Buy Your Car an iPhone
I have a ridiculous product category that I would like to briefly review.
This is going to be interesting.
Carry on.
Do you remember a few, maybe six months ago, it was a while ago.
I remember exactly what it was.
It was when the new iPhones came out.
Remember they ran a little warm and we were discussing briefly how isn't it annoying when you first get a new iPhone and it has to like re-index everything as it's being all set up and everything.
It's indexing all your photos and it gets really hot and maybe like slows down and throttles its performance as a result.
and we jokingly discovered that razer the gaming pc company um they make a like magnetic clip on like a mag safe mounting cooling fan with a thermoelectric element slash peltier however you pronounce those with with one of those in it to to help cool phones while gaming are you about to pull a casey what does that mean talk about something that we've talked about in past episodes already
Oh, well, fair.
That is 100% pulling a case.
Let's see.
Let's see.
Let's sit back and watch.
He just said what we spoke about in the past, though.
He's clear.
He's acknowledged it.
Go ahead.
And also, well, I thought, I have to try this.
Why?
Wait, wait, wait.
Slow down.
Why?
Why do you need to cool your phone?
About once a year, I need that because when I'm setting up a new iPhone, it's really kind of terrible.
So I thought, you know what?
What the heck?
Let me try it.
I can talk about it on this show.
I placed an order on Amazon shortly after we recorded that episode.
It was backordered immediately and just has never arrived.
It never will arrive at this point.
In the intervening times, random Amazon sellers with those vowel combination names that, you know, they last about six months before they disappear and make new vowel combination names.
They have come up with entries in this product category.
And at the same time, I've been facing a problem as I am using my iPhone 15 Pro on the dashboard of my car, like in the dash mount on road trips.
As it's getting warmer...
It's starting to become a problem that my phone is really getting like quite hot in the car while being used this way.
Why don't you use CarPlay?
Mm-hmm.
You should.
You definitely should use CarPlay.
I'm going to say that every time you bring this.
You should.
So anyway, so I, and it's getting so hot that, you know, like the screen starts dimming and the battery can't keep up with the charge and everything.
So I'm like, I'm like, this is kind of annoying.
It's also probably not good for the phone, for its battery life and et cetera, and for its components to be like super hot for hours on end as I'm doing like a long road trip.
Sure.
You should buy your car on an iPhone.
Remember when you bought your car a watch?
Just a iPhone that's just for the car.
Anyway, so I ordered two product entrants in this category.
One is just like basically a direct copy of the Razer thing.
So it's just a fan with a thermoelectric plate in it to chill below ambient temperature.
And it just has a USB-C input and it mounts via MagSafe.
So it doesn't charge the phone.
I was a little wary, like, you know, because the way thermoelectric plates work, it's incredibly power consuming.
It's nothing like a heat pump, like an air conditioner where like you can get pretty cool temperatures that are not that much energy.
No, like those Peltier plates use a ton of power to make a little bit of cooling.
And so I thought, how much could I possibly get out of like a USB powered fan for 30 bucks on Amazon?
Like how cool could it possibly get?
Let me tell you, surprisingly cool.
It's cool to the touch immediately upon plugging it in, and it actually cools the phone pretty well.
That being said, the one that just mounts to the back and just like a standalone thing, it's not really made to be used in a car.
What I wanted for the car was a MagSafe charging puck on some kind of mount that could stick to the dash in some way that also had cooling built in.
Does this actually exist?
I'm assuming you're about to tell me it does.
Of course it exists because of Amazon.
So not only does it exist, there's like 25 of them, all again from these weird no-name brands.
So of course, I got two of them to try.
Cause like I had to know what would fit my car.
There's not a lot of options that will, that have like a stick on mount.
Usually they require like the vent mounting, which the placement of the vents in Rivians, it's like, it's only down low.
So there's not really anywhere to put something like that.
Anyway.
So I tried one of these and I actually took my last road trip with, I went upstate about a week ago and it worked fantastically.
So let me, let me just set expectations accordingly.
Okay.
That version of it that has like charging and a cooler in it, the phone does not get cool.
It is not strong enough.
It just can't keep up.
That's a huge thermal load.
It does not keep up.
It does not keep the phone cool.
However, it does keep the phone a lot less warm.
And so it keeps it from overheating.
It keeps the screen from dimming.
It keeps it very slowly charging.
And so it actually does serve a pretty useful function here.
Like in the summertime, when my phone was getting so hot in like regular car rides, it was like hot to the touch.
It actually works.
So this ridiculous thing in my car that was from some no-name brand that has a thermoelectric plate and a cooling fan behind my phone and MagSafe charges it actually works and is totally worth the whatever $35 or $40 it was.
So I got to say, if you have this problem,
Check out this category of products.
You don't think it would work.
It shouldn't work.
And yet it does work.
Yeah, you already mentioned this, like the Rivian vents are down low or whatever.
But the regular car version of this, like in my cars, where my mag safe, my charging mag safe magnetic mount is clipped to an air vent.
I'm just trying the AC on and it blows AC air on the back of my phone the whole time I'm driving and my phone gets cold, literally cold.
Yeah, I mean, that is the better approach if you have that option.
I mean, it's not, I don't know if that's an, it's not intentional.
I don't actually like it that it's blowing air on it because in the winter it blows hot air.
But, you know, the fact is my phone doesn't overheat.
can you put a link to this certainly in the show notes can you share it with us so i can laugh at how ridiculous this is oh yeah it's bad i mean because it's it's hideous i mean here let me show you so you said like the rivian vents like you can't clip anything to them they're just too they're too weird like weird electric car type vents and they're down too low they are weird electric car events but yeah the bigger problem is that they're they're mounted down like at the bottom of the dashboard it's actually it's not a great place for them even just to be vents although hops loves them all right so i just put a link uh in the chat
it's like a big tongue it's like a big tongue licking an ice hockey puck so i have that i mean i'm using that uh mount with this second one that with this charging pad because this one was a little bit it had a little bit stronger um cooling i love the artwork makes it look like it's going to make frost form on your phone which i think would not be good
truth truthfully it's not as bad as i thought but uh it's not great no i mean it look it's ugly but you don't see and one thing i was surprised by the fan really is not loud like you don't you really don't hear the fan in a car cars are loud like it's going to be drowned out by not his yeah electric cars aren't i was i was actually concerned about that just like the wind noise and tire noise alone
Yeah, I mean, the tire noise, yeah, for sure.
Like, you do hear that.
But I was very pleasantly surprised that it actually is really not too loud.
And this one, if you just want a cooler, not a charger, this is the other one that actually cools it substantially better.
They're all kind of limited by how much power they're going to draw from USB.
I have one of those little USB power meter things.
The one, the Lysen one, that one draws the most.
That's about 20 watts while charging a phone and cooling.
That seems to be the max.
Everyone else is around like 12 to 15 watts.
So they could theoretically use USB power delivery to have even higher rates.
But for some reason, they don't do that.
And I haven't looked into that further.
But I haven't found one that does for whatever reason.
But look, these are fine.
They work fine.
And look, this is ridiculous.
You shouldn't need to do this.
Our phones shouldn't be overheating when just operating in a car.
But they do.
And here we are.
Well, I don't know if you can blame it on the phone.
I mean, I would blame it on the carmaker for making you use your phone in that way.
But like, because the car is like, you know, even when you're driving, I know it's like air conditioner or whatever, but it's like in direct sunlight, right?
That's pretty much.
And it's like a little greenhouse.
It's a difficult situation.
Yeah, and I'm using wireless charging, which of course generates some heat.
And I have a case around the phone, which of course also basically insulates the heat on the inside.
So there's a lot of factors working against it, but it is kind of a ridiculous problem.
But a ridiculous problem deserves a ridiculous solution, and I found one.
All right, let's do some follow-up.
Psywazam or something like that wrote with regard to the Snapdragon X10, whatever this is, trillions of operations per second.
And that person wrote, while 40 tops is the minimum spec for something to be called a Copilot Plus PC, all Snapdragon X Elite and Plus chips are actually rated at 45 trillion operations per second.
Apologize for underselling the Snapdragon X, 45 tops.
Excellent.
I am glad to hear it.
Justin Long has come back around.
I don't know.
I actually really liked him when he was very popular like 15 years ago.
But he is the actor that you would know as the Mac to the foil of John Hodgman's PC.
And he came back to promote...
uh qualcomm powered windows pcs i i don't i don't even know what to make of this but the verge writes apple's former on the mac actor justin long defected to intel a few years ago and now he's looking to switch to a qualcomm powered windows pc during qualcomm's computex 2024 keynote today long appeared in a brief 30 second skit where he was bombarded by mac os notifications and nag screens causing him to start searching for a snapdragon powered pc instead cool
I'll put a link to Gruber's post about this, which covers pretty much everything I wanted to say about it.
But yeah, the main thing that's really baffling is like, okay, so, you know, you get the actor that was in an Apple ad campaign, you try to ride an Apple's coattails, you do a thing.
Intel has done it before.
Apparently he's done this for Huawei as well.
whatever but like you have to have some motivation for the person in the ad to be saying i'm dissatisfied with apple so i'm gonna get a copilot plus pc or whatever right but the reason he's dissatisfied is he gets notifications like the email has arrived and stuff i mean you can turn off notifications like they should have asked an actual mac user what's annoying about mac os we can tell you
Like there are things you could put in the ad that are legit, but what they had in the ad was like, why does this make him want a new computer?
It is just not a sensible ad.
And it shows like real, just not again, just ask anyone who has a Mac.
They'll tell you what's annoying about Mac OS.
For example, like the, I think that people have done ads on this, all the stupid permission things.
that pop up that we've been complaining about for ages.
Jason Snell had a big post about when he had to set up a new computer.
That's actually annoying.
Show those flying in his face and saying, boy, I just tried to set up a new computer and I had to give a million different permissions to a million different apps.
I'm going to get a Snapdragon X Copilot plus PC because then I won't have to deal with that.
I don't know if that's actually true, but that would be a sensible ad showing an actual pain point, but this failed to do that.
Anyway, I'm glad he's getting paid to do ads and it is really just a...
It's not, I don't know, an embarrassing move to be trying to play off of a now very old Apple ad campaign rather than making your own ad campaign.
But, you know, advertising is what it is.
All right.
So Windows Recall.
Everyone seemed to be really worked up about how this was going to be a security nightmare.
And I'll actually admit that I assumed that, no, Microsoft knows what they're doing.
This surely can't be as bad as everyone fears.
Well, it's as bad as everyone fears, if not worse.
Yeah.
Recall is part of the new Copilot Plus PCs that are debuting on June 18th, but experts who have tested the feature are already warning that Recall could be a quote-unquote disaster for cybersecurity.
Kevin Beaumont writes, stealing everything you've ever typed or viewed on your own Windows PC is now possible with two lines of code.
cool kevin's post has a big like uh you know mock q a about the way it's implemented so as we said in the last show that or maybe it was a show before that the people who are have not sort of mentally prepared for the idea of a feature like this by you know knowing about rewind or live streams or whatever it's just blowing their mind that something's going to be recording their screen all the time and it seems really terrible and they don't want it um and now that people see
the actual implementation, yes, the implementation does have problems.
But a lot of the freaking out about it is about sort of policy decisions.
So one of them is that it's on by default.
And apparently during like the setup process for a new PC, you can't opt out during the setup process.
You have to finish the setup process and then go in settings and turn it off, right?
So you can turn it off, but it's on by default and you have to hunt down the thing to do it, which is mind boggling.
Everyone has like all the enterprise admins for Windows PC, you know, enterprise IT people are already paranoid.
They're, I'm sure they're slamming Microsoft saying we need a way to turn this off by default because we don't want everything recorded on our computers because during legal discovery, during lawsuits, we don't want to give a lot of information, all that stuff.
And then as you alluded to Casey, there's the, okay, but how is actually implemented?
Some aspects of it are unavoidable.
If you are recording everything that's on the screen and those recordings are accessible to the logged in user, then those recordings are accessible to the logged in user.
You know what I mean?
Like people want it to be recorded, but they're like, yeah, but I don't want bad people to see it.
Well, guess what?
Bad people can gain access to your account as you.
And then if you can see it, they can see it.
So the mere existence of a treasure trove of recordings of everything you've done is in itself a security problem, no matter how quote unquote secure it is.
There's no way you can make it so secure that it can't be hacked because then the user wouldn't be able to see it either.
Like for it to be useful, you have to be able to go back in time and look at stuff.
If you take away that ability, you can make it real secure.
it's not a very useful feature right so that i think is just that's never going to be fixed it's just people are just going to have to live with it and deal with it and be fine but the second part is okay but you should at least make it so that other people can't see it easily like it should be encrypted on disk and stuff like that and they didn't even do that it's like a plain unencrypted sqlite database
that's accessible to of course the login user apparently it's also accessible to any admin user on the system it's just a plain text file like they didn't even encrypt it at rest so implementation of this does not look great and turning it on by default does not seem great and it's basically giving the copilot plus pcs kind of a marketing black eye before they have a chance to impress people with all the good things about them you know what i mean
like this is not the fault of the snapdragon x processor this is not the fault of the hardware it's the fault of windows including this feature and turning it on by default and apparently implementing it poorly so i don't know microsoft they've got a lot of work but by the time you hear this episode presumably microsoft will have issued an apology and said they're not going to have it on by default and yada yada but right now things don't look good
Yeah, I mean, I assume they will have it off by default before it's released because there's way too many problems.
We talked about all this when Rewind AI came out, whenever we talked about that like months ago, and then again on our overtime a couple weeks ago.
As you said, there's really no good way to have this data be like, you know, quote, only accessible to good reasons or good people or whatever.
I think the ultimately like as long as this data is being collected somewhere on your computer or on some service like whatever it is like even even if you have it all local all encrypted it's still being collected and there will be ways to exploit that people will find security holes malware will try to access it some malware will succeed in accessing it.
There are also things like legal discovery risks and things like that, too.
You know, that will make a lot of companies not want to do it.
And just plain old social engineering, because, again, the user can access it.
So if you can convince the user to do something like that, most of hacking and malware is based on tricking people into doing something.
Right.
And there's there's again, there's no way to collect this and have it be totally safe.
If the user has access to it, the user is the weakest link.
Yeah, and there are so many practical and privacy concerns and just legal concerns with this.
How are they getting around things like wiretapping laws?
There's so many problems with these kind of approaches.
I think it's interesting that these tools exist.
They make for fantastic demos, and some people will use them and will love them.
It is so far from being appropriate to be on by default.
It is nowhere near that universally good that it should be on by default.
This should be something that it's fine for companies like Rewind to have products that do this.
It's interesting that Microsoft's doing it at the OS level now.
It's wonderful to have it as an option for those power productivity users who know about it, who know exactly what it's doing, and who will opt into it.
It has to be only for them, though.
It cannot be everyone opted in by default.
That is just irresponsible.
Yeah.
Not good, Bob, but here we are.
AMD's next generation of AI laptop processors have been announced.
Reading from The Verge, AMD announced at Computex 2024 that its next generation of Ryzen laptop processors for generative AI workloads...
The Ryzen AI 300 series.
It's a rebrand of its top-tier Ryzen 9 chips.
The new Ryzen AI chips are built on AMD's latest architectures for neural, integrated graphics, and general processing.
The first two processors in the series are the Ryzen AI 9HX370, just rolls right off the tongue, and the similarly eloquent Ryzen AI 9365.
Both have 50 trillion operations per second on their NPUs, but the HX variant is the higher end of the two.
You know that because it says HX.
so we mentioned uh last episode or whenever we talked about the copilot plus pcs that uh amd you know and intel also have processors that they're going to be rolling out that are going to qualify as copilot plus pcs it's not just an arm thing so they're behind but they're catching up and look there's ai right in the processor name i'm sure they'll never regret that branding and it won't look dated when we look back on it but 50 tops hey better than 45 right so good job amd
Hooray.
All right.
Intel has also detailed its new Lunar Lake CPUs that will go up against the aforementioned AMD, Qualcomm, and Apple.
Reading this time from Ars Technica, Lunar Lake will be Intel's first processor with a neural processing unit or NPU that meets Microsoft's Copilot Plus PC requirements.
Intel rates Lunar Lake's NPU raw performance at 48 tops.
Lunar Lake has two functional tiles.
The compute tile combines all of the processor's performance and efficiency cores, the GPU, the NPU, the display outputs, and the media encoding and decoding engine.
And the platform controller tile handles wired and wireless connectivity, including PCIe and USB, Thunderbolt 4, and Wi-Fi 7, and Bluetooth 5.4.
Another big packaging change is that Intel is integrating RAM into the CPU package.
Well, just like Apple.
Yeah.
So does this sound familiar?
This is, you know, the Apple sort of led the charge here in the mass market PC, in the market for mass market PCs, right?
They made their system on a chip.
It's got the RAM in the same package.
It's got the whole thing in a giant SoC.
Here's Intel finally catching up with that philosophy.
I think the AMD one is similar with the chiplet type thing, but...
I really feel like this is Apple leading.
And people are going to say, well, Apple isn't the first one to do that.
Lots of people have done it before, so on and so forth.
But Apple showed that it can perform very well in personal computers that they sell millions of to regular people.
Put it all on one chip.
Put the GPU on there.
Put the neural processing, the media encoder engine, everything.
And so here's Intel basically many years later saying, let's do that.
Now they have things separated.
I think we've talked about this before.
I think they're using like different processes for different parts of the chip.
I think the like the the connectivity thing is not built on the same.
Three nanometer processor whatever I think they might I forget what the details are if they're using TSMC to fab this or whatever but so taking a slightly different approach to Apple because Apple can afford to just put it on all one thing which is has some Efficiency benefits, but of course it is also more costly, but it's really kind of weird to see the PC world
essentially following apple's lead and deciding you know what that thing apple decided to do with the m1 we should make all our pcs like that too snapdragon amd intel or all seem to be moving in that direction at least for like the low end and medium end laptop type things when it comes to big desktop pc and gaming pcs they still have just giant discrete gpus that use a ton of power and giant chips that aren't socs so in that respect they're not following apple down that path but
Boy, if I had predicted that when the M1 came out that by the time Apple has the M4, Intel, AMD, and the ARM things would be following, I feel like that's unexpected.
I would have been more likely to think, oh, maybe the whole PC world will go ARM as discussed in the past episode.
It doesn't look like they're all going ARM, especially since the Copilot Plus PC thing isn't firing off like gangbusters.
But I'm still holding out hope.
And anyway, in the meantime, Intel and AMD are in the game too.
speaking of apple and m chips uh apple says the m2 ipad air no it doesn't have 10 uh gpu cores we actually meant nine cool cool we're cool right uh reading from mac rumors apple is seemingly updated its tech specs web page for the latest m2 ipad air models to indicate the m2 chip has a nine core gpu rather than 10 cores as previously stated
The change was first reported by a 9to5Mac.
Based on available web snapshots, the update to Apple's U.S.
website was made within the last 10 days.
This was written two days ago as we record.
However, the equivalent webpage on many of Apple's regional stores still lists the M.2 iPad Air as having a 10-core GPU.
Eventually, a statement was provided to 9to5Mac, and Apple said that the details it shared with the iPad Air's performance were always based on a 9-core GPU.
So Apple said, and I'm quoting, "...we are updating Apple.com to correct the core count for the M2 iPad Air.
All the performance claims for the M2 iPad Air are accurate and based on a 9-core GPU."
Whoopsie-dupsies.
What a weird flub.
Like, I mean, it doesn't even seem like it's a last-minute decision.
This is something that had to have been decided long ago, but, like, maybe there was a miscommunication.
Like, they decided to go with the 9-core instead of the 10-core to save money on the iPad Air, and just the web team didn't hear about it, even though that decision was made four months ago.
Like, it's not like they started manufacturing the iPad Air on the day of the announcement or something.
Very strange.
Not a big deal for the iPad Air.
That's fine.
But I don't know what's going on over there.
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Let's talk about LLMs and how they can learn.
Adeco writes, there's some quote-unquote new tech that aims to enable LLMs to learn in context in production, avoiding limitations of relying solely on RAG, or Retrieval Augmented Generation.
While promising, this approach is significantly more expensive.
Here's a paper explaining, and we'll put it in the show notes, the methodology from earlier this year, and a video discussing the current limitations you mentioned on the episode, and a potential solution that is clearly explained.
So we'll put all three of these links in the show notes.
John, care to summarize and or dissect for us?
Yeah, so there's one video that says, what is RAG?
What is retrieval augmented generation?
And my summary of it would be you take what the person typed into their chatbot and you stick a bunch of text in front of it.
Right.
Right.
It's taking more than what you said, but trying to augment it with some context.
Okay, LLM, maybe you weren't trained on any data about cars, but I'm going to pull the latest up-to-date information about the car they mentioned in their prompt, and I'm going to put that in front of their prompt, and then I'm going to shove all that text, their question, plus all the text I grabbed about the latest cars, and I'm going to chuck that into the LLM because the LLMs are like,
Oh, I don't know anything after 2021, right?
Like the old versions of chat DPT would say that because they were trained on older data.
Well, what if someone's asking about something that's more recent that the LM could not have been trained on, or maybe just wasn't trained on because it's really narrow interest.
That's what rag is, right?
But of course that has lots of limitations.
We'll put the second video says, what are the limitations of rag?
And you learn all about that.
And then the final thing is continual learning for large language models of the, the, the paper, um,
The scientific paper will link.
And this is the thing from the abstract.
It says large language models are not amenable to frequent retraining due to high training costs arising from their massive scale.
However, updates are necessary to endow LLMs with new skills and keep them up to date with rapidly evolving human knowledge.
This paper surveys recent work on continual learning for LLMs, right?
So the idea is, you know, we said before, when you throw things through an LLM, the weights, the little numbers inside the LLM don't change, right?
They take input, they produce output, but the inside of that LLM never changes.
So you can't teach it anything.
All you can do is make your prompt bigger and bigger and hope that the information in your prompt influences the answer.
And it does influence the answer, but not as much as training the LLM on a whole bunch of that information.
Anyway, so that's RAG.
Right.
So then Stephen Tierney writes that Sundar Pichai's infinite context window claim from Google I.O.
seems to stem from this paper, which is entitled Leave No Context Behind, Efficient Infinite Context Transformers with Infinite Attention.
This work introduces an efficient method to scale transformer-based large language models to infinitely long inputs with bounded memory and computation.
A key component in our proposed approach is
is a new attention technique that incorporates a compressive memory into the vanilla attention mechanism.
The attention mechanism in transformers exhibits quadratic complexity in both memory footprint and computation time.
Compressive memory systems promise to be more scalable and efficient for extremely long sequences.
Instead of using an array that grows with the input sequence length, a compressive memory primarily maintains a fixed number of parameters to store and recall information with a bounded storage and computation cost.
In the compressive memory, new information is added to the memory by changing its parameters with an objective that this information can be recovered back later on.
John, translate that for me, please.
So the scaling thing for people who ever took computer science class with big O notation is like, how does this algorithm scale scale with the size of the input?
For example, linear scaling would be if you asked me to process 20 of these things, I take twice as long as if you asked me to process 10.
That's linear scaling.
You can have other kinds of scaling where it scales to the square of the input, and that's worse.
And quadratic, that's what they're getting at there.
The point is, if you make longer and longer inputs to the LLM,
it just the time goes like a hockey stick graphic it's really really bad it doesn't even scale linearly and even linear would be bad because sandar pichai was saying you're gonna have infinite context we have a limitation now of like two million tokens and that's pretty good you can put a large wad of text through our llm pretty big right but you can't like i was mentioning like the infinite context open the door to the idea of like can you actually teach an llm well if your context is infinite you
you can just keep typing stuff until the LLM gets it.
No LLM.
Let me tell you more about this thing.
And let me tell you more.
Like essentially you're not training it.
You're not changing the weights, but it's like anytime I type anything, you know, the last billion characters I've written to it over the past five years get sent through the LLM plus the question I just asked stuck at the end.
And that's, as you can imagine, incredibly inefficient because of the way it scales.
So this infinite context thing is like, well, we're not going to do that.
Instead, we're going to use this thing where we kind of like, we try to do with a fixed amount of memory and computation.
I don't understand how they're doing it, but it's like, I feel like they have some sort of block that the input goes into and then it modifies the values in that block.
And it just keeps doing that over and over again.
And finally it gets the final block and sends that through the LLM after it's been modified by all the input.
But it's much less compelling.
Like many people who wrote in about this is like, yeah, it's not really infinite context.
It's more like,
taking an infinite amount of input and squishing it down to a small finite size and sending that through the llm and hoping you've preserved enough information to get a useful answer out of it and by the way the other thing the um the previous link about the continual learning is that some people are looking into the idea of what if we did change the weights when you sent a question or something through if you talk to an llm and you try to tell it something can we retrain based on what you put in and change the weights of the model
and that's an area of research or whatever, and as I mentioned, we talked about this earlier, that opens the door for people to screw up the LMs and make them terrible, right?
You could tell it a whole bunch of bogus stuff, and now your LM just gets dumber and worse and tells more lies, right?
It's like children, right?
You can teach them whatever you want, right?
You hope you teach them good things and teach them how to read and write and, you know, do math correctly and be a nice, polite person or whatever, and what you will get out of all that effort is hopefully a, you know,
uh a good adult right but if you are terrible to them and do terrible things and tell them lies you the results will be worse right so the ability of as you can imagine if you allowed anyone on the internet to type anything they want that would actually change your llm that would be bad instantly
We already saw that with the non-trainable elements.
Remember when Microsoft put their chatbot up and it was like spewing Nazi stuff?
That's just because it's trained on the internet and it's filled with all sorts of terrible things.
So they're trying to tamp that down.
But this would be like, no, it will be retrained based on the things you tell it.
nightmare fuel but of course if you had your own independent lm and you were sensible then you could mess up yours and other people would have their own and they could mess up theirs and you know it's it's an interesting idea but the infinite contact window was like no the lm doesn't change until we release a new version the weights are unchangeable but we'll allow you to type an infinite amount of information in your prompt and maybe let them make it do something sensible
None of these approaches seem super great to me, but I'm glad people are trying to figure out how to get around the current limitations, because the current limitations are crippling for some use cases.
Like, they just basically make it impossible to do certain things reliably.
It doesn't mean they're not useful.
They're useful for other things, but certain use cases, it becomes...
completely useless.
So I will look forward to this research advancing.
But when it's appearing in scientific papers and stuff, it makes me think it's many years from being practically implemented.
But we'll see.
All right.
As we sit here, it is the evening of Wednesday the 5th.
And in just a few short days, we will all be flying west to the greater San Jose area in order to go to WWDC, Apple's annual Worldwide Developer Conference.
As we mentioned in the last episode, all three of us will be there, barring any plane catastrophes.
And I know all three of us are super excited.
Why do you have to say that, Casey?
You know what?
You never know what will happen.
So I just mean like a delay for the record.
That's not what it sounded like.
It's not getting any better.
What?
Don't worry, we'll fix it in post.
So yeah, WWDC is coming up.
And so we should probably talk about what to expect.
And honestly, I'm very surprised, well, maybe not surprised, but impressed with the lack of concrete leaks.
And let me go through a few things here, unless one of you has an opening statement.
Let me go through a few things that we haven't really talked about that we can use as jumping off points.
But by and large, I feel like it's pretty well under lock and key, what we're going to see on Monday.
Wonderful.
Why do you think that?
It's just because the things we've talked about have been rumored.
I believe most of the things will come to pass, and I think that's what they're going to show.
But we'll see.
We'll go through the items we have here.
Again, we've talked about a lot of things on past episodes that have been rumored for WWDC, and I don't think many of them have been debunked.
They're just sitting out there for us waiting to see if they're true or not.
Yeah.
So we'll start.
Mark Ehrman has said, read my lips, no new hardware.
And so there's apparently not going to be any hardware this year, which I don't think is particularly surprising.
But Mark has stated it is definitely not happening.
Yeah, that sometimes happens.
We have the no hardware WWDC.
Sometimes Apple itself kind of leaks it to control expectations.
In this case, I don't think there were any particular expectations that Apple needed to leak to tamp down.
Other than my unrealistic expectations about the Mac Pro and the Mac Studio, but there's cold water on that.
My expectations about Siri not sucking?
Yeah, but no hardware.
No hardware, WWDC.
We just had a bunch of hardware.
The only hardware that Apple should be updating right now are the ones they apparently can't update because the chips aren't ready, and that would be the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro.
I mean, you know, he was pretty definitive.
And when he comes out this close to WWC and says no hardware, I just have to accept there's going to be no hardware.
So I'm sad about it, but perhaps not surprising.
You know, let me jump in and go a little off script here.
Do you think, John, that this is the year that the forthcoming macOS release, whatever it may be called, do you think that's the year that they start really hammering down or, you know, like taking away stuff for Intel?
Because you aren't missing out on much on your ancient-ass Mac Pro, right?
Yeah.
performance well done marco yeah but didn't we talk about this like what year we thought the yeah i forget what i predicted but whatever i predicted back then i i stick by because i think that was probably a reasonable prediction uh maybe this year i don't know i feel like it's a little bit early but you know we'll see like i don't and here's half the reason i think it's not going to come this year is because that would require extra work by apple to deal with that and they're like oh mac os do we really want to put that much effort let's do it next year
Fair enough.
All right, so speaking of macOS and also iOS, allegedly, according to Mark Gurman, the settings app is getting revamped with a cleaner interface, better organization, and much improved search.
And that's both iOS and macOS, like I said.
I'll believe it when I see it insofar as I don't doubt that they've touched and maybe rejiggered some stuff in settings, but...
I am not as offended by settings as most people, but I can absolutely tell you it is a mess.
And although I haven't looked at it in a little while, I feel like they've kind of given a hint about this on the Vision Pro because the Vision Pro settings are vastly different than any other platform.
And to my recollection, they do make a modicum of sense in there.
So maybe we'll see that getting cribbed and put into iOS and macOS.
But one way or another, we're going to get something different.
Yeah, this rumor doesn't have enough detail to be that interesting, either because it's just a vague rumor and they don't have details, or because the person conveying this rumor doesn't understand what's wrong with settings.
Right.
It's revamped to get a cleaner interface.
I don't think the complaints were that the interface was not...
clean i mean i don't feel clean using it jason had a good article like look you can use hierarchy to arrange information visually and conceptually and that can find make things easier to find and just there's there's we don't want to relitigate everything that's wrong with settings but like there's no concrete things about what are they fixing they're like oh well they're just rearranging stuff some things they're putting things in different places and and the search will be better those are all good like improvements are welcome but
I haven't seen anyone say they're totally overhauling it and it's going to be good now.
It's just, it's like minor improvements.
And, you know, I guess if you do minor improvements many years repeatedly, you'll get better and better and it'll be fine.
But I'm still not jazzed about the setting up.
I mean, it's still full of bugs even.
Setting aside the design, which is, I think, still poor, I don't really necessarily need them to massively revamp the design if it's still going to be this buggy.
If they only do one thing to improve it, I'd rather they make the current design actually work correctly.
But that being said, a new design would also be welcome.
But I'm hoping, whatever this rumor is, I'm hoping that what they're really saying is it's been worked on a lot.
and maybe that will include some bug fixes also but it's still it still feels like a broken web app version of something that's trying to imitate an ios setting screen like it does not feel like anything that would ever have come from apple if you would have shown people like you know even even five or ten years ago like hey this is this is current apple software in the year 2024 they would look at it like are you serious
We're talking about macOS settings, but this rumor is actually primarily about iOS settings, which we all are familiar with and doesn't need as much attention as macOS settings, but I think they're rearranging stuff, splitting out some things that were previously combined.
iOS settings, the search has had many years of work in it, so that's how a lot of us navigate settings, because you can't remember exactly where something is, but
you know in all cases i feel like you know the general philosophy of settings in both mac os and ios is being maintained to be the same they're just like maybe we could arrange things better and i think on ios the design is reasonable on mac os they should have better information organization and hierarchy given the larger size of the screens and the more sophisticated input methods and as for the bugs we've said this before when settings was first redesigned how much of it is the settings app how much of it is swift ui bugs you know
I mean, I know it's all the same company and they can complain directly to the Swift UI people.
But when stuff like text fields like don't stay editable or lose focus when you're in the middle of typing, I worry, wonder about that.
And sometimes they're using like, quote unquote, standard controls that I think are bad standard controls.
The settings team didn't define those controls.
They're using the standard controls as part of this form thing in Swift UI.
And I think I think those controls are bad.
I think they look bad.
I think they don't work well.
But this the settings team didn't make those right.
They're just you know using the OS level control So to the extent that they're buggy I think a lot of it is probably on the frameworks teams and to the extent that those controls are bad That's all on the frameworks team like one of the things that drives me Up a wall, and I just can't believe this is not I guess it's in settings But you know the passwords pane in settings when you edit like a password
And it makes you edit text in like a right-aligned thing.
I feel like I'm writing in a right-to-left language or whatever the opposite of the way English is.
Right-to-left.
Have you done this and seen it?
It breaks my brain how like backspacing and forward spacing and moving text goes.
You're editing right-aligned text for like the password.
I don't want any surprises or unexpected behaviors when I'm editing the text of a password in plain text, right?
Yeah.
just that's not a good way to let me edit information it's name value pairs username password website don't make it right aligned in a text field that has no borders it's the same color as the background that just behaves in bizarre ways that's the stuff that really needs to be fixed and the settings team well maybe for the right aligning thing they have control over that but i'm not sure how much control the settings team has over that so
Well, but this is maybe not their fault, but it is their problem.
Yes, they were building this app on what seems to have been definitely a shaky design concept of, let's just make it look like iOS.
And that didn't go so well.
Building it on top of SwiftUI for Mac, which is not the greatest platform for SwiftUI to date so far.
But at the same time, nobody was forcing them to do this.
The SwiftUI team doesn't run the company.
So the SwiftUI team was not forcing the rest of the company to say, hey, you better rewrite all your stuff in SwiftUI right now.
And even if they were...
That's not our problem as the customers.
This is a self-created problem internally to Apple.
So what we see, we don't care what it's written in.
We don't care what team dynamics there were or what they wanted to do on a technical level to make it more idealistic.
All we see is the settings app is really weird and sucks now.
Granted, it was not in perfect shape before, but...
it's bad now and it looks like they did a whole bunch of work and came out with something that was just still very bad, just in new and different ways.
The example you gave with the typing in a right-aligned text field, so much of what I see in the settings app
feels like no one has ever used it like i feel i feel like i'm trying out some code that i just wrote for the first time and i'm running it in the simulator and i'm trying it out like oh this doesn't work okay back to the drawing board but they shipped it that way like all like it just seems like it's it's like a design concept that they showed in a meeting one day and someone hit the wrong button and shipped it
And the thing is, the reason I think they're sticking with design, it did solve a bunch of the problems they had with the old fixed layout.
The old fixed layout just wasn't scalable.
You couldn't add more stuff easily.
Everything was sort of hand-laid out, and it was hand-laid out over a decade and a half by different people, so you could sort of see one preference pane was different than another was different than another based on when it was made and who made it and what they decided to do and what mood they were in.
And this is uniform and scalable and scrollable and extensible, but
The building blocks that they use to achieve that, they're bad building blocks, right?
The individual controls, the way it scales, the way it looks, the way it works, that's all bad.
So they did solve their problem.
Hey, now we have a scalable solution for settings in macOS.
But they've brought on themselves, to your point, Marco, many new problems by using these new controls that either weren't ready or buggy or just bad ideas.
And that...
is a shame.
So we'll see.
Again, I welcome any kind of improvement, but there is no rumor that it's a complete overhaul that adds information hierarchy and visual hierarchy and restores some of the hand laid out things for the most common controls.
Because that's what they should really do.
Like the old hand laid out one, like the good ones, the nice preference panes that were hand laid out and beautiful,
They were nice and easy to use.
And you could remember what they look like.
And you could remember where controls were spatially.
And it was like being in a place in a room with furniture arranged and all my wonderful things that I love.
But it was just nice, right?
And you can't do that for every single one.
So you do need a scalable solution for more settings, right?
You got to have that and they should have a better system.
But for the most commonly used screen, like the five most commonly used setting screens, and I'm sure Apple knows what those are, hand lay them out.
Bring in an actual good UI designer who remembers what Mac user interfaces are supposed to look like.
Hell, bring someone who's ever used a web form because I can't remember any time I was asked to like update my passport on a web page and the text field was right aligned in English.
Doesn't make any sense.
Who thought of that?
Or the labels were like massively far away from the values.
Just disappointing.
It's an adventure in there, but we'll see what happens.
Vision OS 2.0.
There haven't been very many rumors about this.
Somebody pointed out, I don't have the toot in front of me, but somebody pointed out that, hey, Vision OS shipped in the middle of the software lifecycle for Apple.
And so it would not be surprising if Vision OS 2.0 was really just getting all the low-hanging fruit that didn't ship for 1.0.
But one of the things that's been rumored maybe is that some or perhaps even all of Apple's iPad apps that are running in compatibility mode on the Vision Pro, perhaps those will become real honest-to-goodness Vision Pro apps.
So things like home, calendar, podcast pages, etc.
Which I think is possible, although it would not surprise me if that was issued in favor of doing something more whiz-bang.
But we'll see.
Maybe we would be able to rearrange the home screen.
That'd be cool.
Yeah.
So if these apps, if the things that shipped as iPad apps are native, it makes me think that they were already being developed.
They just weren't ready for launch, right?
Because I don't feel like they would launch the Vision Pro and then say, okay, now all those things we had to ship as iPad apps, let's get teams on those to make them like...
Seems like they would have to be in progress already and just didn't make the deadline.
But either way, this is embarrassing when you launch a new platform and a whole bunch of your really important apps are the iPad versions.
But, you know, Apple has done that in the past, like with the iPad, not getting versions of Apple's own pro apps for...
years and years and years sometimes it takes the apple a really long time to get around to doing stuff and it was the the ipad os rumor that's going to get a calculator now it's just they just never got around to it right and so i mean if they do this at least it shows if they have if they're all if all the ipad apps are now native i think that does show some level of commitment that they realized it was embarrassing not to have that and it was just a timing thing and now they're you know fixing that but i agree with you casey that i don't expect vision os 2.0 to be
massively different there's just so many obvious things they need to fix and enhance fix bugs add minor features i i don't even expect them to have a big home screen rearranging thing if they're what they do it'll be very rudimentary because this is really just kind of like the uh you know make it what we wish 1.0 could have been if we had an extra you know six months
Yeah, because that's really all it's been.
Every year you think about these platforms going up by one whole version number and there being a certain kind of minimum amount of improvement.
But keep in mind, Vision Pro was a half-year release.
And so it really hasn't been that long since 1.0.
And from all we've heard, it seems like software was the gating factor of when it could be released, not hardware.
So it's not like they have a bunch of software work saved up for years waiting to be released.
No, it's not.
What we got so far, that's what they have so far.
And so I'm not expecting a lot of movement on the Vision Pro software side yet.
It's too soon.
And that being said, keep in mind, too, this is a very distant, forward-looking platform for them.
This is not going to be a big seller for a long time, if ever.
And so I think the level of improvement to expect for Vision West releases, even going forward, even when they have full years to do it,
I'm expecting something more like watchOS releases or tvOS releases.
I'm not expecting major new changes and major new features to be coming out every single year.
I think it's going to be a slower update pace.
I think this is a very long game they're playing with Vision Pro.
I think, honestly, I would love to see them step on the gas a lot harder, but...
What we're seeing so far shows a different strategy, but regardless, I don't expect a lot of movement on this platform every single year.
I think it's going to be a very slow burn.
You did get that immersive environment for working in Xcode with the wavy neon lines and stuff.
Oh, yeah, from the developer app.
Yeah.
I mean, that's cool.
I guess I actually haven't tried this out yet, but that's a thing, which is neat.
But yeah, I don't know.
I would love to see, even before I see a lot of software motion on Vision OS, I really would prefer to just see content more than anything else.
Like, that's what I feel like I want.
And we're just not getting it right now, which is too bad.
But, you know, it is what it is.
I will say, though, I was briefly using the Vision Pro in using the Mac virtual display mode with the developer strap on with a high-speed USB cable plugged into my Mac.
I do really like that.
I mean, I was at home, so I only needed it for a minute or two because I was working on something.
But it is pretty cool when it works, particularly when it's done via a cable, because then latency is much, much lower.
And I feel like the crispness of the display is also considerably better, which I enjoy.
But yeah, I mean, I just want content.
Give me more content because I'm not using this thing for work a whole heck of a lot.
I'm not sure anyone really is.
So I would really just love more content.
Yeah, and that would also, I think, significantly drive sales too.
That's what we need first because you're right.
It's going to be a long time before there's meaningful software on here, if ever.
So again, like Apple TV.
When we had gone to the thing in November that we can't talk about,
The one thing I was dying to talk about in the intervening months between that and release was it was very obvious to me, even from some past time, it was very obvious to me that this feels like computing on a virtual Apple TV with an infinitely sized screen.
And it does kind of physically feel like you are kind of manipulating these giant apps in your giant space with these kind of indirect mechanisms of your eyes and pinching and flinging things around and stuff like that.
And it kind of...
it felt a lot like computing on an Apple TV, but just in a much bigger way.
And obviously better in some ways, worse than others.
But for the most part, it felt like it was closer to that than using a laptop or an iPad or something like that.
And so I think...
What I would expect here is I think it's going to end up being a lot like the Apple TV as an app platform, which is most apps will not find much reason to be there.
And most users won't want to use most apps there.
But with the right content and with the right specialized apps, this could be something people use frequently.
It just needs that content to be there.
Like I never even think about making an Apple TV app, but I use my Apple TV almost every day.
What do I use on my Apple TV?
Like four apps.
But I use them almost every day.
So the Vision Pro, I think, could be there.
I think it could reach that point where people are using it for mostly content consumption and maybe occasional specialized uses or very kind of narrow productivity uses for certain people.
I see that being possible.
But I think to get there first, we need the install base to grow.
And the only thing that's really going to meaningfully grow it, I think, at this point is content.
So that's what I'm really watching for is like...
Where are the content deals?
Where's the content coming from?
How much can there be?
How quickly?
That's what will actually move these things.
And then we can talk about computing possibilities down the road.
But I tell you what, if you are traveling and want a huge-ass screen that doesn't take a whole lot of space, it is without peers.
So there are some uses, as few and far between as they may be.
Open AI.
According to Mark Gurman, Apple picked Open AI as its inaugural AI partner for a few reasons.
It got better business terms than Google was offering, and Apple believes that Open AI's technology is the best available on the market.
Apple is expected to offer its new AI features as an opt-in service, according to people familiar with the matter.
Yeah, I think everyone's expecting the AI dust to be sprinkled all over the place.
It's yet to be seen if somebody in the C-suite got a burr up their butt to put AI on everything, or if Apple does what I hope they'll do, which is take a more mature approach and ask...
Where are we actually helping?
You know, let's not do this just because we can.
Let's do it because we should.
And honestly, I think that there's far fewer places that AI should be used than where AI can be used.
And we'll see what happens.
But I'm hopeful they're going to be mature about it.
I was looking at this German article.
I'm doing the search for like the Bloomberg style guide says when you are attributing anonymous sources, you have to say the people said, right?
So you just search for the people, that string, because that'll find you the tidbits that he's saying are sourced.
My sources say this.
And everything you read there was one of those the people said things.
So I removed that text from the...
uh some of the snippets because it's awkward anyway the the reasons for picking it was they were talking to google and other partners or whatever the apple thinks that they're the best that they're the market leader and that they gave better business terms to google which kind of makes sense because open ai is younger and hungrier you know what i mean um
And the OpenAI thing is interesting because everything you said about the AI features, right?
We assume that there'll be a bunch of those like, oh, you can down do a useful thing.
And yeah, we'll say it's AI or whatever.
It's the same stuff we used to say that was ML, right?
But the chatbot style, hey, you talk to an LLM as if it's like a little person back and forth.
All the open AI rumors are like, that's what open AI would be providing, because Apple has an internal one that they're working on.
They have their own kind of LLM chatbot named Ajax or whatever, but it's not ready, and open AI's things are better, so let's do a deal with them.
But I still, like, the fact that it would be opt-in, like, what does that mean?
Does that mean that when you're setting up your computer and says, oh, and by the way, we have a partnership with open AI...
Do you want to enable feature that puts like an icon in your menu bar that you can click on that props up a text box and now you're talking to ChatGPT or something?
Like what is opting into this?
How does a chatbot fit into the OS?
We can see how all the other stuff fits in.
And like I said last week, the rumor is that
come down from on high that's telling every single team find a place to put AI into your product that's bad and that's you know kind of the worst of corporate like oh it's a buzzword let's just find a place to shoehorn this into our product but I to some degree I trust the product teams to think what can we do with AI that is useful in the notes app in pages
in the finder like i don't think any of them are going to be like i know how we can use ai on our app let's put a text box up and they'll send the message to chat gbt like they'll think of something better right it's bad that they're asking all teams to do that because maybe it doesn't make sense to some teams to add ai features but the mandate we keep seeing this rumor that the mandate came down from on high every team you better find some way to add ai because this is the ai year right but that is entirely separate from this open ai deal which is like oh you can opt in somehow in mac os or in ios to
Like on iOS, does it just install the ChatGPT app?
Like, what does this mean?
This is the thing that I'm looking for the most in this presentation, that they're going to be on stage.
They're going to say, we've partnered with OpenAI, or maybe they won't say that.
And somehow, some way, they're going to say, in our operating systems that we're shipping, there's a way for you to start talking to ChatGPT and having a little conversation in a little window somewhere.
i don't even think that's that useful feature there's already a gpt app for there's a mac one with swift ui there's a native ios one you can use it on the web like what what what is this i don't get it and this is the thing that's baffling me because as we said i think this is the highest potential for badness because it is such a non-apple non-controlled non-careful just like wild west talk to chat gpt good luck it's not our thing
right how is that a selling point how are you going to promote that as like a new feature of your operating systems non-hardware wwdc i don't think there's probably going to be a developer story unless apple is going to like pay for your api tokens and now you can write an ios or a mac app and use their framework and get free access to chat gpt because apple did some multi-million dollar deal with them or something this baffles me that's why i added this thing of the whole opt-in like what does that mean what are we opting into what are you providing
i have red flags all over this yeah i i don't know i i'm so turned off by sam altman and open ai i don't know it's it's funny the dude who we all snickered about wearing you know the two popped collar polo shirts it wasn't at wwdc like forever and a day ago a long time ago yeah
Yeah, and we all laughed and had a good, you know, laugh at his expense.
And, you know, look at this Silicon Valley bro just being the world's bro-iest bro.
And fast forward five, ten years, and it seems like, same as it ever was, nothing's ever really changed.
Like, it's, you know, move fast, break things, and have no consequences, and...
I don't know.
Like, again, we'll see what happens.
Like, I am cautiously optimistic.
And again, I like to think of Apple as generally one of the more mature and adult organizations in the valley.
I'm sure there's exceptions.
I'm sure that's not always true.
But broadly, I think that to be the case.
And I don't know, I feel, I hope, and I so desperately want Apple to be deliberate, be considered, be mature, and not just put the AI dust on everything they see.
But we'll see.
i mean i like i don't i find chat to be useful i i use in my rotation of things that i do i do i all the chat bots i do google searches like it's it's i get useful things out of it there is used to be had there but i'm doing that already like i don't need apple to add any features to mac os for me to do this i can have a free account on open ai i can have a paid one i can use google gemini i can do it on ios i can do it on mac like all of that is already there i don't think i need any kind of os integration
to make that experience better i can open a web page i can have it you know let's be honest it's already opening a tab somewhere right it's like like you know maybe it's not on my phone or whatever like i guess they could use voice thing like it integrates with siri and you talk to siri and it sends it out like i'm not saying there's no room for os integration there is
But I just this seems such an uneasy partnership.
But also because, you know, like the sources in this essentially seem to indicate some of the sources are not inside the Apple.
Sometimes they're ex-Apple people or whatever.
Like this is a stopgap.
Apple doesn't have anything ChatGP caliber.
They don't have anything Google Gemini caliber.
They want to have something like that.
They want to have a story for that for WRC.
Therefore, they have to partner.
We talked about this before.
But they are working on stuff.
Apple does have its own internal LLM.
It does have its own internal chatbot that its own employees have been using.
It's just not up to snuff yet, which makes sense because they got a late start, right?
But they're doing research in that area.
So presumably, if this turns out to be useful, Apple would want to pull a Google Maps here and say, yeah, we'll partner with this other company because they're the market leader.
But eventually, we'll roll out our own thing.
And eventually, our own thing will be
if not better than good enough.
Right.
And hopefully they'll do it better than they did with maps rollout, but you know, we'll see how it goes.
But still like I, this is what I'm looking at the most of like, what's the pitch here?
How is it integrated?
How is this presented?
If it's opt in,
Like, what does that look like?
Like, it's so weird to sort of, if this ends up being a tentpole feature and not just like an off to the side, because I can imagine just being like, oh, and by the way, we partner with them and blah, blah, blah.
And that's all they say about it.
It's like quick, right?
But if this is a tentpole feature, usually tentpole features aren't like, and we're so confident in it that it's not on by default.
It's kind of like the Windows recall thing, right?
That's a sign of something like,
We think it might be okay, but there is some danger here.
So if you just hit, you know, okay, okay, okay during setup, whatever we're doing, you won't be exposed to, right?
But if you opt into it somehow, then, you know, again, when you talk to Siri and it can't figure out the answer, instead of telling you to check the web, it'll ask ChatGPT or something.
Yeah, yeah, I don't know.
We'll see what happens.
I mean, that's all the items that we had in the show notes.
I just I really don't know what to expect.
And I am so very, very interested to see what the AI story is.
It seems that Apple's previous dedication to ML or machine learning, as we've talked about many other shows and blogs have talked about, you know, they finally embraced AI as a term.
And so we'll see what happens.
I think it's tough because, you know, Apple is a publicly held company and publicly traded company.
And, you know, I think investors and, you know, rank and file shareholders are going to expect them to have that AI dust sprinkled everywhere, you know, like a graffiti cannon of or not graffiti, a glitter cannon of.
of AI dust just shooting all over, you know, everything WWDC touches.
But I don't know that that's appropriate or reasonable.
So we'll see what happens.
And I'm just curious to see, you know, now that we've got a whole new platform, I'm so excited to see what Vision OS 2 is.
If history tells us anything, it will be disappointing.
Do you think Vision OS will have AI dust sprinkled on it at all?
Anywhere?
I'd be surprised if iPad OS even has it.
Keep in mind, again, we're still dealing with Apple's hierarchy of platform importance.
iOS is going to get all the cool stuff first.
I would be surprised if we see it anywhere else.
I think it's going to be iOS certainly first, and then maybe they'll put some of the basics into iPad and Mac.
Well, the cross-platform stuff will get it.
The whole removing people from the background of photos, that's just going to be everywhere because it's a common framework.
You know what I mean?
Yes, of course, yeah.
But in terms of features specific to, say, the Vision Pro or the Watch, I would be surprised to see anything like that this soon.
And speaking of sprinkling AI sparkles everywhere and everyone expects it to do it, at this point, though, and this is what everyone expects, but at this point, it's true that the only way for Apple to really make news...
is to do something different than everyone else does.
I mean, they can make news by saying we're not doing any AI stuff, and that would be news, but that's obviously not what they're doing, right?
But they're not going to do what every other company did, which is like, AI everywhere, sprinkle, sprinkle, sprinkle, sprinkle, like, you know, because that looks like everyone else did that, like throwing spaghetti against the wall, right?
Like Windows did.
Anything we could think of, we're just going to do.
The only way Apple can actually make news is by saying, we're doing AI, but we're doing it the Apple way, where everything is useful and blah, blah, blah.
They have to present it that way.
That is a marketing decision.
We already know they're already doing that.
We talked about that last week.
There's tons of features that they used to call ML that are just features of our phone, right?
If they do that this year and they present it as we're not doing AI like everyone else, we're not throwing speed against it.
So we don't have a thing where you draw a picture and AI draws along with you because we didn't think that was that useful yet.
So we didn't put it in.
Right.
That's the story.
That's the Apple story.
And the news would be Apple WWC rolls out a bunch of AI features.
But unlike other people's AI features, they only introduce the ones that are useful.
and also right because that's the wild card but i don't understand that right that is the way to make news otherwise the story will be apple catches up with everyone else and does what everyone else has already done which is you know i guess better than the the bad story which is apple doesn't do any ai stuff and they're doomed right well i mean that's i think that's the most likely like i think by far the most likely reaction by the overall press and you know business and wall street communities is going to be they didn't do enough and
Now, as actual Apple users, for me, like what you were saying earlier, I would rather they do things that are useful to me.
I don't need them to do the most stupid things that they are because other companies will gladly do the most stupid things that they are.
Apple doesn't need to do that.
They are, as you were saying, they are the more grown-up company.
I don't think that is their style to be...
the spaghetti against the wall, cutting edge, like, let's do a bunch of stupid stuff.
Like, that's not Apple style.
Apple is very conservative in that kind of approach.
And, you know, to some degree, that's kind of just in their DNA.
To another degree, they need to be because they have much more scrutiny on them and, like, their moves have, you know, they make bigger waves.
And their brand, it's not that they're Disney, but their brand is very kind of like, let's not do, let's not be hasty and do the radical stuff just because everyone else is doing it.
right and i honestly think if they market this well the story won't be apple didn't do enough the story will be what apple wants it to be is that apple took a more considered approach everyone else has just been like yeah and apple you know made all their features useful here are the things that it does it only does things that are provably useful right kind of like they did last year and the year before and the year before like oh and os wide you can ocr text
like that's an AI feature, but it's useful.
Like, and it's not, if that is the story Apple presents, I think most of the stories from outlets that don't have it in for Apple will be, Apple decides to take a different approach to AI.
Unlike its competitors, Apple says that it's only rolling out features that are provably useful.
They're not going to use that term because that's not a good marketing term, but you know,
Some marketing person will come up with a two or three word phrase that distinguishes Apple's approach to AI, which, again, is going to be no different than what they did last year.
The only difference is the magic of marketing, right?
And, you know, you're right that there will be some stories like Apple's not doing enough.
They're falling behind.
Microsoft has 40 LLMs running in the background in Windows 11.
But I feel like the whole Windows co-pilot PC thing is just so wrapped up in the recall disaster that no one is even talking about the draw along or whatever or the OS-wide translation, which I think actually is useful.
So the door is open for Apple to do something smart here.
And again, the wild card is what the hell is OpenAI?
Because OpenAI is not that.
OpenAI and ChatGPT, that is not we only do the things that we are sure are useful and safe.
Because...
you know for for all the uses that chat gpt has it's not conservative it's basically the floodgates it's like type anything you want hope it works fingers crossed yeah like that i i would be very happy with take most of the basics that we already know that quote ai stuff can do even take a lot of the stuff the phones already do and just make it better make it more reliable give it better results as we were saying last episode
Basic dictation, speech-to-text kind of APIs.
I believe, is it all Android phones or just the Pixel phones that have supported system-wide closed captioning?
You can just have constant transcription showing on screen of whatever audio is playing on the phone.
Likely added to Windows.
Right.
Why haven't iPhones been able to do that yet?
That's such low hanging fruit for Apple.
That should be a feature.
Of course it should be a feature.
And that's, again, things like removing people from photos that shouldn't be there.
That kind of stuff.
These are not cutting edge new ideas.
These are features that the rest of the industry has done.
And yes, Apple will be playing, quote, catch up.
But that's fine as long as they do a good job of it.
The reason why some of these features stand out to us as things Apple should do is because they are good ideas.
We are not saying Apple should do everything everyone else has done.
Most of the other things people have done with quote AI are weird and useless and creepy or something.
But there are a few really cool killer features that it would be nice if Apple had good versions of.
And then beyond that,
what we've already talked about things like obviously the big one is make siri better like that is the big one please for the love of god make siri better makes it makes it's interesting make siri better but don't turn siri into chat gpt you know there's a line there because you want siri to be better it's like all the things that siri supposed to do now imagine if it did them reliably and with lots of flexibility and sophistication and maybe you could do one or two new things but that is very different than hey guess what now you can just ask siri anything and it will do something
That's not what we want, right?
Because that is this throwing spaghetti against the wall because you can get yourself into trouble real fast with just – especially since Siri has essentially control over your phone.
And when it gets wrong, there are consequences, bad consequences.
So that is something – I mean there's no rumor that like, you know, the Siri is suddenly going to become ChatGPT, right?
Apple needs to, it's kind of like what you were saying, things that the phone already does just make it do them better.
But that is different than Siri is now an all-knowing wizard that you can ask anything and cross your fingers.
I don't need Siri to become a chatbot.
I don't need Siri to generate images that don't exist already for me.
Many of the things that we think of as modern AI apps, I don't need Siri to do those things.
What we need Siri to do is what the promise of Siri has always been promising, and it has just never reliably delivered on that promise.
That's what we want to do.
And I think, you know, looking at modern AI techniques and models, I think this gives them the ability to tackle what really is a pretty old set of problems in a new way that should theoretically be substantially better.
So that's what I'm most looking for is like,
And everything else that we've talked about, like being able to control apps without configuration and stuff like that, that's all going to be great down the road whenever that comes together.
I don't even need that right now.
I just want Siri to work.
That'd be great.
And maybe give me a good captioning model on the phone that I can use.
And otherwise, I think that could be enough for us.
It's not going to be enough for the press.
It's not going to be enough for the analysts.
It's not going to be enough for Wall Street.
But I think that would be enough for Apple's actual customers.
i have an addendum to an earlier statement i meant to correct myself immediately and then the time passed and i couldn't but uh talk about when they're dropping uh intel support i forgot about all the ai stuff the whole requirement to have an npu like that's why rewind doesn't work on my computer that may push the schedule forward i mean that wasn't really a glimmer in anyone's eye when back when we were talking about this years ago uh but now the whole like you
You know, the Copilot Plus PC is requiring a 40 tops NPU, blah, blah, blah.
You know, my CPU doesn't have NPU in there, right?
And so every single one of these quote-unquote AI, if they bothered to add quote-unquote AI features, yeah, they could just make them not work on Intel, but they could all just not make Mac OS.
also does not make macOS work until so i feel like that nudges the possibility that this is the year my mac isn't supported nudges it a little bit i don't think it makes it a slam dunk i'm thinking it's a sure thing i still think i'll probably be supported and just won't have features visible but the llm stuff
is a problem for me can you reprogram the afterburner card to be an NPU it would still be so bad right they're not they're not spending any time optimizing any of this stuff it's like well it runs in the neural engine and also someone did an implementation for like the SIMD instructions on the Xeon nope not happening
yeah it's not sorry you're out of luck on that one yeah so it's really just i mean okay what mac has going for it is like apple probably doesn't care that much oh sorry intel mac users you don't get these new features right just be glad mac os still we still ship it for your your uh cpu um and that i feel like that has a likelihood because apple's like yeah it's just mac it'll be fine right but if they really it was the old apple where it's like everyone on the same page they'd be like
No, we're cutting them off this year because we got so many of the AI features and they all require the neural processor and Intel doesn't have that.
So tough luck.
We'll see.
The worst case scenario for me, it's like I was going to ask you to what you're most looking forward to, WWC.
But the thing I'm fearing the most is...
is that I won't be able to run this version of macOS or the feature that I want in macOS doesn't run on my thing.
So for example, the photos features that use quote unquote AI to do cool photo stuff.
Granted, there's ways I can use other AI tools to edit my photos.
I don't need this to be built in.
But if I can't even access those features, like if the if the person removal thing is built into the photos app, like this is great.
Saves me a lot of time.
It's right built in.
I don't have to edit in an external editor.
I have to go to a web page.
Oh, but not on Intel.
That's a big fear for me, because even though I would still it's like, look, macOS still supports your system.
No problem.
I'd be like, oh, but I really want to use.
the new AI-powered photo editing features on my Mac, and now I'm sitting at my wife's computer to do photo editing, and she's complaining that I'm hogging her computer, and that hastens the timeline for me getting a new Mac.
Which Apple hasn't shipped yet, like an M4-based Mac Studio or something.
But anyway, I want to throw that.
Anyway, so what things are you most looking forward to?
Marco, you already said Siri, but is there anything else?
Speaking of developer stuff, like developer tools, Xcode, Swift, what big thing are you looking forward to at WWDC, assuming there's no hardware?
So, I mean, for me, I really want to see what I was talking about last episode.
I want there to be good models that developers can use on the phone for free with no limits.
That's what I really want.
Give us built-in AI SDKs that we can just use the same way we can use almost every other API on the phone.
Like, that would be game-changing in so many ways.
And so that's the big thing I want in terms of capability.
Now, in smaller ways, like, you know, there's other, like, developer tool type stuff.
Xcode has had a lot of bugs for me this past couple of years.
A lot of, like...
Issues that don't clear, that I've actually cleared.
A lot of having to do clean builds just to clear weird compiler bugs.
My rewrite of Overcast, I use a couple of packages that I do locally.
And every time I change anything in the package, I have to go resolve package caches because otherwise it just won't pick up the change.
There's all sorts of weird, straight-up bugs in Xcode, or at least behaviors that sure seem like bugs.
I think Xcode really could use some help in that area.
I don't think they're going to be working on that.
I suspect that...
think they are working on that it's just a question of whether they'll fix more bugs than they introduce them yeah like because i'm sure that what you know whatever they're doing like with with ai stuff i'm sure there's obviously been massive demand for integration into xcode of some kind of ai based tooling whether it's like an ai based autocomplete like the old version of what microsoft called copilot um or you know other stuff like there there's obviously a lot of demand for that in recent years and there's rumors for it we didn't have in the past but yeah like basically like
oh, Xcode will help you write your code for you using AI.
I'm assuming that's going to be there.
Can Xcode write around its own bugs using AI, maybe?
Can it automatically clear the issues for me so I don't have to do it?
When Xcode makes SwiftUI view, the preview also won't work.
Right, exactly.
There's a lot in Xcode, a lot of the basics that I think could use some attention.
But otherwise, in terms of the actual APIs and the language...
This is going to be a big year for Swift concurrency safety.
This is the year of Sendable really getting its moment because I presume they're going to introduce Swift 6 and that brings with it a whole bunch of strict concurrency checks and theoretically some language enhancements that make complying with strict concurrency easier.
Right now, as I've been writing the Overcast rewrite and as I wrote Blackbird,
I have tried to make them comply with the strict concurrency checks as they've existed in the pre-6 Swift languages.
So you've been able to opt in to these warnings that will tell you, like, hey, this thing that you're doing over here with this mutable state in this object, this will be an error in Swift 6.
So I've been trying to comply with the requirements before it's even out.
And it's pretty hard.
And there are certain things where, like, this object here clearly is not being mutable state.
And it's, like, losing its state right here before this is even returning from its init or whatever.
Like, there's all sorts of things like that.
And there have been various proposals in Switch Evolution to, like, make some of that stuff automatic and, like, detect it so you don't have to, like, jump through hoops to go around it.
I haven't followed in detail of like whether those things are actually in Swift 6 or whether they will be.
A bunch of them are.
Yeah, I'm sure a bunch of them.
And so what I want to know is like right now, all the stuff that will be an error in Swift 6 concurrency checking mode –
A lot of that's pretty hard to work around.
And so what I want to see is, have they made it easier to work with for the actual release of Swift 6?
Because that's what most of these proposals were aiming to do.
So that's what I want to know.
As we go into this new era of Swift concurrency and Swift strictness, how easy is it to do the right thing?
I've seen a lot of languages over time that make it hard to do the right thing.
So far, Swift has been pretty good about it.
So let's see.
And then beyond that, I've been writing this whole rewrite using SwiftUI and using Swift Async Modern Concurrency wherever possible.
And there are still a lot of system APIs that do not play well with Swift concurrency.
I'm still having to write callbacks here and there.
I'm still having to shell out to task to do something in a function.
There are still areas in the system frameworks that have not been updated yet for Swift concurrency.
I would love to just see more of that, please.
Give me as much more as you can.
Whatever you've gotten done this year, every year it gets better.
So I just want to have everyone work on the frameworks throughout the year as they have time.
And here and there, I get updates that make things easier for me as a Swift async programmer.
So that kind of stuff is mostly what I'm looking forward to.
Most of the boring tooling and API stuff is
But that's what actually improves our lives as developers day to day in the following year.
It's not like this one new hotness that we must use.
That's like some cool new API or something like, no, usually it's just like a bunch of small life improvements that they made to the rest of the system and the rest of the tooling and the rest of the APIs.
That's what I'm looking forward to mostly.
But also, yeah, give me some of that cool transcription model, please.
Thank you.
You know, I'm glad you brought up Swift stuff, because sitting here today, that's what I think I'm most excited for, is what is the new hotness within Swift?
And Swift can get on my nerves from time to time, but by and large, 10 years on, because the announcement was 10 years and a few days ago...
10 years on, it is a really, really great language.
It is not without problems.
It's not without faults.
But it is a really great language.
And I do think it is mostly moving in a positive direction.
And I feel like now that there's big and exciting things happening, like Swift Concurrency, I feel like a lot of the... What is the term or phrase?
Like bike shedding?
Is that what I'm looking for?
That...
That was going on in the like Swift 234 era where we were worrying about really, really useless and dumb arguments that were happening all the time.
And I don't know, John, you're more plugged in.
I don't think they were useless and dumb, but yes, there was some sort of – you do have to hash that stuff out and it is important to get it right.
So it might have seemed like a lot of kind of like, well, who cares what that keyword is called?
It's not that important.
Just do stuff that actually is kind of important because you get stuck with that stuff.
So I don't have many complaints about the process, but –
But either way, like, you know, spending a whole bunch of time bickering about whether pre and post increment, you know, the plus plus operator should or should not be in the language.
Like, whatever, y'all just move on.
But anyways, that being said, you guys really messed up substrings.
Well, you know, there's because, you know, there's there's some lousy things.
But the thing is, if they come up with better ones, you can just abandon the lousy ones and never use them.
You know what I mean?
Like that's they're not they've not painted themselves into a corner, which is really what you want to avoid with language design.
Everything they've done with substrings and various array index stuff, oh my god.
Every time I have to manipulate an index or a string, I have to look up code examples.
I cannot figure out how the heck do I do this.
Substrings are not strings.
yep it drives me nuts but i mean it makes sense if you know why they're doing it for like for implementation efficiency but it's like i don't want to have to see that but just pretend it's not like that yeah yeah right exactly but we're getting we're getting off on a tangent so a lot of that bike us no way a lot of that bike shedding and yak shaving and whatever the turn of phrase you want to use is i feel like that used to bubble up into my world insofar as like i don't pay attention to swift evolution even though maybe i should but a lot of that
that navel-gazing was bubbling out into my world, and I haven't seen much of that recently in at least a couple of years, which I think is a good thing, because that means whatever is happening, instead of people going, ah, look at this ridiculous argument, you know, instead, legitimate arguments are happening, good ones.
And so I'm excited to see what Swift 6 brings.
I am...
i cannot begin to to tell you how scared i am of turning on the warnings for swift you know for strict concurrency checks because i'm sure it's going to be a mess i'm not knowingly doing anything wrong but i bet you i'm doing a lot wrong you gotta try it you gotta see it's it's not necessarily wrong it's just like i mean i've made several runs of this and i'm sure we'll talk about it more after wwc and following episodes but like
in the absence of concurrency before it existed we all did our own things using the technologies that apple did offer at the time grand central dispatch you know callbacks async await like that's all kind of like creepy it's not quite you know precursors to the big strict concurrency checks right so if you have an application that's already written it's like okay but i already don't
did a thing to deal with concurrency maybe it's not as good but then swift you turn on the strict concurrency checks and it's like everything you're doing is a violation of strict concurrency yeah this is what i had to do before you existed to do things concurrently and so it's like yeah that approach you should use a different approach to do that our approach is safer but you end up having to like rethink stuff it's not like i'll just add an annotation here and it'll fix it it's like i mean this sounds dumb but like the swift concurrency strict checking thing
wants you to use swift concurrency features right it doesn't want you to use grand central dispatch and queues right you can you can like satisfy it if you're but but it's like if you just use these our features like use strict concurrency use what we want you to use use actors right that's why they exist
And it's like, but I already did it a different way.
And it's like, well, you're going to have real problems trying to make me, the compiler, satisfied about that.
So I'm sure there will be much discussion about that.
I mean, the good thing about Swift, the Swift illusion process, it happens in public.
Swift is open source.
Like there should be no, for the most part, there should be no secrets revealed at Apple about the Swift language, right?
About what they're doing with it, that'll be revealed.
Like, because, you know, if you looked at like all the Swift language things and it was like, and then Swift UI appeared.
Swift UI wasn't developed in public, but Swift was, right?
you know we'll see what kind of surprises apple has for us but the swift features they're adding they know the pain people have trying to you know comply with swift concurrency and they're trying to make it easier but fundamentally i think the problem they have is that they want people to use actors and swift concurrency as a way to manage concurrent processes and that supersedes and replaces a bunch of things that people had used in the past and figuring out how to
do that without like changing your approach to concurrency.
Like Casey, I know you love to use the, what is it?
The publisher thing with the source and syncs and the events.
What is that called?
Which I don't, it's combined.
I don't use that much of it in call sheet.
I do use some, but it compared to just a couple of years ago, I use very, very little.
And I only use it in a handful of places where it makes the most sense.
Generally speaking, the concurrency and stuff that I'm doing is async await, which I,
is good insofar as it's new, but it's bad insofar as I'm probably doing a rudimentary version.
Your stuff is not sendable, I'm sure.
Yeah, for the most part.
Nor should you make it sendable.
I can tell you that I use a lot of combine and async await in the rewrite.
There's places for both of it, and I think they actually play somewhat nicely with each other if you don't do two ridiculous things with them.
But those things do solve different problems.
Yeah, and the solution is not like, oh, I'm going to take all my data and I'm going to make everything sendable, because that's not how to fix this problem.
You can't.
You have to have mutable states somewhere.
It should be protected by actors, but very often you're sending OS objects back and forth, and those aren't sendable, and you don't have a way to change that because you don't define that class, nor can you make it sendable or lie about it being sendable, and it's just...
Anyway, I'm sure we're going off on a big tangent here because we're developers and we've all struggled with this.
But, like, I think the way Apple presents this story is interesting.
Down to, like, the idea of, you know, the warning Marco mentioned.
This will be an error in Swift 6.
Does that mean you can't use Swift 6 unless you have strict concurrency compliance?
Or is there a mode in the Swift 6 compiler that lets you run Swift 5 code?
And do you lose out on any features in Swift 6 if you decide to?
Like, that's a story that Apple will tell.
like and has been has been telling in the open but they'll see how marketing presents that like swift currency it's great but if you're not ready for it don't worry you can still use swift six you just won't turn on the strict concurrency thing kind of like it is in swift five now yeah and i think that's the case i could swear and i'm probably getting the details wrong especially because well
My memory, as John makes fun of me, justifiably is very bad, but I could swear that Ben Cohen or someone on the Swift team has publicly stated, hey, Swift 6, it's going to be opt-in for the concurrency checks, and you still will be able to do the rest.
This is what you just said, John.
You'll still be able to do the rest of the Swift 6 hotness without going all in on the strict concurrency checks.
Yeah.
Because you can just download the Swift 6 compiler right now and try it.
And you can see how these features work or whatever.
But doing it at open source and having the developers talk about it is kind of separate from how Apple will present it, how Apple marketing will present this when it shows the new version of Xcode.
You know what I mean?
Like how it manifests in Xcode, what the defaults are for a new project in Xcode.
These are things that aren't actually strictly related to the Swift open source project, but have huge effects on how this change is perceived by the people who are not following Swift W.
most developers, right?
Kind of like when they do a new project, like does it default to SwiftUI?
That is kind of like an important political thing.
Does it default to strict concurrency?
Does it default to adding tests, Marco?
The defaults matter in Xcode and policy changes like that.
So that is...
That is, you know, for developers, I mean, it is a developer conference.
It's more esoteric and you're not going to see big news stories about it.
But the Swift 6 story is going to be interesting.
And, you know, like you said, for most people, it's entirely new to them.
It's public information.
They could have been looking at it all since last year.
But most people, that's not their hobby to keep up with language evolution.
They just wait until a bit of a C and see what Apple has to offer them, even though you could go download it right now and try it.
Exactly.
And so for me, that's what I think I'm most interested in right now.
Of course, I think I'm interested, you know, when the iOS changes and, you know, oh, yeah, iPadOS is still, you know, an operating system in our lineup.
I'm very curious to see what the, you know, we'll get a second data point for VisionOS so we can start to draw a line between the two data points.
But more than anything else, I'm very curious what my development life will look like
for the next year plus.
And I think some of that will probably be me ripping all my hair out trying to get this concurrency stuff working properly.
But I think some of it should be fun and exciting.
And, you know, as much as I will in one breath whine about SwiftUI and tell you that it neuters me here and there and, you know, there's nothing you can do to put a search bar anywhere but in a navigation bar, you know, and things of that nature that it makes it very, very stodgy and difficult and unwavering.
But I'll also tell you that it's just such a joy to work with and so, so much nicer and so much faster than UIKit.
And so I'd love to see what new SwiftUI stuff is happening.
It certainly seems like Apple internally is spending more and more time and putting more and more energy into consuming SwiftUI, which makes me think...
They're doing the same within SwiftUI itself.
The best way for Apple to make a good API for developers is for them to dog food it.
And they seem to be doing that more and more.
So I'm excited for that.
I don't know.
I'm really excited, leaving aside the fact that I'm going to see you two, leaving aside that I'm going to be there, that I'm going to be at Apple Park.
All of that is, of course, incredibly exciting.
We covered that last week.
But I'm just really excited to see what's coming because there's so little that has leaked out, like we said.
And what's leaked out is more of a, oh, there's AI dust a-coming.
You know, there's a dust storm a-brewin', and that's about it.
I still think the leaks have covered...
A lot.
I don't expect to see tons of stuff that wasn't leaked.
It's just that the stuff that's leaked is, I don't know, obvious or like not shocking.
You know what I mean?
It's also a bit vague, like particularly around the AI stuff.
Yeah.
I mean, it is vague, but like, you know, we won't get the details, but...
I don't think.
Well, we'll see.
Will there be something that was like totally not rumored that is shocking?
I think it'll just be in, you know, in the details of how things work.
And by the way, speaking of testing, I forget.
I think there's a bunch of open source projects that do this.
And I kind of hope Apple like adopts one of them or takes one under its wing or makes it official.
But the XC test framework, which Casey may be familiar with.
it's not great it's kind of stodgy and old and if you've ever used if you've used a modern testing framework in like a language like node or whatever you kind of or even i mean obviously all my testing experience comes from pearl the great great great grandfather of good testing and programming languages um just the fundamental stuff that you expect from a test framework
is either doesn't exist or is very awkward in xc test because it's old and so what does the swift ui for testing look like and there are a bunch of open source projects that try to do this like make a sort of swifty type api that looks kind of like the you know the popular testing packages for node or you know like just a nicer testing framework um
I would love Apple to bless one of those and adopt it or to come out with its own.
I mean, this kind of falls into the category of a marketplace thing.
It's like, hey, we've got a bunch of old APIs.
Some of them aren't really Swifty, right?
They don't match the language well.
They don't take advantage of the features.
They look kind of old.
They're kind of awkward to use.
We know better ways to do things now.
Test framework is one of those things.
I think that would be a big quality of life improvement for people.
Of course, they have to keep supporting the old one basically forever because people use it and make huge test suites.
But
Swifty testing.
Again, there's been no rumors about that.
I've just been looking at a lot of the open source ones.
I'm like, these are all good ideas.
Pick one, Apple, and do it.
Or, you know.
I miss fluent assertions is one that I used in my .NET days.
And so, you know, I'm looking at the about page trying to remind myself how it works.
And basically, you know, say you have a string that's an account number is the example they use.
And you, the way the code you write is account number should be, you know, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
And so it's, it's, it's written almost like plain English and it's not too dissimilar from.
Are there dots between every word?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Account number dot should pren pren dot be pren.
That's a little bit, that's a, that's a very popular trend.
I know it's awful.
It's code that looks great on slides and examples and it's totally unwritable.
Well, it's not terrible, and that is a common thing, but really what you're looking for is the convenience of being able to essentially, you know, to just give one example, and I know XeTest has ways of doing this, but it's awkward and weird.
You have a bunch of nested data structures and objects, and you want to diff them, right?
Yeah.
I don't want to have to do that manually.
I just want it to be able to use reflection to traverse them and to give me, like, a really cool-looking diff of where they differ.
You know what I mean?
Right?
As opposed to comparing properties manually one at a time at each level and having messages so you know which part differed or whatever.
Every modern testing framework has a way to say, there's this thing like that thing, and they're both kind of deeply nested structures, and the good ones say, oh, and by the way, I don't care about these differences and ignore these properties and I don't care about white space.
And, like, just...
It's all just convenient.
It's like, oh, that's just convenience method.
You can do that all yourself.
Yeah, you can.
It's just annoying as hell, right?
So it's not so much the whole, oh, it looks like English.
This should be that and has this and does this and whatever.
I just want, like, especially in a, you know, a language like Swift that's so, you know,
really on board with static checking and so you really just can't just chuck these two things over the fence they look like they're the same it's like swifts like whoa whoa these are totally different classes i can't compare these two things what are you talking about i don't have those kind of reflection it's like you really need convenient support from the framework to satisfy the swift compiler to allow you to just say is this thing like that expect this thing to be like that that's going to be like this you know it's
That stuff is tedious in tests.
It makes people not want to write tests.
Like Marco.
Well, that's not why.
But if you did write tests, you would say, boy, it sure is tedious comparing these deeply nested object trees to each other.
And if you get lazy, when the test fails, you're like, why did it fail?
What was the problem?
And you basically got to step through it in the debugger because there's no automatic diffing of object trees to tell you exactly where it failed.
Anything else you're looking forward to, John?
I am kind of – I mean I mentioned the photos feature because that's what I'm thinking about a lot.
Like again, when I edit photos, I have many tools.
I've purchased many other external editors.
I have Photoshop.
I have Photomator, Pixelmator.
I have –
raw power.
I have access to web tools or whatever, but there's something to be said for having stuff built in and photos does have stuff built in, but it's so outdated.
I like the quote unquote healing brush in the Apple photos app is just barbaric compared to what the good apps can do.
But I don't always want to edit an external editor.
I certainly don't want to export and edit it on the web and bring it back or whatever.
So to the extent that Apple can catch up and add those features to photos itself, and I can actually run them on my Intel Mac, that will be a big quality of life change for me.
I will really appreciate that, not this year, but next year for my Long Island Beach vacation pictures.
I want it to be in the Photos app.
I want the Photos app to get better.
This is not the year...
It seems like if there's something about Apple's platforms that you wanted to get better that doesn't have to do with AI, this is not the year.
All the bugs that report in the Finder, all those things that are annoying you, the apps that you feel like are neglected and haven't had any attention paid to them, this is not the year they're going to fix that.
Usually it's never the year that they're going to fix that, but definitely not this year.
What they're going to do, those teams spent time adding AI features or whatever, and so I will appreciate those when I have them, but we're all still hoping for that year when the bug that's been in your favorite operating system for 10 years finally gets fixed, but...
just does not seem like this is the year for that and it wasn't last year and it wasn't the year before that and it wasn't the year before that and it wasn't the year before that and it's a big systemic problem that we've discussed in the show but definitely not this year because everyone's been off doing ai stuff so that's kind of a shame but yeah i i if i had a wish list it would be like oh they fix all my long-standing bugs that's not gonna happen uh i'm looking forward to the photos editing features i am kind of looking forward to the better siri like i rarely use siri but the things i use it for
I find useful, the, you know, remind me to do whatever, use that all the time, almost daily, right?
Because I know how to do it.
I know the syntax it wants.
I know how it works for the most part.
It could be better, but it just shows the utility.
If you can give me something that I can, that works enough for me to use it,
It has a big effect on my life.
So if they just take something that Siri has supposedly been able to do for 10 years and they make it good enough for me to want to use it, that could potentially have a big impact.
So I'm kind of looking forward to that as well.
And I was looking forward to hardware, but that doesn't seem like it's going to happen.
And the SwiftStick stuff, like I said, I'm mostly looking forward to how Apple presents the stuff that I've already been reading about in Swift Evolution for an entire year.
Like, what is the pitch?
What is the...
what are the ergonomics of it how does it manifest in xcode how do they present it to the world because there is a potential for uh pushback let's say right you know for everyone who has tried it it's it's an obscure flag that you have to know about like oh strict concurrency all caps blah blah equals whatever and you're built like it's not it's not obvious how to do it in the existing xcode but the people who try it they're like oh 50 000 warnings
I'm like, wow, I reduced that to 100 after just changing two lines of code.
And then I spend a week trying to get that 100 down to 10.
And then I spend a month trying to get that 10 down to zero, right?
Depending on how much of their app they're willing to rewrite.
That's a tough story to pitch to people.
And I'm setting aside the technology and the actual features.
How do you present that to a room full of developers and make them excited about and not dreading it?
Like, you know what I mean?
And that is going to be a challenge this year, I think.
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All right, let's do at least a little bit of Ask ATP.
It's been a little while since we've done it.
And let's start with James, who writes, any chance that the now expected late 2024 M4 MacBook Pro gets upgraded to Thunderbolt 5?
And my question to James is, why do we care?
Not to say that we shouldn't.
I'm not saying that the question is unreasonable.
But I genuinely don't even know what Thunderbolt 5 brings.
So, John.
Faster speed.
That's what we talked about on the show in the past.
Yeah.
Unlike Thunderbolt 3 to 4, which didn't increase the speed at all, Thunderbolt 5 does.
Is there a chance?
Yes, there is a chance.
I think there is.
I don't know enough about the M4 and the iPad if anyone has examined it and see if there's any vestiges of Thunderbolt 5 or whatever, but...
You know, there's always a chance.
It's not a good chance.
Apple has not really been known for being on the... We talked about this when we were talking about the Copilot Plus PCs and how they just all have the latest versions of every standard, latest version of Bluetooth, latest version of Wi-Fi, latest version of Thunderbolt, right?
Apple doesn't really do that.
When they do, it's notable.
Apple's current line of stuff have one back from the latest version of most of this stuff.
That's just the way Apple tends to roll.
So...
I don't think it's highly likely, but absolutely it is possible.
Keep hope alive for those M4 MacBook Pros with Thunderbolt 5.
David Martin writes, do you think Apple will finally ship 16 gigs of RAM in the MacBook Air when the M4 gets put into it?
I don't, but I hope.
I mean, you can hope.
Now's the time you can have this hope.
I don't think so.
Just they should.
They 100% should, but I don't think so.
I mean, do the MacBook Pros start at 16?
I forget.
I think the pros do.
Even the low-end one that's, like, barely a pro?
I don't know.
It wouldn't surprise me either way.
I mean, they're going to keep shipping.
For the MacBook Air, that is a computer that is extremely important for it to hit a price point for its sales.
And Apple will not sacrifice its margins.
So they're going to get their, you know, whatever 38%, whatever their margin is.
Like, they're going to get their margin somewhere.
And so, you know, if they make more money on average by skimping on the RAM on that base model...
They're going to keep doing that.
They're going to keep doing it as long as they possibly can.
See, on the MacBook Air, though, I think that is, I mean, of all the computers Apple sells, I feel like the MacBook Air is probably the least likely to have its specs bumped because people just want the cheapest laptop they can get.
And so on the MacBook Pros, what percentage of MacBook Pros are purchased with the base RAM versus the percentage of MacBook Air?
The MacBook Air has got to be so much bigger than the MacBook Pros.
I don't know because in both cases, huge amounts of them are purchased by businesses and schools and stuff like that.
And I think usually when you're talking about those big bulk buys, it's very, very frequently it is either the base model or the next stocked up config that is normally stocked, like not a custom build.
So – but there's tons of base model sales sold in any case.
So I bet it is a pretty high ratio for both the Air and the Pro, although I think you're right.
It probably is higher for the Air.
Well, anyway, like they can't stay at 8 forever just like they couldn't stay at 4 forever.
Yeah.
Do they have to double?
Do they have to go from eight to 16?
I mean, the iPads apparently come with 12, but they're only using eight of it.
Like you can go up.
You don't have to double it every time.
Like it'd be nice.
There'd be catching up.
I think it would be a good idea, but like 16 seems too generous for their lowest end laptop.
Yeah.
it's not the m4 version of their lowest end laptop it's 2024 because that the 16 versus the eight cost them like five extra bucks the only way would hurt the margins is why marco was mentioning it is it will stop people from buying the more expensive model where they charge you a bazillion dollars for that ram right that's how it hurts margins not because like oh that's not hurting margins that extra ram cost them nothing that's true but it stops you from buying the one where they overcharge for the ram upgrade and that that is the
That is the problem that Apple's trying to avoid.
But, yeah, they need to bump their RAM.
If they're going to do this thing where they just will only ever double it and will wait until it is incredibly embarrassing before they do the doubling, that's not a good dynamic, and I hope they should fix it.
But, yeah.
yeah yeah like i think they will upgrade the macbook air ram once the whatever type of ram chip the macbook air uses is no longer available in 8 gig chips that's when they will finally update it i mean like it was in the ipad maybe they you know maybe they those ones aren't available i don't think they're ever not going to be available like but it's just i'd
When is the someone had a similar question?
I think I cut it out of this.
Like, which do you think will happen first?
The MacBook Air get 16 gigs of RAM or some other highly unlikely thing.
And it was like, you know, a rock and a hard place.
Two things that Apple just does not want to do.
But, you know, they they can't hold the line on RAM forever.
They will have to bump it eventually.
It's just maybe not this year.
Winnie Lewis writes, could Apple's reluctance to put cellular on the Mac be due to their failure to produce an in-house modem?
Considering Apple's reluctant dependence on Qualcomm and the exorbitant rates Qualcomm charges, I can understand why Apple's holding off on adding cellular to high-priced devices like the Mac.
This argument is undercut somewhat with the iPad Pro costing the same as a MacBook Air, but MacBook Pros can still greatly increase in price over an iPad Pro.
And if customers have waited this long, what's the harm in making them wait longer?
Yeah, that's fair.
I feel like we've talked about this a couple of times in the past.
We need to debunk this again because we've mentioned this years ago and then we corrected ourselves and some people are still going with the outdated information.
The idea that Qualcomm charges you a percentage of the purchase price of the product and because Macs can be so much more expensive that Apple would be charged a ton more, that's not how it works based on our most recent looking into this.
There is a cap and Apple is already at the cap.
Qualcomm, they'll charge you a percentage up to whatever the amount is
And basically every Mac is already at that maximum cap.
So Apple is not avoiding cellular and Macs because it would be too expensive relative to putting cellular in iPads and other devices.
They could be doing it for whatever their reasons are.
That's not it.
Like it's like, oh, they can't do it because you can buy a $5,000 Mac and then a Qualcomm will get $500 of that.
That's not.
how it works at least you know it used to be and then we were corrected and then we entered the correction and i think it is still the case that there is a monetary cap for this every possible argument people put up for why cellular maybe is being held back from the laptops for some kind of weird business reason it's in every ipad like it's even okay
It's in the $350 base model.
You have to pay a little more for the cellular.
But it's been available on every iPad ever since 2010.
So every iPad model has had cellular as an option that has cost between usually $130 and $200 extra.
And it is great.
It just works.
And the only thing I can think of is in some various forms of their deals with carriers or their pricing with Qualcomm, I'm sure there are differences in how the devices are categorized.
I'm sure they have different agreements and different rates if somebody's considered a phone or a wearable or a tablet or a PC.
I'm sure those are different categories for some kind of licensing deals or whatever.
But again, like cellular laptops have existed in the PC world for a very long time now.
So obviously this is not something that's that difficult to navigate with the carriers and the royalty holders like Qualcomm.
This isn't a difficult problem and this isn't a problem that no one has solved.
This is a choice that they've made.
They just don't care.
And I'm sure if an Apple person was here, I'm sure we'd get a wonderful PR answer of how important it is to serve our customers and what we show, blah, blah, blah.
But
Look, actions speak louder than words.
Apple does not care about cellular on the Mac.
They have not prioritized it.
They seem to have no path to get there from where like they seem to be in no rush to do it.
And we are so far past the point where like it can't be just like, oh, they're working on it, but it's not done yet.
No, we're so far past that point.
They don't care.
i mean ipad pro being so expensive being some you can make an ipad pro more expensive than a mac pretty easily by configuring it it's the same you know they're using the same socs all apple silicon like every excuse has fallen away uh when his question here is though is actually vaguely plausible is that apple has been planning to bring cellular to the mac just as soon as they're done with their in-house modems and unfortunately they pinned that feature to the timeline of a product that is terminally behind right the
Apple's been trying to they bought the modem business from Intel and they've been trying to make cell modems and they want to do this for their phones, obviously.
But like maybe they said, we're not even thinking about cellular in the Mac until we get our modem stuff and the modem stuff should be ready by 2022.
Right, guys?
And, you know, it hasn't has worked out even that theory.
Like, why?
It's literally been in every single iPad.
That's totally an Apple thing to do, though.
It's totally an Apple thing to do.
But why?
How different is the hardware in a MacBook Air versus the hardware in an iPad?
I know.
Well, this is definitely a business thing.
If you worked in a big company, someone will say, we're going to do this.
It's been a long-standing thing that people want, and we're going to tie it to this other thing.
And then the other thing gets delayed, and then the people will say, can we just untie these two things now and just do, like you said, just do what we do in the iPads?
Can we just stick a Qualcomm thing?
And there's just tremendous institutional...
sort of resistance to untying two things that have been tied to each other, especially when it comes to a product line that is not the top priority.
Like if you tie something on the phone and it turns out, oh, you know, now one thing is delaying another, untying that is easier because the phone is so important.
But on the Mac, I'm sure it's like, no, we've already started down this path.
We're working on the modems.
Let's just wait until they're done.
I think they're going to be done this year.
And they're not done.
And then the next year you have the same conversation and with the same result.
That is plausible.
It is a common dysfunction of businesses.
But, you know, us out here as customers, like we don't care what the reason is.
We just want it.
And, you know, I think Apple's answer would be like, well, you may want that, but you're in the minority.
So tough luck.
Yeah, it is what it is.
But how many iPad owners choose it?
How many Apple Watch owners choose it?
Well, we feel like iPad owners prioritize it differently.
When we survey Mac users, a very small percentage seem to want it and our tethering solution is so amazing and blah, blah, blah.
That's what they would say.
Not that there's any reason that they're not doing it, but that it's like, well, we have to prioritize it.
Even though you super duper want it, not everybody is like you.
I think that's what they'd say.
And again, if tethering is the answer, why do iPads have it?
Why does every iPad forever have it?
And why is tethering so bad?
That too, yeah.
No argument against it holds any water once you say, well, then why is it available in every single iPad they've ever made?
It just makes no sense when you consider that.
Why?
I'm kind of glad the iPad mania is passing now from the iPad Pro.
I'm so annoyed at the thought.
How amazing would it be if the MacBook Air was released with an OLED screen and cellular?
we would be flipping our minds.
An OLED screen.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
That is a pro product, Marco.
People with iPad Airs cannot handle faster than 60 hertz refresh because that is also a pro product.
And they cannot handle OLED screens.
Don't even talk about that for at least five more years.
Like, why is that?
I shouldn't get all mad.
Why...
Does the iPad Pro in even an 11-inch form factor have an M4, a great OLED screen, cellular in a really small package that costs around a little over $1,000 if you put the keyboard on it and stuff, and the MacBook Air with most of those same guts at about the same price is not only does it not have those features at those price, but those features are not attainable at any price on that product.
why it's so it's so frustrating i mean part of that is that the ipad you were describing is the most expensive ipad and the laptop you were describing is the least expensive and apple wants to segment its product line but yeah i mean you can't even get the same people are looking at both of those products i know you can't even get the oleds on the macbook pro so it really hurts that argument for now but we'll see how it goes but yeah look the oled oh that's brand new like i understand that that's going to be a process of like you know bring it to everything slowly sure
cellular is not oh my it's so not new like i was using a cellular modem to tether my laptop in 2006 this is not new i hear you and i agree but if we continue this any further it will turn this entire show into a marco and casey wine about cellular max power hour so
I feel like at this point we should probably call it, even though I would like to agree with all your grumbling and whining because I am right there with you.
You're just making so many people write in to say how little they care about cellular on their Macs and it's a useless feature and Apple should never edit.
Please don't.
And if it's so useless, why is it on every iPad?
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Music
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
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-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-
All right, so we're going to do a little post-show neutral today.
And we're going to talk about our member special.
This is the most recent member specials we are recording right now, which was talking about cars and car-related things.
And so, John, I guess you would like to revise your statement with regard to buying cars for your kid.
I just have updates like I threw at the end of our discussion.
The discussion was like, if you had to buy a new car now, what would you buy?
And we had all the sorts of conditions and caveats and whatever.
And we got increasingly ridiculous.
At the very end, I said, what about buying a car for a kid?
Which, you know, neither one of your children are driving age, but mine are.
So I'm like, maybe this will come up anyway.
And we talked about it and it's a difficult problem and yada, yada.
But the problem has continued to exist in my household.
We have four licensed drivers and two cars.
And that is a difficult situation.
And it's made more difficult by me because I don't want my children to drive my car.
Right.
So now we have four licensed drivers and two of them can only drive one of the cars.
So it's kind of like the whole, you know, bring in the goat and the chickens and the wolf across the river or whatever.
Like, OK, well, if this person wants the car on this day, then I will let my wife use my car.
Right.
So that means she'd have to take my car when she goes to work.
So her car is here for the kids to use.
And then it's just.
it's a pain right and we're talking about on the show is if you had to buy a car for your kid what would you buy uh and i'm because i'm faced with that problem we were considering trying to get a kid car not a car for a kid they could buy their own car eventually and maybe one of these cars eventually will be given to slash sold to the kid when they graduate college and move out of the house but we just wanted to have
a car that the kids can drive that like if they bang it up or hit a curb or get into a fender bender we don't care about it and they're not driving our cars and we don't have to do this car shuffle thing and i've been working on this problem since we recorded that member special and as again as you can imagine i make it so much more difficult for myself because of
what i want out of this so here's here's the difficulty okay let me let me guess the end of this discussion is you have bought or will buy either an accord which is my guess or a civic because i cannot fathom you owning any other car manufacturers product other than honda well so here's here's i'm looking for cars and getting frustrated here's here's the frustration first one let me find a crap box
Although I'm trying to use the kind word for that, right?
Let's find a kid car.
It's like a $2,000 thing.
It's junky.
You don't care.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, the old Volvo box.
Yeah.
And I was even looking at old Volvos.
I was like, can I find a Volvo or whatever?
And I was looking at the safety ratings and stuff and...
not that volvos aren't safe they are but like the safety rating information available to us is not granular enough for me to distinguish how much better a volvo is than like some other car of similar vintage you know what i mean like because everyone games the system like they all want to get five star crash rating or whatever and so two five star cars they're not the same they both got five stars but one of them is probably better than the other but how much better and how can i tell but anyway i'm looking for crap boxes
and there's a lot of them available but they're crappy hence the name right i mean they have like 200 000 miles in them they're filled with rust because it's new england right like any car that you can buy for a very small amount of money it has huge amount of miles this is going to be rusted out it's going to have so many mechanical problems i don't want to leave my kids stranded i do want it to be safe but any car that's that's like two thousand dollars is going to be old and older cars are less safe they have less safety equipment they weren't they're safe in crash testing you know what i mean and
And it's like, do I want my kid to be in an unreliable car that's going to cost me like $1,000 in repairs once I bring it home and realize like the engine is dead or it needs a new water pump or all the brakes are shot or whatever?
Did you get yourself a new car?
That's exactly what I was wondering.
Are we pulling a Marco and buying ourselves a new car?
Well, we're just talking about the crap boxes now, right?
Oh, my God, he did.
You're always hoping to find the car that was just driven to church on Sunday every day and kept in an air-conditioned garage.
It has a small number of miles on it, but that just doesn't exist.
And then so I'm looking for used cars like that.
And then I go up.
OK, well, what if I say it's not a crap box?
What if I look for a decent used car?
Then what happens with my philosophy is like I go right from crap box on Craigslist or whatever.
Right.
I go from that.
I immediately go to what I don't want a crap box.
I don't want to worry that this car is unreliable.
I want a car that doesn't have a lot of miles, that's probably pretty reliable, and you get into the whole land of certified, pre-owned, with warranty from dealer type things.
And guess what?
Those cars cost as much as a new car.
I was like, what the hell?
And you're going to say, is there nothing in between?
Yeah, there are things in between, but I don't want what's in between.
I either want a crap box that costs me nothing or a very reliable car.
And guess what?
If you want a very reliable car with not a lot of miles, it's basically the price of a new car.
Now, wait, hold on.
I don't really disagree with anything you've said, although I have not gone car shopping in like six years now.
You're always going car shopping.
Come on.
Well, yes and no.
But anyways, I haven't done serious car shopping.
I've done no more than kick some tires.
But anyways, first of all, and just leave this be because we'll get on a huge tangent, but you should be buying a lightly used electric car for your kids because it doesn't have a lot of rain.
A lightly used electric car?
Yes.
Point me to those.
Yeah, get a Leaf or something, or even an old Model 3 at this point.
There's so many out there now.
So I'm not going to buy a Tesla, so we can just take that off the table right away.
And the Nissan Leafs, I did look at them, but they don't have conditioned batteries, so all their batteries, again, in New England, are so hosed, it's not even funny, like the used ones, you know what I mean?
Well, that's your own fault for living somewhere with...
weather i mean what do you expect and nissan leaf is it's not an unsafe car but i just i'm not sure there are options and the thing is even a lightly used electric car they're expensive they're they're not you can't buy there's no such thing as a crap box version of that and then all of a sudden you're getting into new car territory prices right it's like oh you buy a lightly used nissan leaf for 22 000 that's new car territory
Okay, that's fair.
Okay, so the other thing I was going to say is there is an in-between that I'm sure you will thumb your nose at for some reason or another.
And maybe it's that you just don't have these where you are.
But, you know, it's local hero CarMax, which I think I've mentioned many times.
It's been a long time on their website.
It's headquartered here in Richmond.
And, um, and they, to the best of my recollection, not only do they typically sell decent used cars and it's always a crap shoot.
I'm not saying they're guaranteed to be perfect, but they're usually pretty decent, but a, they do have like a one week return policy on freaking automobiles, which is pretty cool.
But secondly, you can, you can choose to buy into their like extended warranty.
And so you can basically like
create your own cpo situation granted it does cost extra money it's not free but you can basically create your own cpo situation by giving them some money up front and then they will do a bumper to bumper warranty on this used car which might be the best of both worlds for you although i suspect that they're probably still more expensive than you would want to spend
Yeah, I spent a lot of time on CarMax, AutoTrader, AutoTempest, Cars and Bids even, where I've had saved searches for months on Cars and Bids just out of my own curiosity.
Cars and Bids is more of like an enthusiast site and I have like saved searches for like the last stick shift accord or whatever.
Of course.
Actually, to go back a step, I'm embarrassed.
I forgot about this because my parents have one.
DTemp from the chat brings up, why not a used Chevy Bolt?
They weren't that expensive new.
They can't be, but so expensive used.
The used EV things, a lot of things keep me away from the used EVs.
You can't get them cheap.
They have old cruddy batteries.
The NCAS thing is out there too, and it's like, do I want to buy an electric car with a connector I know is not going to be the connector I want it to have, and wire my house up for that kind of...
Oh, it's so easy.
I know the adapters aren't that big, but the main thing is there's no electric cars that I like at this point that I can afford.
But it's not for you.
It's for your kids, and the Chevy Bolt is the answer.
But that's the thing.
It's a kid car, but it's not for the kid.
What?
what the title is going to be in our name it's not going to be the child's car that doesn't matter who's driving this i know they're the ones driving it but like the thing is if i'm going to spend like five digits five five digits at ten thousand to twenty thousand whatever dollars on a thing i want it to be a car that i like that maybe that's just a me thing i don't know it's not for you you know it's a kid car i i i can't buy a car i don't like
On the plus side, now I understand why you give me so much about me driving an automatic, even though I drive Aaron's car maybe 100 miles a year.
But now I get it.
Aaron's car is Aaron's car.
Yes, it is our car, legally speaking.
But I almost never drive that thing.
It's her car.
If she wanted something that I really disagreed with, I would have a conversation with her about it.
But she's your wife, not your child.
Well, even still, I don't understand why you're hanging your hat so much.
It needs to be something John approved.
Who freaking cares?
As long as it's not an absolute disaster, it's not for you.
It has to be me approved.
It has to be me approved.
There's no electric cars that I like.
They're very expensive.
I'm worried about the battery life and the battery health.
There's not a lot of good cheap ones.
Well, half the Bolt batteries have been replaced under warranty.
Most of them have.
You really are doing yourself a disservice.
The Bolt is probably the best contender in that category because, like I said, the Leaf doesn't have the condition batteries.
The Bolt did have that battery problem, and they've been replaced.
They are still kind of expensive, but that is actually a good possibility.
But there's just...
There's a lot of unknowns there with having it be our first electric car and having it be for the kids and everything like that.
You're coming up with excuses, darling, but whatever you need to do.
Like I said, it's not the shape of the market that's forcing these two polar things.
It's my desires that are forcing them, that it either has to be a crap box or a reliable car, and the crap boxes are too crappy, and the reliable ones are too expensive, and the EVs are too expensive, or I don't like them, or I think it's not the right time to be an EV, especially for kids.
So that got me into that situation, and
I feel like there are options that will solve this problem, which it is well within your right to say, I don't care and they're not for me.
But I do think there are options out there for you that would work.
But carry on.
What car did you buy yourself?
It's not me that's the problem here.
Oh, it's not you?
I assure you it's you.
It is 100% you, John.
With respect to getting the car.
Once my wife got wind of the idea that I was looking for a third car for the kids to drive.
You know what happened.
She's the Marco in this situation.
She's like, oh, you're looking at cars?
Does she want a new car?
You know, my car is kind of old.
She is right, isn't you?
No, no, no.
Hers is newer than yours.
Hers is the newer.
It's 2017.
It's not that old.
But she gets the seven-year itch.
Literally, the seven-year itch.
Better here than other places, John.
I'm not looking for a car for you.
you already have a car.
I'm trying to get the kids out of your car so they won't wreck it and give them a car.
And she's like, why not just let them continue to wreck it and get her a new one?
But you're looking at cars.
I like cars.
Oh, gosh.
Oh, gosh.
Before you say anything, I'm going to wager.
I don't know how this is going to turn out.
I really don't.
But I'm going to wager...
That Tina has decided she would like something new and thus will need to want something that only has two pedals, not necessarily because she prefers that, but because there's no other choice at this point.
And now you have a marital issue as to whether or not Tina will have a two pedal car.
That's what I'm going to guess.
I'll go even further.
I'm going to say Tina wants an EV.
Well, you don't know her driving case, apparently.
That's the thing I forgot to mention before, is that all our cars are stick shift.
My kids both learned on stick shift.
They're not stick shift enthusiasts.
My daughter, in particular, had a real hatred for stick shift.
And she's like, when are you going to get a good car?
She just...
Oh, that hurts me deep down inside.
Whatever.
That's their taste, right?
Like all my friends have good cars with just two pedals in them or whatever.
She's come around a little bit since like getting more comfortable with it.
But my son, he can drive stick fine, but he's also just not into it.
They're not into it at the very least.
So the whole idea with the kid car is we would get an automatic.
The kid car would be automatic, right?
Because they both don't like it.
And...
The whole point is that they would drive it and whatever, right?
Because, I mean, if they're not enthusiasts, stick shifts will have no place in their future life.
You know what I mean?
It's just, this is what we had.
They had to learn on it, whatever.
But, you know, anyway.
See, but in my recollection of Tina was, of her preferences, was that she actually legitimately does prefer three-pedal cars, but I feel like she has more, she's more willing to give on that issue than you and probably I are.
Well, when she started saying you're looking at cars, I would like a car.
I think she also eliminated EVs along with me because they're just very expensive, especially if she's looking for a car for herself.
And she's not.
I don't think there's any EVs that she really likes either.
So there's nothing out there that she's like pining for desires or whatever.
And when it comes to non EVs, she wants a stick.
which i mean i mean yeah i love that i love that but good luck i mean there's a reason i'm not forcing her to buy stick cars every car we've owned has been stick because that's what she wants she's driven automatic she drives rental cars we're have we're watching our friend's car now and they ask us to drive every once in a while she drives it she wants a stick and you know she knows they're being rare and she knows eventually we won't have one and we'll have an ev or whatever but
you know she's out there saying i you know and she doesn't know what's available what's out there but i do golf r and golf gti or maybe the gti already folded but the golf r is briefly still available we were like we went from let's buy a kid car and have it be automatic to let's not do that and let's get a third stick car which would make my children's head explode it's like what you got another car and it's also stick and it's like i have news for you about the cars we've purchased in our own
and we can't drive it uh anyway i know it's out there with stick obviously accord doesn't have stick anymore so that is eliminated my wife does know that i've told her about it so she could begin her morning period many years ago right but many other cars do have stick shifts in them but since getting her 2017 she has a 2017 accord with stick shift she has some new requirements
That have been added to the I want a new car.
Can you guess what her new requirements are?
CarPlay.
That's one of them.
And by the way, how did she get that requirement?
None of our cars have CarPlay.
We've never owned a car with CarPlay.
How did she get that?
Because she knows it exists and she's used it.
Yeah, exactly.
She's seen the forbidden fruit.
And not only does she want CarPlay...
she wants wireless wireless car oh good friggin luck you're either getting like a kia which there's nothing wrong with that or a bmw that's your choice i have personally never used carplay by the way i can tell i can tell you tina the latency really sucks on wireless carplay it is convenient though like tiff's car has it you know her in her i3 um it it is convenient but the latency never stops being annoying
uh it's it's not great but i don't personally get as offended by it as you do but i mean you're not entirely wrong all right but only we're getting sidetracked so i was trying to picture i would say like wireless like i have to say i have to preface by saying i never used it but in my my like you know i have suspicion that maybe you would actually prefer wired just because of the reliability and nope you know latency or whatever but whatever right there's that and what is what is the other there's one other thing that she wanted
Well, hold on for the record, because I know Tina is or will listen to this, is listening or will listen.
Wireless CarPlay, if you do the kind of driving that I do, which maybe she does not.
So take this with the appropriate amounts of caveats and salt and whatnot.
I tend to be in the car.
10 maybe 15 minutes at a time it is very unusual i'm in the car for more than about 15 minutes and so it's a lot of shorter trips and because of that it's and i realize how entitled i sound right now but it's very burdensome to take my phone out of my pocket or in her case purse perhaps and plug it in and then take you know unplug it put it back in the pocket slash purse whatever i find if you're doing a lot of short trips like i am i personally think that even with the higher latency
that juice is worth the squeeze.
And furthermore, these little boxes like the one I have, they're not phenomenal, but they work just fine.
It is more than sufficient if you're not a complete snob about it, that it will get the job done.
And you can retrofit wireless into a wired-only car.
So I wouldn't go too bananas on insisting wireless, but I don't think on the surface there's anything necessarily wrong with it.
I would cave on wireless car play.
long before I would cave on many of the other things that I'm sure are requirements.
Yeah.
And I will say too, like what you said about like your driving pattern of like frequent, frequent short trips, wireless car play is very good for that.
Like it is very convenient for that.
As long as you don't actually really like interact with the screen that much, because the interaction is like the latency will annoy you, but it is nicer than the alternative of just like Bluetooth controls.
Like it's nicer than that at least.
So in most cases, so yeah, I get that.
So what is the other feature she wants?
Other than a stick shift, I don't think you guys do a lot of highways.
These are new features.
Obviously, it's a stick shifter, but this is the thing.
The request that she's never had for any previous car that she suddenly has.
Wireless CarPlay is one because it didn't exist last time she bought a car.
Most of the cool new adaptive cruise features, most of those are not available on sticks.
You say that, but my car has radar cruise, and it won't come to a complete stop, but it will slow down.
So that's actually exactly what I was going to say.
I was going to say some sort of radar, or I forget the industry standard term for it, but basically— Adaptive cruise control?
There you go.
Thank you.
Adaptive cruise control.
That was going to be my guess.
Yeah, that's a great feature.
That's something you want if you don't have it.
Yeah, well, she's never had it.
And unlike CarPlay, apparently she hasn't experienced it enough to want to know.
The thing that she demands that is a hard requirement
Now, because she's had it once, heated seats.
Oh, I didn't even think about that.
Of course.
I know that sounds boring to you people who get fancy cars all the time.
No.
Not at all.
We've never purchased a car more than $25,000.
The very first car we have ever owned with heated seats is her current car, which is a 2017 Honda Accord.
Oh, no.
100% it is a requirement.
By the way, don't stop there.
Get the heated wheel, too.
Trust me.
I was going to say the same thing.
So my car does not have a heated wheel.
Erin's car does.
And every time I get in her car in the winter, it annoys the crap out of me because even in our pretend winter's John, it is still delightful to have a heated steering wheel.
So again, I wouldn't make that a requirement in the same way I wouldn't require wireless car play, but I would strongly, strongly encourage it.
So the things I've outlined to you, stick, shift, heated seats, wireless car play, and given both of our tastes in cars, you will not be shocked to learn that, I mean, if I just said manual transmission alone, like if you go like CarMax or Auto Tempest or something, it just eliminates every car in the country.
You could check that check.
You go to transmission, like we found 80,000 matches.
Check the manual transmission checkbox, two matches.
That's before you do wireless car play and heated seats.
And then before you consider our taste in cars.
Well, and the problem that you're having is I don't think a brand new car is necessarily going to fix your problem.
It might, but it won't necessarily fix your problem because...
oh i'm not shopping brand new cars at this point those things will search used cars let's i like yeah you know what i mean like i'm i'm not being like oh you have to i'm going to these search sites to try to find like the big mega ultimate meta search try car max try auto tempest try cars and bids try like just everything and if some the best thing is if you do any search terms first if you put anything in first like heated seats it just removes the manual transmission option from the menu because they know there's zero matches once you've selected that stuff
yeah so i mean that's the thing is that i don't think even going new would help you and going used i mean again i'm tunnel visioned on it because it's sitting you know below me in the garage but a gti or a golf r that would do the trick i'm trying to think of others like a couple a handful of year old bmw listening now and she's trying to claim that she never actually required wireless car play but i contest this
Honestly, I'm team Tina on this one.
Your contesting is noted.
Your contesting is noted and ignored.
I would say a several-year-old BMW, you'd be insane to do it, but you could do that.
So here's an example of a car that exists that would fulfill most of her requirements, especially if you let go of the wireless CarPlay.
The very last stick shift Honda Accord.
you could get with these features on it right that was like the 2022 like the previous generation like yeah but there are like four of them in the country right so here's the problem there's a lot of those cars but the only ones that have she thinks i don't know if she demanded leather but she wanted leather but the only one that has leather heated seats and a stick shift at the end of every accord generation for many years now they they do the accord special edition so they'll have like you know whatever generation accord it'll be the 20
2018 19 20 21 22 only the 22 model year the very last model year where they even offer a special edition right so the only accord that you can get with a stick shift with leather heated seats is the accord sport special edition in 2022 that car does not exist
that's just like everyone doesn't exist for sale people the people who bought them are keeping them there don't come up on any searches cars and bids maybe one will pop up every once in a while and get snatched up for some ridiculous price forget about that car nowhere nowhere in the entire continent you want to get shipped from new mexico sorry it doesn't exist anywhere and you know how large the radius would you like to search 3 000 miles sure zero matches
so that eliminated that so i was looking for stuff i'm like is there any car that satisfies these things can i find and it just it narrowed down so much to this tiny aperture of acceptable makes models and trim levels oh and by the way i often have a requirement about cars that i've mentioned uh that you've heard me talk about no sunroof you've heard that one right oh you are you are the worst not because i'm against sunroofs
But because I'm for having headroom, and most of my height is in my neck and my upper body.
And when I sit in the car, I don't want my head to hit the headliner.
You're losing all your hair anyway.
Don't worry about it.
It is true.
I'm losing a lot, but it's enough of it there that when my head hits the headliner, it is not, right?
Yeah, I feel really bad for you.
Try adding that into the mix.
leather heated seats stick shift wireless car play no sunroof yeah get out of here with the slick top you're gonna have to cave on the slick car again the accord sport special edition 2022 i believe fulfills these requirements minus maybe the wireless car play but that car doesn't exist and so like i you know i'm doing all the research i'm bringing it back to her saying yeah well you know this that the other thing whatever i had to bring her i said look a car exists that fulfills a lot of your requirements and
but it's got a sunroof and she's like great buy that okay i said but this but the sunroof and my head and she's like i don't care it's my car what do you care i'm like but i don't even if i never drive your car i passage in your car and my head will be hitting the ceiling is that a verb
yeah i'm making it one right now and so i went to the car dealer we went we went shopping ourselves and went to some car dealers uh one of them was closed on sunday which i didn't understand yeah that drives me service department closed on sunday fine the showroom people shop for cars on weekends anyway um i'm like look we're gonna i'll sit in i'll sit in the car i'll see because you know you can say oh sunroof takes up headroom or whatever blah blah blah uh and what by the way one of the cars we looked at not that we were gonna buy us we looked at the integra
oh that is a good answer that's such a good answer why didn't i think of that well it's expensive but it's such a good answer i mean we're not we're not it's a 50 000 car we're not getting that but anyway uh but like since it's basically not worth it to you i think since it's basically a civic i'm like well let me check this for headroom head was hitting hard in the integra with the just it's not made for me with the sunroof or whatever
but that's not you know whatever so like i'll get this there's one model and one trim level that fulfills your requirement it's got a sunroof i will go sit in it i went by myself to a car dealer to sit in a car to see if it fit my head and this i don't like car dealers no one likes car dealers i was what i was hoping is you know you go in they got a bunch of cars like indoors and you can just like wander around and like open the door and sit in them that's what i wanted to happen
because then i can get in and out in five minutes that didn't happen i there was the the car that i wanted was parked out front wanted to sit in i went in and i asked the receptionist and i said can i just go sit like someone that wasn't one of the inside ones was out so can i just can i just go to that car out there can i just go sit in it and she's like yeah sure go ahead i don't know if it'll be unlocked though i go of course it's locked i come back in i said oh it turns out it was locked and she says to me
I'm going to have to get a salesperson.
And she says it with that look.
Like she knows.
She knows what happens when you get a salesperson.
Because now you've got a car salesperson.
And it's like, I just want to.
Because they come and they attach to you like a leech.
And they want to sell you a car.
It's their job.
I get it.
Right?
She gets a salesperson.
Salesperson comes over.
Opens the door for me.
I sit in it.
headroom's not great better than the integra though but the headroom's not great i try the passenger seat i lean the seat back a little bit you know what i mean you try to do all the tricks like of course the passenger seat does not go up and down at all right um the driver's seat does go up and down but it doesn't go down that far but i'm like whatever so i go i spent way too long with the salesperson they did not sell me a car they tried real hard though i went back and i said uh to my wife i said
I think I can live with the sunroof since it's your car.
It's not as bad as the Integra.
I will suffer with my head hitting the headliner.
This is what you want.
And she said, yes, it was.
And I did the search.
How many cars with these features in the color that we wanted exist within, let's say, 500 miles?
Well, with the color that you want, I mean, at this point, you're looking for a needle in a haystack, and then you're going to say, I want a blue or whatever, red needle.
Yeah, right.
Color matters.
Again, if I'm spending new car money, I want a car that I like.
Wait, did you tell us what car it is?
Did I miss this?
Not yet.
We're getting to it.
Okay.
All right.
All right.
And how many existed?
Two.
500 miles, two.
Okay, stop right there.
Please, please, John, for the love of everything that is good and holy, if that car is anywhere near or even better on the other side of Virginia, I will give you all of my money if we can road trip that bad boy back to Boston.
I would do anything to be on that trip with you.
You would assume that if it's far away that you could do some kind of dealer trade with a local dealer or whatever.
But anyway, two cars.
So I'm like, all right.
So we're just noodling.
We're just thinking like, well, whatever.
I'm not buying a car.
We were visiting car dealers.
I'm sitting in them.
We're not buying a car.
I'm just looking around.
But then there's like two.
And so I send emails to people.
I contact them through their various websites or whatever.
And I say, hey, I've got VIN numbers now, right?
I say, hey, do you actually have this car?
That's question number one.
Yeah, that's good.
Fair, fair.
And you may be shocked to learn that car dealers are anxious to get back to you about cars.
They get back to me and say, yeah, I have this car.
I ask them a second question, which is, can you just tell me what color it is?
because i don't want to give them the answer you know what i mean i want them to tell me yeah we have i want them to go and look at it right and they tell me the correct answer and they're all like this is the big thing with car dealers this wasn't last time i they were like when should we schedule a test drive when do you want to schedule a test drive do you want to schedule a test drive let's schedule a test drive when are you going to come and look at this i'm like i'm just asking you questions over email person chill out right they're being chill right
And then I forget what day this was.
This was like Monday of this week.
And I was like, there's two of these cars.
I really don't like any of the other colors.
She really seems to want a car.
We've already given up and giving the kids what they want.
So one of the dealers, the one that's closer to her work, I call her at work and I say...
don't come home rather than going home do you want to just go to the car dealer who just knew your work and look at this car oh my god did you impulse buy a car john siracusa i wouldn't call this impulse buying if you based the amount of research i'd done up to this point but anyway fair fair we but like i'm at the point now where i know this too so we go we drive i drive up there to her we both drive together to the dealer which is you know further up uh from where her work is we look at this car um she test drives it
She likes it.
You know, the headroom is better than the Integra.
I can live with it.
We go back and I'm like, well, I think we should get this car.
Oh, my word.
Because like, look, I spent like a month on this.
Like, we know when you recorded the member special, I was already looking into this then, which is why I brought up the question.
And I was like, I don't have any other answers.
This is the best answer to this problem.
And if we don't get this car... And so, like, here I am in a situation where I'm going to negotiate the price of a new car with a salesperson, trying not to let them know that, according to my searches, two of these exist within 500 miles.
Yeah, like, you're buying this car no matter what they make you pay for it.
Part of my research was, like, I'd mentioned that...
the person who asked about new cars, and I mentioned that Car Edge service.
I had signed up for that a little while ago, and one of the things they'll give you is, there's a lot of services to do, is what is the invoice price?
What would be a fair price for this car?
That type of thing.
And so I had, before I went to this dealer, this would be a fair price for the car, minus any kind of incentives or whatever.
It's like it gives them a little bit of profit to the dealership.
They'll probably accept this, but you're not getting ripped off.
I had that price in my mind.
Went into that negotiation.
I'm very proud of myself.
I got within $100 of that price.
Well done.
Within $100 of the quote-unquote fair price for the thing.
Part of it was by saying, well, I have two other cars, two other dealers I can go to.
And I listed the one in the color that I didn't like because, of course, I never told them I didn't like the color.
Don't tell the dealer what colors you like.
It was a blue one.
I was like, well, there's a blue one and another white one.
And the dealer was pushing back.
Wait, a white car just happened to you?
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
This is getting more and more delicious.
And he was like, well, is that other car?
Are you sure that's not the same car as this?
Because we got a call from a dealer about this car and they wanted to take it from us or whatever.
I'm like, no, no, these are other cars.
I can show you the emails.
I'm like, here's whatever.
Like to basically let him think there are other places where I could go for this car, even though I would never buy the blue one.
right oh my god and so anyway i got within a hundred dollars of the price oh my god very proud of myself he's going through the thing okay we agreed on this price and then you know obviously tax title and blah blah blah like that's you know that's the thing about the car each thing they don't include tax title or whatever in the fair price right we agree on the price and then he says and then of course 129 for the locking wheel nuts
I'm sorry, what?
No, absolutely not.
The locking wheel nuts.
And I said, I don't want locking wheel nuts.
He's like, well, they're already on the car.
Well, take them off.
I said, yeah, well, why don't you take them off?
I was like, well, but they're already on the car.
And I was like, everything was going so smoothly.
And I basically got into a shouting match with this guy.
It's like, look, when we agreed upon this price, we agreed like this is going to be the price before tax, title and fees.
It was the price for the car that's sitting out there.
Whatever is on that car, that was what we were negotiating.
This number.
We weren't negotiating this number plus other things.
And he takes me out to the car and he's like on the sticker.
It has like $129 locking wheel nuts as a separate line item.
It's like, I don't care.
We were negotiating for that car.
everything that that car is not parts of that car not partial that car and that was this number and then we would add tax titles and fees and so like i'd never gotten so angry at a car anyway he went back to his manager and took the 120 29 off damn right he did good for you and he made some big excuse of like uh you know we can't take it off the price but we'll just subtract it also i don't care what you subtracted dude just subtract it
Oh, and then by the way, the incentives of like, is there any incentives?
Can we do any blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
The one incentive that we were eligible for was the Honda loyalty program thing.
And yes, now you're revealing everything about it.
Guess what?
We are loyal Honda customers.
and i got another 500 off just because i already own a honda oh good for you so as you as you should have already guessed by now what is the only car this could possibly be it is the honda civic in the most expensive trim level the honda civic is offered in because that is the only one that has wireless carplay leather seats and heated seats oh my god and a stick shift and a sunroof
I cannot believe you just bought yourself a white, well, bought Tina a white Civic.
This line in our internal show notes, Kid Car Revisited, that has sat there for like two weeks.
If I had known that this was the direction this conversation was going, we wouldn't have even done the... This happened this week.
We should have done an emergency episode, dammit.
I picked up the car today.
Wait, so is it a Civic SI or a Civic Civic?
No, we looked at the SI, but the requirements that I just gave you are not available in the SI.
And also the SI is more expensive.
We could have saved $5,000 if she didn't want heated seats.
We could have got the sport trim.
Heated seats are really, really good.
$5,000 heated seats.
Especially because you live in New England.
Winter is a big part of your life.
My car doesn't have heated seats.
I think it's fine.
But she wants them, so she goes.
After this, she deserves the heated seats, damn it.
anyway oh and this is a turbocharged car i don't think you've owned a turbocharged car i mean they're all turbos now you know yeah yeah i'm just saying we got a white honda civic hatchback a hatch you got a hatch the hatchback and sedan looks so similar in the civic and i wanted a hatchback because we don't have a hatchback and as you know as marco knows hatchbacks have a lot of utility
I'm sorry.
Am I making this up?
Didn't you give me boatloads of crap for not having a car-shaped car?
Yeah, I don't want a Volkswagen Rabbit or a Golf.
I don't want that kind of hatchback.
Look at the car.
It looks exactly like the sedan.
It's just, like, it's barely different in profile.
It looks like a sedan.
That's why I got it.
This looks a lot like Chase's car.
It sure does.
And why did I pick white?
It's white.
It's the best color for this car.
Absolutely.
The SI also.
Not the SI.
The Civic Type R.
Also looks best in white.
I don't even see white as an option here.
Oh, no, there I do.
Never mind.
Sorry.
I have the... What is it?
Noir or whatever it is that darkens... That synthetically darkens websites.
And so I had that on.
And the white paint swatch was colored black because dark mode.
By mistake.
This doesn't look bad.
This looks nice.
But I mean... Yeah.
So people wondering, you know, our recommendations for buying cars and the services we offer and the advice we have.
I just followed all that.
And this is what I ended up with.
So...
Can't say we don't put our money where our mouth is.
So a white hatchback happened to you.
I wanted the hatchback.
I absolutely wanted it because it's useful to have something with a hatch for like taller items.
Yes.
Especially since this is obviously smaller than the Accord, right?
And so I'm going to get a small... Like if the sedan version of this, the trunk is very confined.
The opening is confined.
It is very confined.
The hatch really...
helps with that it gives you way more space than you get with the sedan version and it looks almost like the sedan so all my you know hatred of hatchbacks that look like a volkswagen rabbit doesn't apply to this car who knows if i ever get to drive it anyway it's my wife's car so anyway the kids are driving her old car as they have always been they have always been driving that car and they will continue to drive it and now we have three six of cars and just to review uh my history of car purchases
Go like this.
Civic, Civic, Accord, Accord, Accord, Accord, Civic.
All six shift.
You're pretty consistent at least.
You are consistent, which is funny because I have never bought more than one car from the same company.
And I have never bought cars from any other company except for Honda.
Did you even look at like a GTI or anything like that?
We like Hondas.
We like them.
Yeah, but it doesn't mean that there's not other better things, John.
We looked at other things.
It's just, I mean, we're a Honda family, and we got $500 off for being a Honda family.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, they are good cars.
I'll give you that.
Even the things like they haven't screwed themselves up.
They haven't gone all touchscreen or done anything weird.
The interior is, I think, my favorite mix of physical and touchscreen-type controls.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The real question is, are you going to, for your future car purchases, convert to hatchback once you realize how good it is?
No, hopefully I'm going to convert to EV.
That's what's going to happen to me, but not anytime soon.
But you just crapped all over every EV on the market.
I know, but eventually all the EVs will change to NACS and there'll be EV sedans that I like.
This is going to be years in the future.
Yeah, this is congratulations to really Tina for forgetting what she wanted, because I cannot imagine the amount of bickering and grief that you gave her over heated seats and most especially a sunroof.
No, I just tried to convince her and she didn't want to be convinced.
So there was no there was no heated arguments.
I just needed to sit in it and be able to say I can tolerate this.
I can I can passage and not die.
It's a glowing review.
Yeah, because like the Integra, I was really surprised.
The Integra was worse.
It did feel like they're basically the same car.
Like that's why I was part of the reason I was showing her the Integra.
She's like, why can't I get a fancy car like Integra?
I'm like, A, the good one is $50,000.
And B, this is just a Civic.
When you see the Civic, you'd be like, oh, like you sit inside them.
They're very, very similar.
and by the way finding stick shift integra is talking to the dealer who are there is also very difficult the packaging is better on the civic civic is just a better better car than the integra unless you get the type s and those are very expensive and don't exist the integra type s you mean or the oh yeah they're very hard very hard to come by and they're very expensive much more than we wanted to spend
Well, I'm very curious.
Again, congratulations.
You've done this well.
You've done it right.
I'm proud of you for sticking to your guns about the locking wheel, lug, nut, whatever things.
You know, it's funny.
When we bought the Volvo, I'm sure I've told this story, but when we bought the Volvo, I told the dealer, I do not want any stickers on that car.
I do not want a plate surround.
I totally forgot.
I do that same thing.
And I totally after we came home from the dealer after negotiating the price and say, we're going to buy it.
I'm like, oh, I forgot to tell them all those things you just said.
No, you know, sticker, no plaque.
Yeah.
No dealer branding.
Yep.
Whatever.
I was like, oh, like stupid me.
Like I buy a car once every seven to ten years.
So, you know, but like I totally forgot.
I was so mad at myself.
Yeah, well, so when we bought the Volvo, which was seven years ago in like a week or something like that, I think it was July, so a few weeks, July of 2017.
Anyways, I vividly remember going to the car and saying, oh, the sticker's there.
And the salesperson looked at me like, yeah?
Yeah.
yeah we're not we're not gonna buy this car and he's what as i told you i will not have this sticker on this car and he rolled his eyes so hard that i think they fell out of his damn head but then he had like a mechanic or who knows or detail or whatever come over with like a heat gun and pull the sticker off the car and and i was not going to sign any paperwork until he did and i stand by it and i will stand by it forever
That's pretty nice of him considering you'd already agreed to buy that car and signed all the paperwork for him.
No, I don't think I had signed it at that point.
If you hadn't signed it, then yes, you have the power there.
But yeah, the good news is because even though I totally forgot about this, this dealer was great.
Not only did they not put anything on this car, he pointed out to me, I noticed this already, but he pointed out to my salesperson, pointed out to me,
I didn't even put a license plate surround on for you.
Nice.
Like, thank you.
That's good stuff.
It's just literally like, no, I've never seen this.
Everyone always does license.
It's easy to take that off.
You just unscrew it or whatever.
But then he didn't even put that on and he pointed it out to me because he could tell based on me yelling at him about the lug nuts that I didn't want that.
I was like, thank you.
I appreciate that.
Is Massachusetts a barbaric commonwealth like we are?
Front plate states.
Yeah.
It is.
It's the worst.
It's fine.
I hate it.
I hate it so much.
Virginia is a front plate barbaric commonwealth.
I don't think it's barbaric.
I think it's fine, but I've got the front plates.
Well, congratulations to Tina.
I'm glad she stuck to her guns and got what she wanted.
See, she did the negotiation with you, so you would do the negotiation with the dealer.
Yeah, she doesn't deal with the dealer.
She just watches me do it.
I think she was a little bit upset when I was yelling.
And by the way, all of our cars have locking lug nuts.
It's just that I never want to pay for them because I didn't ask for them.
So if you're going to put them on there, I'm getting them for free.
I have to concede.
I am a little upset at Tina because I would have given infinite dollars to have a video recording of you yelling at the Steeler and would have given nearly infinite dollars for a voice memos recording of you yelling at the Steeler.
as listeners to this podcast would know it's not angry yelling it's incredulous yelling like you when you hear me on the podcast talking about some bad software feature it's like no i was like it was like we just negotiated the price for that i was literally pointing for that car that's the number we agreed on remember that whole thing where we were talking about the numbers and you're going to ask your manager or whatever and we agreed on a number we said yes this is a number we can both it was for that car
everything that's in that car that's the number we agreed on it was just i was incredulous i'm like are you kidding me you can't add you can't say and also other parts of that car we're now going to itemize and add to the price and so i was i mean would i have not bought the car with the hundred at that point i probably would have oh here's the here's the final kicker right when i came home and and like reloaded one of my tabs that had that search in it
Oh, no.
Zero matches.
So guess what?
That car that was listed twice, there was one of these cars.
Oh.
In 500 miles, and I just bought it because you can say Impulse bought it.
After a month of research, I saw that it was available.
I saw it had been on the market for 29 days, and I found the one that was near.
I was lucky we picked.
They both said they had the car, but only one of them really had the car, and we randomly picked that one because it was close to my wife's work.
That's incredible.
And so when I bought that car, it disappeared.
Now there's zero of these cars within 500 miles.
That's incredible.
I'm a little sad that we didn't get to do a road trip together, but ultimately I'm glad that a white car in a white hatchback happened to you.
I was ready to ship a car from New Mexico in CarMax, but, you know, because I was like, oh, rest free.
It'll be great.