I guess some of the changes, like that's not enough. You can't do it anymore, but you can't just have a shortcuts action to open a specific album. And honestly, like you can, again, customize your photos experience. Like if you scroll all the way down to the, that's too bright. If you scroll all the way down,

in the photos app in ios 18 there is a customize and reorder section which i do recommend doing because it makes it a little more usable you can uncheck certain categories and then reorder them but even like i've done that and so it's a little easier to find my albums but even so like it's just not and like having to kind of scroll down to get to this like all photos view like

It's not great. It's worse than that. I think Photos is Apple's version of the Sonos app. Okay. Okay. All right. So, all right. Here's our prediction. I mean, the parallel is pretty close, right? You broke a bunch of things that people wanted to do because you wanted to improve a different type of experience, but that's not what people actually wanted. And maybe...

you know, Apple said Apple intelligence was going to be able to do like more fun photo slideshows or whatever. I mean, it did slideshows before, like they did moments and memories and there was a for you tab before. And like, I do, I think I do miss the tab, like navigation at the bottom. We just had like photos and I forget what it was. The long lost days of the tab. My, my wife said, and she hates it by the way. And the thing that, here's the reason I care about this so much is that because I,

Whenever Apple changes something in a piece of software, I get yelled at. I don't actually work there. I did not make these changes. I do not design software for Apple. But if I update the software on one of the people in my homes...

and then they don't like the software, they're mad at me. They're not mad at Apple. And so I take this very personally. But the thing is, if you open it up and you're not someone like you and I, if you just look at this UI interface, you're like, how do I edit this photo? And they're like, what do I do? And you have to hit the little thing that has all the little fader suggestions. And my wife's like, you know what worked really well? The word edit. She's so mad. Yeah.

at the way that they change these things. And I just, you know, the only thing I would say on the other side of that is it's like my wife posts photos to Facebook. And I realized not that long ago that I don't think she cares if any of her Facebook friends see those photos because

the single killer app and Facebook is every day. It shows you your photos on that day in the past. And so she's just creating this like time capsule rep record. So I imagine some of the things that you and I think are stupid in the photos app, like show me memories, show me trips, show me whatever. Every time I've seen a demo of those things, I'm like, who cares? Like if I want to see photos from my trip, I just search for the location. I don't need you to,

AI generate a thing. But I do think that I'm not typical. I think that average normal users who don't spend as much time thinking about this, they think that's cool. Like, oh yeah, that trip we took to Alaska. Here it is. It's right here. Well, I will say there have been times when usually it's at like birthdays or

Where sometimes, I don't know about you, but like especially adult birthdays, my birthday, like parents, in-laws' birthdays, you get to a point where it's like, what do we do now? Can we throw in a movie? They're like, we just had cake. We did maybe a gift or two. And honestly, one of the...

more enjoyable activities I have found at that point is to go to the photos app and see if there is a memory about the person. And if you have that person's birthday in their contact, I have found the photos that pretty good at being like, Hey, here's photos of so-and-so throughout the years. Yeah. And actually throwing that up on the TV, air playing it. It's actually, that is pretty good. Like I give photos that, but it was doing that in Iowa 17. Yeah. It's not even an iOS 18 feature. And I actually have created shortcuts because people ask for them.

where you can create a shortcut that just shows you photos you took a year ago. Like I can run a shortcut and it'll just pull all the photos from a year ago and you can do multiple years or whatever. So I do think I agree like for more normal people and if you can get in the habit of doing it there are some good things there in like the for you curated over time memories but I

But again, memories was something that already existed. The iOS 18 redesign honestly has made it, I feel like harder to even find them. Like unless you reorder those categories, because now like you have to scroll kind of pretty far to get to the memories. So it's not great. Honestly, if, if Apple said the iOS 18 photo update,

is that we have enabled a toggle that lets you hide screenshots, and that was the only change they made. People would be raving about it. People would say, I was 18, the best update ever. Because honestly, that is the one new thing that I definitely use. Like, I hide the screenshots, so I don't have a bunch of screenshots in my photo thing, like when I'm looking at all my recents. But that's everything else. All right, so here's some prediction questions for you.

Do we think Siri with the, oh, sorry, I said it out loud. Yeah, I've said it like seven times. They're not going to be that mad at you. Do we think Dingus? It's too late. I don't know why I'm saying it.

is going to get the semantic index update with contextual awareness and being able to interact with app intents and your data. Is that coming in 2025 this year? I think that the chances are greater that they rename it to dingus than that. They actually deliver on what they promised. No, the only thing that's going to happen. I think the rumors are 2026. I think they have to do it this year. I just, I can't, they're so far behind. And I, I think the, I, okay.

This is so revealing, though, I think about the mindset of Apple because I think that in their mind, they're like, what are you going to do? Use a pixel? Right? In their mind, they're like, you're going to keep using an iPhone. You may not like that we haven't done this, but since you've never experienced that, you don't really know what you're missing. And maybe your friends talk about this cool thing. But your friends who use Android have been talking about cool things that they can do, like rearrange their home screen for 10 years and you are still using an iPhone. So I think that they probably just don't care. Yeah.

I don't think it's coming this year. I'm going to say it's going to come this year. I hope so. I really hope you're right. I want to lose this one. I almost want to predict that it will come...

before WWDC because if they talk about Apple Intelligence again with the same exact features they did last year, which the semantic index was a large part of the Apple Intelligence presentation, like Craig Federighi walking through, oh, you took a picture of this program of your kid's musical. It's going to tell you whether or not you can get to it in time after your last meeting. Like, he already did all that. And so to rehash all of that at another WWDC I think will not go over well.

And so even if it is a limited version, like maybe we don't get the third party app intents just yet, but a version of the dingus that can look at your calendar, look at your text messages, look at your photos, uh,

and figure it out because you can't even ask it right now show me a picture of my driver's license or what's my car license plate because apple said at dub dub you would be able to do that right that it would be smart enough to do that i think those things the apple first party app uh features i think those are going to come in the first half of this year the app intents and the third party integrations are

That'll either be later, like iPhone 17 time or maybe 2026. But I do think we will get a smarter Dingus this year. I think that if Apple can release a smart enough Dingus that you can say to your phone when you come back from CES, where did I park my car? And it knows your car and it gives you walking instructions on the map. Apple's a $5 trillion company by the end of the year. Seriously though, because these are the types of things that people's mind will explode. And it's like,

If my phone can just do all of these, like look, Apple's thing for years. This is what I should have written about is like, it just works. Right. And this is the perfect example you have. Even without the third parties, Apple can do most of these things first party, because even if I use fantastic out, but guess what? Everything's still in my calendar app on my iPhone. I don't ever open it, but it's all there. Everything is still there. Same thing with the mail app. Same thing. Obviously I use messages, but like all of those things are first party. It has access to all of that information. I feel like,

I don't, maybe this is a harder problem to solve. Like it seems easy to us because we don't know anything. I think, but like the parked car thing, that's something that Apple does already. Yeah, that's true. When you park your car someplace like you can open the maps app and it will show you your parked car. And so you might even be able to do it now. Like ask the dingus, where's my parked car? I'm not sure, but to preemptively do that and connect it with Apple,

I don't know, remind me when I land where my car is. Right. Like that kind of query, I feel like should be possible. Yeah. This year. Yeah. But we'll see. All right. Photos app. Is it going to get another redesign or revert in iOS 19?

Uh, I think, I think they're going to, I think they will tweak the interface to make some of the things that they didn't realize that people care about, like easier to get to, but I don't think that they're going to revert it. That just doesn't seem very Apple. Like they didn't. Okay. I think the, the, the, uh,

The precedent, that's the word I was looking for, for this is Safari when they did the tab, when they changed the position of the tabs and all that kind of stuff. And then they're like, okay, fine, you hate it. We're going to stick with this sort of mental model, but we will make it easier by giving back. Like they kind of compromised a little bit. I think that that's what we're going to see with photos. I think, yes, I'm going to make a weird prediction. I think the tab bar will come back.

At the bottom. I thought we were talking about Safari still. Sorry. No, no. I was like, wait, what? The tab navigation at the bottom. I think that's honestly a major part of people's psyche about how to get around photos because just go to albums or for you or recent photos. I forget what it was, but I think that I think there'll be some kind of tab navigation at the bottom again. Ooh, see, that's interesting because, and I would, I don't think so.

And the reason is, I think the model here is infinite scroll, right? Which is what you do in every single other app is just infinite scroll. Yeah. Well, we'll see. It's a weird prediction. I don't even know if I fully believe it, but I'm just going to throw it out there. You got to make it interesting. I'll make it interesting. Okay. Another question for you. New display from

From Apple in 2025. You mean standalone? You don't just mean that the iPhone 17 gets all that? Okay, I just made sure. Either a Pro Display XDR or Studio Display or new product. Will Apple release an updated or new display in 2025? Yes. I think it'll be more expensive than the Studio Display and I don't think they'll make the XDR anymore. Oh, really? Yeah.

Who's buying that? John Syracuse. Marco Armit. But I don't think either of them would have bought that if the studio display had existed at the time. I feel like Syracuse would have.

He wants to know every pixel is the most pixeled it can be. You know what I mean? Yeah, but it's not any more high resolution. I mean, technically it is because it's bigger. It's just HDR or XDR. It's not even really HDR. It's not even true HDR. Right. Like the iPad and iPhone screens are more HDR than XDR. Last year's 13-inch iPad was more HDR than that. Right? Right, right. Yes. So, I don't know.

I think Apple loves things with lots of margin. And I feel like the pro display XDR probably has got a lot of margin built into that thing. So I'm going to, I don't think it's going to go away, but I will, but I'm going to agree. I think there will be an updated display this year, either new or updated, and it'll probably come around WWDC. That's my prediction. I agree. All right. And also along with that, will we see the M4 Ultra? Yeah.

this year which we did not get an m3 ultra okay so my prediction was going to be that they will put the m4 in all the macs so i by the end of this year which just seems like a logical like yes that's easy so i do think that that means that we will get an m4 ultra this year because they're not going to release the studio mac studio or mac pro i don't think we'll see another mac pro do you oh that's a good one i know i think we will in the same form factor

Same form factor, zero work, just swap out the chip for an M4 Ultra. I think they need to say they have a Mac Pro. I think they just need to be able to say, like, this is our Pro Mac machine. Because they don't, like the Mac Studio, they talk about for professionals and for this and for that, but they don't call it a Mac Pro, and I don't think they would.

I think if they try to call the Mac studio and Mac pro people would be like, no, it's not right. I think, I think they're going to keep the Mac pro around. It will not, it will not be the computer to get for pretty much anybody kind of like how the Mac pro is now, but they'll just put the M four ultra in there and say, cool. There it is. Do you think there'll be anything higher than the M four ultra? No, I don't think so. Okay.

I know there were rumors like M4 Extreme, but there's been rumors of a more Ultra than Ultra chip since the 2 generation. I don't think so. The M4 Ultra Pro Plus. The Ultream. Extra Ultra.

Do you think it's going to be something more? The M4 Altium. Adamantium. Adamantium. Yeah, there you go. The M4 Vibranium. I'd buy that. I'd buy that chip. I don't think they probably will. I don't think that they think it's necessary. I think Apple thinks of its lineup differently than a lot of people think of its lineup. And I think they know what sells and they know what they need to do to please...

And people who are like, I want an M4. I want the Mac Pro to take external graphics card. They're like, that's just not our market. We don't care. Right. Yeah. Tim Cook's like, buy your mom an iPhone and then buy yourself a gaming PC. It'll be fine. We don't care. All right. I have two more. And then if you have any predictions you'd like to make. Apple.

a home pod with a screen. The thing that's been rumored for like four years. I think German saying this year, it'll come out. Are we going to see some kind of home pod with a screen home device? Yes. And it will be a disappointment. Here's what I mean by that. I feel like it's getting the vision pro treatment, which means they're doing too much with it. This I'm like, no kidding. If they just released a speaker stand for the iPad and,

that you could magnetically attach it to it. And then the iPad went into some kind of like home dashboard mode. That would be the killer application. And that's not what they're doing. Right. They want to think there's this talk of a robotic arm and all these things. And it's like, I feel like they, it's like they looked at the landscape of the stuff. They're like, well, this stuff sells. Okay. What could we do to really juice this up? And it's like,

no what people just want is something they can stick in the like kitchen and set timers and look up recipes and see photos of their kids while they're doing stuff like that's what people want like yeah i agree i think it's gonna some version of it's gonna come out this year it will probably be a disappointment to many for me totally immersed in the apple smart home i'm hoping i don't i'm not predicting this i'm hoping it comes with like

a bunch of updates to the Apple home thing. Like there's still a bunch of automations that you can't do in the Apple home app. That's really annoying. Like you can't create an automation that says, let me know when this door has been left open after a certain amount of minutes, which is ridiculous. Like you have to do weird workarounds with push cuts and stuff like that. And multi-step automations where if you want, I have an automation that I had to create it in the Eve app because Apple home doesn't support it.

but I have a Eve weather outside on the patio that can measure the temperature. And I have an Eve motion sensor out there. And the automation is just, if the temperature is over 78 degrees or 75 degrees and it detects motion outside, turn on the seal, the fans, the patio fans. And like just that simple two-step automation, temperature and motion, you can't do directly in the home app. You have to like create it in the Eve app,

And then it's available in the Apple Home app. You can literally toggle the automation on and off, but it's just very limited. And so I'm hoping that Apple does more with that. Things like HomeKit Secure Video with 2K and 4K video streams. So those are higher quality. Maybe even a web view. It still drives me nuts that like you can log into iCloud.com and there is literally a tab in a menu or a menu choice for HomeKit Secure Video with a little camera. Does nothing.

Like it's, it's an option. It literally does nothing. Like it doesn't give you any information, but I would, I would love to be able to go there and see my recordings from all my cameras, like every other smart camera, like Arlo, like ring or whatever. So that you could download clips because downloading clips from the home app on your iOS devices is super annoying. Like it's cumbersome. So I'm hoping that a bunch of home improvements, uh,

Not the show, but that there are improvements to the Apple smart home alongside this HomePod with a screen or whatever. But I do think we'll see a HomePod with a screen. And I'm even going to predict an updated HomePod mini. I don't know what they're going to update it with, but it's been multiple years since

updated home pod mini you know what i would rather they do is just sell a standalone subwoofer for the home pod mini that would be nice listen a lot of people ask for like the home theater setup with home pods i had a lot of people ask like when i did videos about the home pod twos they're like can i buy two home pod minis as surround speakers like no why i don't know apple should totally let you do that right don't let you do that i mean you buy some more home pods for that i mean you can't really do it either with that but like home pod minis are not the best back

No, but you can't do four big home pods. No. I mean, two big home pods is pretty good. I understand it's probably not like a Sonos Arc with a bunch of Aera 300s behind you or something like that. I get that. But it's actually a pretty darn good setup, but it would be nice if you could have surround by adding two more. Yeah.

Yeah. So that, so that'd be cool. And the last question, uh, open AI, I'm not sure what prediction to even ask. Hardware device. Hardware device. Oh really? Yeah. I think there's rumors that they're working on it with Johnny Ive or whatever. Oh, that's true. Okay. So wait a minute. So the open a hardware device and also transition to for-profit and or IPO.

What do you think is the transition to the for-profit will happen for sure? A hundred percent. What about public like IPO this year? I think either they'll transition to for-profit and they'll do an IPO immediately or, or it'll take boom, file both paperwork today. Like, I don't know. I think, I think that that's a possibility. I think it, but I don't, I don't know how much I believe that that's the case. I think that they would like to rake in as much money as they can. And I think that they would become much more, uh,

appealing to certain types of software engineer people if they could get equity in the company that they could freely trade. But I think a hardware device in the next 363 days, I think is a possibility. Okay, I'm going to say no hardware device. Okay. I don't think they're going to do that. But definitely for-profit IPO this year. I'll say it.

The IPO, the IPO, probably like the end of the year, like November, December, but IPO. Okay. All right. Is that, I don't even know like all of this entailed with that. If that's even possible. I mean, it's possible. You just, the, the,

the mechanics of an IPO are much less complicated than like your strategy and rationale for it. Right. Like you just file paperwork, right. Hire a bank to like make that market for you. But like, yeah. So, yeah. Okay. Did you have any other predictions for next year? One, uh, iPhone gets a new form factor this year. So yeah, we didn't talk about this a lot last year, but the iPhone 17 air is the rumor. I don't buy that, but yeah, that's the rumor. I, uh,

I don't know. I'm going to say no. They might say it's gotten thinner, like just the iPhone overall, and maybe like the iPhone 17 non-Pro models get like dramatically thinner, but also maybe give something up or don't get a feature that the Pros do. But I don't see an iPhone 17, 17 Plus, 17 Air, 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max. It seems like a lot.

Maybe new SE this year. And that, you know, that could be an ultra thin model or something, or just, you know, has a lot less features, but the home button finally going, I'm going to say that I'll make this prediction. 2025 is probably wrong. The home button goes away.

The iPhone SE is updated with face ID and there's no more home button. What do you say to that? I don't think that will happen for one reason. I think Apple has to keep a phone with a home button with touch ID and not face ID. I think it's an accessibility thing. Yeah, you're probably right. Okay. They could, I mean, could they, would they do like an iPhone SE, uh,

without a home button model just to have like a low cost face id and then keep around the home button one is like some dark place on their website i mean they have a low cost face id version it's the iphone 14 you can still buy it on the website how much is that hold on like 5.99 or something like that apple.com iphone and let's go oh yeah iphone 14 look at that i told you it's 5.99 i told you 5.99 though

I mean, the SE is like four something, isn't it? It's $399. Oh. The iPhone SE is $399, which is what makes it compelling. The iPhone SE, though, has like the iPhone 8 inside of it. Right? Yeah, that's true. Excuse me, $429. The iPhone SE is $429. Yeah, I think $599 is the right price for the iPhone 14 because it is still a fantastic device for most people. $200 more for an iPhone 8.

seven 16 and then you can still get the iphone 15 as well that's 699 they really they got those price tiers this is what i'm saying so 599 699 all i'm saying is the low cost face id phone is the iphone 14 if it's not low cost not really low 599 yeah i feel like that the 400 price point like where the iphone se is right now 429 that would be a low cost face id phone i think because you're still like 200 away from that with the iphone 14 but this is apple i

This is not Samsung. I know. One plus you get refurb phones for pretty good. That's true. Pretty good deals too. But anyway, all right. I don't know. I don't know what predictions to make about Microsoft or whatever. Ooh, Microsoft and open AI and their deal.

I don't even know if I believe that. I'm just throwing it out there. No, I think it'll remain a tenuous, awkward relationship. A marriage of convenience. Yeah, just for Microsoft out of necessity just because they've said our models are better. Whatever. You're going to be with OpenAI. Right. Okay. Let's talk about, I feel like maybe we leave our travel bags for the bonus episode. Okay. So we have more to talk about. But CES starts next week. Officially, it's the... Anyway.

I'm scheduled to go there January 4th, Saturday. Sunday, there's like CES Unveiled, which is like the first-ish event. Okay. I think. And then we got all the CES stuff. I have no idea what to expect because it's my first one. Like, I've just seen the coverage for the last...

14 years. I mean, I was following it like in gadget days when like Nilay Patel and Joshua Topolsky were at and gadget Joanna Stern. And so I was following it all the way back then. And, uh, it's very exciting. It's, I expect to see lots of gadgets and tech that never sees the light of day. It's just as in the CES showroom. I expect to see a lot of TVs and a lot of smart home weird things, which I'm excited about. I don't know, like,

I'm going to look to you to even know what to do. Like Monday and Tuesday, just walk around the show floor. I don't know. So I'm excited, but I have no idea what to expect. I don't think the show floor will be open until...

Maybe Tuesday, but maybe Wednesday. I don't think that the show... Oh, really? I don't think the trade show part starts until Tuesday or Wednesday. CES.tech. We'll find out here while we're talking. Yes, well, it's the 7th through the 10th. So, the 7th is Tuesday. Yeah, but I don't know when the actual trade show floor opens. But anyway, it doesn't matter. But I don't think you'll be walking around Monday is what I'm trying to say. Oh, okay. But typically, my approach is...

I look at some of the, usually, okay. When you sign up, you probably have gotten 16,000 emails, right?

I got a lot of emails. We'd love to talk to you about this gadget that will never see the light of day unless you write about it. And you're like, I don't write about things. I'm a YouTuber. So no. Anyway, you should be like, I could add it to my pile of discontinued dead AI. I just sit around my desk if you would like me to do that. But so I usually will look and see if there's some interesting things. And then I look at some of the big stuff. Like, so for example, on Tuesday, I'm one of the first things I'm doing is going to Delta's having a keynote at the sphere. And I really just want to go to the sphere. So I'm going to the Delta keynote at the sphere and,

Uh, they're celebrating their hundredth birthday this year or whatever, which is weird to think that they were commercial airlines a hundred years ago. That doesn't seem possible, but it's true. In 1925. That's when Delta started. What? Wait a minute. Oh, I need to do a history lesson real quick. Where's, uh, Wright brothers launch. Wait a minute. That was 1903. You're telling me 22 years later, Delta had enough,

whatever it be a company uh yeah i mean yes i mean i'm not the one telling you that i just know that they're celebrating their 100th anniversary this year so yeah what okay wow yeah air travel continued to be far from comfortable yeah in the anyway delta airlines began in 1925 when huff deland dusters inc was founded in macon georgia as the world's first aerial crop dusting company there you go

That makes sense. So crop dusting first. Well, yeah. I mean, I imagine that if most of the airlines started as we not carrying a hundred people at a time or whatever. So anyway, so that's one thing. The first flight, sorry, the first flight took off in 1929. It was on, I'll tell you what, let me, I'll include this link in the show notes. Sorry. I'm not nerding out about Delta's first passenger flight was June 17th, 1929 board. The travel air SSR,

S6000B, single-engine plane with an enclosed cabin, capacity for one pilot and up to five passengers. It went from Dallas, Texas to... Oh, it had to stop at Shreveport in Monroe, Louisiana, scheduled stops, and then landed in Jackson, Mississippi. The 427-mile flight took five hours and included a half-hour stop for lunch in Monroe, Louisiana.

that's amazing that's amazing yeah sorry that's super fun okay so i am the other thing i'll typically do is i'll look at the schedule and find out if there's any other big keynotes i want to go to so like sony will have a big keynote and they'll talk more about their electric car whatever they're going to talk about like i'm just something i don't even know yeah the new playstation you can play the new playstation in the electric car it's like all this kind of stuff like

So, and Samsung will do the same thing. A lot of times these companies will let you schedule booth tours. They'll, they'll walk through. I don't ever do that. I want to walk through on my own. I don't want you to know who I am or that I'm there. I just want to quietly walk through. And then if there was something that I'm like, that's really interesting. I should learn more about it. Then maybe I will reach out and talk to someone about that. There's a lot of other interesting things that are often on the schedule. Like I saw, I've, I've,

the year that Apple sent their head of privacy was on a panel with meta's head of privacy. Yeah.

And a couple other people like that kind of thing happens at CES. So I'll, I'll, I'll pay attention to what's on those things. And a lot of that stuff that people will email and say, Hey, we're, this is happening. Put it on your calendar kind of thing. And so I'll do that. Um, they actually, tomorrow my plan is to go through the schedule and be like, what am I actually going to be doing for these couple of days and figure stuff out. So, yeah, but mostly I have, I arrive on Tuesday and I fly home Friday. So, okay. Okay.

Yeah. Well, I'm excited to be honestly just to meet a bunch of people for us to podcast live from the show floor and then to meet a bunch of people. I've told most companies just like, I'm not scheduling anything. Like, like you're saying booth walkthroughs or even press briefings. Cause I'm like,

let me just go to your booth and just see what's there. Like, I don't, yeah, I don't know. Do you have like, unless you know, so for this is my approach, I just want to like absorb a bunch of stuff. I think of it like a funnel. I just try to get a bunch of stuff in the top of the funnel. And unless it's like, I know I'll write about whatever Delta does. Cause it's their 20th, their hundredth anniversary birthday, whatever. That's the kind of thing I know. And it's a big deal. They're having it at the sphere. I'll Miami might write one or two articles out of that.

So I put things on my calendar and I'm like, oh, like I went, I've been to the Sony keynote a couple of times. I've written about their pretend electric car a couple of times. And that's that kind of stuff is I enjoy doing that. And so I'll pay attention to that. I think I was at, I was at the Samsung keynote when they introduced the first little Bali thing, you know, like a little robot thing. So I'll go to some of that stuff because it's good. But for you, if there's, I would just try to absorb as many things.

Yeah. Because your, your motivation is very different. Like, but you could like the YouTubers are like, here's five things I found that you just won't believe we're at CES or like that kind of stuff. There's lots of crazy stuff, but you're not going to get that by scheduling a bunch of briefings. You're going to get it by wandering around and being like, you seriously make this like, this is a real thing. So that's, that's, that's the goal. Okay. Well, I'm excited to do it. Drink lots of water.

Drink lots of water. Sure. I think it's going to be cold in Vegas too. I hope so because it makes it easier for me to pack. I put away all my summer stuff.

Right, right. Well, very cool. We'll be over there. All right, we're going to go talk about what's in our travel bag because I have a new travel bag I'm bringing. And literally my desk is covered in things. I did not plan this, but just as I've been trying to plan and finish up a couple of videos before going, it's like there's stuff everywhere. We're going to talk about a travel bag in our bonus episode, which if you want to listen to that, you can go to primarytech.fm, click bonus episodes, support the show, and

monthly or annually you save a little money that way you get all the bonus episodes in the back catalog and an ad free version of the show or you can support us directly in apple podcasts unfortunately they strip out my chapters for the actual main episode sorry this is what they do so but if you want to do it there you can and uh you listen you should listen to the show front to back anyways uh although the chapter artwork is is pretty fun i spend a lot of time doing it anyway uh

If you support the show, you can go listen to our bonus episode about our travel bags coming up. You can leave us a five-star rating and review an Apple podcast or Spotify, and you get a shout out on the next show. Welcome to 2025 with Primary Technology. Great to be here. We'll catch you next week live from the show floor.