A Glimpse of a Better World
Marco:
So I had the pleasure today of unboxing one of the new iMacs.
Marco:
Have either of you done this?
Marco:
I don't think so.
Casey:
Yeah, I haven't.
Casey:
Why are you in possession of a new iMac?
Marco:
It's not for me.
Marco:
I was helping someone else set it up, but I was unboxing it.
Marco:
And I got to say, it was a pleasure.
Marco:
It gave me such kind of old Apple fun vibes, even though in certain ways it's very modern, because it has all of Apple's paper-based packaging now.
Marco:
There's no plastic anywhere.
Casey:
Which I really do like, by the way.
Casey:
I think we've talked about that in the past.
Casey:
But generally speaking, Apple's packaging has gotten really, really, really good.
Casey:
And aren't they using like the bags from the Apple store?
Casey:
I think like even the handles, which feel like their rope are actually like recycled paper or something like that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
That was, that was one of the first paper things that they did ages ago.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Years and years ago.
Marco:
But yeah, like, so the iMac boxes, like it's in many ways, it has a lot of the similar elements as like the Mac pro and XDR boxes with like those big, like arrow panels that like kind of butterfly out when you open it up.
Marco:
Uh,
Marco:
But of course, obviously in the consumer line, but it's still like, it's pretty elaborate cardboard work to make like this pretty well cushioned thing with no plastic anywhere in sight.
Marco:
It's, it's pretty remarkable.
Marco:
But what's nice about it is this was a green iMac and you know how like, you know, the typical iMac box, you have like the outer cardboard, like the brown cardboard shipping box.
Marco:
And then inside of it, you have the nice white Apple box.
Marco:
Then you have a little handle on top.
Marco:
The handle, it's green, right?
Marco:
You open it up.
Marco:
Everything that can be tinted green is tinted green, like because this is the color of the iMac.
Marco:
So like, first of all, you open up the box and you see the the like screen overlay, like the big sticky thing that covers up the screen for protection.
Marco:
On the front of it, it says, hello, written in the Macintosh hello style, you know?
Marco:
So, like, the first thing you see, you open it up, the cardboard butterflies out, and you see it saying hello under, like, the translucent paper cover.
Marco:
It's delightful.
Marco:
And every single accent, it's the accent color of the computer, like...
Marco:
It was so well done.
Marco:
It very much reminded me of old Apple, back when we were all buying desktops.
Marco:
I mean, John still is, but no one else is.
Marco:
Honestly, it was delightful.
Marco:
And so I just wanted to kind of shout that out.
Marco:
In a world where most of us aren't even buying desktops anymore, it was really nice to see Apple putting a ton of little detail work into making the desktop unboxing experience in 2024 pretty delightful.
John:
I think the candy color iMacs predate both of your Mac use, but that was back when they were shipping with Mac OS 9.
John:
And they did the same thing where Mac OS 9 would ship and the accent color inside the interface, like basically the scroll thumb color and like the text selection color and everything would match the color of the computer you got.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the background to a desktop background, like the default desktop background.
John:
It's an iMac tradition.
Marco:
Apple, as we often discuss on the show, they really could use more use of color in their product line, please.
Marco:
But when they do it, they do a nice job.
Casey:
I know as we're recording this, it's the 28th of August, and that means it's not quite September.
Casey:
But you might be listening to this in September.
Casey:
And you know what, darn it, we're close enough to September.
Casey:
And what is September, gentlemen?
Casey:
It is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, which means it's time for the Marco Offset.
Casey:
What are we talking about?
Casey:
So, hey.
Casey:
If you live in a backwards country like we do, healthcare is a real problem.
Casey:
And if you live in any country, then childhood cancer is a real problem.
Casey:
And there is an establishment in St.
Casey:
Jude, or in St.
Casey:
Jude, in Memphis, Tennessee, excuse me, called St.
Casey:
Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Casey:
And they are a truly phenomenal organization that wants to end childhood cancer.
Casey:
They would like no child to die from childhood cancer ever.
Casey:
That's their goal.
Casey:
Their final form is to have them just go away because childhood cancer is cured.
Casey:
That is the goal.
Casey:
So why do you care?
Casey:
Why am I telling you about this?
Casey:
Because September, like I said, is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
Casey:
And our friends at RelayFM, which is also us, you know what we mean.
Casey:
They slash we are trying to raise as much money as possible for St.
Casey:
Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Casey:
Currently, as we record, the goal is $500,000.
Casey:
The campaign has been officially open for eight-ish hours, and we have already raised $30,000, which is truly incredible.
Casey:
That is so very cool, but we can do more.
Casey:
And I know that both the Relay and ATP listeners really, really do come out and support this wonderful organization.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
If you're interested, you can go to stjude.org slash ATP to kind of fast track your way straight into the donation.
Casey:
Or if you'd like more information, you can go to stjude.org slash Relay.
Casey:
And hey, here's the thing.
Casey:
Relay's been trying to get to $3 million lifetime.
Casey:
We've already crossed it.
Casey:
Honestly, I think we should shoot for four.
Casey:
Let's shoot for four this year.
Casey:
You never know.
Casey:
Could happen.
Casey:
Could happen.
Casey:
It's an audacious goal, but it could happen.
Casey:
So how do we get to $4 million, which is my goal, not relays?
Casey:
Then you got to donate.
Casey:
So stjude.org slash ATP.
Casey:
Let me just kind of talk about a couple of things real quick, and then I'd like to explain the Marco or have Marco explain the Marco offset.
Casey:
So here's the thing is that
Casey:
400,000 kids worldwide get cancer each year.
Casey:
400,000.
Casey:
That's a lot of kids.
Casey:
In many countries, four out of the five kids who develop cancer will not survive, mostly due to lack of access to quality care.
Casey:
So St.
Casey:
Jude and Relay and ATP, we all think that's no good.
Casey:
That is no good at all.
Casey:
So what are we trying to do?
Casey:
We're trying to raise money to help fix that problem.
Casey:
So
Casey:
St.
Casey:
Jude needs your help because St.
Casey:
Jude, they pay for everything.
Casey:
They pay for patient families to come and be with their sick child.
Casey:
They pay for everything.
Casey:
I actually went to Memphis in April for a big conference for fundraisers, and I cannot...
Casey:
eloquently describe what it's like to be there.
Casey:
It is unreal seeing a mass of people so wholly dedicated to just saving lives.
Casey:
It's phenomenal.
Casey:
And the way they can afford to do this is from people like you and me and donating at stjude.org.
Casey:
So in a couple of weeks, I will be going back to Memphis.
Casey:
I'll be going back to the St.
Casey:
Jude campus in order to participate for my very first time in a 12-hour telethon event, which we call the Podcast-a-thon, with our friends Mike Hurley, Stephen Hackett, Kathy Campbell, and Jason Snell.
Casey:
The five of us will be there for 12 straight hours, and you can watch me melt into a puddle during that time.
Casey:
It'll be great.
Casey:
It'll be fun for everyone.
Casey:
So again, please, if at all possible, go to stjude.org slash ATP.
Casey:
Here's the thing.
Casey:
And they've kind of asked me to read this, but I think it's accurate.
Casey:
So when we rally for a common cause, we become more than a community.
Casey:
We become beacons of hope for all.
Casey:
I mean, think about that.
Casey:
Think about if your kid was sick or you're...
Casey:
Your sibling was sick, and suddenly somebody swoops in and in so many words says, don't worry, I got this, because that's what St.
Casey:
Jude is basically doing.
Casey:
So that's why we're asking all of you to join Relay and St.
Casey:
Jude and ATP this September for Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
Casey:
Together, we can help cure childhood cancer.
Casey:
Now, okay, what if you don't care about childhood cancer, which you should?
Casey:
What if you just want to feel better about your rampant consumerism?
Casey:
Marco, how do we do that?
Marco:
So, here's what's about to happen.
Marco:
You and I both know that's not going to happen.
Marco:
Of course, we're going to buy these things.
Marco:
So here's how you assuage your guilt as a rampant consumer who is wastefully throwing away your money on phones and watches and Macs and things that you don't necessarily need.
Marco:
I mean, look, you could use your old one for a little while longer, right?
Marco:
But you won't.
Marco:
So we know you're going to buy new stuff.
Marco:
Here's what you do.
Marco:
Donate a chunk of money to St.
Marco:
Jude when you do this.
Marco:
Think about what Case is describing as the Marco Offset.
Marco:
This is a term we've come up with over the last couple of years for describing, here's my strategy for how to figure out what a good minimum donation to St.
Marco:
Jude is.
Marco:
When you buy your new Apple product this fall or Apple products this fall, think about amounts of money that are kind of added on during the process that you kind of just accept or tack on without thinking too critically about them.
Marco:
Things like
Marco:
sales tax, or cost of accessories, cost of storage upgrades, cost of AppleCare, these kind of additional costs that are above and beyond the base price of the most basic model of thing that you could get.
Marco:
So if the iPhone starts at $1,000 of the line that you want, and you, say, spend another $100 to double the storage, and then you spend another $60 on the case, you're at $160.
Marco:
Maybe you spend another $60 on tax, you're at $220.
Marco:
I think.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So you're at $220,000 with those kind of add-ons over the base.
Marco:
That is your minimum donation to St.
Marco:
Jude.
Marco:
So here's what you do.
Marco:
Whenever you buy these products in the next coming weeks and months, well, hopefully coming weeks because then it'll be during the drive.
Marco:
But when you place your order for your new iPhone on Apple Watch in a couple of weeks maybe, figure out that baseline minimum of the add-on price that is like, what are you getting that's a little bit extra?
Marco:
That's your minimum.
Marco:
So, in my example, my minimum was 220, I think, if I remember correctly.
Marco:
I've already forgotten.
Marco:
I'm talking a lot.
Marco:
So, 220 is your minimum.
Marco:
Then that's your minimum donation to St.
Marco:
Jude.
Marco:
So, if you've done that configuration there, consider...
Marco:
a 220 donation to st jude now if you are fortunate enough you can give more that's great we encourage that but that's kind of a good baseline of like here's here's an amount of money that while making my frivolous technology purpose that i purchased that i probably could have gone another year or two without making um when i'm making this frivolous technology purchase i'm throwing away another 200 and just add-ons and fees and taxes if that if i can spend it that easily um
Marco:
I can give at least that much to this amazing charity doing amazing work for the world.
Marco:
So that's the Marco Offset.
Marco:
I encourage you to give generously.
Casey:
So several years ago now when ATP started really embracing this, I kind of jokingly but also seriously offered, hey, if you have the top donation in the donation list,
Casey:
If you reach out to me, forward me a copy of the receipt and give me a mailing address, as long as the United States Postal Service can mail something to your address, I will send you some not-for-sale ATP stickers.
Casey:
In the course of the last eight hours, I have two batches of ATP stickers to send out because one person, and I don't recall if they want to be anonymous or not, so forgive me for not naming them, but one person donated $8,000 and then the other person said, in so many words, hold my beer and donated $10,000.
Casey:
That's $18,000 of the $30,000 raised between two ATP listeners, which is incredible.
Casey:
So you don't have to donate $8,000 or $10,000.
Casey:
But if you donate at least $10,000 and one cent, as I sit here right now, then you too can earn some hilariously overpriced ATP stickers.
Casey:
So reach out to me, forward me your receipt, and give me a mailing address, and I will dispatch them as soon as possible.
John:
The competition for the world's most expensive stickers.
John:
And I know we just talked about you're buying a new tech device.
John:
You're going to pay a minimum amount that you paid for the accessories and these people competing to get the top donation.
John:
So that keeps rising or whatever.
John:
That's great for the people who are hearing that and say, I think I could swing that.
John:
That's great.
John:
If you're listening to that and you're like, that's ridiculous.
John:
I barely have enough money to get by.
John:
a five dollar donation is fine yep don't stop yourself by saying oh this pledge drive is just for people who can donate hundreds of dollars who buy new iphones every year give a single dollar like i swear like they will anything you do helps right like they they're not going to turn you away because you can only give them three dollars give the three dollars like that's what that's what these donations are made it's the relay listeners adding up all this money or whatever they're not all giving ten thousand dollars i swear to you people are giving five bucks ten bucks twenty bucks that's what makes this pledge drive
John:
So please, stjude.org slash ATP.
Marco:
there you go all right so let's do some follow-up i hear that things may be different in overcast land what's going on there so i re-added streaming as discussed last episode that update is out um i've been uh in kind of a bad place mentally over the reaction to the update in part because as i described um in a few uh a few episodes ago i said basically like that i
Marco:
I described my star ratings being lower as a small fire on a big building that nevertheless I needed to put out.
Marco:
And so I'm happy to say that since the streaming update, there has been a sharp rise in the average score of new ratings.
Marco:
So I think that has made a substantial difference.
Marco:
So thank you, everybody, who has updated your ratings since then or added new ones.
Marco:
Thank you for that.
Marco:
I'm also happy to announce now that what I've been working on for the last week or so is I'm bringing back a swiping UI to the now playing screen.
Casey:
Oh, hooray.
Casey:
That makes me very happy because I have mostly adjusted to the current one, but still my natural reaction after so many years is to swipe laterally.
Casey:
So that makes me very happy.
Marco:
Yeah, and it was very hard to do because in SwiftUI, there was not a good way to detect pixel-perfect scroll positions of a scroll view until iOS 18, which added like a scroll geometry thing that you can finally actually read it.
Marco:
And I've been experimenting with this for a while trying to get because the reason I need scroll positions is when in the current UI, when you switch over to like from the artwork view to the info view, I animate down the height of the of the main playback controls to make more room for it to give the info view as much room as it can get.
Marco:
And in order to do that, I have to know, like, well, if you're dragging across and you, like, don't drag all the way, well, how do I know where you are in that animation to know, like, how far to bring that bar down?
Marco:
So I tried all these different hacks, including, like...
Marco:
wrapping a ui kit ui scroll view uh in swift ui and then of course inside that scroll view the content that i'm putting in it is itself swift ui again so it kind of like you know go back and forth through ui kit and let me tell you that creates so many shortcomings and problems like and i tried i tried making that work for like two weeks and i couldn't get it to work uh well enough and have no like massive show stopping problems
Marco:
So anyway, I finally figured out a way to do it where the animation works okay on iOS 17.
Marco:
It works a lot better on iOS 18.
Marco:
So I'm working on that now.
Marco:
That should be out fairly soon, at least into beta.
Marco:
And I'm looking forward to sharing that with everybody.
Marco:
Because honestly, it does make the app better.
Marco:
It does make it easier.
Marco:
You can swipe the whole screen again, just like the old version.
Marco:
It is a much better design.
Marco:
It was just very difficult to achieve in the constraints that I had using SwiftUI until fairly recently.
Casey:
So, I'm sorry, is the swipey stuff, is that requiring iOS 18 then?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
The way it's going to work, the way I have it right now, which is probably how it's going to ship, is the swiping works no matter what.
Marco:
But on iOS 18, as you drag across and as the controls shrink downward to make as much room as possible for the info...
Marco:
On iOS 18, that will be pixel perfect.
Marco:
On iOS 17, it will stay at the top height until you are halfway through.
Marco:
At the halfway point, it will then animate itself down all the way.
Marco:
And so there's kind of like this threshold where like at the halfway point, it will cross that threshold and do the whole animation at once as opposed to, you know, doing it pixel perfect as it tracks your finger.
Marco:
It looks okay at high speed.
Marco:
If you do it at slow speed, you'll catch the transition.
Marco:
But, you know, small price to pay for a much more usable interface.
Marco:
And, you know, the way my users are, like by December, I'm going to probably have like 70% iOS 18 usage anyway.
Marco:
So it doesn't really matter.
John:
I know this is one of your pet obsessions, making all the animations beautiful and everything, but honestly, I think from a user's perspective, the thing that counts so much more than the pixel precision of the transition where it scrutinized is the responsiveness of when I put my thumb on it and I move, does the thing move immediately and in tracking with my thumb?
John:
And I think users will, I'm not going to say the forgiving of, they will not even notice almost anything else at normal swipe speeds as long as it is responsive.
John:
So I would sacrifice the
John:
attractiveness of the transition, even on iOS 18, if it took away from the responsiveness at all.
John:
Right.
John:
And, you know, again, like users aren't running your animations at one 100th speed so they can scrutinize every pixel or whatever.
John:
They just want to put their thumb on the screen, move it to the side and see the info real quick.
Marco:
Believe me, some of my users are that picky.
Marco:
But yeah, overall... And yeah, it is very fluid and responsive on both OSs because, again, it's all SwiftUI.
Marco:
It's all very efficient with the way it's drawing the UI and updating things and everything.
Marco:
I've got to say, I've gotten pretty good at SwiftUI.
Marco:
Doing the whole app this way, I have finally built up decent SwiftUI skills.
Marco:
So if something is possible to do in SwiftUI, I can probably figure out how to do it.
Marco:
It just takes a little bit of time.
Marco:
And my usual pattern of doing it is...
Marco:
I will start trying to solve a problem.
Marco:
I will build up this ridiculous amount of complexity as I try different things and figure out different what works, what doesn't try different approaches.
Marco:
Then I'll like will it all back down to like the distilled essence of here's the one thing that I that really worked well.
Marco:
Like it's a whole it's a whole process.
Marco:
But I'm very happy to be able to do this so quickly.
Marco:
Like this is part of the reason why the rewrite has been just so massively productive is that now that it's done is I can do pretty substantial changes like this.
Marco:
in now days and a week or two instead of months that it would take before.
Marco:
It's so much faster to iterate.
Marco:
It's so much faster to change and design, to restructure, redesign screens and controls and everything.
Marco:
It's so much easier.
Marco:
So I'm very thankful for that.
Casey:
That's awesome.
Casey:
Well, I'm very, very glad to hear that things are looking up and looking better.
Casey:
They are literally looking up because that's the way the graph is moving.
Casey:
So that's very good news.
Casey:
We had some feedback with regard to the Mac screen sharing like badge.
Casey:
And we were talking about, oh, could we do something visually or something like the Siri animation in iOS 18?
Casey:
What can we do to make it more obvious without having to nag the user?
Casey:
Is this okay?
Casey:
Is this okay?
Casey:
Is this okay?
Casey:
So Josh Hattersley writes, even the existing colorful icon indicating screen capture approach has its downsides.
Casey:
Some friends and I occasionally stream movies for group watch events in Discord.
Casey:
And while I normally do so from a Windows machine, I tried recently for my Mac.
Casey:
I was extremely annoyed to find that the colorful badge Apple slaps on captured Windows also appears in the streamed video, even in an app like, however you pronounce, I-I-N-A.
Casey:
We went through this years ago, I don't remember.
Casey:
which hides the title bar.
Casey:
Frustrating, and it feels like there should be a method to dismiss it.
John:
That's what I was saying last week that Apple really needs to do, although it may be tricky if an app like Ina is not using the...
John:
the right API so basically like that the purpose of that badge that badge is for the person who is doing the stream so they know that a streaming app is recording their screen but the output of that streaming app like when it says okay I'm projecting my screen to all my friends so they can see it the friends don't need to see the screen recording badge it's not for them
John:
I think Apple should like this is what I was saying.
John:
If they ever did like a Siri type border, that part should be omitted from screen recording itself and from any output of that or whatever, because its purpose is to inform the person who initiated the screen recording or who is on the computer that is running the app that is recording the screen.
John:
That's just for them.
John:
It doesn't need to be in the output or the recording or the outgoing stream.
John:
And I hope that's something that either if Apple already does that, I hope apps that use those APIs learn how to get just the part they want and not the badge.
John:
And if Apple isn't already doing that suggestion, maybe I'll file it as a feedback.
John:
I mean, not really familiar with the APIs because I don't have any screen recording apps, but I just assume that's a logical thing to do.
John:
And it amazes me that like the badge is going out in the streams and stuff.
John:
yeah that's something else oh yeah one more one more thing that i didn't put in there about screen recording someone i forgot who it was it didn't make any of the notes but someone showed a uh a picture probably or maybe it was a screenshot of apple tv projecting something apparently you can do screen recording in apple tv uh somehow either is it like a diagnostic thing to do screen recordings for like feedbacks or maybe there are apps that do it but either way there was a giant solid red border around the entire television and that is the indicator apparently in apple tv to let you know that the screen is being recorded
John:
Not quite as elegant as the Apple intelligence wavy thing or whatever, but gets the job done.
Casey:
That's special.
Casey:
John, you had some good news in your own world.
Casey:
You have finally gotten to the front of the line.
John:
Yeah, the Apple intelligence wait list.
John:
Quinn Nelson suggested that I log out of my Apple ID and back in, but it turns out I didn't have to do that.
John:
I just updated whatever the latest beta of 15.1 is because I'm on the 15.1 train.
John:
And I went into Apple Intelligence and I was like, yay, you're in.
John:
It's Apple Intelligence and Siri, a personal intelligence system integrated deeply into your Mac apps and Siri.
John:
Learn more, dot, dot, dot.
John:
Right underneath that is a little box that says, Apple Intelligence is not available when starting your Mac from an external volume.
John:
whoops cool so i am through the wait list and i have learned that i think i mentioned this on a past show but there it is right in my face i cannot use any apple intelligence features in the beta because i am indeed booting from an external disk i don't know what that limitation is about but it is what it is and i'm not putting 15.1 beta on the internal ssd of my wife's computer i don't blame you
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
With regard to making photos memories using Apple intelligence, Simon writes in to say, I cannot get Apple's AI to create a photos memory of the times my kids have gotten dirty.
Casey:
So Simon includes some screenshots, and the prompt that he typed or said was, my kids are covered in dirt, to which Apple says, try another description to create a memory, add details to your description, or choose a new person, place, or event from your library.
So
Casey:
So Simon tried again.
Casey:
My kid's getting dirty while they play.
Casey:
To which Apple said, unable to use that description.
Casey:
And then my kid's getting dirty while they eat and play.
Casey:
Unable to use that description.
Casey:
Okay, fine.
Casey:
My kid's playing in sand.
Casey:
Try another description.
Casey:
Create a memory, add details, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
So apparently they are...
Casey:
Really trying not to do anything naughty or inappropriate, which for the most part I applaud, but they might have swung a little too far in one direction.
John:
That was the prompt that we read on last week's episode, like nothing filthy.
John:
So my suggestion was, yeah, what about your kids like getting dirty or like getting food on their face or whatever?
John:
It's so hard to tell with these different responses, kind of like when HomePod tells you different things or whatever.
John:
Which one of these responses is because Apple intelligence is baited in and just couldn't figure out how to do these?
John:
And which one of these is because of the prompt preamble or whatever you call it that said nothing filthy, right?
John:
You can't tell, am I being denied because of that nothing filthy thing?
John:
Or am I being denied because it just wouldn't work either way?
John:
I guess we'll all find out when we get this and start using it and start trying to make memories of ourself.
John:
If we get thwarted on things that we didn't hear mentioned in the little preamble, then we know it's just Apple intelligence being weird.
John:
But it's not an easy problem.
John:
Like the nuances of, you know, my kid getting dirty while they eat, right?
John:
And the prompt saying nothing filthy.
John:
I can see where there might be some confusion there.
John:
But I'm glad someone's out there trying it.
Casey:
And speaking of trying it... Yeah, so Evan Zhao put up a YouTube video where they figured out how to do prompt injection against Apple Intelligence.
Casey:
It's pretty wild.
Casey:
It's only like a 10-minute video, so it's worth watching.
Casey:
But it is pretty cool what they ended up doing.
Casey:
And it involves a lot of disassembly, not in the computer code way necessarily, but like, how do I get it?
Casey:
What they're using?
Casey:
Where is that data stored?
Casey:
How can I...
John:
Yeah.
John:
Uh, so the thing you're typing to an LLM, you want that to be processed, right?
John:
All the other stuff where you're saying, this is not what the person is typing, but this is what we're trying to tell you on the side LLM, like instructions to the LLM.
John:
You really want those things to be separate.
John:
But the way most of these systems work is it's all just being one big wad that you throw in the top and...
John:
probably most of that wad gets to the actual lm under the covers right so if you watch this prompt injection thing he's just looking through like the config files and figuring out what do i have to put inside the text that gets fed to the top of this big system such that it will interpret that as an instruction and then do like oh well you set it off with double curly braces or you put it in angle brackets or whatever that's an example of trying to put stuff in line it's in the same place as your message it's kind of like back in the day when
John:
you would on Twitter where you would try to like quote tweet something it would just be a bunch of text and inside that text would be the URL of the tweet that you're trying to quote tweet but later when Twitter officially supported that I don't actually know the Twitter API but I'm assuming what they did was said okay now when you quote tweet something you get to say what you want to say in your tweet
John:
and then you tell us the url the thing you're quote tweeting but that's not part of your text it's totally separate like in the api request you say here's my text and here's a whole other field which is and by the way this is the thing i'm quote tweeting so you don't have to worry about reading the text and trying to find a url and once you find a url figure out if it's a twitter url and if it's a twitter url figure out if it's a tweet you don't have to do any weird parsing or whatever and if
John:
these systems use something like that they wouldn't be as vulnerable to just typing a double curly brace and then putting a bunch of special instructions and typing two closing curly braces and then going back to what you were saying because you get to type that in a text box and you can watch it like he's just typing like text edit and he's selecting it and firing up the writing tools and saying go and they do
John:
totally different things like they don't do like whatever feature he suggested it's because the text that he selected oh we did a double curly brace inside the text and now we've escaped out of the text world and now we're into this world and parsing those things out and making it so people can't inject that in there is a much harder problem than you think it is
John:
But that's how these systems work.
John:
And they don't have to.
John:
They don't have to work this way.
John:
Like Apple could have made it so that when you select a bunch of text and you right click it and do the writing tools thing with Apple intelligence, it could take that text, put it into one separate bucket and then take another bucket and say, here are the instructions to our system and send them as two separate blobs.
John:
So like it would never parse an instruction out of the text that was selected.
John:
but that's not how it currently works at least in the beta he was using the instructions that are in the text get interpreted by the system and make it do all sorts of things and those those instructions are just plain text strings whether they're double curly braces or angle brackets or whatever you can find what they are in a bunch of config files and even if they can encrypt those config piles or try to hide it or whatever like people can figure it out so that is a weakness of uh of trying to put metadata in line see also file name extensions
Casey:
You will never stop banging this drum.
John:
I will never let it go.
John:
Put it on my gravestone to the day I die.
Casey:
Maybe because I grew up with extensions, it just does not bother me the way it does you.
Casey:
Because I like that in the file name, it's clear what this file is.
John:
You can have that without literally putting it in the file name.
Casey:
So how did you have that in Mac OS, in classic Mac OS?
Casey:
How did you know what kind of file it was?
John:
There was type information.
John:
It was metadata separate from the file name.
John:
No, no, but that's what I'm saying.
John:
The system would never try to parse anything out of the file name.
John:
Never.
Casey:
No, no.
Casey:
This is you and me having two different conversations, which I think the two of us do a little too often.
John:
There was separate information.
John:
Just like there's separate information, like where's the creation data in the file?
John:
Is that in the file name?
John:
No.
John:
It's somewhere else.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
You're missing my point, probably because I'm not presenting it well.
Casey:
What I'm saying is I'm looking at a finder window or whatever the hell of the equivalent was in classic Mac OS.
Marco:
It was called Explorer back then.
Casey:
Yeah, it's called Windows Explorer.
Casey:
I have 10 different files in this folder or directory or whatever.
Casey:
And three of them are pieces of text, two of them are images, and the rest are a smattering of other styles of file.
Casey:
How do I know as a user what's text and what's an image?
John:
You asked this question as if that's not a thing that can happen today on your Mac.
John:
Do you have show all file names extension at all times turned on?
Casey:
No, I don't.
John:
So if you have a bunch of files in the Finder and the file name extensions are not visible, how can you tell what kind of files they are?
Casey:
I guess that's fair.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Touche.
Casey:
Touche.
Casey:
I mean, I think I do typically see the file names.
Casey:
Where is that?
Casey:
I know what the setting you're thinking of.
John:
Some people turn that on, which I guess I could understand you forgetting that that's not the default.
John:
No, I don't have it on.
John:
But it's not the default to turn it on.
John:
And if you don't turn it on, most of the time the system tries to hide them by simply literally hiding that part of the file name.
John:
It's still in the file name, but it's hiding it.
John:
And then your question is exactly the same.
John:
Casey, well, how do you tell?
John:
No, that's fair.
John:
You look at the icon.
John:
If you're in list view, you look at the kind column, right?
John:
That's how we did it.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
I mean, either way, I just really don't see why this is so offensive to you, but it's fair.
Casey:
I'm not saying you're wrong.
Casey:
I'm not saying you're wrong.
John:
It's the principle.
Casey:
I guess.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I bet if I grew up the way you did, I would probably also be deeply offended by it.
John:
I had a glimpse of a better world, and it was taken away from me.
John:
But I'm still glad to still I'd much rather still have Max even with the sport.
John:
At least we didn't get drive letters.
John:
Am I right?
Casey:
That is actually drive letters are a true abomination.
Casey:
I am right there with you on that one.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Moving right along.
Casey:
How do you add grammar constraints to an LLM, John?
Casey:
So like if I want to get a valid JSON out the other side, how do I do that?
John:
So that was a question, again, when we were looking at the prompts that people pulled out of macOS or wherever they were.
John:
The prompt said, please produce only valid JSON.
John:
And I discussed how just mind bending it is that you have to put that, again, in line with the text that's being fed in.
John:
You have to put these instructions in plain English in line and then cross your fingers and hope to get it done because there's nothing particularly special about saying please provide valid JSON or only output valid JSON or please produce JSON that's valid or please please send your output in the format of JSON.
John:
Like you can say it a million different ways.
John:
It's just text.
John:
This is not offset by double curly braces.
John:
This is not a special instruction to the engine.
John:
It's literally just the plain text sent exactly the same as your text, right?
John:
And that doesn't seem particularly reliable or great.
John:
But Stephen Tierney was the first to write in to give some examples of how LLMs are augmented to try to make this slightly less ridiculous.
John:
So he writes, you can constrain the output format of an LLM by specifying a formal grammar.
John:
And he linked to an example from the Llama open source LLM.
John:
I'll put a link in the show notes to the readme and GitHub.
John:
It's basically just like a BNF type grammar where you say, this is what JSON looks like.
John:
And it's a grammar that defines...
John:
the valid structure of json uh there i'll put another link to a recent paper on the topic called llm generation with grammar augmentation from one of the authors of the paper they write all of the compared approaches use constrained decoding to filter syntactically invalid tokens tokens during generation they remove the set of bad tokens when the llm is choosing the next token so basically the llm goes through this process and for every token which is basically like a letter or part of a word or whatever it has a list of possible candidates and like
John:
probability and then there's this other system where you pick one of them you don't always pick the highest probability but you pick one of the ones that's near the top right and what it does it says okay lm during this normal process produce all the possible tokens the candidates that we might pick uh but before we do the picking process we decide which one we want again it's probably going to be one of the top ones although it's not always the toppiest top one that's part of what the temperature setting does right um before we pick that one uh
John:
delete any token that would make the output invalid json because it knows like it based on the grammar like okay we just did like the end of a double quoted string right the next colon the next token has to be like a colon or a curly brace like you know in the grammar what is even valid for the next token is any letter valid does it have to be like is any letter or double quote or calling it knows and so it just goes through it's the candidate list it just deletes everything that wouldn't be valid and
John:
And you hope there's something left, right?
John:
You hope that when you delete everything that would be valid, hopefully something's left.
John:
And it usually is because the candidate list is very, very long, right?
John:
And that's one way where you can constrain the grammar.
John:
Now, there's a possibility that you might have to backtrack where you end up at a terminal condition where you can't produce any more tokens because you deleted all of them or whatever.
John:
And there were some earlier versions of this that did slow down inference a lot.
John:
But a lot of them used a similar approach.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes to a Reddit discussion where someone tried to explain the pipeline of the text goes into a tokenizer that goes into the model.
John:
They would get the list of candidates, then a sampler takes it, then you get the winner, and then you keep doing that.
John:
And then the grammar filter just goes in between the candidates and the sampler.
John:
And OpenAI has a similar type of feature where you tell it what kind of output you want.
John:
Again, this is different than asking for plain JSON.
John:
But even given all of that, like I said, if you want to make sure that your candidate list contains something that will be valid JSON...
John:
You should also still ask for it because that makes it much more likely that near the top of the candidate list or at least somewhere in the candidate list will be tokens that would make it valid JSON.
John:
So you still have to say please and thank you.
John:
Like, please produce valid JSON.
John:
But by the way, even if you, you know, when we pick your tokens, I'm going to delete all the choices that aren't valid JSON and only pick from the ones that are left.
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
I mean, it makes sense.
Casey:
It's something though.
Casey:
And we also had Nate write in and point out that the notification history that I think John was asking for is basically the one that exists in Android right now.
John:
it's better in android could be better still but hey they have a notification history and it shows you your notifications to show here's all your notifications in the last 24 hours grouped by application and it gives you little summaries of it you could have even more information because again what i was looking for was like show me all the notifications that that have gone by when did they appear uh and what action did i take on them if any right and at what time did i take the action like stuff that the system surely knows at the time you do it but just like record it and keep a rolling 24-hour window it's not probably not that much data
John:
because it happens to me all the time a notification notification comes and go whether maybe i actually did something with it maybe i swiped it away and actually i want to see it again and i would just like to say you know i would like it to be just like a big linear list where i'm at certain point in the list but at any point i can say show me things that have gone by in the list already and i can scroll backwards or forwards that's just not how notifications work on ios or the mac for that matter and i wish they did
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Casey:
We're not going to talk too much about it right now.
Casey:
We'll do more of that next week.
Casey:
But we wanted to note that Apple has announced their September event.
Casey:
It will be the 9th of September, which is a Monday.
Casey:
It'll be Monday, September 9th.
Casey:
at one o'clock, one true time zone.
Casey:
We will be watching along with everyone else, and I'm excited for it.
Casey:
I think it's going to be really fun, and we're going to talk about what we expect later.
Casey:
But any thoughts about that, gentlemen?
John:
We're going to talk about the little invitation, which...
John:
i gotta admit a little odd this year uh so people haven't seen the artwork we'll describe it it's like an apple logo with what i guess is supposed to be kind of like the new siri kind of glowy effect around it but it doesn't really look it doesn't look like the old siri and it doesn't quite look like the effect that goes around your screen when you activate apple intelligence and the new uh ios and ios 18 but i think that's what they're going for and then the slogan in white text with a similar kind of multicolored glow behind it is it's glow time and
John:
Apple intelligence isn't even launching with these phones and now I know there's going to be features that are like whenever you activate Siri it's going to glow so I guess yes it is glow time because now you're going to be activating Siri and it's going to glow around your screen so technically it's glow time but do you really want to highlight
John:
The feature that everyone is going to associate with Apple Intelligence, even though you know Apple Intelligence isn't shipping with these phones, it's kind of weird.
John:
I guess this is the invitation, so who cares?
John:
But we have a very strong tradition in this community of overanalyzing these, so I feel like I need to do my part.
LAUGHTER
Casey:
I feel like I ask this question every year and I never recall what the answer is because, hey, it's me.
Casey:
Has there ever really been a strong correlation between this and like a actual new announcement?
Casey:
You know, this clearly is reminiscent of Siri, but Siri's been around for a while.
Casey:
Have we ever seen like the Dynamic Island as an example?
Casey:
Like that wasn't teased in any way, shape or form in an event poster, was it?
Casey:
Like, have we really ever gotten one of those in the last 10 years?
John:
You have asked this multiple times, although I think the question is shifting slightly over the years.
John:
But you used to ask, has any one of the invitations ever hinted at anything that was actually in the presentation?
John:
And the answer is yes, it totally has.
John:
Now you're asking, has it hinted at something that we didn't know about at all?
John:
I think maybe the closest we can come there is one of the ones that was like the invitations basically let us know that there was going to be Mac stuff.
John:
And at that point, we were so disillusioned that nobody thought any Mac stuff would be announced because the Mac was really down in the dumps.
John:
But when we saw the invitation, like that's got to be Mac stuff.
John:
And it was it was Mac stuff.
John:
that's fair i forget what the particular invitation was or which one it was but yeah these things often do have hints about what they're going to show sometimes it's boring like this year they're like yeah the glowy effect we've all seen it in the betas and that's what they're going for but it's glow time it's so weird uh and i i don't i do think that a lot of times the invitation has a thing and a theme or whatever that is not they don't you won't see the presentation and say that was the glow time presentation because they're not going to say it's glow time in the presentation they're probably not even going to show this graphic or whatever but they will of course show
John:
their new os and their new phones and all the other stuff so anyway it's you know i i don't think this is revealing anything like i can't even think of anything that hasn't been rumored that could possibly be hinted at by this uh invitation but you know it could happen
Casey:
hey so hell might be freezing over there are rumors this was posted on bloomberg that apple is going to increase the ram in their base max or backbook pros like what what huh what we're not gonna be stuck with oh i just got an error network changed uh we're not gonna be stuck with eight gigs forever and forever
Marco:
Is this the first time during the history of our show existing that this is going to maybe happen?
Marco:
Right.
John:
I was going to say, how long has 8 gigs been around?
John:
And what we're talking about is the base model Mac.
John:
So whatever the cheapest Mac is, for years and years, the cheapest Mac laptop would come with 4 gigs of RAM.
John:
And then one glorious day, Apple said, you know what?
John:
The cheapest Mac, even whatever, the lowest end Mac we have, now it's going to come with 8.
John:
And I think that day may have been before the beginning of the show 11 years ago.
John:
We looked it up.
Marco:
Remember, somebody looked it up and pointed it out to us, and there was, I believe, if you went to, like, you know, if you settle in, like, new models, there was, like, I think the MacBook Air was the last one to have a little configuration of that at some point, but, like,
Marco:
If you look to just whatever was for sale, I think the MD101, the last one that had the CDU drive, that one stuck around for a very long time in the sales channel.
Marco:
I think that one started up at four also, and that might have been the last one that was actually for sale.
John:
Yeah, and despite this, let's say, conservative approach Apple has taken to RAM,
John:
RAM prices do fluctuate over time.
John:
You can look at the graph.
John:
It's not smooth.
John:
But in general, RAM becomes cheaper for the same amount of memory over time.
John:
And despite the fact that Apple has always done it this way, there's nothing particular about RAM that absolutely dictates that you must go from four to eight.
John:
You could go from four to six or four to five.
John:
Now, probably it's going to be powers of two.
John:
And there you can't get out.
John:
You can't everything you want.
John:
It can't go from four to four point seven five because they probably don't sell things in those units or whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
But you you don't always have to double it.
John:
And as the amount of RAM gets larger and larger.
John:
doubling becomes much more significant you're you know you're adding one gig of ram then you're adding four gigs of ram then you're adding eight gigs of ram like because you will you know from one to two and two to four and four like it just you don't necessarily have to double it again ram is usually sold in powers of two and it usually makes sense to do the doubling or whatever but what it means if apple is going to really hold the line on ram for a
John:
it's not a smooth ramp it's like just eight eight eight eight eight for just years and years and years and you're like oh it's okay you know when it went from four to eight it's like wow everyone gets eight that's gonna be great and then you're like eight is okay and then you're like well you know you probably shouldn't buy one with eight and you're like oh really don't get the base model that has it you really need to get 16 like eight outstays its welcome and it's like you know you could have gone to 12 at some point in there but instead it's just going to be eight forever and this rumor is we're going to go from eight to 16 which
John:
I'm all for, I'd rather go from eight to 16, right?
John:
But I'd rather not always have to wait for the doubling because it's going to become untenable.
John:
Like what about when you're just going from 64 to 128?
John:
That's a missing 64 gigs of RAM that you have to live with until finally it becomes completely ridiculous that they're only shipping with 64 gigs of RAM.
John:
And then finally you get 128, right?
John:
How about a 96?
John:
How about throw a 96 in there somewhere?
John:
You know, like it should be smooth.
John:
And this is all the more frustrating because
John:
of that weird it's not even a rumor it was a teardown that i think basically confirmed this like they opened up an m4 ipad and look at the m4 soc and it had 12 gigs of ram on it because the the ram is on the soc it's like right right next to the actual little chip it's like on the package with the soc right and
John:
It had 12 gigs of RAM in it.
John:
Only eight was exposed to the iPad, but the chips were a six and a six.
John:
Now people are like, oh, maybe those are RAM chips that only, you know, four of the six gigs work on those RAM chips.
John:
And other people said that's not how RAM usually works.
John:
Are they just disabling that RAM or whatever?
John:
I was like, hey, that made me hopeful that the next low end Mac would start at 12 instead of eight because we had seen M4 SoCs that Apple shipped that have 12 on them.
John:
again i'm way happier with 16 but it shows that 12 was possible is possible apple did ship 12 on machines granted it didn't expose all or whatever uh and they could have done that on the m3 or on the m2 or whatever but they didn't so uh this may be the year for when the m4 max the plain old m4 max not the m4 pro not the m4 max those will have tons of ram you know whatever just a plain old m4 max that's probably going to ship in the macbook air obviously the imac
John:
um what am i missing the mac mini right plain old m4 starting at 16 gigs of ram long overdue and it will make the m4 line a great time to buy in you won't have to to scare people away from the basest of base models except for the fact that i'll probably have 256 ssd which is insane and they should double that too but anyway setting that aside you won't have to tell everybody oh you're gonna get a macbook air are you getting an ivac
John:
you just make sure you double the ram to 16 and you'll be fine and of course they charge you like 200 for that extra ram which is disconnected from all reality and then suddenly the base price doesn't look that good so it seems like when the m4 max come out you can buy the base model and it won't be terrible
Casey:
So we are getting real-time follow-up from the chat from David Schaub.
Casey:
And the desktop Macs, if I'm reading this graph right, which I think I am, desktop Macs went to 8 gigs of RAM in 2012.
Casey:
When did we start the show?
Casey:
It was 2013, right?
Casey:
So that was before the show started.
Casey:
Laptops, however, went in 2017.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
what so in in you know early 2017 you could buy a laptop with four gigs of ram like the base model macbook air probably oh my god i mean that's what it's like towards the end right before a ram transition you like you look back and you're like really they were selling max with that little base ramp because we just all get into this mindset we tech nerds of like of course you'd never get the base amount of ram that would be ridiculous right but that's just because apple holds the base amount of ram for so long that we just get trained to like
John:
you don't, this is a great machine.
John:
You don't have to do anything to it except pay 200 extra bucks for more RAM.
John:
But everything else about it is great.
John:
You're like, wait, why doesn't it, like, why can't I just get the cheapest one?
John:
I'm like, well, that doesn't come with enough RAM.
John:
It's like, well, why would they sell it?
John:
This is what happens if you talk with a non-tech person.
John:
They would say, well, why would they sell it if it doesn't have enough RAM?
John:
I was like, well, it has enough, but if you want the machine to last longer and it will be a little bit better.
John:
And like, you have to go through, it used to be worse with spinning disks, obviously.
John:
SSD makes this better, but it's still not an excuse.
John:
Like, it just, it lets you get away with less RAM for longer.
John:
But there is a time limit.
John:
You can't hold it at eight gigs for 50 years.
John:
You have to increase the amount of RAM.
John:
And it looks like 2024 slash 2025, we're going to go from eight to 16 and we will enjoy a blessed two, three, four, maybe even five years where we're all happy with the base RAM on Macs.
Casey:
I'm excited.
Casey:
This is reading from MacRumors.
Casey:
Next year's iPhone 17 models will come with 12 gigs of RAM, up from the 8 gigs of RAM expected across Apple's upcoming iPhone 16 models, according to the Weibo user PhoneChipExpert.
Casey:
The iPhone 15 and 15 Plus feature 6 gigs of RAM, while the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max come with 8 gigs of RAM.
Casey:
The difference is said to be the reason why Apple Intelligence is only currently supported on the iPhone 15 Pro models.
Casey:
Since it's a requirement for Apple Intelligence, all four of Apple's upcoming iPhone 16 models are expected to feature 8 gigs of RAM, as is the rumored iPhone SE 4.
John:
So this is the Apple Intelligence RAM dividend.
John:
On the phones, obviously, it's forcing all the phones up to 8 gigs, because we know, based on what Apple has shipped already, that the 6 gig ones can't do it.
John:
Now, obviously, Macs were already shipping with 8 gigs, but there's more stuff going on and contending for RAM on the average Mac than there is on the average phone, given the different environments.
John:
or there can be anyway because there are fewer constraints on what people can run simultaneously, yada, yada.
John:
Why?
John:
Why is this the year that we go from 8 to 16?
John:
I think the answer is Apple Intelligence.
John:
I think that's why all of a sudden the phones are going out.
John:
All of a sudden the pro and non-pro phones are going to have the same amount of RAM, and it's going to be more than they had last year.
John:
It's still kind of weird to me that the 15... I mean, it shows kind of how blindsided Apple was by the whole LLM stuff, that the 15 line...
John:
have this bifurcation where the pros can run the lm stuff but the non-pros can't because they they only had six and they're not making that mistake with the 16 line and apparently not with the 17 we're all gonna have it maybe maybe the 17 line uh they just this rumor just says the iphone 17 models will come with 12 gig does that mean all of them will i mean again i welcome it i think it's useful even if it wasn't for apple intelligence but if if that's what it takes
John:
If it takes a new, incredibly RAM hungry feature that Apple wants to promote to get them to finally start putting RAM in their devices, I'm all for it.
John:
No argument here.
Casey:
And then coming back to this upcoming, I was going to say year, but this upcoming month, I guess, this upcoming event.
Casey:
iPhone 16 camera improvements.
Casey:
These are rumors about the cameras for next month.
Casey:
Again, reading from MacRumors.
Casey:
The summary is that the ultra-wide camera will go from f2.4 to f2.2 aperture.
Casey:
The 16 and 16 Plus may support macro photography for the first time.
Casey:
The iPhone 16 Pro, the human-sized iPhone 16 Pro, not the gigantor one that I have, will gain the 5X Tetra Prism telephoto camera, which will make my decision-making very complicated for this upcoming month.
Casey:
The iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max will feature an upgraded ultra-wide camera with a 48-megapixel sensor with the same pixel-binning feature as the main camera.
Casey:
It will have an f2.2 aperture up from f2.4 and support 48-megapixel ProRAW photography.
Marco:
This all sounds good.
Marco:
I'm happy that I will finally get the 5X lens in my size phone.
Marco:
I won't have to pull a KC and jump up.
Marco:
So I'm looking forward to it.
John:
Yeah, there were some other items in this article as well.
John:
I just pulled out the most relevant and interesting ones.
John:
But one of the things I didn't put in, because that's not an improvement, is the rumor is...
John:
that the main camera no change exactly the set for the pro models anyway the 16 pro and the 15 pro will have exactly the same 1x main camera which is i mean obviously there'll be processing changes and there's always something they tout and apple has done it a couple of times where they really haven't actually improved the camera hardware at all but they have find a way to make you think that it's better or whatever uh but the rumor is this is going to be one of those years but
John:
You know, they make up for the other changes.
John:
Suddenly the ultra wide getting, you know, a 48 megapixel sensor with pixel binning and having a better aperture.
John:
That'll really hopefully make the ultra wide a lot better camera.
John:
I forget if there was a I might have snipped out.
John:
I forget if there was a rumor about the selfie camera improving, but that's always welcome.
John:
So it's not always and especially these days, it's not always about like how much better is the one X camera getting because it seems like they're really pressing up against the
John:
uh size and cost constraints that they want to at least that apple wants to dedicate to camera other phone makers are dedicating even more size and even more cost to their cameras but with apple's current design i'm not sure
John:
We can't expect the kind of changes we got during the big camera blow-up era.
John:
Someone should do a graph of this, of how rapidly and dramatically the cameras improved when Apple started making them way bigger.
John:
Because they used to be flush with the back of the phone, and then all of a sudden they weren't, and they became less and less flush over time, and they took up more and more room.
John:
And the camera improvements during those years, when they went from a tiny little flush pinhole to these gigantic mountains, huge improvements.
John:
But even though the camera bump has been getting, still getting bigger, it's getting bigger more slowly.
John:
And the area dedicated to the cameras is also slowing.
John:
So yeah, the One X camera is probably not going to be that big of a leap.
John:
Well, they're running out of space to expand into on the back of the phone.
John:
Well, you got to do, like I said, I've always said that you can't, you know, you got to do the full width, right?
John:
And maybe have fewer, bigger cameras.
John:
Like, look what the Pixel 9 does.
John:
They've been the full width of the phone for a while now.
John:
And their lower end phone just has two cameras side by side.
John:
And the high end one has three cameras side by side.
John:
Like, you know.
John:
We'll see what they do on the slim and if they actually change the design of the non-slim ones.
John:
But I don't think like you could make better cameras with bigger sensors, but they will take up more room and stick out more and cost more money.
John:
And every bit of space inside a phone that you take up with camera is space that you can't put battery in or any other parts in.
John:
So it is a balancing act.
John:
But we've definitely seen the rate of improvement of the One X camera really slow down and lean heavily on processing features.
John:
But the other camera is getting better.
John:
Again, I think that's great.
Marco:
Honestly, what I look forward to more than camera optic changes, because again, as John's saying, the actual raw quality of the cameras changes pretty slowly these days.
Marco:
Again, because we are really hitting a lot of limits of physics and current sensor tech and optics.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
The processing does change every year.
Marco:
And even when in the past, even when they have occasionally had a generation where the basics of the camera didn't change between one and the following phone, usually the processing is tweaked or is able to be more advanced, maybe be less heavy-handed in certain ways.
Marco:
And as I've spent more of the last couple of years getting back into real cameras, like big cameras...
Marco:
Obviously, again, there are certain things that smartphones will just always be worse at because they're so optically very, very small sensors, very, very small lenses that have to be very inexpensive relative.
Marco:
But also there are certain things that phones are way better at and generally always will be like stacking multiple exposures together to generate HDR and different effects and different processing steps.
Marco:
but it is still very very clear to me when i look at a phone picture versus a big camera picture you can you can spot the differences very quickly if you know what to look for because phone pictures are still so heavily processed by default and there are like there's recent things like i know um didn't halide just release a cool um like raw mode that's that's less or like that's basically unprocessed yeah it's like called zero processing or something i actually tried it out where it's
John:
not no processing but it's almost no processing obviously there's some amount of processing just to get a reasonable picture off of the sensor but they do almost no processing and if you ever wondered what it would look like if you didn't apply most of the iphone's processing the answer is noisy
John:
Yes.
John:
Because they're very tiny sensors and you're going to see rainbow noise all over everything unless it is extremely bright sunlight.
John:
And you're like, wow, why would anyone ever use this zero processing mode?
John:
It's like, well, in good lighting, what you're saying is phone, don't try to do the thing where you take 17 exposures and make everything look beautiful and have it all be exposed in like this weird, you know, artificial exposure bracketing HDR type thing.
John:
Let the sky blow out or let this thing be in shadow or whatever.
John:
And if there is enough light, you won't get that much noise.
John:
And it is, you know, it's it's it's it's not a feature that most people want.
John:
The default should still be all the processing on.
John:
But it is fun to just see, like, what are these cameras capable?
John:
Honestly, I'm pretty impressed with the zero processing mode and saying, actually, these cameras aren't that terrible.
John:
Like, it's not too long ago that I owned, like when my son was born in 2004, we had a digital camera that took pictures that were just about as noisy.
John:
only there was no there was no option to add processing to make them better uh so technology marches on so if you want to try that download the i think it's in the latest version i think i might be on the beta but i think it's in the latest uh release version of halide uh that zero processing feature they have a big blog post about it it's it's fun to try
Marco:
Yeah, I was also very impressed, honestly, by how decent the raw sensor stuff is.
Marco:
But yeah, you do get a lot of the rainbow, the chroma noise, and that is just the realities of such a tiny sensor that's having to crank up its sensitivity a lot in a lot of different lighting conditions.
Marco:
And so anyway...
Marco:
One of the biggest differences when you look at iPhone pictures versus bigger camera pictures is you can tell there's been a lot less processing done to the bigger camera pictures.
Marco:
Now, again, in certain conditions, this is not what you want, especially in terms of if you need to combine multiple exposures to get larger dynamic range, for instance.
Marco:
That's something that the phones are just so much better at and probably always will be.
Marco:
But the big cameras, you can really... A big camera version... If you're in the spot and you take the same picture with a big camera and then a phone...
Marco:
Barring exposure differences for things like HDR, other than that, usually the big camera one will look a lot more natural because there will be way less over-contrasting, edge-sharpening, all these artifacts of the heavy-handed processing.
Marco:
One thing I hope for every year that I don't usually get too much.
Marco:
Sometimes it gets worse, but usually what I hope for with the new phones every year is...
Marco:
They've developed better processing so that it is a little bit less obvious, so it can be a little bit less heavy-handed by default or at all.
Marco:
This is something that, again, just due to the sensor size and the realities of those optics in phones, it's very hard to make it not require a lot of processing to look good, but...
Marco:
over time we do approach that we do get better over time some phone generations are a step back i'm not super happy with the 15 in this regard i think it does apply very strong processing by default but i think it actually is better than the 14 was in that same area
Marco:
So hoping for more improvements there.
Marco:
And that usually requires not only just slight improvements to the camera here and there, but that also usually requires higher end processing, different techniques, more power in the signal processing pipeline.
Marco:
and you know where ai comes in and helps sometimes too or ml or whatever we're calling it this this few year period all those things help too but anything that can make the camera make this make the photos appear less heavily processed i very much welcome those changes when we can get them
John:
There's an interesting parallel with the AI thing, like one of the knocks against the early and even some of the current image generators, like a dolly or whatever, where you just ask it to make you an image based on a text prompt, is that they had real difficulty with text because they didn't know or care what letters were.
John:
So if they had a sign with text on it, it would look like,
John:
like greek text where it's like oh this isn't a real language they aren't real letters it's just like you can tell it's supposed to be text but they're not there's no actual alphabet they're just these blurry smear of letters right because it you know it didn't consider that an important part of the image and whenever it sees signs in its training day it's like oh just a bunch of high contrast lines on a background you know anyway
John:
The parallel to that in over-processed phone pictures is they take a picture of real text on a real sign, but then they apply their processing to it, and their processing, if you zoom in, often looks like kind of an impressionist painting where it looks like blobs of paint instead of sharp individual pixels, and they're doing that sort of denoise and lump everything together.
John:
and it will make text unreadable so if you ever tried to use your phone to take a picture of some tiny text so then you could pinch and zoom on the text you may be surprised to find that when you pinch and zoom the text looks like a total mess it looks like that ai generated text and you can't even read it you're like wait is the text actually blurry on the you know this little temple
John:
not stem not stick of my eyeglasses because you're trying to let you in there it's like no the text is perfectly clear on your eyeglasses but the processing of your phone totally mangled it and made it unreadable that is an example of where uh process zero which is the actual brand name that they're using for this hey lines process zero would come in handy because yes it would be noisy but it won't take the letter forms and melt them into nothing and
John:
Sometimes I can tell a phone picture from a real picture like, oh, well, you're just pixel peeping, which is what they mean by that is you're zooming in to the picture.
John:
So you can see at an individual pixel lever that, oh, this is totally blobby and gross.
John:
Whereas if you zoom in on a real camera, it looks nice as you zoom in and right up to the point where you actually see the individual pixels kind of right.
John:
But like pixel peeping is said derisively.
John:
Well, first of all, that is getting a closer look at the quality.
John:
But second, there's a thing called cropping, which with real cameras you can do.
John:
If you didn't frame the shot well or perfectly with a real camera, it's usually better to, although AI helps with this, it's usually better to get more of the background that you want so that if you do need to reframe, you can just crop in a little bit.
John:
Or if you take a big picture and the most interesting part is in the upper right corner or whatever, you can crop in on that, but you can only do that
John:
If when you crop in, which is another way of zooming, throw away everything except for this tiny square, pinch and zoom until only this tiny square is visible on the screen, they're both the same operation.
John:
If you do that with a phone picture, you're like, oh, this is unusable.
John:
This person is a wax blob, right?
John:
They are an impressionist painting.
John:
I can't make out a single thing.
John:
At regular size, it looks okay because they're small.
John:
But when I crop in, all of a sudden, pixel peeping becomes, I just want to crop this.
John:
i just want to crop and only have this person in the picture and with a real camera you can do that because the quality of the pixels doesn't immediately go into wax melted blob the second you go you view it at more than you know 1x zoom or even like less than 1x because sometimes the phone screen uh doesn't even show the entire picture so uh yeah i'm a little bit of a big camera bigot despite the fact that i take tons of pictures on my phone and mostly enjoy how they look but
John:
I know the weaknesses, and I know better than to try to crop a tiny one-third portion of a phone picture and expect it to look good, especially if it's a person, because they will look like a melted wax horror.
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
All right, so our subtopic that I alluded to earlier, so allegedly Apple will support JPEG XL, which will sit alongside Heif, JPEG, Heif Max, ProRAW, and ProRAW Max.
Casey:
And the initial reports I read about this were
Casey:
Seemed to hint that Apple invented JPEG XL, but having looked at the Wikipedia entry, that doesn't seem to be the case.
John:
No, I don't understand these stories that put like a new format from Apple called JPEG XL.
John:
Like just Google the term before you write that story.
John:
But before we get to that, though, have any of you heard of Heath Maxx?
Marco:
no i was just thinking i don't recall what that is at all i mean i didn't google it either like i'm assuming it's just some variant of heath and heath has been around for a while what the heck is heath max i have no idea like we we had only two image formats for so long and then when they added heath which was now i mean a good number of years ago that was like such a big change and
John:
kind of like what makes me a little bit nervous about this jpeg xl news is like we still don't really have amazing support for heath in the ecosystem around our computers and phones well i mean that's that i think is a a thing in favor of jpeg xl which we'll get to in a second when we get to the forum but i did just look up heath max that's just what they call what they call the 48 megapixel thing where you get all the actual 48 megapixels and you don't bend it they're calling that heath max but
Casey:
Well, so the way it was, was that originally when the 48 megapixel came out, the only way you got all 48 megapixels was if you did a raw shot, if I recall correctly.
Casey:
Then they eventually added with 14 Pro Heif Max, which is, yes, I would like a 48 megapixel image, but feel free to compress it.
John:
Right.
John:
It's not raw.
John:
Right.
John:
So the Heif, Heik, H-E-I-F, H-E-I-C, whatever that whole when Apple introduced that format.
John:
Right.
John:
Their pitch was here's a new image format.
John:
Again, it's not an Apple invention.
John:
It's some standardized thing that Apple likes and probably had some part in.
John:
And what their pitch was, you get better quality images for the same size.
John:
or you get smaller images, you know, like it was, it's a better format, right?
John:
Compressed images.
John:
It's not a raw format.
John:
It's a compressed thing.
John:
The format is very flexible.
John:
We can do all the things we need to do.
John:
We can implement all the features we want to implement.
John:
I forget if this is the one that they implemented the little live picture thing in.
John:
Instead of having the sidecar thing, they combined it.
John:
But anyway, the pitch was it's a better image format.
John:
Right.
John:
And we're judging that by the quality of the image at a given size.
John:
And even though it was weird, we're like, well, but it's not like it's Apple's proprietary format.
John:
This is a format that anybody can use.
John:
It's an open thing and it's better than JPEG.
John:
And that frustration that we have about like, oh, only Macs and stuff can read those things, mostly mitigated by the fact that when you share, we convert it to a JPEG.
John:
And if you didn't like it at all, you can go into settings and say, I don't want to ever use this stuff.
John:
Just shoot everything in JPEG and it would still work.
John:
But I left everything on the default, which was shoot everything in heave or whatever, because they take up less room on my phone or they take their better quality at the same size or whatever.
John:
Like it's a better image format.
John:
And I was figuring before I read the story that, you know, this heave heave thing,
John:
We'll just, you know, tough it out for another, you know, five to ten years, and eventually you'll see more widespread support for this format, and it won't be that big of a deal.
John:
Honestly, it hasn't been that big of a deal for me, again, because of the sharing stuff or whatever.
John:
But then this JPEG XL story comes out, and it's like, well, if you were waiting around for Heif or Heek to become so standard that it's as common as JPEG, that seems like that is never going to happen for reasons that we will explain now.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Oh, so JPEG XL supports lossy and lossless compression of ultra high resolution images up to one terapixel, up to 32 bits per component, up to 4,099 components, including alpha transparency, animated images and embedded previews.
Casey:
So this feature is aimed at web delivery, such as advanced progressive decoding and minimal header overhead.
Casey:
as well as features aimed at image editing and digital printing, such as support for multiple layers, CMYK, and spot colors.
Casey:
It is specifically designed to seamlessly handle wide color gamut color spaces with high dynamic range such as REC 2100 with the PQ or HLG transfer function.
Casey:
I understood about a third of what I just read.
Casey:
so there are some sweet features involved there's independent tiles so decoding of sections of a large image by allowing images to be stored in tiles progressive decoding more specifically does excuse me it's a mode specifically designed for responsive loading of large images depending on the viewing device's resolution there's support for both photographic and synthetic imagery the format features two complementary modes that can be used depending on the image contents
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
JPEG XL can losslessly transcode a widely supported subset of JPEG files, making about 20% smaller file sizes possible due to JPEG XL's superior entropy coding.
Casey:
This process is reversible, and it allows for the original JPEG file to be reconstructed bit for bit.
Casey:
JPEG XL, and I think this is the kicker, is a royalty-free format with an open-source reference implementation available on GitHub under a three-clause BSD license.
John:
Poor Heek and Heef.
John:
They were better image formats and they had their very brief time in the sun, but not enough to become industry standard.
John:
And here comes JPEG XL, which is basically better than them in every possible way, including the most important one, which is royalty free.
John:
BSD implementation, royalty-free, open source, parallelizable, supports all the new modern things, huge image files, transparency.
John:
Just think of all the image formats that we've lived with and all the weird stupid we've had.
John:
We had GIFs, which are fun, but they only go up to 256 colors.
John:
We have JPEGs, but there was a kind of blurry, so you'd use GIFs for those if you could, but if they had more than 256 colors, then you needed to do PNG, but PNG was the only one that supported transparency, but then I didn't support transparency in PNGs.
John:
And even today, like even when I'm putting stuff on my website, it's like I'm going to put, oh, I want it to have transparency.
John:
I guess I'll have to use a ping.
John:
But of course, pings are basically uncompressed, even though you can squish them down a little bit farther.
John:
So JPEGs are much smaller than pings, but then JPEGs are blurry, especially if you have text because they don't do a good job with that.
John:
And there was progressive JPEGs when we had modems, so the JPEG would slowly fade in or whatever, and there's those old JPEG 2000, and then there's WebP and all the weird Google formats, and what is it, A-V-I-F, and then there's all these wars about... I hate it when I download a WebP image because macOS doesn't like those, and I always have to end converting them, so I have a RetroBatch thing that converts all the WebP images into...
John:
PNGs, and of course, there's Photoshop format and stuff.
John:
This solves all of them, supports everything that they all support, is totally open, has the name JPEG in it, which is really important.
John:
I mean, it probably is from the Joint Photographic Experts group, but being called JPEG something is important.
John:
Now, granted, it didn't help JPEG 2000, but putting 2000 in the name wasn't a great move, right?
John:
And Excel makes it sound like it's extra large, but I think that's not what the Excel stands for.
John:
But this has all the features, and it's royalty-free, and it's open source.
John:
And like it's made like it's made for modern hardware, parallelizable.
John:
The thing with the tile encoding or whatever that is parallelizable is you can break up your image into chunks and decode them all in parallel.
John:
And if you're just showing one quarter of an image, it can just decode that corner of the image.
John:
Like it's it's so well thought out and well designed to not have any of the weaknesses of the existing formats.
John:
And by the way, it also makes smaller files at the same quality or better looking files at the same size.
John:
Right.
John:
So I am ready to throw Heek and Heef.
John:
In the dustbin of history, I'm ready to go all in a JPEG XL, provided everybody starts supporting it.
John:
That means macOS, Chrome, all the other, like every platform needs to support this, which almost sort of mostly happened with WebP.
John:
I think WebP on the web works okay, as its name suggests, but when you download a WebP onto your Mac, macOS is like...
John:
you know and whatever the other format that google likes is an avif or whatever there's a bunch of other image formats that are better than most of the existing ones that are kind of competing with he can heath and all that but yeah the only thing jpeg xl does have going forward you know it does support animation you know why do we have quote-unquote animated gifs for so long because it was the only image format that supported animation and then there was like animated pings but that didn't get very wildly supported these days when we say i'm uploading a gif they just conferred it to mp4 behind the scenes
John:
right?
John:
And like Twitter and Mastodon or whatever, they don't actually show you an actual GIF because actual GIFs are humongous because it's individual frames that are, you know, individual GIFs or whatever.
John:
And this is not a video format, so it doesn't solve all the problems.
John:
Like H.265 will live on and all that other good stuff.
John:
But
John:
I am excited about JPEG XL.
John:
And I hope, unlike Heek and Heaf, this does sweep across the entire industry and become boring and supported everywhere.
John:
And I guess the only barriers to that not happening are companies that are really tied to their formats, either because they own the patents on them.
John:
Or because they've already invested in this giant infrastructure that understands WebP and process them or whatever.
John:
And I hope we get over that.
John:
Again, this being royalty free should help.
John:
Being royalty free also means people don't make money from it.
John:
So some people are motivated not for that format, not to spread.
John:
But my fingers are crossed on this.
John:
And this is just a rumor.
John:
We don't even know if it's true, right?
John:
I haven't even seen the betas.
John:
And even in the, is JPEG XL going to be the default?
John:
Are they going to talk about it in the event?
John:
And because they did talk about Heek and Heep, they said, hey, we've got a new image format and it makes better images, right?
John:
And don't worry, it'll be compatible because when you share it, it'll convert to JPEG.
John:
I assume they would take the same approach to JPEG XL.
John:
And where does that leave heath and heek?
John:
Are they still even going to be an option?
John:
Or are they just going to be removed from the menu and it's going to be plain old JPEG, same as it ever was, or JPEG XL, which is the extra large version, but not really.
Marco:
Yeah, this I'm hoping this takes off because, you know, heath and heath slash heath.
Marco:
I know one's the container and one's the format.
Marco:
Heath has just still it's been around for a while.
Marco:
It has never gotten good enough support across the industry to the point where, like, if you are taking a photo from an iPhone and sending it anywhere or using it anywhere else besides another iPhone.
Marco:
you've probably been just having to convert it to jpeg and to the point where like apple's own frameworks will do that for you a lot of the time because that is usually what people need to do i would love for jpeg excel to get wide enough support everywhere that we don't have to do this dance anymore in a few years because jpeg has been a wonderful format for the entire tech industry and
Marco:
For the 150 years that we've had it, we do have better techniques now.
Marco:
We do have better compression now.
Marco:
We do have like different needs now.
Marco:
It is time to hopefully retire JPEG and replace it.
Marco:
And the only reason we're still using JPEG is because it is like the kind of universally compatible version.
Marco:
Now, everything I just said is also true about MP3, and I say that with love because I love the MP3 file format.
Marco:
I think it's a lot easier to replace JPEG than to replace MP3 for a lot of reasons.
John:
Well, I mean, here's the difference, though, because you mentioned JPEG and how much you love it, and it's been around for a long time.
John:
But JPEG has obvious problems, which is the reason people used anything that wasn't JPEG.
John:
First of all, if you have something that's like line art or something like that, like a black and white line art,
John:
a gif is better for sharpness 256 grays in a gif for example is going to give you sharp crisp edges none of that weird compression artifact stuff or whatever it'll be a real small file or a png or something like that jpeg makes things blurry and gross until you unless you crank up the quality and then it makes your file size bigger it is it is made for photos it relies on your perception of the human perception and it's great for photographs but
John:
black text on a white background line art uh tiny text that becomes a fizzy mess that is jpeg's weakness transparency not a thing in jpeg except probably jpeg 2000 animation i believe there is an animated jpeg you know there's motion jpeg formats or whatever but like lots of things that we eventually found to be useful in image formats plain old jpeg in most implementations simply doesn't support
John:
Not true of MP3.
John:
MP3 has a lot of things going for it.
John:
Number one, pretty much every thing you could think to do with an audio file, MP3 supports, right?
John:
And number two, MP3 is so close to the perceptual limits of human hearing and file sizes in the grand scheme of things are so low that we don't care that you can make a better sounding, slightly smaller file with AAC or whatever because the difference isn't that big.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Maybe for hours and hours of video or something like that and maybe for multi-channel formats, it's a whole other thing.
John:
But like,
John:
mp3 for its role doesn't really have any of those glaring weaknesses like like no transparency in an image format for the web it's so killer and there's no equivalent to that for like oh here's the problem with mp3 right and so you know it was bad when we were doing like mp3s at really low bit rates but
John:
you know, a 320 kilobit MP3, that's fine for 99% of the planet for, you know, basic two-channel audio or mono audio.
John:
And so, yeah, I think MP3 has still got more legs.
John:
But JPEG, like, again, the reason anybody uses formats other than JPEG is because they know JPEG's weaknesses and they know this has to be a ping, this has to be a GIF, or, you know, this has to be something else entirely because...
John:
jpegs can't do it all but jpeg excel like those old this is what i said i don't know if this is the case but when i read support for both photographic and synthetic imagery with two complementary modes i think it's going to be one mode where it recognizes line art i don't know if that's true i'm putting my hopes and dreams in that one line there and then the other thing where it can transcode existing most existing jpegs and make them 20 smaller smaller essentially losslessly and you can reverse that that means that like if you have a library full of jpegs like if you shot jpegs for years and years on your phone
John:
And then when he came out, let's say you didn't pick that format.
John:
But either way, if you've got JPEGs on your phone, this format can make all your JPEGs 20% smaller, like losslessly, not re-encoding them and making them look worse.
John:
Just take that JPEG and replace it with a file that is exactly the same, but it's 20% smaller.
John:
That's one of the great things about having JPEG in the name and saying it will subsume your existing JPEGs and make them smaller.
John:
And 20% is not a small number.
John:
So...
John:
But, you know, again, we're just reading a feature list and it's from the Wikipedia page and it makes everything sound like, you know, wonderful and roses.
John:
And we'll see if this is really true or if all my hopes and dreams are accurately represented by these bullet points.
John:
But this is looking great to me.
John:
I mean, just recently I've been putting images up on my website and, you know, it's just like, why are images such a mess still on the web?
John:
And here's JPEG Excel.
John:
come to save us all.
John:
Probably people said the same thing about JPEG 2000, and again, that didn't quite work out, but maybe this time we'll do it.
Marco:
I hope so, because if you think about what it takes for a new image format to really gain a foothold and really get as widely supported as JPEG and ping are today...
Marco:
We have such a massive world of technological tools and infrastructure and various devices, server-side, open-source libraries, server-side language support, CDN support, obviously browser support, different phones, whether cameras are going to shoot this format.
Marco:
There's so much out there that either...
Marco:
processes or converts or resizes or displays images and this is part of the reason why we haven't had more formats that really take a foothold because the world of of just tech and software and hardware that deals with images is so vast so for this to really take off
Marco:
Obviously, having royalty-free and open-source components is massively important here because if there's any kind of royalty requirement on a format, that means that the entire ecosystem of open-source tools and of server-side language supports and everything is probably not going to support it or at least is going to support it in a very loose or half-assed way.
John:
And there's going to be format wars because they're like, well, you have your royalty one and I have my royalty one and I want mine because I get money from it and you want yours because you get money from it.
John:
And even in this case, there's an open source implementation, but it's not like a copy left type of, you know, GNU public license or whatever.
John:
It's BSD, which is the one that says, take it, make money off it, whatever.
John:
Like it's not even a restrictive open source license.
Marco:
Yeah, so that really is setting the stage for this to be widely adopted.
Marco:
So we'll see.
Marco:
I mean, the only other thing that generally tends to hold back new formats from being adopted besides the technical requirements, royalty requirements, open source lack thereof, the only other thing that tends to hold things back is if it's not a big enough improvement over the ubiquitous established format.
Marco:
That was always the problem with JPEG 2000.
Marco:
And I think to some degree that was a problem with HEAF.
Marco:
I think this might be enough overall improvements to finally make it worth people actually putting in the work to implement this.
Marco:
So I hope this goes that way.
Marco:
Because again, JPEG really has had its time.
Marco:
It's been wonderful.
Marco:
But this is a lot of advancement over that.
Marco:
And I hope we get a chance to actually use it.
John:
And even if it isn't, even if it turns out this is not a big enough jump for it to be adopted industry-wide, I'll say the same thing that I said when Apple went to Heek slash Heaf.
John:
Even if this is only a format that only Apple ever uses, if it makes all the pictures on my phone a little bit smaller and they all just get converted to JPEG anytime they're exported, which again has basically been my experience, I never have to think about the fact that this phone is always taking pictures in Heek, Heaf unless I like look at, see that format in the photos menu on my Mac when I export.
John:
I'm like, oh yeah, that's right.
John:
That is a format, right?
John:
Like, I don't have to think about it, but they take up less room in my iCloud photo library.
John:
They take up less room on my phone.
John:
I'm that's worth doing.
John:
That's why I didn't change that option.
John:
I want my pictures to be smaller.
John:
I keep taking pictures.
John:
I want them to be, you know, like I said, I want them to be smaller or better quality at the same size and just keep making those formats better.
John:
So probably like half my collection is JPEGs before the introduced heat.
John:
And then half of them is the new format.
John:
And then I'll start with JPEG XL.
John:
I would prefer it if it went industry wide and, you know, solve those problem.
John:
But like to give another example, because of Apple, I have, I use the photo screen shaver on all of our Macs and I have like my favorites for my photo album being like the floating, you know, floating images going up and down your screens, like pictures of my family and everything.
John:
They're all the favorites from my photos library.
Um,
John:
The screensaver has a feature that says, hey, pick an album from your photos library in this little picker, and we'll use that to feed this slideshow.
John:
But I can tell you that once you push up around 200,000 pictures, that UI gets very upset.
John:
So what I do instead...
John:
uh apple you can fix this but anyway what i do instead is i go to the favorite collections and photos and i export them all to a folder on my mac somewhere and i don't export them at 100 size because they're just going to be in a screensaver and they're usually pretty small in that floating screensaver so export them in like the quote-unquote large size instead of original size
John:
And I do that in Heek.
John:
And when I used to do that in JPEG, the folder was way bigger.
John:
And now the folder is smaller.
John:
And I like that.
John:
Right.
John:
And then you just point the screensaver at the folder and it can somehow handle that when it couldn't handle the thing in the photo picker library.
John:
I try not to push my photo library too much.
John:
I don't want to upset it.
John:
But anyway, just just for that thing, taking up less space on my phone and taking up less space in the favorites folder that is on all the Macs in my house.
John:
For that alone, please, I welcome JPEG XL.
John:
But yeah, I really hope it does sweep across the whole industry because it seems like it just finally resolves all of the issues.
John:
It's the image format that does everything we want image formats to do and hopefully does it well.
Casey:
All right, you want to do some Ask ATP?
John:
Let's do it.
Casey:
All right, so Tom Thorpe writes, it's that new iPhone time of year again.
Casey:
And time to ask the age-old question, whether to restore from backup or start fresh.
Casey:
I've been on the same backup for 10 years, but I'm starting to think it would be nice to start fresh, partially because I want to clear out unused apps, but I also still can't help but imagine it would clear out the craft, provide better battery life, etc.
Casey:
What are the pros and cons of doing so today?
Casey:
What would I lose by starting fresh?
Casey:
And would I get any of my imagined benefits?
Casey:
I don't think I've ever started fresh.
Casey:
I think I'm still carrying the same iOS installation, if you will, from my 3GS way back when.
Casey:
So I don't think I can say from experience whether it would be a good idea or not.
Casey:
Generally speaking...
Casey:
I don't think it's a bad idea.
Casey:
The thing that scares me the most personally is losing my iMessage history, which, granted, is basically a black hole anyway because search is terrible in messages.
Casey:
But, I don't know, it gives me the heebie-jeebies to think of losing it.
Casey:
But I guess, man, go for it and report in and let us know if it was a mistake.
Casey:
Especially if you take a backup first.
Casey:
I mean, it's not going to hurt anything.
Casey:
You can always go back to your backup.
Casey:
All right, so Marco, correct me.
Marco:
I mean, the whole thing of like, well, you could always back up.
Marco:
Like, I feel like, yeah, you can.
Marco:
But after a couple of days of using the new one, it's like how when you undo in an undo stack, as soon as you make any change, you can't redo anymore because there's no way for you to like merge that change back into your stack.
Marco:
You know, it blows the redo stack.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
You can take a backup, but as soon as you start doing anything on the new installation that is creating new data, writing new things, you're not going to want to ever go back to that backup because it'll be too disruptive or you will lose something that you've done.
Marco:
Basically, that's usually a pretty one-way transition.
Marco:
I would say...
Marco:
if you actually want to like have a clean start if that's like a really appealing thing to you for some reason sure go ahead do it i don't think though that it's necessary it with modern you know os installations in almost every case especially on the phone on the mac sometimes you can build up a whole bunch of weird stuff in various like library directories even then you can clean that out um but it's so it's rarely necessary on the mac i would say on the phone it's basically never necessary i think like you casey
Marco:
I think I've either never done it or I've done it maybe once in total ever.
Marco:
But I don't think it's really necessary because iOS is already so controlled and limited.
Marco:
You're not throwing in texts.
Marco:
You're not throwing in weird preferences that live around forever in some directory.
Marco:
You don't need to run iPhone cleanup utilities to find lost and abandoned files.
Marco:
There's so much on the iPhone that...
Marco:
Because of the technical limitations imposed on apps and because of all the containerization of all the apps data and everything, you don't really need most of that stuff.
Marco:
Now, whether you want to go through your apps and clean out apps, that's a different story.
Marco:
But you can just delete the apps.
Marco:
You don't need to reinstall the whole thing from scratch instead of bringing it over to your restore app.
Marco:
I think mostly what you'd be doing by doing a fresh installation without a restore and manually starting things from scratch, I think most of what you're doing there is causing a lot of time loss, possibly some data loss in apps that don't transition over at all or well or perfectly, all for a benefit that I'm not sure is real.
Marco:
Or at least I'm not sure it would be anything you would ever notice.
Marco:
so i would recommend if this is not something that you really think you need to specifically do because of a specific reason you're trying to get rid of um i would say don't don't do this just bring your stuff over it's not gonna make a meaningful impact on stuff like battery life or things like that's that's mostly a myth on ios and uh there's other ways to control that like deleting apps so just go through like if you really want the same effect go through and delete a bunch of apps that you don't use anymore like you can do that just do that it's fine
John:
Before I address Tom's question here, I'll just say that all three of us are in agreement for just general people who don't have the specific question.
John:
Our advice is just transfer data from your old phone.
John:
It's what everybody does.
John:
It's the default.
John:
That's what we recommend.
John:
Flat out, not even close, right?
John:
Now, Tom's question is like, I think I might have a problem.
John:
I think I might want to do this.
John:
What are the tradeoffs here?
John:
What would I lose by starting fresh?
John:
Marco kind of already addressed this.
John:
It is possible to lose something because if you have an app, especially older apps, but who knows, could be modern ones too.
John:
that don't have any kind of cloud sync type thing and you start fresh and you reinstall that app, the data that was associated with that app that was on your old phone is still sitting on your old phone.
John:
And that's the only place it is because it doesn't have any kind of like it saves it up to iCloud or it puts it on a server or does any kind of syncing thing.
John:
It's just locally on that inside that app.
John:
If you did a backup and restore or did a data transfer, you would keep that data most of the time, right?
John:
But if you have an app like that and you're like, hey, let me download that app from the App Store and you launch it and you see nothing in the app, you're like, hey, where's all my stuff?
John:
It's back on your old phone.
John:
So it totally is possible to lose data.
John:
Again, good apps don't do that.
John:
They have some kind of cloud sync thing.
John:
They use CloudKit or whatever.
John:
That's how people expect iOS apps to work.
John:
But there's no way as an end user for you to really know
John:
What is this app doing?
John:
Is it just storing things inside its container locally on my old phone?
John:
And if I install the app fresh on a new phone and sign into it with my account, it doesn't bring my data with it.
John:
You won't know that until you do that.
John:
So that is a pretty significant risk, which is another reason to keep around your old phone when you're setting up your new phone, just to make sure that's not the case.
John:
As for would I get any of my imagined benefits?
John:
There are scenarios where a fresh install will save you, but they're pretty obscure, right?
John:
So because everything is so containerized or whatever, the usual way that you're going to get any kind of benefit is there's some kind of problem situation, usually having to do with corrupt data.
John:
Like there's some kind of file format or data or whatever associated with an app that is, that for whatever reason, a bug in the program or who knows something, it's not, it got mangled.
John:
And so it's sitting on your SSD on your phone and it is improperly formatted.
John:
And maybe you don't notice because it's some obscure corner of some database that some file uses to keep track of its stuff, right?
John:
But the way this could potentially manifest is, let's say that app runs in the background once an hour for 60 seconds.
John:
If during that 60 seconds, it goes into a tight loop, because it's decoding code gets tripped up over the bad formatting and just goes around and around does an infinite loop for 60 seconds before it gets before it gets killed.
John:
You don't know that's happening behind the scenes, but once per hour, there's a little tight infinite loop for 60 seconds draining a little tiny bit of your battery because of some tiny corrupt database and something you have no visibility into this.
John:
The app developer thinks there's nothing wrong with my app.
John:
I don't know what the problem is.
John:
He would have to diagnose and get your actual data file to determine that your data file was corrupted, maybe by a bug of three versions ago in his program.
John:
And you've been slinging that corrupt database file around from phone to phone to phone, burning tiny little bits of power on it and multiply that by three or four apps that have this problem.
John:
If you do a fresh install of those apps and it syncs a new thing down from the cloud or whatever, you wouldn't have that problem, right?
John:
If it's corrupt in the cloud and you do a fresh install and you install that app and it syncs to the cloud, you've got the same problem.
John:
You know what I'm saying?
John:
And you don't know unless you're the developer of that app, is this corrupt just locally or is it corrupt in the cloud?
John:
What I'm saying is you could have problems on your phone.
John:
do a fresh install, reinstall all the apps that you use, lose, and restore all those problems.
John:
Because all the problems were like corrupt data in the cloud or something like that or any bug related to that, right?
John:
Because you never know, like, is the problem that I have, like, people have this concept of like, I think there's cobwebs inside their phone or whatever, but it's, you know, there are specific things that applications could be doing that could be causing you a problem.
John:
And
John:
I'm not even sure what the ratio is, but a huge number of those are not solved by setting up a new phone at all because it's just going to faithfully reproduce every single one of those problems.
John:
If you just delete that entire app, then, hey, problem solved.
John:
But if it's an app that you use every day and you had a problem over there, you're also going to have a problem over here in a lot of circumstances.
John:
And that's not satisfying, right?
John:
On the Mac, again, it is much more likely that there's some leftover files to something you never use that you can just clear out.
John:
And doing that manually is very difficult, and I do not recommend people do it.
John:
And it takes a lot of experience not to hose yourself.
John:
So...
John:
You know, that's why the Mac is what the Mac is.
John:
But on the phone, your tools are fresh install or backup, delete app or not delete app.
John:
And that's pretty much where it ends.
John:
And that's good.
John:
You don't want more tools than that.
John:
But sometimes you have problems that you can't escape by doing a fresh install.
John:
And...
John:
That's just a break.
John:
So I would recommend not doing it.
John:
You didn't say you had any specific problem.
John:
You just want your thing to be better.
John:
Getting a new phone and setting it up as a fresh phone by itself will empty out a lot of stuff.
John:
Like when you transfer data from your phone, it's not transferring like every single thing that was on your phone to your new phone.
John:
It's transferring the things that it thinks it needs to transfer.
John:
And everything else on your new phone is fresh.
John:
Probably all like the caches directories, the spotlight indexes are going to be recreated, whatever the heck Apple intelligence is doing.
John:
It'll sync your photos down from iCloud fresh.
John:
So if a bunch of photos were corrupt over there because of some heated up part of your SSD flipped a bunch of bits or something, you won't have that problem over here as long as they weren't corrupt in iCloud.
John:
Like just restore from backup.
John:
It will still be a fresh phone even if you don't start from zero.
John:
And if you do start from zero and you have a lot of stuff, you will spend hours and hours and hours trying to get it back like your old phone.
John:
And as soon as you think you have a good and you sell your old phone or wipe it or whatever, then you're going to find the thing that you missed and it was only on your old phone and you deleted it.
John:
So don't do it.
Casey:
Michael Quinn writes,
Casey:
This is a really good point, and holy crap, I would assume, since Apple is a company that knows what they're doing and cares, that it would transfer, but then photos.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
I don't know what's going to happen.
Marco:
I mean, I think Michael's question here contains the likely answer.
Marco:
So what Michael says in the question is, do we have to retrain every phone forever, a la waiting for photos slash spotlight to rescan and index each year?
Marco:
I think it's probably going to end up working much like spotlight indexing because that is kind of what it's built upon, or at least that is like the structure that they have built it with.
Marco:
So chances are, and again, I don't think we know this yet, but chances are the way Apple intelligence indexing or assistant learning will work on the phone is very similar to photos in that when you get a new phone or you do a restore phone,
Marco:
It'll spend the first couple of nights that it's plugged in all night indexing your data and training itself on that data.
Marco:
As it's sitting on your desk during the transfer, it'll heat itself up like crazy, melt itself while it's doing all this.
Marco:
So I would expect it will be similar to that.
Marco:
Apple does have a history of features like, for instance, some of the people training metadata stuff in the Photos app.
Marco:
Apple has a history of having features that have local intelligence or categorization or other ML kind of data that is generated on device, but then they have ways for other devices or restores on that same device later down the road to re-index and basically get that same data somehow on them.
Marco:
So I think it will be very similar to that process where whatever you have taught it
Marco:
By the way, we don't even know necessarily what that means yet.
Marco:
I don't know if any of the features that we've seen even have things that you can teach them besides indexing content from your apps.
Marco:
But whatever effort you put into training Apple intelligence will probably carry over just fine.
Marco:
And I think, again, most of the features that we're going to see in this first year, I think are going to be based upon either just kind of global, knowledge-less models that you're not putting your special spin on.
Marco:
Or index content from apps that can just get re-indexed as when you have a new phone.
John:
So photos is a good example of this because I think one of the photos things he's probably referring to is face recognition.
John:
When that feature was first introduced, photos would scan all your photos and find people and find their faces and do all that stuff.
John:
And you get a new phone, it would have to re-scan them and re-find all the faces.
John:
And it was frustrating because the scanning for faces is not perfect.
John:
And sometimes you have to correct it.
John:
No, this isn't my mom.
John:
This is my grandmother.
John:
No, this isn't my first kid.
John:
It's my second kid.
John:
And you would do those corrections because it would get it wrong.
John:
And then you get a new phone.
John:
You're like, geez, it's getting it wrong again.
John:
I corrected the same photo that it thinks is my mom, but it's actually my grandma.
John:
This is literally the same photo.
John:
I corrected on the other thing.
John:
This is like Michael's question.
John:
If I do all this stuff on my phone, do I get a new phone?
John:
Do I have to like essentially like I lose all that information?
John:
And so Apple added a feature, I think a year or two after the face recognition came out, that said, we will transfer your face recognition data from your old thing to your new thing.
John:
But they didn't mean...
John:
get your faces set up all the way you want them on your old phone.
John:
And when you get your new phone, it'll be just like that.
John:
That's not what they meant.
John:
The way they implemented it was anything you manually did on the old phone, when you corrected that and said, that's not my mom, it's my grandma or whatever, right?
John:
That action by the user, those actions were recorded and transferred to your new phone and synced to your new phone or whatever.
John:
Everything else was not.
John:
So what would happen is it would transfer over basically like the manually entered info, which is probably pretty small because you just manually do one or two things where you got thousands of photos.
John:
Then it would rescan all of your photos and do face recognition augmented by your corrections.
John:
But the re-scanning is probably like a new version of iOS and a new code base or whatever.
John:
And who knows, it's not going, first of all, you have to do the re-scanning because that, so that takes time and energy or whatever, at least usually not that long.
John:
And second, it's probably not going to end up in the same state as your old phone because that was scanned, you know, some of those photos were scanned two versions of iOS ago, depending on, you know, how old your phone is or whatever.
John:
And here's totally different code scanning.
John:
And by the way, it's scanning with the benefit of all your manual data, whereas those were scanning with only the benefit of some of your manual data that existed at the time the scan took place.
John:
And so you end up with your new phone not being like your old phone.
John:
It's one of my frustrations with the photos on the Mac because I meticulously arrange my, you know, select my faces and everything.
John:
And on the Mac, your iPhotos library is essentially a folder on your Mac.
John:
I can never lose that folder because when I go to another Mac and pull up the same photo library, faces are all over the freaking place.
John:
I guess it doesn't benefit from all of my stuff.
John:
Like this is a carefully curated collection of things that have been scanned over the course of years, plus my manual corrections or whatever.
John:
So that is what they did with photos.
John:
What might they do with AI?
John:
There's no technical reason for both photos or AI that they couldn't take your complete semantic index or whatever they're calling it and transfer it wholesale to your new phone.
John:
uh they could do it through the cloud because they have end-to-end encrypted things in the cloud where apple would have no access and there was information but it would go up to the cloud in a way that apple has no access to it because it's end-to-end encrypted not like your iCloud messages backup where they can read it all or whatever but like totally encrypted and pull it down to your phone it could be device device transfer where it never touches any apple server but it goes directly from your phone to your other phone they could do that but i kind of understand why they don't want to
John:
Well, for multiple reasons.
John:
One is that I think the amount of manual information in the vein of like, oh, I'm correcting the face in this picture for AI is going to be small.
John:
People like this question envisions like, oh, I've got this AI on my phone and I've trained it up to really know me or whatever.
John:
You haven't trained it up.
John:
You're not retraining any models here, right?
John:
Basically, all you did was threw your data in it and let it chew it up.
John:
If you allow it to chew up that same data on your new phone, it should more or less come to the same result or maybe better because it's a new version of the model or whatever.
John:
But it's not as if you are retraining the model, so to speak, and it's somehow the model is getting smarter and learning you or whatever.
John:
You are just feeding it more data into that semantic index thing.
John:
And that it's reading that or whatever.
John:
That same process should be pretty much 100% repeatable on your new phone.
John:
Because again, like the LLMs and all their weights and all their numbers or whatever, you are not changing those by talking to the LLM.
John:
Those never change unless Apple releases a new model.
John:
It's only the semantic intake stuff that's there.
John:
And how did that index get formed?
John:
It got formed without your intervention.
John:
It got formed when you were sleeping and your phone was plugged in and it was scanning all your data.
John:
So as long as that data is over there, the semantic index will be over there.
John:
So I kind of understand why Apple wouldn't copy it.
John:
And also, like I said, if they make improvements to that, you want to do the scanning with the new improved system rather than taking the scan that was made with the one year old system and transferring it to your new phone.
John:
So that's how I guess this is going to work.
John:
Again, we don't know for sure.
John:
Apple intelligence hasn't even shipped, let alone had anyone transfer from one phone to another.
John:
But I don't, let's put it this way.
John:
I think it'll be better than photos because I think photos, there is actual work that you're doing and like a presentation of all the faces that you don't get reproduced.
John:
I think with Apple intelligence, whatever happens on your old phone, when you set up a new phone, it should all be reproduced because I think there's less manual stuff.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsor this week, Trade Coffee.
Marco:
Thanks also to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
One of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime, a bonus topic every week.
Marco:
This week's Overtime, we'll be talking about rumors of a folding all-screen MacBook.
Marco:
which is, I think, very interesting.
Marco:
So we'll be talking about that.
Marco:
So that's this week's ATP Overtime.
Marco:
If you want to hear us talk about unfolding all screen MacBook this weekend, new topics every weekend over time, plus other membership bonuses, go to atp.fm slash join to join up and support us that way.
Marco:
Thank you so much to everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-
Marco:
I have a brief life update I am happy to share with everyone.
John:
Oh, you're doubling your RAM?
Casey:
Yeah, I'm doubling my RAM.
Casey:
Actually, I'm doubling my 5G because as of a few hours ago, I am even more vaccinated than I was before.
John:
What?
John:
He's got his new COVID vaccine.
John:
He's got his new COVID vaccine, is what he's saying.
John:
I need to get that, too.
Casey:
Yes.
John:
Oh.
John:
Yes.
John:
Yes, indeed.
John:
Did you get a flu shot at the same time?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
In my personal opinion, October is the right time for a flu shot based on no science, no medicine, just an opinion.
John:
I mean, there is science, but, like, there is science about the timing.
John:
It's of any of these shots because your immunity is strongest, I think, like, the first, you know,
John:
right after you get the shot your immunity is the strongest and it does fade over time so there's a strategy that says wait until you're farther into like cold and flu season to get your flu shot same thing with covid but the thing is especially with covid you get covid tomorrow so yeah it's going to be worse in the winter but if you get it tomorrow waiting was the wrong move but if you don't get it tomorrow waiting was the right you know what i mean so and flu i think is more has more of a seasonal bump to it so you can probably game that a little bit better but like i just know so many people have gotten covid lately like the summer has been
John:
a pretty big surge and it's out there and it's waiting for you to get it and so i'm gonna get the covid shot immediately i'm also gonna get the flu shot immediately because i don't even bother timing that and i just don't want to have to go back and forth you know what i mean uh to get multiple shots but uh yeah recommended when you're in there getting your covid shot get your flu shot and if you want to wait and take the risk feel free but if you get covid before the shot that sucks because you get covid and it also sucks because you can't get the shot until you've been over covid for some amount of time too so not great
Casey:
Yeah, I am stunned that we didn't bring it home from Europe.
Casey:
And I feel like our time is ticking because it appears from what the kids are telling us that like half of their elementary school is out for multiple days at a time.
Casey:
And then occasionally some of them will come back with masks on.
Casey:
And so you put two and two together and you know exactly what's going on.
Casey:
It's only a matter of time.
Casey:
So here's hoping that I dodge it at least long enough to get through the podcast-a-thon.
Casey:
And then if I come down with it after that, so be it.
John:
And COVID was out there in Europe with you.
John:
A bunch of people who were there got it.
John:
A bunch of people were there with it and got it while they were there or brought it back.
John:
And, you know, you just dodged it.
Marco:
Oh, it's like all summer.
Marco:
It's been everywhere.
Marco:
Like we got it in my family.
Marco:
We got it in May.
Marco:
And it's been, like, everyone has it around here all summer long.
Marco:
I just talked to one of my friends here today, just coming off of it, like, from the last nine days.
Marco:
Like, it's everywhere.
Marco:
Like, you know, we like to think that we're, like, past the era of COVID.
Marco:
Not only are we so not past it, and not only are we probably never going to be past it, but the only things that are really different now is that...
Marco:
For most people, it is less severe to get it now than it used to be because we have some experience with it in our bodies now.
Marco:
But it's still very widespread and still causing problems for a lot of people.
Marco:
And so it's just everywhere.
Marco:
So yeah, definitely get your vaccines.
Marco:
Yeah, they're not perfect.
Marco:
They're also a lot better than nothing.
Marco:
So get your vaccines.
Marco:
It's not a big deal.
Marco:
Just please, for the love of God, do what you can to help.
John:
Yeah, even if you read a story, it's like, oh, the vaccine is for a strain that's not even circulating.
John:
That's true.
John:
But like the vaccines, you know, even if they don't stop you from getting it, they make the symptoms more mild.
John:
And that's what you want.
John:
Like you want every bit of help you can get, even if it helps just a little, even if it makes you like a little bit less.
John:
Because there is still the possibility that you're going to have a bad experience or get long COVID.
John:
Like that is still happening to people.
John:
Like we benefit from, quote unquote, benefit from the fact that a lot of the people that COVID was going to kill, it has killed like millions.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Right.
John:
So those people are dead.
John:
And, you know, and the people who are still here are the people who didn't die or didn't catch it.
John:
And we all have lots of vaccines.
John:
And that makes the symptoms less severe.
John:
But, yeah, it's just not not a thing that you want.
John:
Same thing with the flu shot.
John:
Do they guess right on the strain or whatever?
John:
It's just like every little bit helps.
John:
Right.
John:
And, you know, the studies say it does help.
John:
It does help if you've gotten vaccinated.
John:
It does help if you've gotten vaccinated recently.
John:
And it does help if you've gotten vaccinated recently with the strain that isn't.
John:
somewhat close to the one that's currently circulating so just do it yeah that's highly recommended and same thing with flu shot and any other vaccines that you might be overdue for when you visit your doctor yeah I mean honestly like one of the I wouldn't necessarily it's hard to say like upsides but you know a silver lining of all of this is that
Marco:
It seems like in recent years, as part of the covid vaccines ramping up, it seems like getting almost any vaccine has gotten a lot easier because like the like, you know, major drugstore chains now have not only, you know, they they had flu before, but not in, I think, the numbers they have now.
Marco:
And most people weren't thinking to go and get it as much as they are now, especially younger people.
Marco:
Now you can go to any drugstore in the U.S.
Marco:
at almost any time you want and get a COVID shot.
Marco:
You can get a flu shot.
Marco:
You can get other commonly needed shots like HPV that a lot of people should be getting.
Marco:
It's so easy now to get access to so many vaccines that are just in drugstores, widely available for little to no money.
Marco:
To have built up all that infrastructure now is quite an upside.
John:
And if you have a primary care doctor and you do annual visits, that's also a great time to do it.
John:
Time your annual visit for right before flu season.
John:
You will get a flu shot when you go into the office.
John:
They'll have it there.
John:
It'll just make sure it's out by the time you go and get all your vaccinations.
John:
It's very convenient.