There’s a Certain Smell
i'm coming in hot this week again this time my my desktop audio setup is one of those like you know the desk is very clean at least when i'm when it's not covered in other crap but like my desk is very clean and it looks like i have a very simple audio setup three boxes all next to each other with all like neatly tucked away cables
One of them is a Zoom, I think it's the F1, yeah, the Zoom F1, which serves as my kind of backup hardware recorder for podcasting.
Next to that is my sound device's USB Pre 2, which is my main microphone interface.
And to the left of that is the American audio amplifier company named after a swear word that looks German but isn't.
That would be sheep.
Yeah, thanks.
They have a product called the Jotunheim that I've used as my headphone amp.
and speaker volume control and there's switches in the front of the second switch between podcasting which uses a different input and stuff like that and so that's kind of my my audio output control center and earlier this afternoon i left the house to go pick up my kid from school i come back and i notice upstairs it smells like someone has left an iron on oh no oh god what is the magic smoke escape yeah
so it smells it doesn't okay I have smelled like a blown capacitor I think or a melted capacitor like there's a certain smell like I think the magic smoke is like where like you know a blown power supply has a certain smell this was not that smell this just smelled like an iron being left on too long so like
like slightly melting but not like chemical melting like it smells almost like slightly melting plastic or slightly melting you know metallic stuff and i i'm sniffing around what what is the smell i there's there's an iron but it's been unplugged for hours my god it's not that like what what i'm looking around sniffing around upstairs and i finally come to my desk and i'm like it smells strongest in my office i'm like looking around like what is going on here oh no
And it seems to be concentrated around my Jotunheim.
Their products, these are like audiophile amplifiers.
And audiophile amplifiers are often very power inefficient compared to a standard kind of class D dynamic switching kind of stuff that most modern compact low power amps are made like.
The old style amps, because they tend to sound better this way, use electric topologies that, forgive me, I'm not an electric only new year, so I don't know how any of this stuff works, but they use topologies that waste a lot of power because they sound better.
That produces a certain amount of heat that I'm familiar with.
You touch it, it's kind of warm.
I wouldn't describe it as hot normally.
Well, this time I touch it and it was hot, like really hot.
I took out a little thermal camera to measure because that was the most convenient thermal measuring device in my office.
I don't have a thermometer up here, but I do have a thermal camera.
It measured it at like 140 to 160 Fahrenheit.
This is hotter than normal.
This is like tuck shit and you should not leave your hand there because you'll get some kind of minor burn after a while kind of hot.
This is not normal.
So I unplug it.
Then I move on with my day.
I've got to make dinner and everything.
So eventually I come back.
Oh, it's podcast time.
Let me just turn it on, see if it works, and see if I can get through the podcast.
And it won't turn on anymore.
Okay.
So I'm like, all right, well, that answers the question.
This has now become a warranty repair.
But in the meantime, I have a podcast to do in 15 minutes.
What do I do?
So, you know, and I could, all I need to do is plug my headphones in so I can hear myself and you.
um but because i have like the zoom recorder i have like a kind of split two-channel output where like i'm in one ear and you guys are in the other ear for the purpose of the recorder but then i sum it to mono for myself to hear it and like so i have this setup that is visibly very simple is actually very complicated and it took me a very long time to finally get the like
like pulling cables out of my closet, pulling boxes and bins out.
Do I have this kind of cable, that kind of cable?
I have finally arrived here.
Not a minute too soon.
I finished the setup as we were starting the pre-show discussing the topics and stuff.
I'm finally here.
My Jotunheim is unfortunately dead.
I will have to get it repaired.
And there are wires everywhere, all over, like every bin is out.
The lids are off.
The wires were dug through everything.
It looks like somebody ransacked my office looking for an audio cable because that's basically what happened.
And it was me.
But all that is to say, I am here just barely, but here.
The only thing you have left is learn how to pronounce the name of that product that you keep talking about.
It's Jotunheim, isn't it?
Something like that?
Something like that.
I mean, I don't actually know because my basis of pronunciation is a video game.
So if you play Destiny, you may be familiar with Jotun.
But some people don't pronounce it that way.
So I don't even know what's right.
But I'm going to guess it's not Jotunheim.
Anyway, all right, let's do some follow-up.
It is my self-anointed position on the show to call attention to new immersive content on the Vision Pro for the three of you that have Vision Pros.
And so for all three of you, I'm telling you now that there is a new boundless immersive episode called Arctic Surfing.
These are probably my least favorite of all the different things that they do, to be completely honest with you.
They're like under 10 minutes, sometimes barely over five minutes.
And there's no real arc.
To them, generally, it's just, hey, we're going to talk for a few minutes about hot air balloons.
Or we're going to talk for a few minutes, in this case, about surfing, where it's really freaking cold in Norway.
That's all.
Five, six minutes, we're out.
I mean, it's still gorgeous, and it's interesting, but I don't know.
I feel like even just the vague attempt at a storyline is what I would prefer.
And I don't recall if I brought this...
I don't know.
I don't recall if I brought this to the show or not, but they did a rodeo one like a couple of weeks ago.
I probably brought it up.
And that one I liked a lot more.
And there was a bit of a storyline.
It was a very vague and loose storyline, but a storyline nevertheless.
But anyway, if you have Vision Pro, go check that out.
It's worth six and a half minutes of your time.
How did you miss this one?
The link that I just put in there.
They also are doing some kind of immersive documentary film based on Bono's autobiography book thingy.
Cool.
You're watching people Arctic surfing and doing a rodeo, but you're not going to listen to Bono do his weird narration of his own life?
I just – I'm sorry, John.
U2 has never done anything for me.
It's not –
I guess there probably will be some music part of it.
All the stuff you're watching, you'll watch anything except for something that you might have some familiarity with.
I'll watch it, but I mean, again, I have... This one has a narrative, supposedly, or I don't know.
I guess they will play U2 music.
I don't know if you'll survive, but...
No, I mean, I've seen U2 in concert.
They were fine.
But they're no rodeos or Arctic surfing.
I get it.
They are darn right.
No, I'm kidding.
I'm sure it's good.
I had seen that fly by and honestly, I didn't pay any attention to it because again, U2 is kind of whatever for me.
I'm not trying to say they're bad or anything like that.
It's just a story about a person though.
This is like autobiography of someone who's had a long and interesting life.
That is very fair, and I'm probably being unfair and poo-pooing it.
No, I'll definitely check it out whenever it comes out.
But also, it didn't really hit my radar too hard because it's not out yet.
And honestly, I didn't even look to see when it's coming out.
May 30th, apparently.
So I can worry about that in a couple of months.
We were talking last episode, I believe in the after show, excuse me, in overtime about humanoid robots.
And I think, John, you have some thoughts on this.
Yeah, something I forgot to mention that I meant to in the last show, and I actually didn't hear from anyone as feedback as well.
Part of the overtime was discussing this whole trend of the humanoid robots that lots of companies are talking about or investing money in.
Either officially they're doing press releases or unofficially they're investing in companies or super unofficially.
We just get rumors about what Apple's doing.
What's the deal with humanoid robots?
Anyway, that was last episode's overtime segment.
Um, and one of the questions I was asking in overtime is, are we on the verge of some kind of technological breakthrough that makes humanoid robots suddenly much more possible than they were previously?
Because it doesn't seem like we're very close to it, but everyone's investing in it.
So what's the deal?
Um,
And I don't think we came up with any answers in overtime about like, oh, there is some technological breakthrough and here's what it is.
And that's why even though it seems like humanoid robots are impossible, actually next week they're going to be here.
They're going to be here before you know it.
We didn't come up with anything, but I have an idea of –
how i would imagine that it's possible that there is some kind of breakthrough making humanoid robots or robots in general much more possible than they used to be that is actually founded in real things i don't know if this is true i'm not saying it's true i'm just coming up with a plausible scenario and that's what i wanted to mention last time but didn't so i'll stay now here's the scenario and it actually connects to something i talked about in a couple of past episodes um
Kind of touched on it by saying like, oh, well, the AI stuff was like, well, we have a we have software that's smart now.
So that was the missing piece.
All we got to do is add the smart LM powered software to a bunch of servo motors.
And voila, we're two steps away from human or robots.
I don't think that's it.
But I think the plausible angle.
which, again, not necessarily true, but could be true, is it's the same as I mentioned with Google and its data centers, sort of driving the proprietary Unix workstation server vendors out of business.
The innovation there was, what if we take cheap, crappy commodity hardware,
That was previously unviable in the data center because it was cheap, crappy and commodity and not purpose built and unreliable.
And what if we apply software to that problem such that the software can manage and corral all this crappy hardware expecting it to fail?
But building a software layer on top that will manage all that by saying, well, it doesn't matter if things fail.
I'll just bring up new ones and we'll just, you know, it'll be a sort of a software layer on top of crappy hardware.
And as computing and software improves, I always think that maybe there's a possibility that all the problems about like mechanical devices that, you know, move like living things are able to navigate our world.
It's such a hard problem.
a lot of it, sometimes when I look at them again, like the Boston dynamics robot thingies, it's like, but they're trying to do it the hard way.
Like, you know, let's have very precise, careful, uh, machines that are precision made and are strong and reliable and sturdy.
Um,
and then have computers control them very precisely by having an awareness of their surroundings and what if the other approach is let's have crappy hardware that barely works and breaks half the time uh and just have really smart software surrounding it to make up for that kind of like the drone revolution where if you look at the hardware on a drone it's a bunch of motors and plastic fans you're like how how did we not have this when we were kids we had motors we had plastic fans oh but you didn't have the software and the software is like i you
Give me something that vaguely spins blades around and have some adjustability.
It's just a question of putting in the right sensors and putting in the right control systems so that it takes this crappy hardware and says, well, like you can take a drone and like snip off a piece of one of the propellers and it'll still kind of figure out how to stay upright because it's a control system.
It's like, give me crappy commodity hardware and some smart software and I'll figure out, oh, how much more power does this need?
How do I have to tilt these things?
Because there's something constantly thinking, what do I need to do to stay level, to go up, to do the thing that I want to do?
That's what I'm thinking about with the robots.
It's like, if we can get software that can take hardware that is bad, that, you know, doesn't, a servomotor that you can't precisely control, that doesn't turn to the exact angle instantly, that sometimes slips or fails or whatever, and just puts smarts in it, kind of like smarts in our decrepit bodies, that just says, well, it doesn't work perfectly.
You can't control your body perfectly.
It doesn't have infinite strength.
And as you get older, it gets less coordinated and creakier.
But you have the knowledge and experience to control that body to know how much more force do we have to put in all these things, you know, with constant feedback from all the sensors.
So that's just what I wanted to throw out there, that, like, if there is a humanoid robot revolution, I see it being, like...
you know, sort of the opposite of the perfect welding robots in a car factory where it's like precision stuff where it moves down to the millimeter very quickly with expensive motors and everything.
Just like really crappy hardware with really smart software.
I'd love to see it.
I haven't yet, but it's plausible.
All right.
Anonymous writes in to us.
I was on the QA team for iOS from 2009 through 2012.
I was told that macOS didn't have a QA department.
Let me reread that just to make sure you all heard me.
What?
I was told that macOS didn't have a QA department.
One more time with feeling.
I was told that macOS didn't have a QA department.
Even Apple TV gets QA as a derivative of iOS.
Why macOS didn't get the same treatment is unknown to me, but John's probably right that it's a cost issue.
I mean, well, hold on, though.
So first of all, this was one anonymous email regarding employment that allegedly ended in 2012.
So there's a lot of potential that could have happened in the meantime.
And secondly...
There's the asterisk of like, well, what does it mean to have a QA team?
How were they managing testing and quality and things like that?
There could be some kind of weird technicality where it's like, well, we didn't call it QA, but actually it was this role being served here.
So there's a lot of wiggle room here.
So I don't think this means much.
This is in the context of reliability of software and how much testing like features that don't get looked at for years and years get like the buried corners of Mac OS that no one looks at who's checking whether they break and the Unix compliance.
process being one of the few things according to a previous uh person who sent us feedback one of the few things that actually is testing some of the dark corners of mac os on a regular basis testing an os is not easy i'm sure there are integration tests and other things that are run on a regular basis in fact we've heard stories of like there's certain applications that apple always make sure don't break as part of a new os update so surely there's there there's got to be some quality control process just from the outside it seems like
there's not enough of it for mac os because it is the less popular os with fewer resources and it makes less money and yada yada but i still feel like uh overall there's some baseline of reliability that apple needs to maintain in all its software and mac os is very large and very complex and has a lot of moving parts and a lot of legacy stuff and that's the challenge and so i think mac os could use a little bit more testing uh john i think you would like to go on an apology tour now is that correct
You have to apologize to Joe Rosenstiel.
He says, I have never been so slandered in all my life.
I don't like the Apple TV app at all.
I had implied that he did because he was suggesting that he thought that Netflix should integrate with the Apple TV app.
And I said, well, for people like Joe who like the Apple TV app, he says, I don't like it.
And he provides proof.
An article he wrote in 2023 called 57 app icons and nothing good on.
He wrote that for six colors.
Another article from 2023.
Apps are now flops.com.
Tabs are now sidebars, which is a reference, a very old reference that some people will get.
And then finally, from his not another WBC wish list from 2024 at JoeSteel.com, Joe-Steel.com, he wrote, and I quote, the Apple TV app still sucks butt.
So I asked him, if you don't like the Apple TV app, then why are you rooting for Netflix to integrate with it?
And he said, it's better for consumers to have Netflix in places like Upnex.
Its absence annoys customers rather than weakening Apple's position to a substantial degree.
People that mostly watch Netflix won't be persuaded to use a TV app to do so.
I don't know if you've tried the TV app integrations for Prime Video, etc., but they're an absolute joke.
Apple has no ability to steal consumer behavior in the TV app or everyone would be subscribed to Apple TV Plus and using Apple channels add on.
So he's basically saying it should be there because it's convenient.
And don't worry, it won't give Apple any more power.
All right.
And speaking of that Netflix and Apple TV integration, Serena writes, I wouldn't use the Apple TV app even if Netflix was integrated, but it would be nice to have Netflix results integrated into the Apple TV search features.
Yeah, we got a lot of feedback about that of saying like, it's not about using the app.
I don't care about the app.
I wouldn't use it.
But it's really annoying that when you try to do like the cross-service search, Netflix results are not included there.
Daniel Luce writes, regarding Netflix, I agree with everything you said, but there's another thing I consider important.
The TV app isn't even close to being fair to third-party content.
I have two third-party channels, and I'm not subscribed to Apple TV+, yet I've never seen fewer than half of all trailers and banners in the highlights of the TV app.
Thank you so much.
It would be one thing if the only privilege Apple TV Plus had was an exclusive tab, but even the main screen is just ad upon ad for a service I don't subscribe to, while the content I'm paying for is buried deep.
Slight conflict of interest when the app is run by a company with its own streaming service.
A little bit.
I didn't put any specific person's feedback in here, but I feel like I saw a lot of feedback that if I recall correctly and understand correctly, a lot of people had said, you know, I don't even necessarily want to use the Apple TV app.
However, I have it as one of the icons on the top row of the Apple TV icon grid.
And I, what is it up?
I forget the now playing up next.
There's a term next.
Thank you.
Up next is the term for the, they show above the grid of icons.
There's actionable buttons where different, whatever app you're, you currently have highlighted will give you additional options of things to do.
And I guess a lot of people use the Apple TV app to basically aggregate, okay, what should I watch right now?
And they, and they,
engage that via the home screen on the Apple TV.
This is a really hard word picture to paint.
I apologize if I'm not making a lot of sense.
The terminology doesn't help.
The naming of things doesn't help.
Right.
But basically by hovering your cursor, if you will, over the Apple TV app, the stuff above there is the stuff that you're most likely to want to watch.
And having Netflix in that list
would be very convenient.
And that's something I hadn't thought about.
I don't believe our Apple TV app is on the first row of our Apple TV.
So that never really occurred to me, but it's a completely fair point.
Yeah, a lot of people are also big fans of Up Next and they were wondering why I was complaining about it.
And there's two reasons.
One, the most obvious and you're lucky this doesn't occur to you or doesn't happen to you.
is that it just doesn't work well for me.
As in, it doesn't show me things that I've watched recently.
When someone said this to me, I had just used television two seconds ago and I said, the third item in Up Next is a show I have not watched in years.
It's just broken for me a lot of the time.
It just doesn't show me things that I want to watch next.
So that's one, just reliability.
If it works for you and it's not totally broken, that's great, but it's very broken for me a lot of the time.
But the second thing is, even if it worked perfectly for me,
I hate that interface because I have an entire family watching television and it shows like four icons and we're watching seven shows at the same time.
And it's just like, it's a bad interface seeing four things with horizontal scrolling.
That's not how someone coming from TiVo or any other service that gives you some better way to manage the list of things you're watching.
If you're watching one or two things and the same people are watching that, then maybe it's not a big deal.
But if you have sort of more demanding needs, um,
You're either switching users constantly with the big upper right corner or hold down the button thingy and hoping that, that it maintains state across all those users.
Or you're trying to use one user and the show you want to watch isn't even the list anyway, because something of three years, I know that's getting to reliability, but I just, I just don't think it's a good interface.
Right.
And,
Even if it was, you know, an interface that I enjoyed, it just doesn't work right for me.
Like it shows me things that are wrong or I'll watch an episode and be like, oh, there's the next episode.
I'll hit play.
Nope.
It's the one we watched last night.
Like real basics of like, show me the next thing I want to watch.
How about the episode you already watched?
No, Apple TV.
That's not it.
Cool.
And then finally from anonymous, I implemented Apple TV app integration for streaming service.
This is basically what Netflix has done to integrate with Apple TV app.
You need to one, get a special entitlement from Apple and put it in your app to use a special API that's available only if you have the entitlement to mark your app as a video provider.
Three, report users' playback activity with NSU user activity using custom keys.
Four, write a backend service which provides your content to Apple in XML, of course.
Five, agree with Apple on a deep link format which can open your app, which both sides need to implement.
Oh, hmm.
And six, provide Apple with a test bill to verify and approve the implementation.
And this anonymous person continues and summarizes.
I can't imagine how any of this can happen by mistake.
That was the question about the brief integration.
You know, who accidentally turned it on?
And this is adding another thing.
It's like, look, this isn't something that you can do accidentally.
This is something that both Netflix and Apple have clearly implemented.
Yeah.
And just it's not rolled out, presumably because Netflix doesn't want to roll it out.
But I think this is just Netflix being a smart company and saying, look, if we ever decide to roll this out, we should have it ready to go.
And who knows?
And maybe they implemented it years ago and it's just been sitting there in a turned off mode for ages.
Because like, obviously, if it was up to Apple, Apple would just turn it on.
But it's not up to Apple.
It is up to Netflix.
I don't know who accidentally turned it on, but it seems like Netflix doesn't want it turned on.
But somebody did the work to make it work.
We're sponsored this episode exclusively by Google Gemini.
They really wanted me to show off the Gemini Live feature.
So for each ad read this episode, we're going to do something a little bit different.
I'm going to ask Gemini Live actual questions I've had in real life recently.
I haven't tried any of these before, so we're going to see how it actually does.
So I've installed the Gemini app on my phone.
It's free.
It uses your regular Google login.
And I'm using the free service that everybody just has access to by default.
All right.
So first question, this will be completely unedited and done in real time so you can see the responsiveness.
So here goes.
Tap and live.
Do North American GFCI outlets provide protection even for ungrounded loads?
Yes.
GFCI outlets protect both grounded and ungrounded loads.
They work by monitoring the current flowing through the hot and neutral wires.
If there's an imbalance, meaning current is leaking away, it trips and cuts the power.
How much does a standard bun commercial coffee pot hold?
That depends a bit on the specific model, but most standard bun commercial coffee pots hold about 12 cups.
What is that in ounces?
A standard 12-cup bun coffee pot holds about 96 ounces.
All right, so that's just one tiny example of what Gemini can do.
I'll ask more questions in a little bit throughout the show.
Until then, thanks to Google Gemini for sponsoring our show.
Let's talk iPhone 16.
Do you want to talk about the 16E name implications?
Yeah, I teased that on last episode, but then we never got to it.
We got off on some tangent or something.
Us?
Yeah, I should have.
Instead of teasing, I should have just said it right there.
So the 16E name, iPhone 16E, one of the possible implications of this name and putting it as part of the 16 family is, will there be a 17E?
Will every family of iPhones have an E model that is the less expensive one with the older technology?
Because that was not the case with the SE line.
They would make an SE and it would just sit there for a while.
And then eventually they made another SE and it would sit there for a while.
By putting the number in the name, aside from making it part of the 16 family...
It opens the possibility that when the 17 family arrives, there could be a 17E.
Now that seems unlikely to me because the economics and purpose and role of the 16E are very much like the SE as the less expensive phone.
I don't see why they would make a 17E.
But the name does nudge things slightly in that direction.
So that's something to watch for when the 17 family, which we will discuss later, hopefully, 17 family arrives.
Watch to see if, I don't know, six months later, whatever the weird gap is, that another member of the 17 family arrives and it's the 17e.
Seems unlikely, but you've got the 16e giving you a little hope.
So we got a handful of feedback about potential uses or target audiences, I guess I should say, for the 16.
And there were a lot of people that said, oh, either I have a pacemaker or I know someone with a pacemaker.
And I, Casey, have no idea how this works.
But these people were saying that, oh, if you have something with magnets near a pacemaker, that's very, very bad.
So that's one possibility.
And then we got various flavors of the same message, but Patch wrote in, and I think this one is the best or most concise summary, and let me read what Patch wrote.
One of my many day jobs is managing MDM systems for companies.
What is that, mobile device management, I believe?
Mm-hmm.
I think Apple knows exactly who is buying this phone.
To me, the E stands for Enterprise.
Basically, every single company I manage buys everyone but the C-suite iPhone SEs.
The iPhone 16E's spec sheet makes sense for this use case, too.
Enterprise does not care about AirTag finding, multiple cameras, Dynamic Islander, MagSafe.
It's also been about three years since last SE released, where a lot of businesses will be looking to start to cycle out their devices for new ones.
So here's a new offering from Apple to fulfill that need.
Of course, they will also sell this to the general public too, but to me, this is aimed squarely at enterprise purchasing managers who will be buying these in lots of hundreds or thousands.
People who work in enterprise IT think the world revolves around them.
Yeah, of course, they want the cheap phone to give to people.
But like Apple really doesn't make products of the size of even the smallest iPhone with the enterprise as the main target.
I mean, yeah, whatever the cheapest phone is, enterprise is going to be interested in that.
And I agree that enterprise is more likely to not care about the lack of MagSafe or AirTag.
But I feel like it's just a side effect of the features that Apple chose for this.
Apple has in the past occasionally made products aimed squarely at the enterprise.
They made a thing called the XServe for ages.
They made XServe Raid.
They did all sorts of kind of enterprise-y things.
And they've definitely pulled back from that in the past decade or two, not gone more heavily into it.
I don't think the E in 16E stands for enterprise.
I don't know what it stands.
Did you see that?
Someone had the quote.
I think maybe Gruber had the quote where someone asked, like, what does the E stand for on iPhone 16E?
And the official Apple response was, the E doesn't stand for anything, but we think it's the phone for everybody.
Like, I'm paraphrasing.
But that was basically the thing.
Like they said flat out, it does not stand for anything.
But they said, we think it's the phone for everybody.
Wink.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right.
And speaking of the 16e, was it connected that did the 16e?
That's so good.
I'm going to steal that forever.
Anyways, the Apple C1 modem that is in the 16e, the...
There were a couple of theories of why MagSafe was dropped from the 16E, and both of them revolved around the C1.
I think it was John Voorhees was the first person I saw who said, oh, maybe it's like a clearance or fitment issue or something along those lines.
And then a couple other people said, well, what if MagSafe interferes with the C1?
And so Apple said to Macworld and also 9to5Mac, I believe, that that's not the case.
So reading from a Macworld post that we'll put in the show notes, Apple's confirmed to Macworld that the C1 modem is not responsible for the decision to leave MagSafe charging off the new 16e.
Additionally, from 9to5Mac, Apple confirmed that the C1 has nothing to do with the omission of MagSafe and the iPhone 16e.
The new testing conducted by iPhone case accessory manufacturer and shared with 9to5Mac adds more detail to the situation.
The case manufacturer conducted tests on whether a MagSafe-enabled case and charging puck impaired cellular data speeds.
The tests confirmed that there is no difference between the C1 modem in the iPhone 16e and the MagSafe magnets.
There was no interference between them, yeah.
So Apple says no, and people tested it, and they say no, so that's not a thing, apparently.
Additionally, there is a post on MacRumors, again, linked in the show notes.
Reading from there, Apple's new C1 modem in the iPhone 16e is just the start, said chip-making chief Johnny Surugi in an interview with Reuters.
This is a quote from Johnny.
We're going to keep improving that technology each generation so that it becomes a platform for us that will be used to truly differentiate this technology for our products.
The C1 modem is manufactured with a 4nm process, and the transceiver is manufactured with a 7nm process.
According to Saruji, he said the modem is the most complex technology that Apple has ever built, and it was tested with 180 carriers in 55 countries to ensure reliability for core functionality like phone calls and mobile data.
Apple supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo today said the iPhone 17 Air will also be equipped with the C1 modem.
Most of us, I don't think, really fully appreciate quite how complicated a cellular modem is because the reality is when we think of modems, we think of these basic things from 1,000 years ago that translated signals pretty simply and received them pretty simply.
Cell networks today and all the different tricks they have to use to cram a whole bunch of data into a limited frequency and limited spectrum and share the space with other phones and all the different coding schemes and everything.
It is so complicated.
And there's all sorts of –
Analog complexity, digital complexity, computational complexity.
There is so much to it.
In fact, I'll link to this Wendover video from a few years ago, which kind of goes over some of the basic ideas of how...
how cell service encodes multiple users into certain frequencies and everything like and this like it's just a high level overview the same way it was like well computers represent you know digits by ones and zeros and here's how they add on a basic level and it's like if you compare that to what computers do today it's like yes that is true but wow what a difference in complexity that we have today that's how cell service works like what the cell modem has to do
is so complicated and has gotten so sophisticated.
And it touches so many different types of sciences and systems and needs.
So that's why this was a massive undertaking.
I totally believe the claim that this is their most complicated thing.
Apple has defeated CPUs, GPUs to some degree.
They've made their own versions of those for a long time now, relatively speaking.
But this took them until now.
They could do an entire processor, an entire GPU stack before they could do a cell modem.
That's how complicated these things are.
That's why this is such a big deal.
And I think there's a lot of potential here for Apple to kick butt over time.
We'll see how the first one is here.
But
I'm sure they have taken it very seriously.
The same way like the very first Apple Silicon processor, they took that really seriously.
And, you know, the M1 came out.
Well, I guess that was the first Mac one.
But, you know, even before that, the iPhone ones, they were fine.
Like the A4 was a rock solid chip.
Apple has never made a processor that had major flaws as far as we know.
It seems like they have tackled this with as much discipline and investment as they did processors and graphics cards.
We'll see how it turns out, but there's a huge potential ahead for this if they didn't screw it up.
And knowing recent Apple and their hardware releases, they probably didn't.
So here we go.
Interestingly, for both of the things you mentioned, or actually for all three of the things you mentioned, Apple did this by acquiring companies.
So they acquired PA Semi to make the first Apple Silicon chips, the A4 series.
They acquired what, Imagine something or other for the GPUs.
And of course, they acquired Intel's cell modem business.
Now, the thing is, PA Semi was filled with like rock stars and the GPU company was filled with people who knew how to make small GPUs.
intel cell modem business was not doing well when apple picked it up it wasn't the cream of the crop but it's what they could get and they bought it and so maybe that's why the cell phone stuff has again in according to rumor has been delayed you know delayed from when apple never said there was coming anyway the rumor was it was coming years before it actually came uh you know it's a hard problem so is making the apple silicon but i feel like pa semi was uh
More up to the job than Intel's failing cell mode in business.
But in all those cases, it came down to smart strategic acquisitions at the right time and then a multi-year wait to get to the point where they can produce something that's ready to be in an Apple product.
Speaking of all of that complexity, Pedro Fernandez writes, from a cellular point of view, the C1 seems to have all the bells and whistles, bands, and MIMO.
What is MIMO?
MIMO.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, multiple in, multiple out.
It's like simultaneous transmission on different frequencies, I guess, or antennas or something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
then you can end up using higher transmission power, and that's where power consumption is the most impactful on battery life.
It really takes a lot of courage from Apple to put out a new cellular radio on an iPhone.
Cell radios are one of the most advanced technologies out there.
Hello, Marco.
I always tell people that a cellular radio with negative 105, what is it, milli-decibels?
DBMs.
I think that's micro-milli-decibels.
I don't know.
Very sensitive.
Anyways, with negative 105 dBm sensitivity translates into decoding a signal that is about 31.6 femtowatts.
And on top of that, it could be interfered with by other signals.
It's basically magic.
Now, I think it was John put in the show notes, to be clear, the measurement that Pedro cited, 31.6 femtowatts, that is...
0.0000000000000316 watts.
We will put that number in the show notes so you can see how preposterously small this number is.
It is effectively immeasurable as far as I'm concerned.
And yet that is the level of information that this chip gets in order to try to make heads or tails of it.
It's bananas.
Having majored in computer engineering in college, which is actually just electrical engineering with some computer stuff added in.
I had to take courses that explained what was then state of the art, like in the 90s, state of the art cell radio stuff.
And all the different technologies that go into it and the competing networks for code division multiplexing and old, you know, time division multiplexing stuff.
Like we went over all the different technologies and it was like.
here's what they're doing, here's what the more modern ones, here's the problems with the old ones, here's, and do you do problems and exercises of like, if you have this number of devices in this amount of area and they require this much power and how could they blah, blah, blah.
And it was like, wow, this is really cutting edge stuff.
And it was nothing compared to the number of phones that are out there, like the number and density of phones that are out there now and how amazing it is that we get signal in so many places.
Like, because that was part of the problem.
It was like, how can we come up with a system where, you know, we've seen it ourselves back in the Wi-Fi days.
How can we have a room with 5000 people that each have two Wi-Fi devices?
Like, what can we use to make it so that works?
All right.
Well, now, how about a football stadium where everyone's got a cell phone?
how can you make all their cell phones work?
And the things we were doing in undergrad in the 90s talking about, like, what if you have 100 people in a room?
And I was like, that's nothing.
Everybody has a cell phone now.
And they expect to get signal everywhere.
And it's just like, again, 31 femtowatts.
Like, you just think about the tiny electromagnetic vibrations.
You're like, you're annoyed when you don't get enough bars and you can't load your thing.
And it's like,
Do you know where the cell tower is?
You're inside a building with this tiny device.
The battery is going to last all day.
How is this even working?
It's amazing.
Technology is amazing.
Yep.
Couldn't agree more.
I also wanted to call attention to Andrew Edwards, who is a YouTuber in our same space.
He got an exclusive tour, behind-the-scenes tour, with Tsuruji for the C1 manufacturing process and information about the C1 and 16E and so on and so forth.
I want to read to you a little section of what he said in his video, which will be linked in the show notes.
This particular section is about 5 minutes and 15 seconds in, but the whole video is, I think, like 10, maybe 15 minutes, and it's very good.
In there, Andrew says, the tight integration between the C1 and A18 allows the modem and processor to communicate in real time.
So, for example, if your phone encounters a congested network, John, here's your football stadium, the A18 can signal to the C1 to prioritize critical packets.
Maybe you just opened up messages and you're trying to send a photo or video to someone.
The A18 can direct the C1 to prioritize what you're actively doing so things don't feel like they're bogging down.
This dynamic traffic management not only improves the connection speed, but also makes your device feel incredibly responsive under heavy network loads.
That makes a lot of sense, and that's the first I personally have seen that reported.
So I thought that was an interesting tidbit.
Yeah, well, when I hear things like that from Apple when they're talking about stuff, especially when I'm not well-versed in the technologies they're describing, I say, that sounds great.
I bet that's all true.
Do Qualcomm chips also do that?
Not mentioned.
You know what I mean?
But the larger point is, like this is Rudy saying, it's like, look, now that we're making this,
once we get good at it which they're probably not great at yet but once we get good at it we'll be able to make it you know like with apple silicon exactly the chip that we want to make and we'll have an item more on that in a little bit but like i trust that they will be able to do better than qualcomm eventually because qualcomm has many customers apple is just one of them and it's a contentious relationship kind of like it was with intel where apple would make demands with
Intel, we want chips to do X, Y, and Z. Intel will be like, all right, and we'll do this.
Once Apple can make its own chips, they were much better suited to its hardware.
And I hope that same thing, I expect that same thing to happen with the modem chips, even if the first gen one isn't that great.
Like what Pedro was getting at is like, this may be the most power efficient, but there's like being power efficient at standby is great.
And Apple is great at that.
But if it's less power efficient when transmitting, because they're just not as good as Qualcomm yet,
you will burn your battery faster if you're actually using the cell network versus just sitting there sipping the data so we'll see when this thing comes out you know how it performs in the real world but doing it on the 16e is a good test bed because it's not the flagship phone no one cares that it's missing millimeter wave and if it really screws up oh well
Anonymous writes in, in this week's episode, number 627, which I guess was last week, actually, some guy Casey says that Apple won't need to pay Qualcomm cellular license royalties on phones that do not use a Qualcomm chip.
As Casey himself discussed in ATP episode 476 in March 2022, at around the 40-minute mark, this is not correct.
Qualcomm generally collects royalties regardless of whether an OEM gets the modem chip from Qualcomm or someone else.
Quoting from page 15 of the FTC versus Qualcomm court decision from 2020, OEMs are required to pay a per unit licensing royalty to Qualcomm for its patent portfolios regardless of which company they choose to source their chips from.
Put a link in the show notes to that.
For phones, Qualcomm caps the dollar royalty as a percentage of a $400 phone.
From Reuters in 2018, quote,
Then finally, CNET said that they actually dropped that fee a little bit later in 2018, I believe.
So, yeah, my bad.
I did not remember what I said darn near three years ago, which makes sense because I can barely remember what I said three hours ago.
Someday those patents will expire, and by then maybe Apple will have a bunch of its own patents that it can charge people for from its C-17 chip.
We'll see.
And then finally on this topic, Mark Gurman says with regard to future chips, Apple has a long modem roadmap ahead of it, with the company already testing the so-called C2 and C3.
We'll see the C2 in 2026 when it's slated to appear in higher-end phones.
When the C3 appears the following year, Apple hopes to be able to outdo Qualcomm's modem capabilities.
But there's a new development.
Apple intends to eventually meld the modem component into the main processor.
That should make the electronics more energy efficient and reduce the cost.
I'd expect this in 2028 at the earliest.
That's always the question with these chips that as Apple makes them, hey, it had to be a separate chip on Qualcomm made it.
But now that it's your own thing, does it make sense to put it into the SoC?
Obviously, there is some issues there with the radio frequency parts of it.
And I'm assuming that's why part of it has made it seven nanometers and part of it's made it four.
Like you don't fab the radio parts of the same.
size as the logic parts.
But yeah, some kind of integration does seem to make sense.
Now, Apple has kept some things separate, but it has folded other things into the SoC, like the Wi-Fi chip we'll get to in a second.
So obviously you can't put everything into one big giant chip.
At some point, there's diminishing returns, but
It's interesting to see that the rumor is that they're thinking the C3 is when they will be passing Qualcomm a couple years from now, and that integration is on the table, which I think would be really useful for phones, for larger things like Macs that we want to have cellular.
It's okay to keep the chip separate.
We just want cellular.
All right, you brought up Wi-Fi chips in the iPhones, and particularly in iPhone 17.
Reading from Mac Rumors, Apple will use its own custom-designed Wi-Fi chip in all upcoming iPhone 17 models, according to industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.
Jeff Pu, another analyst who covers companies within Apple's supply chain, said in November 2024 that only the iPhone 17 Pro models will be equipped with an Apple-designed Wi-Fi 7 chip.
We talked about this Wi-Fi chip, Wi-Fi slash Bluetooth chip, a while ago in the context of lesser products.
Like, oh, it's rumored to be coming out in the home products or whatever.
This is an interesting rumor, if true, that it's going to be in all the 17s.
That shows a large amount of faith in this chip.
So we'll see if this turns out to be true or not.
Like, doing the cell model with the 16e makes sense.
I would imagine they were going to roll out the Wi-Fi Bluetooth chip on lesser products as well, but...
And if it's on every single 17, this thing better be perfect.
We are sponsored this episode exclusively by Google Gemini.
Now, if you recall from the last ad break, I'm asking Gemini Live a question on the air to show some of the ways that it can be useful.
This is not just simple questions, though, so you can have a full conversation.
Here's a question I had recently, and as you heard in the last one, you can interrupt the response.
You can ask follow-up questions.
So here's a real question I had recently.
I'm going to ask it to Gemini for the very first time.
Here we go.
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Sure thing.
Some good established VoIP services that are great for small businesses include RingCentral, Vonage, and Nextiva.
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Can I port the existing phone number to them?
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See, that's great.
So you can just talk naturally.
You can ask follow-up questions.
Gemini can do so many things.
It's pretty useful.
So there'll be one more ad break after this.
You're going to hear even more examples, even more from Gemini Live.
In the meantime, go download the free Gemini app and start having your own conversations.
You can see for yourself what it can do in your life.
So thanks to Google Gemini for sponsoring our show.
A friend of the show, Riley Testit, has noticed something.
And I think it was John that put this summary in the show notes, which is just chef's kiss.
Apple approves new wording for emails.
Very well done, John.
So Riley writes, looks like Apple changed the wording of notarization emails to no longer say approved.
Wonder what caused that?
And there's two screenshots, old and new.
From February 11, it says, hey, hello, Alt Store LLC.
The following app has been approved for distribution.
From February 19th, it says, hello, Alt Store LLC.
The following app is ready for distribution.
This annoys me because, like, look, maybe this is the New Yorker in me speaking.
I'm a fan of direct language.
Now, obviously, in the previous sentence, the following app has been approved.
Obviously, this is a passive voice usage, and there is no actor in this sentence.
Who has approved the following app?
And that was the previous language.
It's not like they changed it to that.
Yes, the following app has been approved.
Well, that's very handy.
If they were more direct, they would say Apple has approved the following app for distribution.
But that's not what they said before.
But they have now made it even worse from it's been approved to the following app is ready.
Why is it ready?
How did it get ready?
I would argue it was ready before.
It was ready when Riley submitted it.
That's when it's ready.
When the developer submits it, what are you submitting it to?
Because if you're submitting something, that kind of suggests that your app is ready.
So for Apple to then approve it and to then say, your app is ready as the notification of that, it's like, well...
It was already ready.
This is, you know, Apple's gross, stupid policy having some gross euphemistic language tweaks put on top of it, right in line with exactly the kind of behavior that we come to expect around this.
Good job, Apple.
You're being you.
I think this change is super dumb because, like, as I tried to emphasize last time we discussed this, any reasonable person looking at this from the outside understands the two different contexts and meanings of the word approved.
You didn't have to change the wording to somehow avoid something like you could have just left it as approved.
We under the situation is not mysterious.
It is spelled out.
It is experienced by people every day.
There is no mystery about how products get through this process.
Like it is so clear to everyone and arguing over the words is such a sideshow.
There's no reason to change the words.
No one disagrees about what happens.
when you submit an app and who decides whether like there's no mystery so this is just incredibly dumb and yeah like someone changing this they're doing nothing except for making themselves look even more foolish because no one is confused by that word that nothing hinges on that word
Yeah, it's just it's a weasel move.
You know, this is this is them trying to weasel out of the mess they have created and continue to maintain for themselves.
That's the opposite of courage.
You know, making the cell modem, that is courage.
This is cowardice.
It's not even because it doesn't do anything.
It doesn't like weaseling out of it would be doing something to avoid something.
This does nothing.
It doesn't help Apple in any way.
Well, it's an extension of the passive voice.
This is them trying not to own what they are doing with linguistic cowardice like that.
That's all this is.
But it's not possible not to own it.
They own it so thoroughly.
No one doubts it.
There is no debate about who decides what gets through approval.
They do.
It's Apple.
They decide.
We see that.
It seems like they think that's different.
It could do like the Miracle on 34th Street thing where if there's a court case, you just have developer after developer and you just call now the 700,000th developer on the stand.
When you send an application, who decides where it gets through?
Do you decide?
No.
Who decides?
Apple.
Okay, next witness.
when you submit an application like how many applications like you could just person after person it's like dumping the the letters from to sand out on okay so the letters to sand is uh less uh maybe less uh admissible as evidence except in the movies but like again i think there is no shortage of witnesses to tell you how this problem apple will agree that's how this process works changing the words doesn't change it it's not it's not like something we don't know how things get through they just somehow they become ready yeah
It's a mysterious process.
Nothing acts upon them to make them ready.
They just are ready.
Right.
Just walk away whistling.
Who knows how they got ready?
Gracious.
And then Alex Pretzlov writes, they even changed the regular App Store emails.
It used to say the app was accepted, and now apparently it says, review of your submission has been completed.
It is now eligible for distribution.
Sure.
So every about every year they change this phrasing of what it means for your app to be approved by app review, even in the regular app store.
And every year it confuses me because I'm like, like my app is eligible for distribution.
Does that?
Yeah.
Ready for sale.
Does that mean it's in the store?
Before, it said, your app is ready for distribution.
Does that mean it's in the store?
It sounds like I still have to do something, but no, that means in the store.
Every year or two, they change the phrasing to be even more obtuse.
This would drive George Carlin crazy.
Actually, maybe a year or two ago, remember when they changed App Store Connect?
to like submitting your app as like a two-step process.
Now you had like,
get it ready for a review, but then, like, submit it for review.
So sometimes, sometimes you think, oh, they just changed the language.
And then you'll be sitting there going, I wonder when they're going to review my app.
And you realize, no, now there's a second step where you have to, like, really, really submit it to review.
Yeah.
So it's quite a puzzle game for people who aren't developers in Apple platforms.
It's kind of like Destiny.
It's an ever-changing world of rule changes and releases and buffs and nerfs, mostly nerfs.
All right.
And then finally, and we would be wise not to go on a long time about this, so we'll see what happens.
But Apple has done what we all expected.
It has removed advanced data protection from the UK after the alleged orders from the king of the surveillance states.
Reading from Bloomberg, advanced data protection is no longer available in the UK for new users.
This layer of security covers iCloud data storage, device backups, web bookmarks, voice memos, notes, photos, reminders, and text message backups.
Customers already using Advanced Data Protection, or ADP, will need to manually disable it during an unspecified grace period to keep their iCloud accounts.
The company said it will issue additional guidance in the future to affected users and that it does not have the ability to automatically disable it on their behalf.
Apple writes,
We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP will not be available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy.
ADP protects iCloud data with end-to-end encryption, which means the data can only be decrypted by the user who owns it and only on their trusted devices.
As we have said many times before, we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services, and we never will, which smells a lot like a canary to me.
Yeah, that's a bold statement.
And we never will.
There's no ambiguity left there.
And honestly, this, look, a lot of people have called them out and saying this was a cowardly move.
You know from what I just said two minutes ago, I'm happy to call Apple out if they do something cowardly or weaselly or otherwise selling out in bad ways.
I think this was the best move they had in this situation.
This was a bad situation.
They were put in by another government.
I think this was their best move.
Yeah, I completely agree with you.
Continuing from Bloomberg here, just to make this clear, and this is what so many people got wrong about this, what Bloomberg writes, which I think is true, is,
The move to pull its encryption feature rather than complying with building a backdoor is a clear rebuke of the government's order.
They're not complying with the government's order, to be clear.
By pulling advanced data protection, as we noted last time, if that verge story was true, which it seems like it was, this does not comply.
The UK government wanted them to put a backdoor so that they had access to everyone's iCloud stuff in the entire world.
pulling ADP from the UK does not comply with what they were requesting.
So they did something, but they basically did the thing that they're willing to do, which is kind of like what they do in China and other places is like, look, if you want to screw over your own citizens, fine, they don't get access to this thing.
We can do that, but we will never give you the back door to every single Apple customer's thing.
So when this first came out, people were like, oh, Apple caved in.
They absolutely did not.
They did not cave in.
They are not in compliance with this law or this request or whatever.
And to say, you know, we didn't build a backdoor and we never were going to.
So don't be we're not it's not going to come next week.
Don't wait for it.
Yeah, that is a very bold and clear statement.
So that I mean, and, you know, we'll see what that means.
But, you know, I think it's important for people to realize what this was giving up and where we were before.
What this is giving up is advanced data protection.
And they only added this, what, a year ago or two years ago?
Two years ago, yes.
Yeah, it's pretty recent.
And it's not enabled by default.
And for most people, they probably shouldn't enable it by default because this is the situation where if you forget your password and lose access to all of your devices and things like that,
Apple cannot recover your data.
They cannot reset your iCloud password.
They cannot get your data back.
Apple can't help you if you lock yourself out in this context.
The number of people who lock themselves out of their Apple accounts all the time is way higher than most of us would assume.
Apple is constantly dealing with that kind of support need in their stores and their other support channels.
So the default always has to be Apple has a key to your data that they can use if you or they need them to.
That's also used to respond to warrants from law enforcement agencies around the world.
So what they did with Advanced Data Protection is...
Give you an option to optionally close that door to say Apple won't have a key.
Therefore, if law enforcement comes to us, we won't be able to help them.
But also, if you come to us, we won't be able to help you either.
In the context of a mass market consumer device and platform, I think the right default is to have that not be the case.
So what they've said is that will no longer be offered in the UK.
The rest of the privacy and encryption and end-to-end stuff, the rest of it that was there before two years ago will still be there.
They will still be able to respond to law enforcement requests just like they were before.
But for the most part, most of the other privacy protections are all still there because, again, this is only removing the option to enable or continue to use advanced data protection, which is only two years old and which most people aren't using and shouldn't use.
The interesting twist on that, as Casey read there, like they can't, Apple can't disable this for people.
So if there are people in the UK who have this enabled because it was available in the UK before.
Now, if you try to do it, Paul Hudson posted a graphic, it just basically says Apple can no longer offer advanced data protection in the United Kingdom to new users.
But existing users still have it.
So what happens to them?
Like the statement is like, if these people want to keep their iCloud accounts, they have to turn it off.
And Apple can't turn it off for them.
Again, if Apple could turn it off for them, it wouldn't be much protection because if you ever need to get into the account, like, oh, I'll just turn off advanced data protection for you.
Apple cannot turn it off.
That's the point.
So these people have basically a time bomb on their phones.
Like, I mean, I guess it'll just stop working or just stop syncing or whatever.
But at a certain point, they have to manually turn off advanced data protection.
on one of their trusted devices using their authentication and blah, blah, blah, right?
Because they're the only ones that can do it.
And if they don't do it, all of their iCloud syncing backup stuff or whatever is just going to stop doing that because Apple's going to turn it off for the country.
So I wonder how that will go in terms of people coming to an Apple store and saying, my stuff's not syncing and saying, oh, you got to turn off the security feature, which you can never turn back on after that.
Um, in terms of the defaults, like, I feel like it's just a, a simple calculation of like, what is more likely to be a problem in your life?
Someone hacking you and stealing all your data, or are you locking yourself out of your account?
If you are a government official or a celebrity, um,
You might make a different choice than if you're just a random person on the street.
Most people are not specifically targeting you.
Like state actors are probably not specifically targeting you to get into your phone data because you're just not that interesting and are important, but you will probably lock yourself out of your account somehow at some point in your life.
And so you really just have to decide that for yourself, which is the problem that's more likely to happen to me.
And what are the consequences of that problem?
So yeah.
I feel like people who need advanced data protection, they know they need it.
Again, government officials, celebrities, or just people who are really super serious about security.
But it's always that tradeoff, security versus convenience.
It's why I don't have advanced data protection on because I fear losing my data more than I fear being hacked.
Then Berbicay writes, could you put out a call to all UK listeners to contact their local MP regarding the Investigative Powers Act and Apple's decision to remove ADP from UK phones?
The more people who raise a stink, the more chance we have to turn things around.
Yeah.
And meanwhile, in the US, we're trying to make sure that our dumb government doesn't try to do the same thing to the UK government.
So we're all in this fight on our own little islands trying to keep sanity.
Yeah.
And as I said, you know, two weeks ago or last week,
I think ultimately we're going to lose this battle.
I think in most first world countries, we are likely to not have major platforms permitted to give us end-to-end encryption tools that they can't decrypt with law enforcement requests.
That's just the culture of... Look, law enforcement...
it's very hard for politicians to fight against them politically, legally, power-wise.
It's just law enforcement tends over time to get the surveillance that they want.
And they want it all.
I mean, let's be clear.
What law enforcement agencies want and feel incredibly entitled to is access to everything all the time, often without warrants or kind of outside the bounds of... They...
Look, the entire U.S.
Constitution was designed to help protect us from overzealous law enforcement.
It's a powerful force in governments, and over time it tends to get more powerful.
So...
We will lose this battle.
We are we have already lost it in so many ways that we already have like, you know, secret courts and, you know, seek and warrants that for, you know, monitoring our communications and everything and systems to monitor.
Like we already have lost this on so many fronts.
It's only a matter of time before no major platform can offer end to end encryption and that we have to rely on like, you know, apps that kind of do it on a smaller scale for that kind of need.
I'm more optimistic than you are.
I think the things in the Constitution regarding rights to privacy and everything will probably hold up in the long run despite backsliding.
I know what you're saying about national security.
If there's any kind of like –
You know, military conflict or like 9-11 type things.
That's whenever that happens and people are the most afraid.
That's when people pounce and put in all these terrible laws.
And then, of course, once they get them, it's like a ratchet.
They will never give them back.
Right.
Oh, this is only we only need this because of terrorism, except we are now we're going to use it when people, you know, steal a bicycle in the neighborhood.
Right.
So it's, you know, but still.
Historically speaking, I feel like the trend, I don't feel like they'll be able to breach the firewall of the Constitution, assuming that document still stands and remains relevant, because there are such strong protections against some aspects of rights to privacy.
The UK is already far, it's a very different environment, like the amount of surveillance cameras they have in that country, and they don't have the same type of Constitution that we do.
So that's why we have held up better than them, and I think we will hold up better than them.
It doesn't necessarily mean that ADP is not going to get outlawed in the U.S.
That could totally happen.
But I'm slightly more optimistic that on a long scale, assuming the U.S.
survives as a going concern and the Constitution remains roughly as it is now, that this battle will – not that it will be won, but that we will –
still be doing better than countries without the same type of constitution hope you're right we'll probably be dead by then so don't worry about it great promising we are sponsored this episode exclusively by google gemini now you've heard me in the last couple ad reads show off the gemini live feature what about conversational brainstorming not just questions let's see what it can do i've never asked it this before i'm going to see how it does live right here in the ad break so here we go
I make a podcast app that already does what most people expect from a podcast app what other features might I want to add
Here's a couple of ideas to make your podcast app stand out.
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Imagine being able to sync up playback with your friends so you can all listen together, even if you're not in the same room.
Or you could add a way to discuss episodes with friends right in the app.
Thank you.
On a totally separate note here, what are some surprising things people can ask you that they might not expect you to be good at, but you are good at?
Okay, here's one.
You could ask me to write different kinds of creative text formats.
For example, you could ask for a poem, a song, a script for a play, or even a computer program.
I can also translate things into different languages or create summaries of factual topics.
All right.
As you can see, there's so much that Gemini can do.
There's so much I can offer you in your life.
This barely even scratches the surface.
You can't fit too much in a two-minute ad read, even though I did have it just basically write its own ad read there at the end.
But anyway, try Gemini today.
Go get the app.
This was all with just the free app on my iPhone.
Go check it out today.
It's really amazing what it can do.
So thanks to Gemini for sponsoring our show.
There's been an incredible bit of news this week, a phenomenal, exciting bit of news this week coming from one John Syracuse.
John, you put up another blog post.
I'm stunned.
I can't believe my eyes.
Yeah, I launched my app, Hyperspace.
For anyone who doesn't know, it is an app that will give you free disk space.
There are lots of Mac apps out there that will find duplicate files on your system and then give you back disk space by deleting some of the duplicates.
The tricky bit about hyperspace is that we'll find duplicate files and give you back disk space without removing any of the files.
I am, as I said in the blog post, a digital pack rat, and this appeals to me.
I don't want to delete files.
I do want disk space back, but I don't want to delete anything.
Oh, you got the same file in seven places.
Yeah, just leave it there.
Can I just have the disk space back?
that's what hyperspace does for you it's been in beta testing for a while with atp members providing a great testing service it is now out on the mac app store available to download it's free to download free to scan you can find out how much space it will save you if it's not going to save any space oh well throw it away but if it's going to save you a bunch of space and you want that space then you got to pay to get that space back um
Yeah, fairly extent.
So just to interrupt you here for a minute, is there more documentation than there is code for this app?
Yeah.
uh no i don't think so i can check though i mean code tends to be sparse like in terms of number of lines no in terms of number of characters i'll have to compare i haven't even really looked at how many lines of code this app is but swift ui does make things more terse but yeah i like that one of the things about the documentation um is that like it evolved it has evolved over the course of testing like everything in that document is there because some beta tester had a question about it or because
I found myself answering the same question.
So I put the answer in there and I've been refining it over time.
Saves so much time to just do this up front.
Like then on launch day, if anyone has some question about something, I could just link them directly to the part of the documentation that addresses it.
So that's been going pretty well.
As I said before to all the ATP members who are on the test flight, now that the app is out, the test flight will be ending.
Probably by the time you listen to this, I will have expired the last test flight build for ATP members.
Thanks for all your hard work testing.
There were a lot of you.
I'm sure you're probably sick of this app by now.
But if you are not sick of being a tester and you actually enjoy testing it and you've been providing good bug reports or whatever, and you want to be on the real test flight, not the one for ATP members, but the real test flight,
To get on that, you have to give me your email address because I don't have it.
Even though you're on the ATB members test flight, that was done with the public link.
And so it's all anonymous.
I have no idea who you are, right?
If you want in on the real test flight, send an email to hyperspace at hypercritical.co and tell me you want on the test flight.
And then I will add you to the list.
Now, keep in mind, test flight means you get to use a broken application.
I mean, I hope you all figured that out from being on the beta for like, it's the one that doesn't work right.
It's the one that's weird and could potentially hose all your files.
Like, but if you're game for that, like I had a lot of good testers and a lot of them are already moved to the real test flight.
So yeah, sign up if you want.
And if you have, if you were on the test flight or not, but if you have purchased the app,
and you think it's good uh app store ratings would be appreciated i believe there is currently one rating and that's from me i gave it five stars more than one rating would be great if you like the app please rate it uh yeah it's been out for one day now um well i soft launched it earlier in the week as you do i had version 1.0.1 out before i even posted about it um
I had a little bit of fun with the app review.
Uh, the, the very first build, the one point, very first 1.0 build I submitted, I was watching it.
It's like waiting for a review of all in review.
It's like two minutes and 30 seconds later, instantly rejected.
Oh, neat.
Yeah.
And what was it rejected for?
It was rejected with a message from the reviewer that said, your app says that it gets back free disk space without removing any files.
How does it do that?
Good grief.
It was like, I'm paraphrasing, but it was literally like two sentences.
Basically those two sentences.
And I'm like, okay.
If you read the description, which is only a paragraph, the App Store metadata description, it links to the documentation, which explains this.
If you launch the app, the first thing you see is a window that describes how the app works and links to the documentation, which explains this.
If you select the help top item from the help menu in the app, it links to the documentation, which explains this like...
I don't know how you could literally look at or do anything with my app without having the answer to the question that was asked staring you in the face.
But what did they do?
They looked at the app and I guess, I don't know, read the tagline and said, I don't get this.
Reject.
Boom.
Could hold that review.
So I replied with a link to my documentation and said, if you read this, it will explain it.
Great.
And they let it through.
Let me Google that for you.
Yeah, it was basically what it was like.
I should have said if you launch the app and read the window that appears in front of your face and whatever.
I didn't want to be rude about it.
It was fine.
It was, you know, turnaround time of like an hour and then they put it back in review and then it went through and it was fine.
I did get rejected in my 1.0.2 thing.
And that rejection, both of you should be able to tell me what it is based on the complete inconsistency of the App Store plus your experience with the App Store.
Oh, I have no idea.
You do know what it is, but it's not occurring to you because it is so illogical.
A metadata rejection of some sort?
Yeah, but what specifically?
I don't know.
This is my first app with an app purchase.
Privacy policy?
Oh, that's a good one.
That's a good one.
Or is it that giant disclaimer that you're supposed to have in your app description that's documented almost nowhere?
No, it's exactly what you said.
You have to have a link to the terms and conditions and privacy policy in your app's description.
We, even I remember all of us whining about this, perhaps during call sheet, whining about this recently, like a year or two back, just to make things clear.
And I know we've been around this block once before, but it is so frigging bananas that we have to do it again.
You need to have a URL in your app description to your privacy policy.
Now, John, is that URL clickable on any of Apple's platforms?
No, why would URLs be clickable?
It's too dangerous.
Of course not.
So I don't know what freaking purpose this serves, but they will reject you every time if you do not have a URL pointing to your privacy policy in your description.
Well, let me correct you there.
They will not reject you every time because I, of course, know how...
I knew about this thing being in the description.
I'd heard you guys complain about it many times.
I said, oh, when I have my first output in-app purchase, I got to remember to do this thing.
And when I was filling out my metadata, there's like seven places you put this in.
It's in the app's interface on the store page.
Otherwise, they'll reject you there.
It's in the metadata.
It's not like the terms and conditions of privacy policy aren't in a million different places already.
But because I had submitted 1.0 and it had gotten through, I'm like, I guess I'm good.
And then I submitted 1.0.1 and that got through.
I'm like, boy, I nailed it.
You know, aside from that one thing where they didn't understand how my app worked because they didn't bother reading anything.
Yeah.
I guess I got all the metadata right.
No, on the third version, the third submission, then somebody says, oh, you got to have privacy policy terms.
I was fooled into thinking that I had covered all my bases and I didn't.
But the nice thing is they did actually let me do the thing of saying, hey, if this is a bug fix update, you can do that fix in the next update.
And so I said, yes, I'd like to do that.
Oh, great.
So that system actually kind of worked.
Anyway, app review, as always, is totally inconsistent.
Like, there's no way, even if you play the game perfectly, which I did not, you will be confounded by the results.
So...
there we have it um so far so good no big disasters as far as i know i did the typical thing that i always do is like as soon as 1.0 comes out it's like now i have a big change big dangerous change i want to make so let me start working on that so yeah i'm in the middle of testing a big dangerous change to the internals uh that i had put off i said let's not do this for 1.0 but but for the next day after 1.0 sure yeah let's rip out the guts yeah
Because I had some different ideas about how I might do something and I stopped myself from doing this before 1.0 came out.
But now I'm doing it.
So I did a couple of minor bug fixes and now I'm doing some major surgery for the real test slide.
I've reverted to a build that doesn't actually do the reclamation for real but does everything up to that step just so people can test it better.
yeah a lot of people have reclaimed all their space uh and so that's a problem they have to do what i do which is have a system for making duplicate files anyway that's what it's like to be a beta tester just you know it's like oh great i want to be on test flight do you though it's not an easy app to test and it might hose your file so uh if you really want to again send me email oh and then one final thing the for all the test flight people obviously when you're on the test flight you can like quote unquote purchase the app for free it doesn't really charge you
And what people were saying is, hey, I downloaded the real app from the store.
It's a free download.
And when I launched it, it thinks I still own it because I bought the test flight.
And you know, cause test flight on Mac OS works perfectly all the time.
And the solution to that, as far as I've been able to tell everybody who I've suggested this to has told me they have followed these steps and it has worked for them.
Is that step one, delete all copies of my app, empty the trash, like get them off your computer.
Just delete, delete, delete.
Right.
Two, you probably don't have to do this, but I always throw it in there for good measure.
Reboot.
step three install hyperspace from the mac app store launch it and then go into the settings window and if the settings window still tells you that it thinks you own the app even though you know you didn't buy it for real click on the text that's telling you that it's like unlocked forever or whatever click on that text
And if it prompts you to sign in with one of those janky Apple sign in things, sign in.
Step four, quit the app.
And step five, relaunch it.
Everybody who has tried those steps has found that now you have convinced that you don't own it.
But boy, what a terrible system.
And to answer people's questions, no, there's nothing I can do about that.
I have no idea what back end system or cache thing or whatever is making you think.
Because I can tell you from experience in many, many test flights, buying the test flight does not entitle you to the finished application in any way, shape or form.
even if macOS apparently can get confused about that fact for some period of time.
Well, congratulations, John.
How long did this take you, roughly?
Like four or five months?
Which is not bad.
No.
When I talked about it on the show at the end of December, I basically had gone from zero to a bare-bones working app that week that we recorded.
So it's December until end of February.
Wow, that's really fast.
Good for you.
No sarcasm.
It's a little.
It's not a complicated app.
Most of that time was spent just, like, being incredibly cautious about, like...
you know as you know i only turned on the feature that this app supposedly exists for like in the last few weeks it's always just been a slow build up making sure lots of testing lots of you know so yeah um it's not it's not too complicated but it is something an app that needs to be developed very carefully and hopefully i have done so so again fingers crossed
yeah and honestly it's i so i ran it i finally did my my big reclaim today on my giant uh synology nas uh copy on my mac mini i had 1.03 terabytes of duplicated files gracious so today i paid john ten dollars
to get 1.03 terabytes back.
Do Lifetime Unlock, you cheapskate.
Well, okay.
The reason I didn't do Lifetime Unlock is because I want to actually just... Like, I did the one month because I want to actually keep going back to this over time.
And because...
It feels kind of weird that I was able to reclaim a terabyte for just $10.
No matter how much I was reclaiming, it was the same $10.
Obviously, we talked about the business model options in earlier episodes, and Casey and I were unable to convince you to do a tiered set of space-based options about how much space you were recovering, but...
it does feel kind of odd that I paid such a small amount to get so much value.
So instead, I will just run it once a year on all my computers and see where I get.
Hopefully you don't have a new terabyte next year.
I don't think you're going to need to run this again for a while.
No, all the more reason why you should have charged me more for my terabyte.
Well, we'll see how it goes.
That's one thing about the press that it's gotten.
Apparently, I mean, not surprisingly, the pricing things that I offer are confusing enough that people who write about it
They all tend to make the same mistake, which is they think that the app is available for a one-time lifetime unlock or subscription.
That's true, but there's a third option that is too subtle for people to know because Apple's UI for it is confusing.
And I tried my best to make it clear, but there are auto-renewing subscriptions, which will keep charging you over and over again until you cancel them.
Then there are one-time purchases, like unlock everything for whatever.
And then there are also non-renewing subscriptions.
Pay for one month of use.
That's what Marco did.
He paid for one month.
And at the end of the month, it goes back to being locked.
It will not renew.
It will not charge him again.
That is a thing that Apple offers that seems like very few apps actually offer.
But mine does.
And in fact, it's probably the best option and is one of the more popular options.
But everyone who writes about it is like, oh, it's a subscription or you can pay for it.
no there's there's another thing non-renew i know it's confusing a subscription that doesn't renew what is that and of course all the buttons in apple's ui say subscribe and people like oh i don't want to subscribe i just want to pay one time it's like i know i can't control that button says subscribe but anyway i try to explain it in the documentation which nobody reads but to be clear you can pay for a single month as a one-time purchase or a single year as a one-time purchase and those purchases will not renew
Or you can pay for a renewing subscription.
Or you can pay one time lump sum big amount to unlock it forever and ever and ever.
Those are all the choices.
I'll probably end up eliminating some of these choices when I see which ones people don't like.
But the distribution for like day one purchases is about what I would expect.
It's actually pretty even with the exception of the lifetime unlock, which is obviously going to be super popular with the people who are buying the app on day one because they're like people listen to the show and want to support me and blah, blah.
And I thank you all for that.
um but we'll see how this you know after the initial launch and all the people who actually you know listen to the show and are interested in the app by it we'll see what the long tail this is my expectation is that this app will be a slow type of thing because regular people honestly should really not be interested in this app until it's been out for a year and not destroyed too many people's hard drives and
Right.
Like it would have to like build up a reputation as a thing that it is safe to run and that you're aware of.
And it can't do that on day one.
On day one, it's the most dangerous it's ever going to be.
I don't know why Marco's destroying all his data with it, but he did.
So, yeah.
tune in a year from now and we'll see like, it really needs to build up trust in the community for it to be a thing that people turn to, to use.
And I think for the early adopters and fans of the show and fans of me, yeah, sure.
Buy on day one.
But for people who've never heard of me or the show, I don't expect them to even discover this app until next year.
So we'll see how it goes.
Well, again, congratulations and good luck.
All right.
Let's talk interesting iPhone 17 rumor.
This is for the entire family of iPhone 17s.
There's a post on The Verge about this, and I will read some of it.
of what are purported to be the iphone 17 17 pro 17 pro max and the rumored iphone 17 air with the latter three all featuring pixel-like rectangular camera bars the new cad renders show the rear camera bars on the iphone 17 pro and pro max models stretched to extend their currently square design now reaching across the entire upper body
They still retain the rounder edges as seen on the current models.
The iPhone 17 Air features a similar design, albeit with only a single rear camera lens.
According to these renders, the camera module on the standard 17 model will be largely unchanged, differentiating it from the premium models.
So...
I'll attempt to paint a word picture here.
So imagine the 16, but the camera Mesa, copyright John Syracuse, extends the entire width of the back of the phone.
Then the standard iPhone 17 is the same basic idea as the iPhone 10, where there's the two lenses, one above the other.
I think it's not LiDAR, is it?
It's a flash.
It looks like the 16 is what you're saying.
No one remembers what the 10 looks like.
It looks like, isn't it exactly the same as the 16 today?
No, no.
The regular 16?
Maybe.
Yeah, the regular 16.
Two cameras, one on top of the other on a lozenge-shaped Mesa with the flash off to the right.
I believe that's right, actually, now that you say that.
Then the 17 Pro and Pro Max, the way this CAD rendering has been rendered is that what I presume to be metal is a gold color.
And I don't think that's indicative of... Yeah, this is just a rendering.
These colors mean nothing.
Right.
So there's gold that runs through the Mesa area, but it also goes down all the way to the bottom of the phone.
And I think that's metal, but there's a maroonish, reddish, brownish sort of section that's most of the back of the phone with the exception of the Mesa.
And that appears to be a cutout or something for glass.
So to reiterate, the shell of the phone is all metal, including just a little bit of the back of the phone.
But then there's a large glass section as well, presumably for Qi charging and MagSafe and for the radios and whatnot.
Wi-Fi, stuff like that.
Wi-Fi, yeah, exactly.
And so this may be a best of both worlds situation from a robustness standpoint because you won't –
find it quite so easy if i'm reading this right you won't find it quite so easy to crack the corner of the back glass because the corner of the back glass is actually the back you know steel or titanium or whatever the flavor du jour is all that being said and i'm very happy about the the theories i've got here if they come to if they come true all that being said the enlarged camera mesa looks freaking ridiculous and i really don't like it
Yeah, this is a couple of interesting things here.
First, let's start with the 17 Air, far left in this picture, if you follow the link in the show notes.
It is disappointing to me that the cool back of the 16E is not...
uh, copied by the 17 air.
Uh, the 16 E has one little camera, uh, and it's just sitting there all on its lawn.
I don't even know if it has a Mesa.
Does it have a Mesa or is it just poking out of the flat back of the phone?
I think it's a Mesa.
Cause we look at the right hand side of the phone or the right hand side is presented on this image.
It looks like there's a little bit of depth there to me, but I hear what you're saying and I may have this wrong.
On the 16E, you mean?
Let me see.
No, no, no.
I'm looking at the... Yeah, I know, but I'm saying I think the 16E does not have a Mesa.
It has one camera.
I'm sorry.
But it does not have a Mesa.
I'm sorry.
You might be right about that.
My apologies.
I thought we were talking about the 17E.
Right.
No, I'm saying the 16E.
And the reason I'm comparing it to the 16E is the 16E also has one camera.
So, okay, this is what a one-camera phone can look like.
It's one of the best things about the 16E appearance-wise.
It just looks so clean on the back.
It's just a piece of glass.
It's got one camera, no Mesa.
The camera, of course, sticks out a little bit, but...
Given what camera bumps have looked like for the past several years, the 16E is a breath of fresh air.
So here comes the 17 Air, the super thin one.
It's also got one camera because there's not room for any more and blah, blah, blah, whatever.
It's fine.
Makes sense.
And then they put a pixel-like iPhone Mesa that spans the entire width of the phone.
which I think really takes away from the slimness of this is also some photos of what is supposedly a physical reality of the 17 air case.
And it doesn't look much better there.
There's someone's rendering.
I don't know.
I have a link to this, but you two can look at it.
The rendering of what, how big the air is supposed to be 5.5 millimeters as compared to the 8.25 millimeter, 16 pro max.
Like it does look slim, but then there's the usual camera Mesa and camera bump thing or whatever.
Uh,
one of my questions about the 17 air is what's in the rest of that Mesa?
Like what could they possibly be filling that space with?
Obviously there's the flash and then like light sensor or whatever.
And I see that, but like that whole big Mesa is,
I don't think they can fit more battery in there.
Is it the face ID sensor on the front that needs more depth that's taking that spot?
Like, I do wonder what's there.
The whole rest of the phone is so thin.
I bet maybe there is some part of the face ID component assembly kind of thing that's right in the middle there that maybe that is going to require that kind of thickness.
Yeah, maybe we'll see what the teardown looks like.
And then on the plane 17, it looks very much like the plane 16.
It doesn't have anything extending across the full width of the phone.
It just, again, looks like the 16 with two cameras on top of each other.
And then we get to the ones that have three cameras, the 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max.
And I've been saying for years and years and years that they're well past the time where Apple should stop pretending that their cameras are in the corner of their phone and instead do something that uses the whole width of the phone.
And if this is to be believed, and I put this in here because I think we're kind of at the point where like the CAD renders are probably like the real thing and not just like people making stuff up.
So if this is to be believed, they heard my years of complaining, you know, hypothetically about pretending their cameras exist in the corner of their phone.
And they said, you're right.
We should use that width.
You know how we'll do it?
We'll leave the cameras exactly where they are and just make the Mesa the full width of the phone.
And you may be thinking to yourself, well, at least this solves the problem of the phone wobbling on the table, right?
At least now you won't have this thing where there's a lump on one corner and it's just like a table that's not even or whatever.
But no, you're forgetting that the Camera Mesa is not where the cameras exist.
They exist on top of the Camera Mesa.
So all of these phones exist.
Even the ones that have a camera Mesa that extends the entire width of the phone, all of them have camera lenses that stick out from the Mesa, and those lenses are all shoved to one side.
So they're still going to wobble on the table.
What have we done here, Apple?
What have we gained?
These phones are uglier.
I mean, I get what Casey's saying about the metal being sturdy around the edges and just having a small glass region for radio transparency, but...
Boy, I'm not liking the look of the 17 Pros.
Like I just they just didn't just like they didn't do anything.
They left the cameras where they were and just made the Mesa wider.
I guess that gives them some more space in there.
I wonder what they're going to use that space for because those phones aren't as thin as the 17 Air.
So they already had room for the face ID sensor.
They didn't need that giant Mesa.
But they extended the Mesa anyway.
Like, what is that?
It's frustrating to me.
I'm frustrated with the way these phones look.
I was hoping all of the fake renders that people had on these stories based on the descriptions, I was hoping that they were just entirely wrong.
But now, when the quote-unquote CAD renders come out, presumably leaked from case manufacturers or people who are machining these cases or whatever, at this point, I'm starting to believe.
And yeah, there's things you can do with service treatments to make this look less gross.
I am not a fan.
And honestly, it's making the plain 17 be the clear looker in this arrangement.
I was hoping the 17 air would be the looker, but that stupid pixel-like lozenge is really throwing off the balance of the air to me.
I guess I'm kind of glad that next year is not my year for cameras, but really for phones, but really it doesn't matter because if things go as they have gone for the past many years, even though I'm not buying an iPhone 17, when the 18 family arrives, chances are good that the 18 family will look a lot like the 17 family because Apple does not change their cases every single year or hasn't recently anyway.
Assuming this is all true, which at this stage is probably true, this whole family of phones looks, I think, fairly hideous from the back.
But that being said, how often have I seen the back of my current phone?
And it's not that...
I mean, first of all, I'm still using that leather magnetic snap-on back.
So I'm not really seeing the back plate of the phone, but I do see the part where the camera pokes out.
So, okay, if I get one of these, then the part where the camera pokes out will be much bigger and span across the whole back of the phone.
How will that affect my life?
It won't.
Because when I put my phone down on a surface, it's face up.
And when I'm using my phone, my hand covers the back.
And I'm looking at the front.
So there's pretty much no time where I'm really seeing...
the back of my phone.
So as much as I can look at all these and say, ooh, that's kind of hideous, the way I actually use my phone, which I think is fairly common, with some kind of case on the back and almost never seeing the back, I think it's fine.
will survive, and I would rather have the better cameras as possible.
And in the case of the 17 Air, which at the moment, I don't think I will get a 17 Air, but I think there's a chance that once I handle one, I will have to have it.
So we'll see.
But anyway, all that is to say, I think this will be fine, and we will...
The same thing that we said when the camera Mesa got bigger every time over the years.
It looks hideous when you first see it, and then you just get used to it, and that's just how iPhones look.
We'll be used to it.
It'll be fine.
I think they should have slightly less wobble because the Mesa does extend the full width, so even though the camera lenses do jut out farther, it will be closer to being even than it was before.
But the other thing to consider on the 17 Pro and Pro Max is
There are now things, important things in a region where there weren't before.
I see those two dots on the right side that are across from the camera lenses.
Like right now on a 16 Pro, the light sensor and flash thing are above and below the third camera, but within the little square that you can draw around them, right?
Yeah.
But now, because in my current phone, if I put my finger over like the area that's next to the camera Mesa, it's not blocking anything.
There's nothing there.
But now on both of these phones, if you put your finger anywhere that's like across from the cameras that would previously be blocking nothing, it will be blocking potentially the flash or the light sensor thingy.
And so you may have to do a little bit of change your grip on these phones to not do that.
i mean i never use the flash anyway so it's not a big deal but whatever that other hole is i'm assuming it's a light sensor light no i believe it's lidar all right maybe it's not a big deal then because we don't wait we use this lidar for like the auto uh portrait mode thing doesn't it that's correct as far as i know yeah well anyway there's potentially another area on the back of the phone where you can't cover stuff with your fingers so be aware of that but yeah i'm sure it'll be fine
my wife will get this phone if it has better battery life it'll be great the rumors about the camera that it's better but i'm just kind of disappointing that they didn't do i was i'm kind of excited about this year both because of the air and because of the rumors about them changing the camera arrangement i'm kind of really disappointed to see that it's just like a photoshop stretch of the camera on the existing pro phones
All right.
Then finally for this week, Apple has announced on their newsroom that they will spend more than $500 billion in the U.S.
over the next how many years, you ask?
Four.
reading from their newsroom post apple today which was monday the 24th announced its largest ever spend commitment with plans to spend and invest more than 500 billion in the u.s over the next four years this new pledge builds on apple's long history of investing in american innovation and advanced high-skilled manufacturing and will support a wide range of initiatives that focused on artificial intelligence silicon engineering and skills development for students and workers across the country
Yeah.
Cool.
Go team.
Well, if you go back four years, you will find a very similar announcement that adjusted for inflation gives similar numbers with Apple saying for in 2021 ish, I believe in the next four years, we're going to spend $400 billion, blah, blah.
So this is actually isn't particularly unprecedented, but I will say this about Apple's seemingly every four years announcement of how much money they're going to invest in the United States.
They should be investing more.
Yeah.
As we've harped on for many years now, Apple's reliance on China for everything is so problematic for multiple reasons.
But one of them is that it's not an easy thing to fix.
To fix it is going to take a huge amount of time and a huge amount of money.
And I'm not saying Apple should switch to manufacturing everything in the United States.
That's not going to happen.
But...
trying to become less reliant on China means investing in places that are not China.
One of those places is the U S and Apple has had these announcements like, Oh, we're investing in the U S we're building these factories.
We're doing this.
We're going to make the Mac pro here.
We're going to, you know, do whatever manufacturer servers and for Apple intelligence, like,
I would want to see on a graph of like Apple's investment in the US, I would want to see that going up by a lot as part of a strategy to reduce their reliance on China, right?
And seeing a number that just looks like an inflation-injusted version of the number that they had four years ago is not reassuring.
It's almost like they're just, I mean, I'm not saying $500 billion is trivial, but like it's not, I would like to see a trend line going up, right?
Right.
And this is completely setting aside politics and who's going to use this as a political football.
Just forget about all that and just say, if you're just in charge of Apple from a business and technology perspective.
Having all your eggs in one basket, whatever that basket is, is not good.
Having all your eggs in a basket that is very not friendly to many things that Apple stands for, including encryption and other things that they're not allowed to do in China, is also not good.
And Apple has been branching out to more manufacturing in India, which also has its own kind of rightward lurching problems going on, and more manufacturing in other countries, and the U.S.
should be one of those.
So I'm kind of disappointed to see this
announcement.
And it just seemed like business as usual with the usual rah-rah USA, here's another $500 billion, see you in four years.
You know, Apple PR has a track record of issuing self-flatulence inhaling press releases that mostly just try to promote
in a new way things they were already doing or have already done um that's what this is and you know this is a this is just a political statement they they make them all the time but i don't think like 500 billion dollars is not nothing though like they are doing something i don't think this is like oh we're just doing something for appearances 500 billion dollars is not doing something for appearances
They're clearly, like, have committed to invest, like, $100 billion-ish a year for the past, like, 8 to 10 years, right?
That's not nothing.
But it's also not an upward trend.
So it's, like, if they had done something like, oh, like a $1 million program to help school kids learn to be advanced manufacturing people, well, that's nothing.
$500 billion is not nothing.
Just my question is, is, like...
I don't even care about them trying to use it as a political football.
Fine, whatever.
But they're spending $500 billion.
Why aren't we spending $600, $700, $800?
Like, why is the amount not going up over the years?
It just doesn't send a message to me that they are, like, it's baffling to me that they would be willing to spend this much money.
But not have it be part of a strategy to increase their spend over time or decrease it or whatever, whatever direction they want to go in.
They're not doing any of that.
This is not really news because this investment was like this is just what they were already going to do anyway for their own expansion.
They didn't decide in the last 30 or so days for political reasons.
They didn't decide like we're suddenly going to spend $500 billion because of this brand new plan that we have out of the goodness of our hearts and investing in America.
No, they were going to do this anyway just for their own expansion.
And here we have some candy coating on top of it to please the administration.
Well, I mean, so doing it for their own expansion, like they can choose where they expand.
Like, yes, they're growing over time.
And, you know, like making these announcements every four years makes it seem like it's an every four years thing.
But it's just like you said, it's an ongoing thing.
Every year they spend X amount of dollars on whatever they're going to do.
And that X hasn't really changed that much other than ramping up with inflation.
So you can make these announcements to try to make political head of it.
But like.
They're saying they're going to do this expansion anyway.
They could have put all this money into expansion elsewhere.
They could have put all into India, but they didn't.
They're taking 500 billion of their worldwide expansion money and they're doing 100 billion a year in the US, which is exactly what they've been doing for like 10, 15 years.
And it's like, but it's just it's strange to me that they would put so much money in and do all these announcements every year without a trend in one direction or another, especially when I strongly feel that they should be going in one particular direction.
So, you know, I don't I don't fault them for trying to, you know, score political points with it.
They did it in the last administration.
They did it with the administration before that.
They're going to do it in the next one.
Uh, and I do credit them for investing a hundred billion dollars a year in the U S but I don't understand.
I don't understand the strategy.
I don't get it.
Yeah, I don't either.
And you know, I was on upgrade earlier this week, filling in for Mike and Jason and I talked about it and his point was the same as yours is that look, Apple's been doing this for a long time in similar ways.
Yeah.
And I get that, but I don't know.
It's just, it still feels a little icky.
Plus, I believe, I'll try to remember to put a link in the show notes, but I believe that some of the things that they swear they're doing, all outward indication is that they're not doing it.
Like there's some data center project in like North Carolina or something like that, that if I understand correctly, I don't think anything is really actually happening with it yet or something like that.
Check my math on that.
I might be completely wrong.
But anyways, it's just a little gross.
It's gross when, you know, one of our guys or one of our people is president.
It's gross when it's not one of our people.
It's just, I don't know, it just seems silly.
But all that aside, all the posturing aside.
You think it's gross that a U.S.
company is investing in U.S.
stuff?
No, no.
Set aside the current administration.
They did it in 2021.
I don't think it's gross.
I think it's insufficient.
Yeah.
No, no, it's 100% insufficient, but it's look at us.
Look at us.
Look at how good we are.
Hey, listen, we want them to expand more in different places.
We want them to invest more in the United States.
So in 2021, when they say we're going to spend $400 billion over the next four years, I say, good, like you get to announce that and do the thing.
Now make that investment and next year have it be substantially more.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with you.
I don't know.
It's just, they're smelling their own farts.
That's what Marco said.
They're just smelling their own farts.
It is a press release.
Yeah, but even for a press release, it's an unnecessary press release.
Just do it.
Just do the thing.
Just do the thing.
Also, like, with the North Carolina Data Center, like, that's the problem with these big projects.
Like, there's always so much to them and they get so entangled with, like, local and state governments and, you know, changing investment landscape.
Like, just keeping track of all this money and where they actually end up spending and how it gets shifted around.
Like,
it's, it's difficult.
Like the problem with this is kind of like cell radios.
We talked about before, like how incredibly complicated and difficult a problem that is, uh, advanced manufacturing, like the stuff that builds Apple products is not the type of thing where you can just say, Oh, we'll just build a factory and then we can make iPhones in it.
No, there's so much supporting infrastructure from every single manufacturer that produces the little screws and the machines that make the screws and the machine and the machines that make the machines that assemble the products that like and this before you even get to the workforce and everything.
all the transportation systems and shipping.
And like, there's a reason it's not so easy for them to get out of China.
And so if you want to get anything like that type of advanced manufacturing somewhere that's not China, you need to invest so much money over so much time.
And if you're going to spend tons of money and tons of time,
maybe you want to spend some of that in your own country granted the cost of labor is much higher here and there are lots of other problems in terms of being far away from the people who make all the parts and so on and so forth but like you're never going to get there if you don't start right it's it should be totally an apple move to have like a multi-decade strategy of diversifying their manufacturing and it seems like they have that kind of they've been doing so much more in india and i think in some other countries around that area
which granted are a lot closer to China and it makes it a little bit easier.
But every time I see a U.S.
investment, it's like, are you in this or are you out of it?
Like, are you trying to create advanced manufacturing with this like advanced manufacturing fund?
Like, is that just so those people can go get jobs in China?
Like, what are they going to be using this advanced manufacturing skill?
What are they going to be building with those skills in the U.S.?
The best we've got is like enticing TSMC to make two-year-old chips in Arizona for us.
which there's a whole bunch of stuff about that lower in the show it's that who knows we'll ever get to but like that's an ongoing thing and uh it's the best we've got and in theory they will be building chips for apple products there they're close to cutting edge but tsmc is not a u.s company
All right.
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And thank you to our members who support us directly.
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In overtime this week, which is our weekly bonus topic exclusively for members, we're going to be talking about Sigma's new camera that they announced, the Sigma BF.
This is a pretty interesting kind of radical design model.
a little full-frame camera.
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Thanks, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-
All right, John, any other hyperspace stuff we want to talk about?
Let's actually talk about the icon.
I freaking love this icon.
Yeah, it is very good.
I think people like the icon more than they like my app.
In fact, some people have explicitly said, I don't even like your app, but I like the icon.
Wow.
Wow, that's very kind.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
icons icons are tricky uh i am uh an icon aficionado i collect i have collected icons for my entire computing life because icons have been a thing since 1984 for me uh i had a vast collection of 32 by 32 uh pixel icons in the classic mac os days and
there were multiple classic mac os applications whose only job was to be libraries for icons not just one of them multiple ones and i had multiple of them um in the mac os 10 days obviously there was a big change from the 32 by 32 pixel app icons of classic to the
what was then massive, I think 128 by 128 in the first version of Mac OS X icons that were like photorealistic and just like it changed the whole landscape of icons.
It was no longer pixel art.
Now you could have these other things.
And anyway, Panic, did Panic make this app?
No, Icon Factory made this.
Either Panic or Icon Factory made an app.
I forget who.
Yeah, I think Icon Factory made it and then it changed hands to Panic.
Anyway, it was an app called Candy Bar that was a modern Mac OS X version of an app that just collects icons.
And that app was eventually discontinued, but then I begged them to bring it back.
And they actually let me hack on it a little bit to get it up and running.
And I did.
And then they took it back and hacked on it a little bit more.
Now when you launch it, it shows a dialogue that says, Candy Bar is a 20-year-old application.
Don't expect everything to work.
And I'm like, fine.
Fine, Candy Bar.
Just keep my icons.
All this is to say is I love icons.
I have tons of icons.
And so when it comes time to make icons for my own Mac apps, I have very strong opinions.
If you go to my website and go to the apps section, you will see my three apps, my three weird little apps, which is kind of an awkward arrangement because there's three of them instead of four.
Maybe I'll fix that someday.
And the first app that I made, it was an icon that I made myself, and it was easy for me to make because it involved using pixel art from classic Mac OS, which apparently is old enough that Apple doesn't care anymore.
So front and center, that's an icon that I made.
It's kind of amazing that I was able to make an icon that
Out of the window UI of my previous operating system.
I could fit one-to-one, non-scaled, pixel-accurate representations of actual windows from my previous operating system.
Now it's the icon of an app.
I found that incredibly enjoyable.
My second icon was made by a talented artist.
At my request, based on a design that I suggested, that's Switchglass, you will note that neither of these icons is the...
what was it big sir rounded rectangle thing that apple said that all mac apps should have uh front and center i think predates that but switch class i think does not anyway uh i am against that i like it when uh mac icons were not all squircles
right i like them when they were outside their bounds so switch glass is kind of a squircle but it's tilted so screw you right um and it looks lickable and kind of aqua-y that was done by brad ellis it's really good um and so then i had hyperspace uh and my the test flight icon was just a stock art picture of the milky way because i didn't have an icon yet i said the icon is temporary but i had an idea for the icon um
And I knew I wasn't going to be able to draw it myself.
And so I got Icon Factory to do it.
Icon Factory, maker of some of those classic macOS apps that we use to collect your icons.
Maker of tons of the free icons that I downloaded from their website and put into my icon collections.
And either the original maker of Candy Bar or the eventual owner of Candy Bar.
I forget which.
But anyway, as the name says, they make icons.
And so I came up with a concept document.
it was way too long it said like here's my app here's what it does here's what it's called here's my concept for the icon of kids if you want to understand what this document i showed them my pinterest that's what kids say these days where you you put up little pictures of things that inspire you about the kitchen of your dreams while mine was like here are some pictures of the icon here's what i'm thinking here's some you know it was it was a ridiculous document uh but this the icon that you see was my idea it was a uh
a hard drive spaceship going into a legally distinct hyperspace.
Uh, uh, and my original idea was that the hard drive spaceship would have the same surface treatment as the millennium Falcon.
Uh,
And as I said in the concept document, this may be a terrible idea because at actual icon sizes, all that detail may be entirely lost.
But anyway, that was my concept.
And working with icon factor on this was great.
I know some of those folks from
years ago and they know us they did some art for one of our atp t-shirts the the big uh angel of death uh trash can mac pro one that was icon factory that did the art for that they're really great so anyway um uh work together with an artist at icon factory on this icon and going through many iterations and many concepts including we got to a point where there's a fork in the road where it was like do we want to go in the direction of millennium falcon kind of
greebles or greeblees it's pronounced two different parts both those words are apparently valid anyway the little nerly things that are on the top of the millennium falcon do you want to go on that direction or do you want to go on the shiny direction and in the end i chose shiny even though that wasn't my original concept just because as part of making the actual icon you learn what works and what doesn't and as i suspected it just wasn't going to read well um i did decide to make this one a squircle
I thought it would work OK with the design.
It's this is the all my apps are weird, but this is the most mainstream of any of my apps.
Not saying much, not very mainstream, but, you know, it's a low bar.
And so I figured if ever I'm going to go normie and use the stupid squircle Mac OS icons, now would be the time because I had a background idea, like the hyperspace, like the stars and everything.
That's the background.
So I have something to put in the squircle at least.
And as you might imagine, we went back and forth.
When I say we, I mean, I got a factory artist and me.
He's doing all the work and I'm just complaining about it.
So many iterations, refining so many nuances of this that no one cares about.
And I hope I didn't drive them crazy.
But I think...
The result is what I wanted it to be.
And I think it came out pretty well.
It was difficult to make this design work at all as an icon because it is very busy and difficult to understand and visually grok.
But I'm happy to see that most people who have seen this icon
I understood it and got it and think it's cool.
And I think it works really well for my app and I like how it looks.
And I also kind of like how I have three apps with three icons that look nothing like each other.
Yeah, it's fantastic.
I really like Chef's Kiss A plus and the icons.
Yep, agreed.
The app's pretty good too.
We had some other ideas, too.
I kind of wanted to do... Well, again, not for 1.0, but at some point, maybe when I get back into doing fun stuff, Mac apps can have alternate icons, even if the Mac OS APIs do not expose those icons to other apps.
There's multiple feedbacks about this.
Please address it.
There's literal APIs that say, give me the icon of this running application.
totally ignores apple's official api for changing the icons anyway there are official icon apis for mac apps where you can change the icon ivory a mac app has a thing in its settings to say hey what icon do you want to use for ivory and i've picked an alternate icon and i like that feature someday i might have in hyperspace an alternate icon feature which has nothing to do with reclaiming disk space and everything to do with just being fun just like the ivory icon
So I figured I would use the test flight icon, which I have some fondness for, even though it's just stupid looking.
It's just a star field, but whatever.
I would put that in there.
I first put the real icon.
But there were some other concepts.
I don't want to spoil what they are, but there were some other concepts that we explored early on in the icon factory engagement for this icon that I think would make a cool other icon.
So I may actually re-engage icon factory later.
at some point in the future and say, Hey, let's do one of those other ideas.
And then I would have at least three icons to choose from and we would see how it goes.
But yeah, one of the things with, uh, with the launch in terms of how things do financially, like, again, I don't think this is expected to be a big spell or whatever.
Uh, but it was nice that on day one, uh, the, uh, the app paid for its own icon.
Yeah.
That's great.
So I am officially in the black.
Woo!
Now we just need one more person to buy something.
But no, worth every penny.
Because like, honestly, as someone who's so obsessed with icons, having a really good icon or at least an icon that I like for the app means just so much to me.
And even though people might look at my other icons and think they're just like ugly or nothing special, I like them and that's what's important.
And I just feel like that is really like...
It's so important to me personally, but also I just think in general, the first thing people see gives a good impression about your application.
And the icon does that.
And so, yeah, I think it's great.
It makes me happy to see it on my website.
It makes me happy to see it in my doc.
And I'm glad that people like it.
Yeah, it's a great icon.
It really is.
There are other fun things in the application, too, if you look around for them.
I try not to spend too much time doing stupid stuff that has nothing to do with anything.
You know, if you go too far down that road, you end up at James Thompson.
But, of course, he shot the moon and wrapped back around and made a whole separate app about his fun things.
uh i'm never going to achieve that level of awesomeness but i do in the very traditional mac sense enjoy adding fun little things to my apps i just have to like time box them and be like you are not allowed to spend more than 1.5 days on this before you get back to doing the actual app because nobody cares about this but it was something i used to distract myself during development and i may return to that well in the future we'll see
Oh, again, congratulations.
I'm really excited for you.
I'm proud of you.
You've done great work and the app is great.
So I'm looking forward to a long future with it.
Did you download it and add a rating, Casey?
Not yet, but I'm going to.
I've been busy, man.
If you don't give me five stars, they're going to kill my entire family.
Oh, well, four it is.
Isn't that what everybody says to you anytime you pay for any service?
It really helps people discover the show.
No, that's a different joke.
The other joke is like, you go buy a cup of coffee and then the person says to you, psst, psst.
they have my family hostage and they're going to kill them.
If you don't give me a 10, like every, everyone, like every single thing I buy, someone says, Oh, and by the way, thanks.
Well, they do it in a practice way, but it's like, but just so you know, it's real important that if anyone contacts you about this, you tell them that blah, blah, blah.
And give me a 10 because like anything less than a 10, they're just going to fire me.
Right.
Right.
It's like, I hate the system.
So I give them tens.
Like I want them to continue to be employed, but I hate it so much.
So I, I, you know, I understand why people are not writing my, rating my app.
It's fine.
But, uh, I guess I'm in the same situation.
Well, you know, John, all that anti-Virginia slander, now that's coming home to roost, my friend.
One it is.
I bought your app and rated it five stars.
Just giving you a hard time.
Just giving you a hard time.
My app will never prompt you to review it.
I'll promise you that.
You say that.
You know, I said that 10 years ago, too, and I had to stop saying it.
Yeah, but you actually try to make money from your apps.
I don't.
These are just fun.
I will never prompt you for ratings.
I promise you.
The only prompting you're going to get is on my podcast where I'll ask you to do it.
.