The Correct Amount of Rocks
Casey:
There is a way to get John Syracuse to leave his house.
Casey:
For those of you who remember, in November, I believe it was November, I traveled up, I made a multi-hundred mile train trip to go see Marco and try the Vision Pro prior to release at a lab.
Casey:
And I said to John in advance, hey, I know you're not going to the lab, but wouldn't it be neat if you came down to New York and visited with us?
Casey:
I think that would be a lot of fun.
Casey:
And John told me to go outside and play hide-and-go-screw-myself.
Marco:
Those were his words exactly.
Casey:
Those words precisely.
Casey:
And so I thought there was no possible way to get John to leave his house, even for his beloved friends of years and co-workers of years and years and years.
Casey:
But it turns out, John, there is a way to get you out of the house.
Casey:
And I am happy to report the ATP reunion for the first time since 2019 is a go.
Casey:
John, what's going on?
John:
We are going to WWDC.
John:
All of us?
John:
At Apple Park.
John:
All of us.
John:
All 13.
John:
Sorry, all three of us.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
I am extremely, extremely, extremely excited.
Casey:
I cannot overstate how excited I am, especially to see the two of you fellas, but also to be able to go to Apple Park.
Casey:
The only place I've ever been on Apple Park is Visitor Center, the public visitor center that you don't need any special privileges to get to.
Casey:
I'm excited that we are press for the purposes of this event, which I'm really, really excited about.
Casey:
I swear I've never done a press WWDC.
Casey:
I don't think so.
Casey:
And I meant to look through my badges to see if I could find a press badge.
Casey:
Maybe I have, and it's just been so darn long and I don't recall knowing me.
Casey:
That's probably true.
Casey:
But one way or another, it's happening again.
Casey:
And I am so excited.
Casey:
So I am glad that you are willing to make the trek instead of just a couple of convenient hours down the interstate and or train from Boston to New York.
Casey:
You're just going to cross the country instead.
Casey:
And I appreciate the effort.
John:
yeah i mean i i have done press wwcs we've all attended many wwcs but i've never been to one at apple park and neither has casey so that's what i'm most excited for is to be officially allowed onto apple's campus uh and i think they don't let you take real cameras which is kind of a bummer so i'll just take lots of pictures with my phone but whatever uh i'm excited to do it it'll be a fun experience uh yeah uh looking forward to not looking forward to taking the plane flight but you know you do what you have to
Casey:
All right, let's do a little follow-up.
Casey:
I wanted to briefly call attention to there's some new Vision Pro content.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Really?
Casey:
Yes, there is.
Casey:
There's new Vision Pro content.
Casey:
Who'd have thunk it?
Casey:
So there's three things I wanted to call everyone's attention to, two of which are from Apple and one of which is not.
Casey:
Uh, first of all, there is a new sizzle reel.
Casey:
Um, I don't know if that's the bestest way of describing it, but basically it's like a three and a half minute video that gets you interested in the vision pro.
Casey:
And previously I hadn't watched it in a couple of months at least, but previously my recollection is, or the way I remember it was, it showed like the, a little bit of the kids playing soccer rhinoceroses.
Casey:
It showed the, uh, tightrope Walker.
Casey:
And I think it showed a very brief bit of space.
Casey:
Sports, if memory serves.
Casey:
I don't entirely remember.
Casey:
But one way or another, there's a new one.
Casey:
And I think it's really well done.
Casey:
It's still, it's a little, it's a little jumpy for my taste.
Casey:
Just a touch.
Casey:
It's not like that MLS thing from a month or so back where it was way too jumpy.
Casey:
It's just a touch jumpy.
Casey:
But the soundtrack is excellent.
Casey:
And I really, really like it.
Casey:
Again, three and a half minutes.
Casey:
You can find it in the Apple TV app.
Casey:
And since it's new, it is...
Casey:
kind of front and center.
Casey:
I know I was complaining and moaning about the information architecture last week.
Casey:
But in this case, it's pretty good.
Casey:
So you should check that out.
Casey:
Additionally, there's a new, I believe it's the Adventure series.
Casey:
This is the one that had the tightrope walker on it.
Casey:
There's a new episode of that all about parkour.
Casey:
And it's three, I believe, Brits, based on accents, although who knows.
Casey:
But anyway, it's three Brits doing all various and sundry stunts across Paris.
Casey:
And
Casey:
And it's really, really well done.
Casey:
It's like 12 to 15 minutes long, somewhere in that neck of the woods.
Casey:
And I really enjoyed it.
Casey:
It's not, you know, earth shattering, but it's really good.
Casey:
And I got to tell you, no spoilers for the 12 minute video, but there's a point at which the three gentlemen are trying to jump from one rooftop to another.
Casey:
And they position the camera such that if you want, you can look down and see how tall it is.
Casey:
scary as hell.
Casey:
So it's pretty, pretty cool.
Casey:
And I think both of these, I mean, all together, these two things are worth literally 15 minutes of your time.
Casey:
I really do think it's pretty cool.
Casey:
And then finally, What If has finally launched.
Casey:
I had planned to do the whole darn thing earlier today and report in on it.
Casey:
Unfortunately, they seem to release on Pacific time, so it wasn't available until my afternoon.
Casey:
And I've only had the time to do the first like 10-ish minutes of
Casey:
But it was very, very cool.
Casey:
The premise here, no spoilers, is, you know, you're in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Casey:
And what if, you know, things weren't the way they were in the movies?
Casey:
What if things went a little awry and different?
Casey:
And it's your responsibility as part of the story to try to fix all this.
Casey:
And so the portion that I've done so far, again, the first 10 minutes or so.
Casey:
is they teach you how to cast some spells.
Casey:
They interact with you.
Casey:
So it begins as fully immersive.
Casey:
You can't see any of your own environment.
Casey:
And then it converts to augmented such that there are a couple of characters in your space.
Casey:
And I don't know if it was an extremely happy accident or if it was deliberate, but I was doing this in my office and...
Casey:
I had spun my chair around, so my desk and monitors were behind me in my offices.
Casey:
I don't know, 12 feet by 12 feet, something like that.
Casey:
So that's something like 4 meters by 4 meters.
Casey:
Not terribly big.
Casey:
No, it's got to be... Yeah, maybe that's right.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
Casey:
Not big is the point.
Casey:
And there were a couple of characters.
Casey:
One is designed to be floating in the air, and sure enough, it was floating in the air, and his feet were kind of inside my guest's bed, which is behind my desk.
Casey:
But, you know, that's fine.
Casey:
He's magic, so whatever.
Casey:
But then the other character was designed to be on the ground, and sure enough...
Casey:
He was on the, you know, guest room floor, like he was standing on the floor.
Casey:
There's a little shadow below him and it looked just spot on.
Casey:
And then they had you do some, you go back into an immersive environment where it's, you know, all you can see is what they're showing you.
Casey:
And they have you do some spells where you're using hand tracking in order to do stuff.
Casey:
And there were three or four that I learned and one of them didn't really work that well, but the rest were spot on.
Casey:
And again, I've only done the first few minutes, but it's really slick and it's free.
Casey:
So definitely, definitely check all three of these out.
Casey:
Again, that's the new sizzle reel.
Casey:
I think they just call it like immersive or like immersive demo or something like that.
Casey:
And then the parkour, the adventure series, the second episode about parkour and what if by Marvel.
Casey:
And I'll put a link to the what if thing in the show notes, assuming I can dig one up.
Casey:
I should be able to
Casey:
Um, I don't think I can link to the other ones in the show notes, but if I find a way I will do so.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
The low storage 13 inch iPad pros have 12 gig RAM or 12 gigs worth of RAM chips in them, but they don't use 12 gigs of RAM.
Casey:
John, what's going on here?
John:
This was discovered by the iFixit folks, Teardown, their lead teardown technician, Shahram Mokardi, found that readers apparently, meaning people who saw the YouTube video, I don't know how they spotted this, but they apparently spotted two 6GB RAM modules on the 256GB and 512GB 13-inch iPad Pro.
John:
I looked at the Teardown video, I looked at the Teardown on their website, I'm like, how did they spot that these were 12GB modules?
John:
I can barely make out the part numbers, they're so blurry from compression, but whatever.
John:
um anyway uh sharam says our chip id confirms this with high certainty two six gigabyte lp ddr 5x modules produced by micron for a total of 12 gigabytes of ram now to remind you apple says this machine has eight gigs of ram because remember if you want to get 16 you got to get the higher storage they say it has eight gigs but there's apparently 12 gigs on the chips there so
John:
Why does Apple utilize only 8 gigs of RAM?
John:
iFixit says Apple has never done this before, as far as we know.
John:
Someone asked if it's possible these RAM chips are defective and some of the RAM is disabled for some reason.
John:
The folks at iFixit says that my understanding is that if this were the case, they would receive a different part number and be labeled as 4 gig.
John:
But I don't think that's how LPDDR5 is manufactured anyway.
John:
There's very little doubt that there's 12 gigs of RAM.
John:
Another possible question, what if those are the only LPDDR5X modules they can get their hands on, but as soon as they're able to put in 4GB ones, they will.
John:
So just to avoid problems, this initial batch is artificially limited.
John:
The iFix answer to that was that these modules have been in production since 2020, according to the spec sheets, so it seems unlikely based on how long they've been around.
John:
Super weird, because, like, why would they do that?
John:
Like, you know, if you follow the thread, the Twitter thread about this, you can see people throwing out a bunch of theories and them basically getting shot down by Axe Fix-It.
John:
Why would they use bigger RAM chips?
John:
Could they not get smaller RAM chips?
John:
And if they couldn't get smaller RAM chips, why wouldn't they just free up the whole 12 gigs?
John:
The other theory is like, oh, they're reserving a certain amount of RAM for LLM stuff.
John:
Why would they only do it on this model and not all the models?
John:
Because I think this is the only one that has more RAM installed.
John:
The other ones have the amount that Apple says based on the teardowns.
John:
But this one has this particular variant of this particular model has 12 gigs instead of eight.
John:
Super weird.
John:
But maybe this is the side door for Apple finally putting more RAMs in its products.
John:
They'll just install it and not enable it for you.
John:
But it's there.
John:
You just can't use it.
Casey:
How is your M4 iPad Pro treating your eyes?
Casey:
Because apparently it's not all roses and pansies.
John:
I mean, it's good for me, but Ben writes in to say, I'm upgrading to an M4 iPad Pro from the 2018 iPad Pro.
John:
Almost immediately, I noticed that my eyes seemed unable to properly focus on the display, resulting in eye strain, fatigue, blurry vision, and even headaches.
John:
I couldn't use the display for very long before the symptoms reappeared, so I went down a rabbit hole researching.
John:
This is kind of like Marco with the Zoom Pro thing, but even worse.
John:
Ben continues, it seems like I'm not the only one experiencing this, though I have yet to determine the exact issue.
John:
It might be PWM, which stands for Pulse Width Modulation.
John:
And by the way, when I follow these links to look at the research that he was doing, everyone just says, oh, it might be PWM.
John:
I think you have a PWM.
John:
Yeah, it's probably PWM.
John:
People will come into a forum or a Reddit or whatever and say, hey, I just got a new M4 iPad Pro and the screen hurts my eyes.
John:
What do you think the problem is?
John:
And people would say, yeah, it's probably PWM.
John:
And I was like, are you going to explain what PW?
John:
I mean, I guessed it was pulse width modulation just by knowing the term or whatever.
John:
But when you're helping somebody, don't just say, yeah, you probably have PWM because they don't know what PWM is.
John:
Never mind that the term pulse width modulation doesn't make much sense.
John:
I bet if you hear this now, you're like, well, I know what pulse width modulation is, but what does that have to do with screens and why it would be hurting their eyes?
John:
So we'll get to that in a second.
John:
So anyway, Ben says it might be PWM, though I've never known this to be a problem.
John:
And I have been using LG OLED TV as well as OLED versions of the iPhone Pro for years without any issue.
John:
Or maybe tandem OLED is misaligned if there is such a thing.
John:
I ended up going to the Apple store and compared my device with others.
John:
Mine appeared to be slightly different as if the HDR was turned on all the time.
John:
Overall, the display was always just too much as best described as basically yelling at me all the time.
John:
Since I was still within the 14-day return period, they switched my device for replacement, which seems to be much better now, although not perfect.
John:
My question is for John.
John:
Are you noticing any eye fatigue with the new Pro, especially compared to the 2018 version?
John:
If so, do you expect this could be improved through software updates?
John:
So here's the research and what PWM is talking about.
John:
According to these links that Ben provided that we'll put in the show notes,
John:
The way this OLED and some other OLEDs handles brightness, there's two ways OLEDs can handle brightness.
John:
One is they can send less voltage to the pixels and they're not as bright, right?
John:
So if, for example, you dim the brightness of the screen or whatever, how does it do that?
John:
One way you can do it is you can just send less voltage to the screen and it gets dimmer, right?
John:
But if you only use adjusting the electricity going to the pixels to control brightness, apparently when you get to low brightness levels,
John:
you lose a lot of the color saturation too and it looks kind of like dingy and gross so they tend to not want to do that for the lower brightnesses the other way you can control brightness on an oled is you can have the screen be at maximum brightness briefly and then go off and then max brightness then off and the longer
John:
you know the on period is the brighter it is so uh if they show like a little graph and this is the pulse width modulation of saying you know if you just pulse the screen pulse pulse pulse pulse pulse the faster the pulses go the brighter the screen if you go pulse pulse pulse it is dimmer because the light is on less of the time
John:
You don't notice this because Apple's screen, this tandem OLED, pulses at 480 times a second, which is a pretty high refresh rate, if you remember from the CRT days.
John:
Like, oh, my screen looks flickering.
John:
At 60 hertz, I can see the flicker.
John:
But at 85, I can't see it anymore.
John:
At 120, I definitely can't see it.
John:
At 480, I can tell you, I cannot see my OLED flickering.
John:
The complaint about the M4 iPad Pro tandem OLED is that it uses...
John:
pulsing to control its brightness through its entire brightness range apparently even at maximum brightness it's still pulsing as opposed to some other oleds which will use pulsing down at low brightnesses but once they get the high brightnesses they will do that by keeping it out all the time by just sending less voltage
John:
I don't know if this is just the way tandem OLEDs work.
John:
Is this a way Apple is choosing to make it work?
John:
But some people report that this bothers them.
John:
I don't personally see how it could because I am not aware of anyone who would notice flickering at 480 hertz.
John:
We're not even talking about motion here.
John:
We're just saying, like, put on just a full field, you know, red slide.
John:
I can't see it flickering at 480 hertz.
John:
If you had asked me whether this is flickering to control brightness, I would have said no, because I can't see it.
John:
But maybe people with very young or better eyes than mine can see it.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Or maybe it's... Anyway, follow the links, decide for yourself.
John:
And by the way, do iPhones use this or do they use voltage regulation?
John:
I honestly couldn't tell you because it just looks like a screen to me and I can't see whether it's dimming or pulsing at 480 hertz.
John:
Some of the OLEDs that are out in the market pulse at even higher rates than that.
John:
So, yeah.
John:
Is this an issue?
John:
Is this something people are imagining?
John:
Are some people just uniquely sensitive to it?
John:
All I can tell you is that my old man eyes don't see this and aren't bothered by it, but...
John:
We'll see.
John:
We'll see if Apple doesn't update.
John:
We didn't put this in the notes for last episode, but there is some kind of actual software error with displaying HDR video where some highlights are getting blown out that Apple, uncharacteristically, Apple immediately acknowledged and said a software fix was coming for.
John:
So it is possible that maybe whatever issue people are complaining about here will also be wrapped up in that fix, but we'll see.
Casey:
Michael Thompson writes in with regard to trillions of operations per second measurements, or TOPS measurements.
Casey:
Michael writes, I found this article on the Qualcomm website that suggests that the TOPS measurement they use for their NPU performance is based on 8-bit integers.
Casey:
In the paragraph headed Precision, they state, quote, the current industry standard for measuring AI inference in TOPS is at int 8 precision.
Casey:
The context here being whether or not the new Surface line and the, what is it, the Copilot plus PC or whatever it is, line of PCs, are they or are they not actually faster for neural related things than Apple stuff?
Casey:
And so I don't recall what was, does this mean they are faster than, I presume?
John:
Well, I mean, so this matches what we saw.
John:
The idea that on this website, Qualcomm is saying the industry standard is int 8 precision, right?
John:
And what we've seen is Apple's using int 8, and so is Qualcomm, and so is Microsoft, and everybody who's talking about their current line of products, they're all using int 8 precision.
John:
And again, this is saying, how many int 8-bit things can you...
John:
process it once, right?
John:
If I ask you how many 16-bit things you can process, it's half as many, right?
John:
And so the number is smaller.
John:
Previously, unlike earlier, you know, Apple Silicon stuff, Apple was using 16-bit stuff, and so their numbers were half as big.
John:
But with their new stuff, Apple is using numbers that are twice as big, and they're using Int8, and so is Qualcomm.
John:
So the answer is...
John:
everyone's using indate now is that because indate is more representative of the actual jobs we're asking our npus to do maybe but you know whatever the industry has decided when measuring tops we're going to use indate precision that may become less relevant if it turns out that the things we ask our npus to do involve 16-bit or 32-bit values and it doesn't really matter how fast they can do stuff on indate things but i would trust that indate is actually a relevant measure right now so the answer is uh you know the
John:
The Copilot Plus PCs and the Snapdragon X Elite thing has 40 tops.
John:
The M4 has 38.
John:
Those are both int-8 measures.
John:
That means they're essentially comparable.
Casey:
Eric Jacobson writes in with regard to iCloud Drive and Node modules.
Casey:
So if you recall, this was with John Sun, who basically nuked his MacBook Air by trying to sync the Node modules folder through iCloud Drive.
Casey:
Eric writes, I haven't used it since I don't use iCloud Drive, but there's a project that will add a no-sync directive to every Node modules on a file system.
Casey:
I imagine it might need to be rerun whenever a new project is kicked off, and we'll put a link in the show notes to no-sync-iCloud.
John:
yeah and i tried to look at the code to remind myself how i think you make like a directory with a dot no sync extension that has the same name as the other one like that's the way you signal to icloud drive not to sync the directory or something like that it's this is a node module itself so you can look at the code but unfortunately the documentation is all in what are we going to say here i'm going to say chinese
Casey:
Yeah, something like that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So the documentation is in Chinese and I can't read it.
John:
But the source code is not in Chinese and I still couldn't quite make details of it.
John:
But yeah, I think it's just making .nosync directories in the right places.
John:
And it's a node module that you can use and it will, you know, I think you just include it in your project and it makes sure everything nosyncs.
John:
So that's, you know, useful and helpful if you want to dare to walk that tightrope of trying to use node modules with iCloud Drive.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
And then Eric continues, I do have a reused time machine and can attest that the Asimov utility works perfectly for excluding node modules and other dependency directories.
Casey:
Also, it is a background service, so it doesn't need to be reinitialized.
Casey:
And we will again put a link to the show notes to Asimov.
Casey:
And also, John, I guess you wanted to call attention to the list of excluded directories, which I put in the show notes as well.
John:
yeah it shows what kind of things like when it says dependencies what does that mean obviously it means node modules but it has a whole list of all the different things it excludes things from gradle bauer pi pi npm parcel cargo maven i think coco pods might be yeah coco pods is in there like marco have you heard of any of those things other than coco pods uh zero precisely flutter anyway um it's sad that i think i've heard of all of these um
John:
but i i installed this and i ran it it installs a little like launch demon thing or whatever and it essentially like does the um i forget what the time machine i think this is an extended attribute or something but there's a way to exclude things from time machine maybe it just calls tmutil yeah anyway uh excluding all these directories from your time machine backups can make your time machine backups go faster what it's basically saying is you don't need to back up
John:
like the dependencies of your code.
John:
If you're writing like something in Node and you use 17 Node modules, you don't need to back those up.
John:
You get them from the internet anyway.
John:
You got them through NPM or YARM or whatever.
John:
They're on the internet.
John:
Do not back them up.
John:
That's not your code.
John:
It's a dependency.
John:
You didn't write that code.
John:
It's just pulling it in.
John:
And there are tons of files.
John:
So if you can exclude those direct circuits from Time Machine, it will make your Time Machine backups go faster.
John:
But who remembers, oh, you know, what am I going to do?
John:
Go to options in Time Machine and drag the little thing in or set the extended attribute.
John:
I don't remember how to do this.
John:
This just runs in the background all the time.
John:
Looks for directories that fit this signature and excludes them from Time Machine.
John:
So I did that.
John:
I probably saved, I don't know, thousands...
John:
Many thousands of files are no longer in my time machine backups because I ran this.
John:
I hope it doesn't have bugs and isn't excluding a whole bunch of important files for my time machine backups.
John:
But, you know, I've got multiple backup strategies.
John:
So for now, I'm trying the experiment of running this Asimov daemon in the background to see if it helps with my time machine backups.
John:
And I'm still not running iCloud Drive, of course.
Casey:
Of course.
Casey:
And then finally, this is actually, I should move this up by the other Vision Pro follow-up.
Casey:
Didn't think about it.
Casey:
But anyway, Jonathan Goldbranson writes with regard to audio routing during Vision Pro guest mode.
Casey:
So if you recall, I was doing demonstrations for my mom and dad, and I noticed that when mom was on Mount Hood or whatever it's called, and I had her go fully immersive, that the crickets and whatnot were being routed through my iPad Pro.
Casey:
which was doing mirroring at the time.
Casey:
And so it doesn't really make for a very good effect if the audio is going through there.
Casey:
So Jonathan writes, you can choose during setup of each guest user session whether to route audio to the Vision Pro or the iPad or whatever the case may be if you choose to mirror content.
Casey:
And we'll put a link to the Knowledge Base article.
Casey:
So what you do is you look up
Casey:
And you get the little green like down chevron near the top of your view.
Casey:
Then you go into control center.
Casey:
Then you go back into the mirror my view button.
Casey:
And then in there, there's a audio routing like section that you can choose to push everything back onto the Vision Pro.
Casey:
Not entirely sure why this isn't the default, to be honest, because pretty much every time I've always wanted this.
Casey:
But here we are.
Casey:
At least now I know that there is a way around it.
Casey:
So good deal.
Marco:
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Casey:
It is quickly approaching WWDC time, which means I'm going to be seeing you too soon.
Casey:
But nevertheless, we should talk about some last-second predictions.
Casey:
And I guess this is most predominantly from Mark Gurman in today's episode.
Casey:
So I'm going to read a whole bunch of stuff.
Casey:
One of you guys, feel free to pipe in and interrupt at your convenience.
Casey:
But here we go.
Casey:
Mark Gertman writes,
Casey:
Much of the processing for less computing-intensive AI features will run entirely on the device, but if a feature requires more horsepower, the work will be pushed to the cloud.
Casey:
There are several new capabilities in the works for this year, including ones that transcribe voice memos, retouch photos with AI, and make searches faster and more reliable on the Spotlight feature.
Casey:
Faster would be great, particularly on my iPad, please and thank you.
Casey:
They also will improve Safari web search and automatically suggest replies to emails and text messages.
Casey:
The Siri personal assistant will get an upgrade as well, with more natural-sounding interactions based on Apple's own large language models.
Casey:
There's also a more advanced Siri coming to Apple Watch for on-the-go tasks.
Casey:
Developer tools, including Xcode, are getting AI enhancements too.
John:
Let's stop here for a second and look at this list of features, because we're always like, how will Apple add AI sauce to all this stuff?
John:
What things will they talk about?
John:
And
John:
There was a big story, Gurman had it, and I think we might have mentioned it on the show, like, oh, they're going to fix Siri.
John:
We were speculating months ago or weeks ago, whatever.
John:
Is this the year that they're going to fix Siri with AI, or are they just going to add it to a bunch of other stuff?
John:
And Gurman's rumor was like, no, they're doing a Siri thing.
John:
So we can expect to see that.
John:
But here's some specifics, and the specifics seem...
John:
not weird i don't know like sometimes these rumors aren't comprehensive like very often apple emphasizes one or two particular things whereas we just get a laundry list and we don't know which one they're really going to concentrate on and it's going to be impressive but let's look at some of these in turn and see how exciting they are transcribing voice memos apple's been doing transcriptions for example on voicemail for a long time now having transcription be better
John:
that's good probably not going to really radically change people's lives since it's an existing feature they're just making a little bit better retouch photos with ai could mean a lot of things that could be a headlining feature that you know that short description doesn't tell us is this going to just be like oh they're better background detection for tearing people off or is it going to be like oh they're going to really emphasize that they're doing like the feature that google and many others have where
John:
if there's something in the background a photo you don't want you can remove it right remove a person from the background who shouldn't be there remove like a sign or a tree or something like that is that going to be uh you know that that could be a big headlining feature google has certainly had a whole ad campaign about theirs and obviously it's
John:
Every graphics application from Photoshop to Lightroom, the Pixelmator and everything, has features like this, and they've been touting them, and I think they're crowd-pleasing.
Marco:
Well, but that's part of the problem.
Marco:
So far, voicemail transcription and fancy AI photo cleanup and removal, that's table stakes today.
Marco:
I'm glad Apple's getting there.
Marco:
They should.
Marco:
But neither of those, I think, is likely to make a big splash simply because...
Marco:
Other people have been doing that for a decent amount of time, and the rest of the industry is there.
Marco:
What I want to see from Apple is what we get excited about from Apple.
Marco:
I want them to blow us away with stuff that we haven't seen from everyone else.
Marco:
I want to see features that are not just playing catch-up with the rest of the industry.
Marco:
I want to see Apple leading the way, not following.
Marco:
And these are just following so far.
John:
Yeah, I mean, well, as with all these things, like we know that this has been done elsewhere and even on Apple's own platforms in various applications.
John:
But this when people get one of these new phones or they update the OS or they see an ad on TV that Apple touts this feature of erasing a person.
John:
chances are good that they've never seen that before if they're not a tech nerd right and so as far as they're concerned wow this is amazing like it is especially if they don't know it's even possible like they're saying oh on my phone i could just tap a person and remove them and we all know that that's been around for a long time and they're playing catch up but a they do have to play catch up we don't want them to not do this and b it can be just as impressive it can be very impressive to people who haven't seen it before so i just hope they do a good job of this because there is a lot of competition again even on apple's own platforms
John:
in applications that you can get for the Mac and for the iPad and for the iPhone that already do this same job.
John:
I hope Apple at least matches them.
John:
Historically, Apple has kind of been...
John:
they want to make it simple so there's not a lot of adjustability and if it does a bad job like the apple way is like well just tap on the person or remove them and you'll tap on a person and it'll make a terrible mess of it and you'll be like is there something i can do to try that again and do better and the apple way is no nope if you tap them and if it does a good job good and if it doesn't oh well whereas like in lightroom there's a million knobs you can adjust and you can take a second attempt and you can mask differently you do all sorts of things that are fancy applications so
John:
There's that.
John:
I just really – I really hope they do catch up and I hope they do a good job of it.
John:
The next item about improving Safari web search.
John:
How?
Marco:
I get – all right.
Marco:
Well, I mean for whatever it's worth.
Marco:
Obviously, we don't know what this means yet.
Marco:
We might not even learn it in two weeks.
Marco:
But –
Marco:
Safari had like whatever Apple is doing, whatever their back end logic is for autocomplete suggestions in Safari is basically a search engine like they like I'm I can't even imagine how many like millions and millions of web searches Apple avoids even making on the iPhone by people just tapping that first autocomplete review result that comes up.
Marco:
So maybe it's just related to whatever the back end is of that.
Marco:
And that could be one of those like invisible things that everybody will take for granted and nobody will even notice.
Marco:
But we will appreciate it getting better, you know, like things like autocorrect.
John:
Well, we'll notice if they screw it up like they've changed autocomplete many, many times over the years.
John:
And when they screw it up, we all notice and we don't like it.
John:
So I really hope.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It doesn't start suggesting ridiculous things.
John:
Like, I think that might all be local, too.
John:
So maybe that is a place for LLMs to try to do, like, better predictions.
John:
But anytime they're messing with an existing feature, you hope it's going to be a big improvement.
John:
But there's a possibility, especially when you're throwing LLMs into them, because it's a possibility, you know, if the current strategy is, like, look at your past history, look at, like, the number one search results.
John:
Like, they could even be hitting the Google backend for some of those things.
John:
Like, it's a very straightforward, noncomplicated algorithm.
John:
But it's deterministic, right?
John:
Right.
John:
And if they switch from that to like, let's just chuck it over the wall to the LM and see what it says.
John:
I'm concerned that there might be some wackiness there, but we'll see.
John:
More reliable spotlight features.
John:
Similarly, like when you use spotlight on the phone, like, I don't know if it's using spotlight spotlight, if it's the same technology as it runs on the Mac, but it's like, oh, I'm, you know, searching for stuff on my phone and it includes contacts and all your applications and files and things you've done recently.
John:
And
John:
Yeah, you could probably throw LMs into the mix there to handle, you know, it's basically like so you don't have to type things exactly and it's better about synonyms and you can type in vague things like type in some expression about what you want to do in settings and have the LM figure out the setting you want to go to.
John:
Potential for good, also potential for messing up spotlight on the phone.
John:
You know, and then suggest replies to emails and text messages.
John:
This starts to get into the area where we thought like, will Apple go there?
John:
You know, we haven't gotten to like chatbots yet, but
John:
um you know obviously everyone else is doing this so it's another catch-up feature but the idea that apple would in within the mail application or while sending text messages pop up a little clippy and say it looks like you're trying to reply to your friend you want me to write it for you which is what i mean just look at the gmail interface for example every time i'm in gmail it's like do you want me to summarize this email do you want me to just write the reply for you like google's been pushing on this for years it used to just be like
John:
here's a canned phrase that is probably a reasonable reply to this email.
John:
And now it's like, you know what?
John:
I can just write the whole email for you.
John:
Like you don't have to click from canned phrases.
John:
You don't have to, you know, the autocomplete that happens in like Google Docs and everything.
John:
It's just like, let me just write the whole thing for you.
John:
And that, we should find that link to Nevin Mergen's blog post.
John:
Nevin Mergen said he got an email from a friend that was written by an AI and he kind of flipped out about it, right?
John:
That seems like a less...
John:
So that is not a conservative move to suggest to people that the phone will write their email or their text message for them.
John:
Summarizing, I can see it's like the phone is helping me.
John:
If I just want a summary, I don't want to read it all.
John:
Let the phone summarize it.
John:
It's like asking the phone to help you deal with your stuff.
John:
But having generative AI write something that you will send as if you wrote it yourself is
John:
is a step farther than Apple has gone.
John:
So we'll see how they present that.
John:
Again, obviously everyone else is doing this.
John:
It's not new.
John:
I'm not saying Apple's going to be the first one to do this and they're going to get in big trouble or something.
John:
It just doesn't, it's not a very safe thing to do.
John:
So I'm wondering how daring Apple will be
John:
in like a little presentation maybe they'll just be like and it can even suggest a reply for you and some happy person who happy text will tap a thing on their phone screen and they'll be so delighted to see the three word reply come and they'll hit the send button and they won't talk about it anymore but
John:
I don't know.
John:
It wigs me out a little bit, too.
Marco:
I mean, keep in mind, like, we're probably not that far away from... I mean, people are probably doing it now, where, like, you're using your AI to compose an email that will be then read by the recipient's AI, and we will all just be sending even more garbage crap to each other and having it be processed by even more garbage...
Marco:
And we will finally reveal email to be the useless thing that it has been most of this time.
John:
It's not useless.
John:
And I feel like in a business setting, this is most useful because a lot of there's a lot of boilerplate and niceties in business that would help.
John:
But like we already have auto, like I mentioned autocomplete, like Gmail forever has had a thing where you start writing something and it guesses what you're probably going to say for these next three words and you can autocomplete that.
John:
But I feel like that kind of piecemeal autocomplete, even if it is LLM powered, that piecemeal autocomplete at least forces you to read everything.
John:
Whereas having a button that says compose a reply for me invites the possibility that you will not read what it generated because that will take too much of your time and you'll just hit send.
John:
And now we're sending messages that we're not even looking at to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down on because it just takes too much time.
John:
And that's just I think it's a waste of people's time because if you don't read what it wrote, maybe didn't write what you wanted it to write.
John:
And now you have an even more confusing email thread.
John:
I mean, again, we'll figure this out as a culture, as a technology advances.
John:
But I'm just saying character for Apple, for Apple's thus far very conservative approach to AI, suggesting replies to emails and text messages seems like a big move for this particular company.
Casey:
Yeah, agreed.
Casey:
Continuing from Mark Gurman, one standout feature will bring generative AI to emoji.
Casey:
The company is developing software that can create custom emoji on the fly based on what users are texting.
Casey:
That means you'll suddenly have an all new emoji for any occasion beyond the catalog of options that Apple currently offers on the iPhone and other devices.
Casey:
Another fun improvement unrelated to AI will be the revamped iPhone home screen.
Casey:
That will let users change the color of app icons and put them wherever they want.
Casey:
For instance, you can make all your social icons blue or finance-related ones green, and they won't need to be placed in the standard grid that has existed since day one in 2007.
John:
All right, so that's a lot of stuff here.
John:
the generative ai emojis obviously they're not emojis because emojis are like unicode things there's a defined set of them you can't just make up new ones i mean you can't if you're the unicode consortium but apple can't right so what what it's actually saying is kind of like on slack and discord and all these other things where you can sort of generate custom stickers or
John:
I think they call them custom emojis or custom reactions or whatever.
John:
The point is, this is going to be a new graphic that they'll generate on the fly for you that will be sent as an image because they can't just send it as a Unicode code point because they're not dynamically adding things to Unicode, right?
John:
That's not how this works.
John:
So they're kind of generating stickers for you.
John:
And I guess they're going to like...
John:
you know they have a bunch of like mr potato head style building parts they feed into the llm and then i can do like sentiment analysis to figure out what kind of emoji i have to say like there's a lot of emoji especially for things like face reactions and stuff like that i guess there's ones that aren't there like you ever try to summon someone an emoji and you're shocked that there's not like a watermelon emoji or something i can't think of one that doesn't exist sorry but it's i
John:
frequently i go into emoji and i'm like oh the surely there's an emoji for this and like there's no ice cream cone like again i don't know if that's real or not but like i'm shocked by what's not there so that's nice that it'll generate to it but it'll have to send it as an image because it can't send it any other way and i do wonder this is another place where like i feel like apple is taking a risk even with a very very limited image generator that's trained on their own source you know trained on all their own source art for emojis that apple makes and
John:
can generate new ones based on that and some other information there's the potential to generate a little image that maybe is embarrassing to apple as a company you know what i'm saying so and there's a potential to generate images that just look ugly or not up to apple standards you know what i mean like this is that's a weird thing to be touting and the coloring icons that's you know another i'm not gonna say i keep wanting to say a bridge too far it's not a bridge too far but it is a bridge
John:
like you're going to take developers icons and draw all over them they've done this before they used to add the shine to your icon if you didn't opt out you remember that like the gloss yeah yeah but now like we're going to change the color of your icon like i'm sure these companies that are like so proud of their branding and change their icons or whatever like that now the user will be able to say you know what i want instagram to be green and the os will be like sure i'll take that instagram icon and i'll make it green we can do that
Marco:
that's weird i mean you can make little color code things on your home screen i suppose but yeah i i can't imagine that's the whole story to that one i mean first of all like a lot of companies i think that have a problem with just like trademark issues with like what if you if you color my icon green first of all it's not my brand identity second of all it might look like my competitors or it might infringe someone else's trademark or something like i could see there's i could see like big companies having a big problem with that but uh
John:
Well, if users are doing it, and by the way, there is a precedent for this in macOS.
John:
Back in the day, someone else will look up what version of macOS or the operating system for Macs used to do this.
John:
When you added a label to something, you know, you can do labels in macOS 10 or in classic macOS, you could add labels.
John:
In one version of macOS or system 6 or whatever it was called back in which version I'm thinking of, I think it might have even been system 7.
John:
When you apply to label it, what color the icon?
John:
Like, so if you tried a green label, it would, like, green tint the icon by basically making the black pixels green or the black pixels red, I think.
John:
It did not look good.
John:
It was not a good look.
John:
That didn't last for a very long time.
John:
Certainly the Mac OS X era, that has never been the case.
John:
But...
John:
Yeah, the user deciding to color icons.
John:
Like, Ken, that was not on my list of things to think of they would be doing.
John:
And I know this is, like, unrelated to AI, but it's just an iOS 18 change, and next week we'll probably have many more previews of WWDC features.
John:
But what an odd thing to do.
John:
Have people been clamoring for this?
John:
I want to change the color of my icons?
John:
I mean, changing icons, they added that a while ago where you can pick from different icons and blah, blah, blah.
John:
But even that, remember how conservatively they added that?
John:
Like, it has to pop up a dialogue in people's faces so you know when it's happening, so apps can't masquerade as other apps.
Marco:
I literally just implemented that in the rewrite yesterday.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
No, but I mean, there's clearly a very large market out there.
Marco:
We've talked about it before.
Marco:
There's a very large market out there for these home screen customization apps that use all sorts of tricks and hacks and, frankly, kind of bad hacks.
Marco:
to get people to be able to customize icons for their apps and make their aesthetic home screens that they want.
Marco:
That's a huge demand, huge market.
Marco:
I think Apple wants to try to address some of that demand without having all these huge hacks if this is indeed what they're doing here.
Marco:
The problem is unless you can have arbitrary icons for apps, like specify your own image as the user.
Marco:
As you can with shortcuts.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
If you can do that, then all these apps that sell like these – because they sell like theme packs.
Marco:
People aren't just drawing it themselves.
Marco:
They're using apps that have like cool theme packs of here's like a bunch of popular icons for all the popular apps that you have like Instagram.
Marco:
Plus also here's a bunch of like random ones you can apply yourself to whatever else you need them to be, like kind of generic ones.
Right.
Marco:
That's a huge market.
Marco:
And so if we're just talking about, like, you can tint it seven different colors, that's not going to get rid of this market at all.
Marco:
And, you know, some people will use it.
Marco:
That'll be great.
Marco:
But I can't imagine that being worth the hassle and the trouble that they might get in with other companies.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I have a feeling this is like, you know, sometimes a rumor comes out and we're just kind of like, huh?
Marco:
And then, you know, whenever it's actually announced, we see, oh, there's important detail X, Y, and Z here that explain it better.
Marco:
And that now it makes more sense.
Marco:
I think we're missing those details right now on this feature.
Marco:
I think there's something else here to explain this that we're not getting yet.
John:
I mean, it might just be like you mentioned those icon packs or whatever.
John:
Part of the limitations of customizing your home screen and using shortcuts to replace the app icons.
John:
First of all, it's super cumbersome as is doing anything in home screen because you have to hide the existing app and make the shortcut to the app.
John:
It's just it's a hassle.
John:
And second, if you get one of those icon packs, maybe it doesn't have an icon for the app that you want to change.
John:
But if the OS says, OK, well, if you're making a little region of green icons and you can use icons from this theme pack, you got, oh, but there's no green icon for this app.
John:
We'll just take the actual icon for the app and tint it green and now it fits in.
John:
So maybe it's like, you know, a catch all for if there's if people aren't going to draw their own custom icons.
John:
And if they can't find the one in a pre-built icon pack, now you can just at least make the icons match.
John:
I don't quite understand the idea to color code everything, but there's that.
John:
And the other part of this is being able to, you know, this does not put them in the standard grid.
John:
It's basically just to be able to leave space.
John:
You don't have to make spacer, clear spacer icons anymore.
John:
I'm assuming that's what they're talking about here.
John:
It's like now you can arrange things on the home screen and leave gaps if you want to.
John:
I still think doing anything on the home screen on the iPhone is incredibly painful.
John:
We've talked about this for years and years.
John:
I think it will continue to be painful.
John:
I really wish there was a nice interface where you could mess around with this stuff and do it without destroying anything and either commit or roll back all your changes as opposed to the current system, which is just pure chaos.
John:
And it's like the hardest game on the entire operating system to try to rearrange icons on your phone without screwing everything up and just throwing your hands up and saying, forget it, I'm hiding everything into the app library.
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, I wonder, I feel like I heard this from Jason, maybe.
Casey:
I heard it somewhere.
Casey:
Maybe it was Mike on upgrade.
Casey:
I forget where I heard it.
Casey:
But somebody pointed out, well, maybe there will be like layers.
Casey:
And that makes me think of, you know, how in SF symbols, you can have like different layers and you can color them in different ways and whatnot.
Casey:
I think that makes some amount of sense, but that's not going to fix the Instagrams of the world, so I'm not sure.
Casey:
Or maybe it'll be opt-in for developers, but again, I don't see... Vision OS has this, right?
John:
Don't they have layers in their icons?
John:
Yes.
John:
I think they require it with Vision OS, which is a little... Yeah, but they made that a new, like, hey, for iOS 18, if you provide...
John:
a layered icon coloration our new coloration api will respect that like like as you sound like sf symbols where we can colorize parts of it we'll see it just it seems just it just seems to me like a weird place to be spending resources i think the the arrangement part is a smart feature they should have that people have wanted that for a long time people have been doing it with spacer icons it's annoying the place where they really should have spent resources is how hard it is to rearrange the home screen we'll see if they do that
Casey:
Yeah, that's the only way I really wish I could still interact with my phone via iTunes, which I know is now Finder.
Casey:
But that was so much better, was doing home screen rearrangement.
John:
And even that was terrible, but it was better.
Casey:
Yeah, it was terrible, but it was way better.
Casey:
All right, finishing up with Mark Gurman.
Casey:
A big part of the effort is creating smart recaps.
Casey:
The technology will be able to provide users summaries of their missed notifications and individual text messages, as well as web pages, news articles, documents, notes, and other forms of media.
Casey:
There's also no Apple-designed chatbot, at least not yet.
Casey:
That means the company won't be competing in the highest-profile area of AI.
Casey:
And the version that Apple has been developing itself is simply not up to snuff.
Casey:
The company has held talks with both Google and OpenAI about integrating their chatbots into iOS 18.
Casey:
Apple ultimately sealed the deal with OpenAI, and their partnership will be a component of the WWDC announcement.
Casey:
A couple of quick thoughts here.
Casey:
First of all, I think we all are in a group chat that...
Casey:
Oftentimes, they'll just pop off at a time that you're not paying attention, and so it is not uncommon.
Casey:
Particularly, I find that I'm in a group chat with a couple of guys that are constantly looking at cars that they may or may not ever buy.
Casey:
One of them in particular is obsessed with finding an affordable 911, and those are mutually exclusive terms.
Casey:
You cannot find a 911 that is affordable.
Casey:
That's not a pile of garbage.
Casey:
And so anyways, so I will often come back to my phone or computer, what have you, with literally 40 or 50 messages, most of which I don't particularly care about because 9-11 is not really my cup of tea.
Casey:
And so if there was a way to summarize that, I'm all in.
Casey:
Sign me up.
Casey:
And then additionally, I mean, here it is that Gurman is saying OpenAI is the winner.
Casey:
And like we discussed, I think, this past week, that's going to be a little dicey.
Casey:
So I wonder how they spin this.
John:
Well, in typical government fashion, there's also no Apple-designed chatbot, at least not yet.
John:
Apple-designed?
John:
Do they mean Apple's in-house LLM that they've been working on?
John:
Is that what he's saying there won't be any of them?
John:
Because I bet, like they say they did a deal with OpenAI, but he doesn't say, okay, well, how is that deal going to manifest?
John:
Is it going to manifest by iOS 18 having a chatbot that is powered by OpenAI?
John:
And will that not be Apple-designed, or will it be OpenAI-designed?
John:
Will it be OpenAI-branded?
John:
These are all...
John:
I guess, questions that he doesn't have the answers to yet.
John:
But yeah, the news is they deal with OpenAI.
John:
There's also news this week that Apple is still talking to Google, obviously.
John:
Anyway, so we'll see if the words OpenAI appear at WWDC, if they're going to announce this as a partnership.
John:
They're just going to use them on the back end.
John:
Like I said last week, maybe they've been building features using the existing OpenAI API, and now they just...
John:
ink this deal so now they can officially do it in a released os instead of just doing in dev builds but i'm just not quite sure how this is going to manifest because this paragraph begins making it seem like oh there's going to be no chatbot but they have licensed the open ai chatbot well is there going to be a chatbot or not is there going to be part of ios where you can start typing to an lm and getting answers in the chat gpt style or will there be an open ai app or will it be integrated into siri
John:
Questions we do not have answers for yet, but that is the capper on all this stuff.
John:
A bunch of strange features, which, I mean, they all seem plausible to me, but this is not the list I would have come up with about how to add AI sauce to iOS 18.
John:
And at the very bottom is, you know, open AI, something, something, something, open AI.
John:
Yep.
Casey:
So, yeah, we'll see what happens.
Casey:
As I think John said a moment ago, typically, you know, in the couple of days leading up to WWDC, we oftentimes or maybe the week before we hear some last minute leaks and so on.
Casey:
I was going to say announcements, but they're not announcements.
Casey:
So we'll see what happens.
Casey:
But I am very much looking forward to sitting next to you fine gentlemen and drinking this all in while at Apple Park, hopefully not getting a sunburn.
Marco:
Well, did you see there was one kind of last-minute thing that came out today also about Siri being used to script apps, but not yet, and only Apple apps?
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, basically the gist of this rumor, I think it was also Gurman, was just in a separate report, that Apple will also preview Siri being able to take more complex actions within apps, kind of what we've been talking about.
Marco:
We've been speculating about how wouldn't it be great
Marco:
If apps could expose kind of stock actions similar to the intent system and just kind of describe what they are in some kind of language and then have an LLM-based Siri interface be able to analyze what the app is telling the system, here's how you can do it and here's the actions to call to do it, and be able to offer to users the ability to perform actions like that via voice commands that are not necessarily phrased in exactly the right way, that were not set up in advance as shortcuts and things like that.
Marco:
The rumor that came out today from Gurman is basically exactly that is happening, but not yet.
Marco:
That basically that it is, that exactly that kind of thing will be previewed.
Marco:
It won't actually ship until a point release, probably next, they said next year, so 2025.
Marco:
So presumably in the first half of next year, you know, iOS 18.2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or whatever.
Marco:
And that it would only work in Apple's apps to start.
Marco:
So that tells me not an API yet.
Casey:
Or an API that is released immediately, or released at WWDC, but obviously nobody's going to be able to implement it until at the earliest of the fall, and it may not be an instant adoption.
Marco:
That's interesting.
Marco:
I wonder if maybe...
Marco:
Maybe we will see, you know, because the current system, the current API to do all this is called App Intents.
Marco:
This is just a couple of years ago, and it's like the new Swift-based method of Intents, which I've mentioned before is way better for developers and way simpler and way easier to implement than the old system of these weird Xcode files that had custom configuration that would generate files, and the generation process would always break and cause weird bugs.
Marco:
and then you'd have this extension that processed it and would have to communicate to your app via weird signaling mechanisms for extensions to apps.
Marco:
It was a whole mess before, and they've redone that system two or three times.
Marco:
I wonder if sometimes when Apple is kind of going in a direction for a future update for something,
Marco:
sometimes the the apis will launch for it that don't come out and explicitly say this is what this is for but kind of lead the ground or lay the groundwork for it so for instance auto layout coming out this is the famous example auto layout coming out before the iphone 6 came out with the first like really new screen size um you know not kind of the iphone 5 of course that's that was just adding a table row anyway so that's um
Marco:
I wonder if what we're going to see this summer is maybe they will add something to the AppIntense API to give us kind of more ways to describe to the system what these actions do and maybe hide them from the user but make them available to this indexing system that presumably the new Siri would have.
Marco:
Maybe we'll see something like that.
Marco:
So I think if for some reason they demo this and don't tell us how to use an API for our apps in the future,
John:
maybe we'll be able to see hints in like what's new in app intents this year so let's keep an eye on that it sounds more like they like this instead of doing their own apps first they're not quite sure what that api should look like so they can experiment with their own apps because if they change their minds they'll just
John:
and rewrite their own apps to fit with it or whatever.
John:
And once they get it worked out, because it's very often, especially in the old days of Mac OS X, they would very often roll out entire new frameworks.
John:
They would be private frameworks that only Apple's apps could use, and they would work out the kinks.
John:
Is this the right API?
John:
Because they could change the API all they want, because all they'd be breaking is their own apps, because no one else should be using this private framework.
John:
And once they finally got the framework
John:
where it you know looking like they wanted it to then the next year they roll out essentially the same framework under a new name but now it's a public framework it kind of sounds like what they're doing here that they're not at the point like especially if they're kind of like rushed to catch up they're not at the point where they're ready to even tell perhaps even to tell developers you know in the size class type of way do this thing and then next year you'll be folded into the system because it seems like they don't even know what that would be yet
John:
like how to indicate like that they're working that out themselves but they do want to get something out there and you can demo it if they do it on their own apps right they say coming in spring or whatever you know whatever like not in the 18.0 right whatever release down the road we're going to have this and it's only going to be our apps to start basically because they haven't even figured out what they want to ask developers to do and related to that maybe think of windows and the recall feature whatever they have isn't there something on ios it's like
John:
activity something rather where you essentially make a call that lets the os know what your app is doing yeah you are the user activity uh framework or yeah anyway there's a similar we had a very similar name on windows it's some kind of like activity something something i think i had the exact same name
John:
because i saw the story breeze by and like user activity that's our that's our api yeah and it's like it basically that's how they did the thing where like you can see like a powerpoint slide and recall and click on it and go to that slide in powerpoint it's because like during the i think during the screen recording like powerpoint itself called the user activity api to let it know that it's viewing slide number one two three and like recall recorded that because it's a it's an os api and you're just telling the os what's going on and then when you click on the thing in the recall thing
John:
Yeah.
John:
you know, cooperates with that, sees the stuff that those APIs call, then connects the dots.
John:
And that's exactly how we would think.
John:
I mean, the thing you described for user intents, I think that's probably better than when Apple is going to roll out.
John:
I have dim hopes that they're going to do what you described.
John:
What you described, I think, is what they should do.
John:
But it sounds much harder than what they might do.
John:
This, especially since they're not even rolling this out publicly, this seems like it might be a little bit simpler than that and, like, not involve the existing intent system at all.
John:
which would kind of be a shame, but we'll see.
John:
When they demo the feature, we'll see the utility of it because they won't tell you how it's implemented.
John:
But I do hope there is a developer story for this.
John:
If there's not, people are going to have a lot of questions of like, hey, you demo this feature in the keynote, but it's only for Apple things.
John:
Is that coming for third party soon?
John:
And they're going to not comment on future products.
Marco:
I hope this is a direction they're going.
Marco:
I was simultaneously very happy to see this rumor come today, but also a little bit disappointed that we probably won't be able to really use it until next year or something like next year.
Marco:
Because this is an example of something that only the platform owners can do.
Marco:
And it takes advantage of Apple's strengths and kind of doesn't rely on their weaknesses so much and gives them a way to lead again.
Marco:
Because I think so many of Apple's AI features are going to be rightfully seen as playing catch-up, as I was saying earlier.
Marco:
They need to show us that they're not, especially in this age of government, looking into what they're doing and seeing does this look like a monopoly in ways that hurt consumers or hold things back.
Marco:
Apple needs to show that they're leading and that they're not just being complacent in the next big thing on lots of levels.
Marco:
I think they need to show governments that.
Marco:
They need to show probably the stock market that.
Marco:
And they definitely need to show their customers that.
Marco:
They don't need us all to be looking over in Google land saying, hmm.
Marco:
hmm, they're doing a lot of good things with AI when they're on those Google models these days.
Marco:
Maybe I should switch to Android for this coming fall or whatever.
Marco:
They don't need anybody thinking that way.
Marco:
So they need to show everything's fine over here in Apple land in this new age of AI.
Marco:
Please stay here.
Marco:
It's nice and comfortable.
Marco:
Don't switch.
Marco:
We have features too.
Marco:
You can be happy with our version.
Marco:
And
Marco:
I think there's enough reporting now around this narrative that it's probably true.
Marco:
They were probably caught off guard with the rise of new LM-based techniques.
Marco:
They did probably decide very late, possibly like a year ago, to, hey, we should probably start investing heavily in this.
Marco:
We kind of missed the boat on this.
Marco:
It does seem like there might have been some kind of Bill Gates, we missed the internet kind of realization there.
Marco:
But
Marco:
We'll see how quickly they can actually take action here.
Marco:
I think on some of the big stuff that Google and Microsoft are demonstrating, I think Apple is going to be behind for a while because that's stuff that takes years to develop.
Marco:
It takes priorities and skills and connections that Apple doesn't have.
Marco:
Not to say they can't have it, but they currently choose not to.
Marco:
So we'll see what happens.
Marco:
It took a lot of problems and rot to get where we are today with Siri.
Marco:
Have they fixed those problems?
Marco:
Have they cleaned up that rot?
Marco:
Have they even realized and admitted to themselves that they needed to do that?
Marco:
We don't know yet.
Marco:
Or they're just pouring AI sauce over the rot.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I mean, that is very possibly what we're going to see.
Marco:
I have a feeling, I think what we're going to see
Marco:
I think it's going to disappoint a lot of people for not being enough AI sauce, but I don't really care that much if we don't get all of our AI wishlist items in two weeks.
Marco:
What I want to see is, have they turned the ship around?
Marco:
Have they actually realized...
Marco:
current Siri is garbage?
Marco:
Have they actually started moving in a better direction with that?
Marco:
Or are they kind of half-assing this and being complacent and thinking, what do you mean?
Marco:
Siri is the best voice system.
Marco:
We are the most private, etc.
Marco:
Like, if they start...
Marco:
going in that direction, kind of defending where they already are and suggesting that we don't need anything better than this, I will be concerned.
Marco:
But what I'm looking for is not for them to solve every single problem in two weeks.
Marco:
That's unrealistic.
Marco:
I want to just see, are they going in the right direction?
Marco:
And so if we get a preview of this cool app AI interaction-based system,
Marco:
That only works in Apple's apps.
Marco:
It only comes next spring or whatever.
Marco:
If we get a preview of that and it's really cool and it shows we will be able to do that in our apps, maybe in iOS 19 next year, that'll be great.
Marco:
I will be happy with that.
Marco:
I'll be a little upset that it didn't come sooner.
Marco:
But, hey, as long as good stuff is coming soon, I can be patient and wait, just like Apple is often a very patient company when it comes to this stuff.
Marco:
I just want to make sure that what we see are signs that they're going in the right direction, not just sitting back and hoping that we're all going to start talking about the Vision Pro again and stop looking about AI features.
John:
You know, when it comes to like these sort of inside Apple things, especially when they cite specific executives, the reliability is never great, right?
John:
Because this is a game of telephone.
John:
People have grudges.
John:
Who knows what actually goes on?
John:
uh apple's decision to go all in on ap on ai this year uh exemplify kind of the worst case scenario as far as i'm concerned i don't know if they're true that could be total bs but here are the two things one and we think we've mentioned this snarkily on previous shows is there's
John:
various rumors and uh supposed tales from the inside saying uh recently you know as a year ago or a year and a half ago uh important apple executives who are often named saw chat gpt and that made them realize siri sucks and that's depressing to say how did you not know yeah that's what it took for you to realize siri sucks
John:
Yeah, I hope that I really hope to God.
John:
Yeah, that's not what it took.
John:
We hope that we hope that's not true.
John:
We hope that is just like someone, you know, you know, sort of extrapolating or exaggerating a story they heard or whatever.
John:
We would hope that Apple's donut series is a problem for a long time.
John:
And chat GPT was just really like the straw that broke the camel's back.
John:
But it's an unflattering story about Apple, which is, again, maybe why it spreads.
John:
And the second unflattering story related to this is that I think Federighi was named here.
John:
It was like a mandate a year ago that every team under Federighi has to add some AI feature this year.
John:
And that is an unflattering story, but that's exactly what big stupid corporations do.
John:
They're like...
John:
I don't know, but there's some big thing.
John:
I don't care what you're doing, team.
John:
There's a mandate from on high that says every team has to add some AI thing.
John:
I don't care what it is, but it better say AI.
John:
That's not the way to make a good product.
John:
I mean, and this happens... This has happened frequently in Apple's history.
John:
We know with more certainty that, like...
John:
for example, when a new Mac OS feature, back when Mac OS was important, a new Mac OS 10 feature would come out and Apple would mandate, you know, all the teams have to now, like, add some feature that takes advantage of Spotlight or something, you know what I mean?
John:
And teams would complain.
John:
They were like, we were in the middle of making our application better, but then a mandate came from on high that stop what you're doing and make sure you carve out room in this release to add, like, a Spotlight-powered feature or something.
John:
I'm not giving a great example, but, like,
John:
That is disruptive to teams who are working.
John:
Maybe adding a spotlight feature is not important for whatever application.
John:
It's not important for the terminal application or whatever.
John:
Not that there's more than a third of a developer working on that.
John:
But telling teams you just have to add something with AI, that's not vision.
John:
That's not leadership.
John:
That's just like buzzword exists.
John:
We want to be able to say something about that buzzword, therefore sacrifice part or all of your schedule to feedback.
John:
figuring out what you can do that uses ai it's it's the opposite of the apple philosophy instead of figuring out like what will help people and then doing that it's like we've pre-decided that ai is good in and of itself you figure out something to do with it so you can fulfill that and again it's an unflattering story a totally unconfirmed possibly manufactured or made up by someone with a pessimistic view of apple or whatever and we just really hope it's not true but those are the only two things that i've heard from inside apple and i just hope it's like
John:
Again, people with grudges or people with a dim view of what's actually going on, because you would hope that Apple is more thoughtful.
John:
And honestly, I do think Apple has been more thoughtful.
John:
I think the chat GPT thing, like I said, is it's not they didn't know that Siri was bad.
John:
It's just this really pushed them over the edge to say this is the year we really have to do something, which, you know, fair enough.
John:
because they've been trying to solve it for years and failing and it's a big complicated organization yada yada but i don't need ai sauce to be poured all over everything in the in all their operating systems i just need it used where it can do the most good and part of that is yeah look at where other people have done things and that people like like erasing people from photos they should be doing that right but in other places
John:
You know, manufacturing emoji, the messages team said, how are we going to add AI?
John:
You know, I guess summaries is good, right?
John:
Thumbs up on that.
John:
But can we, someone has the idea to manufacture emoji, maybe have those people work on like iMessages and the iCloud sync improvements or something, but.
Casey:
Or search improvements.
John:
Yeah, there you go.
John:
Or archiving improvements.
John:
I would set priorities differently, let's say, but what can you do?
Marco:
What I really want to see, too, as a developer, I mean, obviously, I'm a little bit biased here, but I think it'd be better for the whole ecosystem, too.
Marco:
As Apple adds AI features, they have a massive advantage that they have really good silicon in their products to do local processing.
Marco:
And historically, they create really good APIs.
Marco:
Like, you know, we nitpick here and there, like, oh, you know, something's under-documented or whatever, or watch connectivity sucks, but like,
Marco:
For the most part, and it does, but for the most part, Apple's APIs are world class.
Marco:
They're really good most of the time.
Marco:
They are extremely powerful.
Marco:
It's very, very difficult to find better APIs for a lot of things than what Apple provides.
Marco:
They are excellent, and they allow us as developers to make really great apps that do really powerful things pretty easily.
Marco:
And one of the reasons that they're able to do that is because their local device hardware bar is just so high.
Marco:
They have all sorts of great APIs for things like ML processing, which is going to be presumably rebranded AI processing, a lot of this stuff.
Marco:
They have all sorts of high processing power things that you can just drop in in your app with not much effort.
Marco:
And all of a sudden now you have this audio training model or whatever.
Marco:
What I want is, as Apple digs into modern AI stuff, give that to us.
Marco:
Make that available for free with no limits right on the device.
Marco:
That's something that not every competitor can offer because they don't have, first of all, the very high bar.
Marco:
Not every Android phone is going to be able to do this kind of stuff because not every Android phone has the right processor.
John:
Every Mac, every iPhone, every iPad is a Copilot Plus Mac.
John:
iPad, iPhone.
John:
Except for the RAM.
John:
Microsoft is in a situation where Intel and AMD are just now going to be getting out chips that can do 40 tops or whatever, and they have that one Snapdragon chip.
John:
But every Apple Silicon thing Apple has sold in the past several years has had a pretty powerful neural processing unit, in addition to all sorts of other hardware units in the SoC for other tasks.
John:
So they're way ahead of the game on hardware.
Marco:
Yeah, and what I want to see from them is
Marco:
Not only make that hardware available to developers, I mean, most of it already is.
Marco:
Give us the models.
Marco:
Have the models for many common tasks built into iOS and let us just call them when our apps are running and just use them unlimited for free.
Marco:
That is how you make an entire ecosystem of awesome apps that run on your platform and keep people locked in.
Marco:
So there is no reason for them not to offer this.
Marco:
Like, for instance, one of the things I want is build in a really good transcription model.
Marco:
There is one.
Marco:
There has been a speech recognition API in iOS for something like six or seven years.
Marco:
It's not that new.
Marco:
It's not very good and it's pretty limited.
Marco:
And it's like in certain contexts, I think they would send it to the cloud because it would limit you to like 60 seconds of transcription at a time and stuff like that.
Marco:
Now we're past that.
Marco:
Now we can do all that on device.
Marco:
I don't want to have to ship OpenAI Whisper and compile it like exactly right for Apple Silicon and make sure it's optimized right using Whisper CPP and keep updating it every time it gets updated and have my app have to download this like, you know, gig and a half file for the model.
Marco:
build that kind of stuff in and just let us call it and let us use it like we can use any other hardware resource.
Marco:
So obviously there'd be some limits on like background execution, burning your CPU and stuff, but like build that stuff in and let everyone use it for free unlimited.
Marco:
That is how you make the next generation of awesome apps on your platform.
Marco:
That's what I'm looking for.
Marco:
I'm looking for, A, give me a sign that you're taking this new technique of computing seriously in what you're building in as features to your OS.
Marco:
And also, don't just keep it for yourselves.
Marco:
Build APIs for it and let us use it in the most unlimited way you can possibly have with the hardware that you have.
Marco:
you know obviously things that go to the cloud yeah you can you can limit those keep them to yourself or meter them or whatever let us do as much as we can locally that's what your devices are awesome at let us use it and there are so many people out there there are so many app developers out there who are never going to go through the process of figuring out how to like train your own model or integrate someone else's model using these weird python tools that we don't know how to use like just build it in let us use it that would be amazing
Marco:
They do have a track record of kind of falling on both sides of this with different decisions.
Marco:
So this could go either way.
Marco:
I really hope they go the direction of here's a bunch of awesome built-in models for everyone to use.
John:
I mean, the limitations you're going to run into is not going to probably be the limitations using the models, but just the plain old limitations on running in the background using CPU, stuff like that.
John:
But the rumor is for this and what Microsoft has actually announced at Build is that both companies are essentially going to give access to models, but through abstracted APIs where the caller doesn't even know or possibly even get to choose whether it runs locally or in the cloud.
John:
So Apple can change that decision sort of on the fly and in new versions.
John:
So yeah, Microsoft advertised that at Build.
John:
Hey, you just use these frameworks and you get these features and don't worry about where it runs.
John:
We'll run it locally if that's best.
John:
We'll run it in the cloud if that's best.
John:
We'll mix and match.
John:
You don't have to know.
John:
It's all abstracted from you.
John:
i would imagine any apis like this that apple offers are going to do the same thing and that is the rumor that apple's going to have apis that give access to quote-unquote ai where it's abstracted where you don't have to know or care if it's running locally or in the cloud they'll do whatever is best and you know pick your feature you just mentioned transcription that's a perfect example of like
John:
There's a new transcription API and it's better than the old one.
John:
And sometimes it runs locally and sometimes it doesn't.
John:
But your app doesn't have to worry.
John:
We'll just, you know, you just call this new abstracted API and we will do the best thing we can do.
John:
And as phones get more RAM and so on and so forth, it'll just get better and better.
John:
But you call the same API the whole time.
John:
The question is, what are those specific APIs?
John:
Microsoft announced a bunch of build.
John:
They have 40 AI models inside Windows, right?
John:
And I think Apple will ship a bunch of models with iOS and with macOS, hopefully, if they remember it exists, and with iPadOS.
John:
And they will have frameworks fronting them.
John:
But for what?
John:
Are they going to have transcription?
John:
Are they just going to have summarization?
John:
Translation?
John:
Like there's so many different things that they can do.
John:
So I think that's the question WWDC is, yeah, I guarantee they're going to do that.
John:
They're going to ship models.
John:
They're going to provide access to frameworks.
John:
But for doing what?
John:
And you hope it's transcription for the purposes of Overcast, but there are many things they could choose to do.
John:
They could even take existing APIs and just say, hey, by the way, it's the same exact API as it was before, but now behind the scenes it's implemented totally differently and we use LLMs for it.
John:
So we'll see.
Marco:
Can I have one small request also on that though?
Marco:
Last time I checked, the speech recognition API required microphone access to be granted.
Marco:
Can that please not be the case if you're not using the microphone, for God's sake?
John:
I'm going to file that.
John:
I filed the thing where I need screen recording permission to find out what the desktop picture is.
John:
I mean, that kind of makes sense in one way, but in another way, I don't want to record people's screens.
Casey:
I mean, what could you possibly want transcription for if not the things that you're speaking right now, Marco?
Casey:
I don't understand.
Casey:
There is no other spoken content.
John:
There's no other source of audio than the microphone, Marco.
John:
I don't know what you're dealing with.
Casey:
There is no other spoken content.
John:
Where else would audio come from?
Marco:
Yeah, that's the thing, too.
Marco:
I hope as Apple hopefully adds or expands APIs to access all this cool new stuff that I hope they're giving us, I hope they do it in broad ways.
Marco:
That, you know...
Marco:
The way Apple does things, I think in a way that fails power users and developers, is sometimes they'll have some kind of lockdown area of the system.
Marco:
Like, all right, we're going to add an extension or an entitlement for only this one very narrow use case to maybe try to use this little ability that we're going to just unlock this little tiny hole in our fence here and just permit this very narrow use case.
Marco:
And as a result, it's usable by like zero to one apps.
Marco:
out there ever.
Marco:
And then sometimes they make larger APIs that are useful for everyone and can be used much more broadly.
Marco:
And if you only do the former approach and not the latter, you never find new great applications.
Marco:
The market never really breaks out of the general capabilities that Apple was able to consider as both existing and as important enough to warrant them gracing us with a doorway to let us do it.
Marco:
Whereas if you make things more general purpose, more broad, have fewer restrictions, let people just kind of like use more general purpose tools, you get apps that Apple not only benefits from in the sense that more people want to use their platforms –
Marco:
But it also gives them ideas on what to Sherlock for the next releases.
Marco:
You know, you get stuff like Quicksilver on the Mac.
Marco:
You get stuff like Dropbox on the Mac.
Marco:
You know, like, these are all apps that, like, they kind of took advantage of, like, system background stuff.
Marco:
You get things like Switch Class.
Marco:
You know, like, you get apps that today usually can only exist on the Mac and are not possible on iOS.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But you need to enable these power user utilities and power user features.
Marco:
You need to enable them to exist in ways that you as Apple didn't foresee as... They didn't have to make an API to let Dropbox badge the file things at first.
Marco:
They just hacked it.
Marco:
It just worked through hacks they already had.
Marco:
And then they later made an API to make it better that I think is still kind of in transition.
John:
Still worse.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I hope as they're diving into all this new AI stuff, I hope not only, as I was saying earlier, that they have APIs for us to use a bunch of nice built-in system models that we don't have to make and train and ship ourselves.
Marco:
But also, I really hope that they allow access to them in broad ways.
Marco:
Now, I'm not talking about like, don't let me just burn everyone's battery down like crazy, which by the way, there's already an API for background task management where you can specify, I believe it's called a background processing task.
Marco:
This is a type that you can tell the system when you have a chance, when you are plugged in and charging and maybe even on Wi-Fi,
Marco:
call me in the background wake me up and let me do a task with no throttling and it and it will do that and if the person like unplugs their phone it will terminate it and whatever but like there are ways that there are opportunities for apps to do background processing on ios that don't burn your battery down but still allow them to use the power of the hardware in the background if they want to you just might have to wait until overnight to do it but that option is there that api is already there
Marco:
So give us broad access.
Marco:
Let us do whatever we want within the existing battery and power limitations you already enforce slash grant us.
Marco:
Let us do whatever we want with this stuff.
Marco:
That will enable great apps to be made.
Marco:
That will enable everyone else on your platforms to make the apps and features that you won't make.
Marco:
And that will both enhance your platforms for everybody...
Marco:
And whatever does take off, either it'll be something that's a little bit tricky, like image generation, that you won't then have to make and take the liability of, and or it'll be successful and you'll be able to then copy it for your next stuff and Sherlock it in the next release.
Marco:
Either way, it's a win-win for Apple.
Marco:
And the more of these features rely on that local hardware and are not based on cloud stuff,
Marco:
That benefits their privacy strategy, that benefits their hardware strategy, and that keeps people locked into iPhones.
Marco:
So there's every reason for Apple to do it this way.
Marco:
Give us a bunch of models and open them up as much as possible to our apps to use.
John:
This is a philosophical change that Apple...
John:
has not been on board with in recent decades that we've all complained about multiple times is the idea that good ideas can come from places other than Apple.
John:
And Apple will say that they believe that and support it, but not to the degree where they will do what you just asked, which is open up APIs to allow third parties to do things that historically in the past several decades, Apple has said, no, only Apple can even attempt that.
John:
Like window management that I always complain about.
John:
The third parties could not have implemented stage manager.
John:
We had to wait for Apple to think it had an idea about window management and then it implemented stage manager.
John:
And if you don't like it, wait another five years for Apple to have another idea.
John:
But no, we're not going to provide you APIs to do that because no good ideas can come from third parties.
John:
They're too dangerous.
John:
You can't have this power, so on and so forth.
John:
The older Apple, whether intentionally or not, essentially gave enough free reign to APIs for tons of good ideas to come out of the third party developer community.
John:
which Apple then incorporated into its operating system, right?
John:
And that was a system that worked.
John:
And we didn't call it Sherlocking back then.
John:
It was just the cycle.
John:
You know, Sherlock was an egregious thing where they copied a particular app very specifically in ways that were obvious that they were copying it or whatever.
John:
But like...
John:
Giving APIs where third parties can have ideas and implement them that Apple can learn from was how the first 20 to 30 years of the Mac, or maybe I'm getting years wrong, but the first early part of the Mac, that was how the platform evolved.
John:
To give a modern example, how did Twitter evolve in the early days?
John:
By having good ideas happen in the third-party world, good ideas like the concept of a retweet and using at to mention somebody and the word tweet all came from third parties.
John:
Current Apple thinks that there are certain classes of ideas that can only come from Apple.
John:
And so they closed themselves off to lots of good things.
John:
They're like, you third-party developers shouldn't have an API powerful enough to do this.
John:
When we, Apple, eventually five years from now, come up with a good idea for doing something with this, we'll implement it.
John:
But you can't have those APIs.
John:
So audio hijack on iPad?
John:
Apple will get around to it eventually.
John:
But it's not like we're going to let a third party do that.
John:
Stage manager?
John:
Oh, third parties, you have ideas about window management?
John:
Sorry, that's too dangerous for you.
John:
We can't give you that kind of control.
John:
It limits us too much.
John:
It limits Apple too much.
John:
Because what if we have an idea, but we've locked ourselves into a bunch of APIs that are being used by third party applications?
John:
We don't want to do that.
John:
It's safer to just
John:
you know and the thing is when this philosophy first rolled out was sort of the mac os 10 error it was uh it's like a pendulum right it was a relief because apple had swung too far in the other direction where they would give apis third parties get locked into them because popular third party products would use them and apple would be constrained into what it could do and so they swung hard in the other direction and said you know what
John:
We're not giving anything like that to third parties.
John:
We're going to keep it all real close to the vest, be very, very conservative, close off innovation in the third party world to give Apple itself more flexibility to innovate and evolve.
John:
And the pendulum had swung too far in the other direction, but now it's so far on the opposite side of things that we are out here suffering from
John:
you know the the lack of apple allowing third parties to innovate and ai is the newest front of that because we see this explosion of you know we described us throwing spaghetti against the wall but another way to describe it is exuberant innovation enthusiastic innovation most that stuff's not going to work out but some of it is the more you give third parties flexibility to do that the better ideas you'll get so i just you know there's either extreme is wrong and we are currently in the apple world at one extreme so i hope it starts swinging back the other direction
Marco:
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Thank you to Delete Me for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, so I see here in the show notes, LLM check-in.
Casey:
And so I guess, John, you'd like to take a state of the world to give us a little situation report?
John:
Yeah, LLMs, they're weird.
John:
There's been a lot of stuff online trying to explain to people how they work.
John:
They're a type of technology where when people look at them, their guess about what they are and how they work is very often wrong because part of their whole deal is the reason people are so fascinated by them is because they can essentially fool you.
John:
This is related to a recent story.
John:
I think we hinted at it in past shows, but you've probably seen it in the news, where Google was replacing their thing that gives you the summary at the top of their search results.
John:
They're replacing that with an AI-powered one.
John:
They poured AI sauce on that.
John:
And it's been doing some silly things like suggesting that you eat one rock per day and suggesting that to keep the cheese from sliding off your pizza, you should add glue.
John:
It's been pulling things from the onion and presenting them as straightforward things and not parody.
John:
Someone writes a snarky post on Reddit and Google pulls it out and spits it back to the user.
John:
Haha, isn't that funny?
John:
AI is so dumb.
John:
And then Google's been trying to
John:
fix these manually and work on it.
John:
And I bet people who see this are like, Oh, AI is dumb, but it'll get better or whatever.
John:
And then another thing thought that people often have an express is why doesn't Google just tell its AI model that you shouldn't eat glue, right?
John:
The glue doesn't go on pizza, right?
John:
Why doesn't it just tell it people shouldn't eat rocks, right?
John:
Like, zero is the correct amount of rocks to eat per day, right?
John:
Why doesn't it just do that?
John:
Like, I know that, like, okay, well, it's not, you know, it's new, whatever, it'll get better, but it seems, because of the mental model people have about LLMs, it seems so silly that they would do something, they would give an answer so dumb, and it's like, well, why doesn't Google just correct it?
John:
Like, these aren't nuanced corrections.
John:
Don't eat rocks.
John:
It seems so simple, right?
John:
And I think part of it is because
John:
That's not how LLMs work.
John:
I'll link again to these three blue, one brown neural network things or whatever.
John:
I know it's complicated or whatever, but if you just keep watching these videos over and over again as I have, it will eventually start to sink in what they are.
John:
The analogy I gave on Erectifs ages ago is a pachinko machine where you drop a ball at the top of this big giant grid of pins and it bounces off pins and eventually aligns in a particular place.
John:
The thing I was trying to express by that is the way LLMs work is they take an input, which is whatever it may be, but in this case, let's just say some text, and
John:
and it bounces around inside doing a bunch of math and some text comes out the other end and you could you know do it with images and other things or whatever but it's just a bunch of you know it's like a bunch of matrix math and a thing comes out the other end uh and it's stateless right the the uh the thing you're putting it into the the machine the llm has been trained
John:
And the training is to essentially set a bunch of things called weights, which are a bunch of numbers inside the model.
John:
And there is just a huge number of these.
John:
And the magic is, well, where did those numbers come from?
John:
They came from training, right?
John:
And, you know, you can look at the video, see how this works.
John:
But it's like, we're going to make this giant grid of pins
John:
And just grind on it with a huge amount of computing resources, feeding the entire internet in.
John:
And the result is just tons and tons of numbers, right?
John:
Tons and tons of pins in the Pachinko machine, right?
John:
And after we've done that, we drop things on the top of the machine, it bounces around, stuff comes out.
John:
And the quality of stuff comes out depends on what those pins were, what those numbers were, what the weights were, right?
Yeah.
John:
And the reason people get hung up on like the glue on pizza and eating rocks is like, just tell it people shouldn't eat rocks.
John:
Like, is that hard to teach it?
John:
That's like, well, you don't understand.
John:
We do this training and it's very expensive and it takes a long time and we produce this giant model.
John:
But once you've got the model...
John:
i mean you can retrain and tweak and adjust or whatever but you can't just type to it oh and by the way people shouldn't need rocks because you drop that into the top of the machine and it would bounce out and you know so there's another thing that people might not understand from first glance of how these things work is uh when you're having a quote-unquote conversation with like chat gpt and you like ask it a question like how many rocks should i eat per day and it gives you an answer and say it gives you a bad answer uh it says you should eat one rock per day you type back to it
John:
Actually, people shouldn't eat rocks.
John:
If you eat rocks, it's really bad for you.
John:
Bad things can happen to you, right?
John:
And then it will reply to you, oh, I'm sorry, I made that mistake, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
What you don't realize is every time you type something to ChatGPT, when you type a message like people shouldn't eat rocks, that's just not what gets sent to ChatGPT.
John:
What gets sent is the entire conversation up to that point.
John:
Your first question, ChatGPT's answer, your second question, every time you type something new, the whole conversation gets sent through.
John:
Because remember, ChatGPT doesn't have any, I know there's a memory feature or whatever, but the LLM itself is just a big bucket of pins in a pachinko machine, and you drop something in it, it comes out.
John:
So...
John:
your quote-unquote conversation all you're doing is making the thing you're sending it bigger and bigger each time there's no back and forth there is here's the entire conversation plus my new thing including what it answered before because that influences what the next thing is going to come out in fact when it's processing things what it does is it processes the entire input and picks the next word and then it throws everything back in and picks the next word and then picks the next word over and over again until it gets all the words in the answer for your thing right and
John:
That is essentially stateless, right?
John:
There is no thing that you can say people should need rocks.
John:
All you can do is put that in your conversation.
John:
And then when the whole conversation goes back in the top of the machine again, yeah, it's in there and it influences the output according to the magic of all the weights and everything, right?
John:
So that's what that whole thing of like, okay, but how big is that?
John:
What is that?
John:
You know, I can send the whole conversation back in that the length of stuff you can stick into an LLM is called the context window.
John:
Like if I have a conversation and it goes wrong for thousands and thousands of words at a certain point, like the, there's a limit in the size of the input string, right?
John:
The input string to LLMs, you know, used to be very small and I was getting bigger and bigger.
John:
This is related to an announcement Google had at their IO conference and
John:
where the CEO said, today we are expanding the context window to 2 million tokens.
John:
And that's a big number because most of the context window started off at like 32K or whatever.
John:
So Google is saying we're expanding to 2 million tokens.
John:
We're making it available for developers in private preview.
John:
It's amazing to look back and see just how much progress we made in a few months, right?
John:
So you can see how the context window would be important because if you wanted to, quote unquote, teach it that people shouldn't eat rocks, what you'd want is to be able to say in a conversation, you just told me I should eat one rock per day, but that's really bad.
John:
Humans shouldn't eat rocks.
John:
And you want it to, quote unquote, remember that and, quote unquote, learn that.
John:
But the way ELMs work, the only way it can remember or learn that is either A, you train on new data that influences the weights in the model, which is something you can't do when you're typing to ChatGPT.
John:
You're not changing the weights in the model.
John:
You're just sending things to an existing machine.
John:
Only OpenAI can change those weights, right, by making a new model or whatever or modifying their existing one, right?
John:
Or B, have that phrase be part of the context window.
John:
that your thing is included in like the example used to give with merlin it was like if you say you know i have one brother and two you know how many siblings do i have and it says i don't know and you tell it i have one brother and two sister and then you then you say again how many siblings do i have and it says you have one brother and two sisters like wow it learned it no because the input you put in was how many siblings do i have i don't know i have one brother and two sister how many siblings do i have
John:
That was the input.
John:
The answer is in the input.
John:
So you shouldn't be shocked when it says you have one brother.
John:
Hey, it learned that I have one brother.
John:
No, the input contained the answer.
John:
It was part of the context window.
John:
You didn't change any of the weights in the model.
John:
You literally just gave it the answer, right?
John:
So here's the final thing.
John:
On stage at Google I.O., Sundar Pichai, Google CEO said, talking about the two million context window, this represents the next step in our journey towards the ultimate goal of infinite context, right?
John:
And this is the first time I've seen someone outline a vision for how LLMs could actually be taught things.
John:
Because if the context window is infinite, what that would mean is that you could talk to an LLM over the course of months, days, months, and years, and everything you ever said to it would essentially be sent as input.
John:
In its entirety, plus the new thing that you said every time.
John:
So if you said six months ago people shouldn't eat rocks, every time you ask any question, part of the input would be your question plus everything you've ever said to it, including the line that people shouldn't eat rocks.
John:
And so when it answers you, it will quote-unquote remember that people shouldn't eat rocks because that was part of its input.
John:
I don't think this is a way to make a reasonable kind of mind that can learn things, but it is the first vision I've heard of anyone outlining how LLMs are not going to be dumb.
John:
Because no matter how well you train them on the big stew of stuff you're putting into them, you can't teach them anything.
John:
They can't learn through conversing with you.
John:
They can only learn by being trained on new data and having a new version of the model come out or whatever.
John:
But we want them to work like people where you can say, oh, silly toddler,
John:
Rocks are bad for you, don't eat them.
John:
And have it learn that.
John:
If you have an infinite context window, I mean, anytime you ask it anything, the entire history of everything you've ever said goes as input somehow.
John:
I don't know if he said this is just kind of like...
John:
a vision a conceptual vision or a practical example of like that's how we're going to do it we're going to have a stateless stateless box of numbers that we throw your input into but we're going to retain your input forever and ever and ever and anytime you ask the stateless box of numbers anything everything you ever said to it goes as input plus the new thing that you said
John:
so that you can quote unquote teach it things and the fun part of like you know teachable ai or like an actual sort of thing that you could converse to is that you can just teach it bs things if you talk to an lm and tell it actually you should eat rocks in fact you should eat really spiky rocks all the time and it says okay i'll you know that's great i'll remember that if you ever ask me about what you should eat again and six months from now you said give me this recipe and it includes rocks it'll be like well that's because the input was you should eat spiky rocks six months worth of text give me a recipe for pizza and it includes rocks
John:
Right.
John:
You could teach it to be less useful, like in the same way of raising children.
John:
If you teach them bad things, they will they will learn bad things.
John:
We don't all have our own copy of chat GPT or LMS or whatever.
John:
There's just one big stateless blob that's instanced all over that our input is going through.
John:
But if we have our own infinite context window, then we have we are essentially building.
John:
our own sort of knowledge base within this llm through the barbaric brute force method of sending it every piece of information we've ever sent to it before with every new piece of information i just thought this was interesting because i've been super down been super down on llms because i just don't see how they can ever be anything useful that can be taught like the difference between fact and fiction
John:
Right.
John:
Like important things that would make the thing more useful are not possible because of the way LLMs work.
John:
But if you give me an infinite context window, at least then I can over time try to mold my little, you know, conversation with the LLM towards something and maybe only have to correct it once or twice when it makes mistakes.
John:
So then so that it will get better over time.
John:
Right.
John:
Underneath my own control.
John:
That said, he is the CEO.
John:
I don't know if he knows about this on a technical matter and infinite contact window sounds ridiculous to me, but I just wanted to bring this up because it really annoys me that LMs essentially do not learn through conversing with you, even though everyone thinks they do.
John:
And it annoys me when people get faked out.
Casey:
Good talk.
Casey:
No, I hear you.
Casey:
And yeah, I think watching these three blue, one brown videos, there's others that are good too, but these are very, very good.
Casey:
And even though they're not fast in the sense that they're not rushed, but they're fast in the sense that a lot of ground is covered very quickly.
Casey:
And I think you're right that watching them like two or three times is what you probably need in order to get this really understood.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But I strongly suggest if you are even vaguely inclined for these sorts of things, and if you're listening to the show, I presume you are, it's worth checking it out just to understand kind of the broad strokes as to how these things work.
Marco:
Thank you to our sponsors this week, Fastmail and DeleteMe.
Marco:
Thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
One of the biggest member perks now is we do this overtime segment.
Marco:
where every week, every episode, we have a bonus topic that just didn't fit.
Marco:
We couldn't get to it in the main episode.
Marco:
This week, Overtime, is about the TikTok ban in the U.S.
Marco:
that is currently working its way through the system.
Marco:
We're going to be talking about that.
Marco:
You can listen by joining at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-
Marco:
All right.
Casey:
So in the section of our internal show notes, where we put after show ideas, there's been an entry that reads Sonos updates.
Casey:
And it reads a couple things.
Casey:
One of them is Marco's desk setup.
Casey:
And you had privately teased something to the two of us about this.
Casey:
And I have been dying for this to happen.
Casey:
And I feel like this is the moment.
Casey:
We almost need an ATP overtime for after show stuff.
Casey:
We finally got there.
Casey:
Don't ruin my high, Marco.
Casey:
Tell me what's going on.
Marco:
In the new house, part of the conditions of getting this house was there was one room upstairs that overlooks a view that you can see.
Marco:
Long Island is full of canals because Long Island, everybody has boats.
Marco:
I don't have a boat.
Marco:
I don't want a boat.
Marco:
But there's canals everywhere.
Marco:
And from one of these rooms upstairs, we can see one of these canals.
Marco:
So as a result of there being a canal out the window,
Marco:
I can see the ducks and the birds and other delightful things floating by in the canal and hanging out.
Marco:
I can see the ducks sit on the neighbor's lawn all folded up in the rain.
Marco:
I can see the rabbits jumping across my lawn.
Marco:
It's a wonderful view.
Marco:
The only way to enjoy this view is by sitting basically in the middle of the room.
Marco:
So when I was laying out my office setup...
Marco:
The only way like like the big like, you know, deal breaker for my office layout was the desk has to be sticking out from one of the walls in the middle of the room.
Marco:
It's like a big capital E where the walls are the outer walls of the E and the one middle thing that sticks out of the E. That's the desk in the middle of the room.
John:
Unlike people who mostly put their desks against the wall.
John:
And when you're sitting in the desk, you would be facing the wall.
John:
That's not what you're doing.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I'm such that I'm facing – that when I'm sitting at my desk, the window is to my right.
Marco:
And so I can just look out.
Marco:
I can turn to the right and look out the window and see the happy ducks sitting around and floating by.
Marco:
So I want to do this.
Marco:
Now, the problem with floating the desk in the middle of the room is that –
Marco:
First of all, it imposes a larger aesthetic burden on the desk and the items on the desk because you don't have the wall to hide your sins.
Marco:
So one of the things I did, one of the reasons why I was drilling stuff into my desk recently is that I got a desk that has kind of like a compartment behind it for all the wires to go into.
Marco:
So behind my desk is clean wire management, not a whole bunch of wires dangling there because, again –
Marco:
it's the middle of the room like you half the room can see the back of my desk so things have to be a little bit cleaner here to look nice than at the beach where i can just shove everything you know against the wall like everyone else does as a result i when i was choosing my speaker setup i didn't have tall speakers as an option
Marco:
My preferred speakers, the KEF Q150s for my desk, those are awesome speakers, and they actually sound fantastic.
Marco:
I still love them at the beach, but they're really big and boxy and tall.
Marco:
And to have those on a desk in the middle of the room looked ridiculous.
Marco:
So I'm like, all right, I'm not going to do that.
Marco:
So I was looking around at small speaker options, and I wasn't sure what to do yet.
Marco:
Meanwhile...
Marco:
We had a friend of the show who was gracious enough to share a Sonos discount code with me, I believe, in the fall.
Marco:
It was a while ago.
Marco:
And at that time, knowing we were renovating the new house, but knowing this was a good opportunity to get some discounted Sonos gear, I bought a set for the future TV.
Marco:
I bought a soundbar and two Era 300s to be used as surrounds.
What?
Casey:
Jesus.
Marco:
Because, hey, I had a discount code.
Marco:
I'm going to take advantage of it, you know?
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I got to back up.
Casey:
If you don't speak Sonos just very, very quickly, the general way that Sonos home theater stuff works is you must have a sound bar, which can cause some consternation among some, but leave that aside for now.
Casey:
You have to have a soundbar.
Casey:
That is your center and your left and right channels.
Casey:
Oftentimes, you'll add one of their two subwoofers, one of which is not very large and one of which is quite large.
Casey:
And then you need a pair of rear speakers.
Casey:
And generally speaking, you would get a pair of Aero 100s or 1SLs, which is what I have.
Casey:
These are roughly the size of the original OG HomePod.
Casey:
Then they came out with just semi-recently the Era 300s, which are freaking huge.
Casey:
They apparently sound amazing.
Casey:
And actually, you know, when I was at the beach house with you, I somehow convinced you to drag from the basement the Era 100s and 300s out of the box to play with.
Casey:
And I can confirm...
Casey:
They sound amazing, but they are enormous.
Casey:
And so that is an aggressive use of rear speed.
Casey:
That's a really aggressive rear speaker.
Casey:
Now they do Dolby Atmos.
Casey:
They fire up there.
Casey:
I believe they're both stereo.
Casey:
So it's incredible.
Casey:
I'm quite sure.
Casey:
But that's a lot for a set of rear speakers.
Marco:
Yeah, they have a ton of drivers in them.
Marco:
I would not have normally done, like it would have felt a little excessive for rears had it not had the discount code.
Marco:
But I was like, well, I like these speakers a lot.
Marco:
Let's give it a shot.
Marco:
What the heck?
Marco:
I'll try out surround sound for real.
Marco:
Anyway, so fast forward, you know, the house stuff, we're still not really unpacked or like we still are needing furniture and stuff.
Marco:
So like the home theater setup is not set up yet.
Marco:
We're just watching TV with the built-in speakers on the TV and the soundbar is still in the box.
Marco:
Well, I needed speakers for my office, and I was looking at all these different things people recommended for small, good sounding speakers.
Marco:
And one day, I was going to be doing a lot of work in my office, like setting stuff up, and I just wanted some speakers to play some music.
Marco:
I'm like, I have these two perfectly good Aero 300s in boxes in the garage.
Marco:
What am I doing?
Marco:
Let me just borrow these from my office until I figure out my permanent setup and until the TV needs them, which it doesn't yet.
Marco:
So I'll just use these now in my office and, you know, I'll move them downstairs when downstairs is ready.
Marco:
I still am using them.
Marco:
I don't think I'm going to move them downstairs.
Casey:
There it is.
John:
They're way bigger than the speakers you move because they were too big, though.
John:
They're bigger and I think uglier than the speakers you got rid of.
John:
So what's the deal?
Marco:
So first of all, I wouldn't say they're uglier.
Marco:
Oh, they're ugly.
Casey:
They're very weird looking.
Casey:
I don't know if I'd go so far as ugly.
Marco:
They're wider than they are tall, which is odd for a speaker to begin with.
Marco:
Well, and so that's what makes them great for my setup because tall boxy speakers would look weird floating in the middle of the room like this.
Marco:
But these are like landscape orientation speakers.
Marco:
But they're huge.
Marco:
They're not that crazy.
John:
They're very big and they're oddly shaped.
John:
they are they are about the size of any other like smallish bookshelf speaker just tipped on its side but not rectangular they're like yes pinched ovoid you are deeply offended by this shape i think the era 300 is among the ugliest speakers i've ever seen in my life i just find it aesthetically unpleasing sound i'm sure they sound great but i'm just saying oh no they sound more than great things how things look on your desk this is not what i would go with
Marco:
Well, anyway, I've been using them as my desk speakers now for something like two months.
Marco:
They're really good.
Marco:
So let me let me say first, I think aesthetically they work great.
Marco:
It's a very clean looking setup because they are like wider than they are tall.
Marco:
They don't look like too boxy on the desk in the middle of the room.
Marco:
So it's wonderful.
Marco:
Now, I went through a couple of ways to hook them up.
Marco:
Here are the downsides and upsides.
Marco:
So first of all, I tried the very first day.
Marco:
I didn't have any audio cables or anything.
Marco:
I didn't even have network cables that first day.
Marco:
So I was like, all right, I'm just going to use AirPlay from my Mac.
Marco:
Never do this.
Marco:
I strongly recommend not using AirPlay from your Mac for pretty much anything.
John:
AirPlay is so responsive.
John:
What was that?
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
So my office setup is I occasionally will use the studio display speakers, which are very good for display speakers, but they're still mostly trash.
Casey:
And then I have an original move, which is the Sonos big Sonos portable speaker.
Casey:
And I often airplay using the music app, which maybe I guess maybe that's the thing is that because the music app is such a pile of garbage that anything that works after that I consider to be a perk.
Casey:
But I don't.
Casey:
typically have any problem with it and it sounds pretty just the one move one you know the original move just the one of them sounds pretty good i mean it doesn't sound near as good as your pair of era 300s and you know as a stereo pair i'm quite sure but it surprisingly sounds pretty good
Marco:
The Move does sound surprisingly good, but it is still a single speaker.
Marco:
There's going to be limitations to that.
Marco:
I believe you can stereo pair them, but I don't know why you would buy two of those, because it's not really what it's for.
Marco:
But anyway, so...
Marco:
Don't expect to use AirPlay as a permanent desk speaker setup because there's multiple issues, the biggest one of which is just latency.
Marco:
There's massive latency.
Marco:
I believe it's the old two-second AirPlay 1 latency.
Marco:
So everything has a two-second delay, and it makes it pretty hard to use without wanting to pull your hair out.
Marco:
It's also just unreliable.
Marco:
It disconnects all the time.
Marco:
And there's AirPlay for the system that you get to from Control Center, and there's also AirPlay built into the iTunes app on the Mac.
Marco:
Both of them are unreliable in different and creative ways and don't play well with each other.
Marco:
There's so many – just please don't use AirPlay.
Marco:
It turns off all the time.
Marco:
It's slow.
Marco:
It is not –
Marco:
AirPlay is great for what it's for.
Marco:
It's for streaming audio from your iPhone to a speaker or it's for mirroring your video off your laptop onto an Apple TV.
Marco:
It's good for that.
Marco:
It is not good to be your permanent desk speaker protocol.
Marco:
Fortunately, that is not the only option with these.
Marco:
Sonos sells this little like $30 adapter that provides a line in jack to all their modern speakers, I believe.
Marco:
Certainly there are 300s and 100s.
Marco:
It's a line-in jack via USB-C, and it also has a network port on it.
Marco:
I believe they sell one that doesn't have the network port, but it's like $5 more to get the USB-C line-in and Ethernet combo, so get that one.
Marco:
Because here's the other thing with using this setup.
Marco:
Sonos supports line-in through these methods, but they always have some degree of latency.
Marco:
The way their protocol works is you can tell their app, pair these speakers together, and then when there's a line-in input to this one, automatically switch to it and then send it to the other one.
Marco:
You can set the latency on that.
Marco:
The minimum you can set it for, though, is 75 milliseconds.
Marco:
It's just enough latency that it would be fairly annoying for games and watching people speak in movies.
Marco:
However, it is fine for music.
Marco:
Like for my purposes, it's totally fine for music.
Marco:
I do notice it a little bit, but it's not a problem for me.
Marco:
And I don't usually play games.
Marco:
I never play games on this computer.
Marco:
And I almost never watch movies on this computer.
Marco:
So those issues are not really a problem for me.
Marco:
I wish there was a lower latency option, but there isn't.
Marco:
The other weird thing about this is that because these are all smart and automatic and everything, and because this is a stereo pair of two networked speakers, when you haven't been playing audio for a little while, even just as short as a minute, they seem to go to sleep or whatever.
Marco:
And then the next time you play audio, you'll lose the first second or two of what you play because the speaker will be asleep and won't have woken up yet.
Marco:
then the left one, which is what it's connected to, that one will wake up first.
Marco:
And then like a half second later, the right one will join in the party.
Marco:
So it's a little annoying.
Marco:
I'm tolerating that annoyance for now because it sounds fantastic.
John:
i have a suggestion for you with the setup but you just described why don't you other than it requiring more crap why don't you just connect these to like uh i don't want to say the r word to scare you but another box that you can control through airplay that plays music and then still let your poor mac be able to like show you youtube video with correct lip sync by having it you know i don't know use the built-in speakers in your xdr doesn't have them but anyway like
John:
let these be your music playing speakers essentially connect these to your stereo to use 80s lingo and let your stereo be controlled through airplay you know what i mean like airplay to your stereo that is connected to the era 300 to listen to your cool music and everything but like those things have just you know you just want to watch like a funny tiktok someone sent you you want to watch a youtube video or you want to watch a wwc video and you lose half a second of thing and the left one turns on before the right and there's audio lag come on
Marco:
I don't do those things through speakers very often.
Marco:
For that kind of stuff, I'm almost always wearing headphones.
Marco:
Speakers are really like, no one's around and I want to play some music.
John:
That's what I'm saying.
John:
Have them connected to your stereo and use headphones for your Mac then.
Marco:
My computer is my stereo.
Marco:
Ugh.
John:
but you know what i mean you'd still be controlling you'd still be playing your fish library in the music app right you'd just be air playing to your stereo because every single stereo supports and i keep saying stereo because i don't want to say receiver because i know people flip out but like receivers they all support airplay you could just connect the arrow 100 well you can't connect the arrow 300 no trust me as i was saying that's using airplay for that is a terrible experience i would i would run playing music i don't care i would run a line cable from them from my desk to the receiver here you could just you just get actual speakers and not these weird computers that are pretend to be speakers you know like
John:
You connect them with speaker wire, you know, like, I know, I'm, I'm, I'm complicating things for you, but it just sounds like such a miserable experience using these as computer speakers.
John:
And when you really, you just want good music speakers.
Marco:
Well, and that's what I, I have that at my beach office where I just have the Q150s and a little like, you know, $50 little amp velcro to the bottom of my desk and a subwoofer.
Marco:
Like I have all that there and it's great.
Marco:
But that setup would look ridiculous here.
Marco:
Like that, that would not fit my aestheticals.
John:
And the Arrow 300s don't.
John:
I need to see pictures.
John:
Convince me with pictures.
John:
Show me this doesn't look ridiculous.
Casey:
Yeah, I would love to see pictures of this because I am not as deeply offended by the look of these as John is.
Casey:
I can understand, John, how you got to that perspective because it's not unreasonable, but I'm not as offended as you seem to be.
Casey:
But no, I get what you're going for here.
Casey:
I wonder if...
Casey:
And now this is going to bring up the whole new app situation, but I wonder if an alternative for your use would be to use the Sonos app to play whatever you want to play on the speakers and thus not involve anything computer at all.
Marco:
The Sonos app sucks.
Marco:
I know they just rewrote it and it sucks even more, and I'm sorry for everyone who's affected by that.
Marco:
I don't use the Sonos app, except for configuring the speakers when I first set them up, and then I never touch it again.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
I play music from the music app, previously called iTunes, on my Mac while I work.
Marco:
That is the use case here.
Marco:
I'm not going to take out my phone and play with the app.
Marco:
I'm controlling it through the music app, period.
Casey:
I get that, but they have a native app.
Casey:
Well, I don't know if I should say native.
Casey:
They have an app for the Mac.
Casey:
I heard rumblings that it's going away.
Casey:
This is not insider information.
Casey:
I think they might have announced this at some point.
Casey:
And their app for the Mac is...
Casey:
fine i wouldn't say it's great but it resolves a lot of these issues that plague you and it will interface with your library now a library of your library size i don't know but it is supposed to interface with your you know itunes match library um and just briefly you know i think i talked about this um i might have talked about on the show and certainly talked about it on analog but like the new app it's
Casey:
fine.
Casey:
Well, as long as you don't need accessibility features, which are coming slower than they should.
Casey:
But it's fine.
Casey:
The only thing that really chaps my bottom about it is you can't do any cue management or playlist management.
Casey:
Or not playlist.
Casey:
I guess cue is a better word for it.
Casey:
So if I really, really, really want to play a particular song next,
Casey:
There's nothing I can do about that except run up to my computer and use the old app to do it, which stinks.
Casey:
And that's coming, and that will come soon-ish.
Casey:
But for the most part, I don't mind the new app, and I think it is less clunky than the old app.
Casey:
It's very different than the old one, so it requires relearning some stuff.
Casey:
But I use the Sonos app to play music almost exclusively.
Casey:
The only time I really don't is, like I said, when I'm at my computer.
Casey:
And I agree with you, ultimately, that I find it easier to find the music I want using the music app.
Casey:
And that's what I do when I airplay it to the move.
Casey:
And that's fine.
Casey:
But especially if I'm just going for ambient music and not, you know, as I'm around the house or whatnot, or, you know, just want to play an album or something like that, oftentimes I'll use the Sonos app, including sometimes on the computer.
Marco:
i mean that is an option but that is just that is a direction i don't want to go like i don't want to play things that way i i that is not my workflow i don't want to change my workflow my i think my workflow for my needs and preferences is better um so yeah i don't i just don't want to deal with that and honestly like once i so i i did hardwire them they each have ethernet going to them um nice and clean of course so they each have ethernet they each have the one has the line in and sends it to the other one over the network and
Marco:
and once i when they were both on wi-fi it was a little bit shaky i had to use the higher latency settings it wasn't good sonos products don't have great wi-fi radios um but i when i wired them they became rock solid reliable like it i've never had one since wiring them to the network i've never had one like drop out or be you know too out of sync or whatever it's never happened so it is fantastic um anyway
Marco:
So if you're willing to do this crazy setup, which again, this is ridiculous.
Marco:
You really shouldn't do this.
Marco:
But if for some reason you're crazy like me and you want to do this, it sounds great.
Marco:
In most ways, it sounds, I think, even better than my Q150s.
Marco:
Not at mid-range and vocals and guitars.
Marco:
The Q150s still are my favorite sound for that.
Marco:
However, they are bigger, they are deeper, they are uglier, and the challenge with the QM50 is that they're really not made for desk listening distance, and they have a fairly small sweet spot in speaker terms.
Marco:
This is like, how much does the sound change or get worse if you shift your body to different directions or are leaning or whatever?
Marco:
How big is the sweet spot where it sounds the best?
Marco:
Most speakers are not great at this.
Marco:
The Q150s are, especially at a distance of like four feet, they're not really made for that.
Marco:
It doesn't have a very big sweet spot.
Marco:
The ERA 300 pair, each speaker has like seven drivers firing in different directions.
Marco:
There's a lot going on there that fires sound in a whole bunch of different places.
Marco:
And so as a result, the sweet spot is very wide and broad.
Marco:
um it also you know in in speaker terms it has a very the era 300 has a really impressive sound stage again just by its design this is this is what what this means is like how wide or big does it sound like the sound is coming from like does it sound like it's coming from two points in front of you or does it sound like you're in like an auditorium full of sound coming you know from the big wall in front of you whatever that's the the sound stage um
Marco:
These have a massive soundstage for speakers that fit on your desk and that you're listening to from four feet away like that.
Marco:
And again, it's because there's drivers firing every direction and they're doing all sorts of processing.
Marco:
It is really impressive for that.
Marco:
By far the best soundstage I've heard in speakers at this distance.
Marco:
And they have pretty good bass for their size, especially considering not having a subwoofer.
Marco:
They have very impressive bass.
Marco:
They destroy the Q150s in bass.
Marco:
And they even destroy the Q350s in bass, which are bigger speakers.
Marco:
They have really good bass for their size.
Marco:
And so you don't need a subwoofer.
Marco:
however then i added a subwoofer which one the sub of course because that was also the big one yes because that was that was also part of the set uh that i got for the for the living room oh i bet that sounds so flipping good oh my gosh
Marco:
So the thing about the Sonos sub, this is their big subwoofer, the one they've had for a while.
Marco:
It is force-canceling.
Marco:
I believe I discussed this a long time ago when I discussed my Q150s and my setup at the beach, and I bought this very expensive KEF subwoofer for the Q150s at the beach because it was force-canceling.
Marco:
The Sonos sub only works with Sonos.
Marco:
It is only like their wireless protocol.
Marco:
Although, I mean, you can network wire it, but it doesn't have a line in is what I'm saying.
Marco:
So it only works with Sonos stuff.
Marco:
So I couldn't use it at my setup at the beach, but I could use it here.
Marco:
And it is a really good force-canceling subwoofer for less money than, as far as I know, any other force-canceling subwoofer on the market by a pretty big margin.
Marco:
And what force-canceling is great for is, and this is why Apple always touts it in the MacBook Pros, because I believe they also have force-canceling subwoofers in their laptops.
Marco:
What's great about that is that it significantly reduces buzzing and vibration from subwoofers.
Marco:
You hear the sound, but because it has two drivers firing in opposite directions...
Marco:
the vibration is largely or completely canceled out.
Marco:
So you don't usually hear too much boominess.
Marco:
You don't really hear materials nearby vibrating as much.
Marco:
It doesn't vibrate with the floor because it is canceling out by doing two different directions at the same time.
Marco:
so the these speakers their 300s again by themselves they have great bass with the subwoofer it's a lot of fun like this is a ridiculous setup like again nobody needs to do this i don't need to do this i happen to have these things for my living room and i decided to set them up in my office for a while first and it's a lot of fun
Marco:
The subwoofer is it's not honestly it's not a massive difference because the bass in them is already pretty good.
Marco:
But it does it does improve things and it does make it a lot of fun.
Marco:
I don't need it, but it's really fun.
Casey:
Well, I am glad you are satisfied.
Casey:
So sitting here now when the living room is ready, are you going to then buy another batch of all these things?
John:
i mean i already have the soundbar for down there maybe that'll be enough i like how the original motivation was these speakers are too big on my desk and you replaced it with two i think also very big speakers and a giant subwoofer it's it's giant for that application i wouldn't say it's that giant particularly for a home theater but for that application it's not small you should do the measurements how many square inches of speaker did you remove and how many square inches of speaker did you add in their place
Marco:
Well, I relocated it.
Marco:
The subwoofer is across the room, like at the opposite wall that I'm looking at.
Marco:
And then the two speakers are, you know, they're tipped over to their sides.
Marco:
The only one, you know, weird thing about these speakers is that because of their design, I can't pile crap on top of them.
John:
That's what I'm saying.
John:
They're weirdly shaped.
John:
Plus, there's up-firing drivers anyway, isn't there?
Marco:
Yes, but there's probably aesthetic benefits to me not being able to pile crap on top of my speakers.
Marco:
At the beach with the KEFs, those are just boxes, and so the top of them becomes a work area.
Marco:
There's always papers on them.
Marco:
When I was burning the Blu-ray discs to back up all my stuff, the M discs, the Blu-ray drive just lived on top of one of the speakers.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
There's always crap on top of my speakers at the beach.
Marco:
And here I can't do that.
Marco:
That's because they take up so much desk space.
John:
There's no desk space left to put stuff.
John:
So you have to put it on top of the speakers.
Marco:
This is fun.
Marco:
And I get to watch the ducks while I listen to my awesome music on my ridiculous setup.
Marco:
So I'm happy.