Quiet Little Leech
Marco:
so i've been uh using your vision pro a lot this week are you asking genuinely or you i feel like i'm walking into something and i don't know what i'm a little scared uh no i've been using it a medium amount i feel a little bad because i haven't really been using the vision pro and i feel like i'm being a bad apple fan and a bad developer and a bad podcaster by not really using it much but
Marco:
you think we haven't talked enough about vision pro is that what you're worried about yeah maybe that's i don't know because like i so so finally like i so i've been in this you know we're doing our house renovations that's taking forever um so we've been in this rental i don't want to like buy my new desk and set it up here only to move it in a few weeks or whenever we actually finally get out of here any day now
Marco:
Any day now, right?
Casey:
Can I interrupt you?
Casey:
Can I interrupt you right there?
Casey:
So I'm guessing the end of the story is not only have you bought a desk, but you have somehow ended up with a bespoke monitor just for this purpose.
Marco:
Not entirely wrong, but not right.
Casey:
Here we go.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Settle in, everyone.
Casey:
Let's hear it.
Marco:
I had all these hopes of like, okay, when the Vision Pro comes out, I'll use the Mac mirroring mode.
Marco:
The rental has this crappy, basic, one of those particle board staples $50 desks.
Marco:
It's fine for most people, but it's too high.
Marco:
Desks, for me, one of the reasons I get standing desks is because they're also...
Marco:
adjustable height desks easily most desks are too high for comfortable computer use for me and i would argue correct ergonomics for almost anybody but that's a separate discussion so anyway so i'm you know i'm at this like particle board rectangle and uh it's too high and my wrists are all hurting and i'm not able to use my good keyboard i don't have space to like lay everything out on the tiny little thing and i'm like i should just should i just order my my new desk early and but it's going to be heavy i don't want to like move it you know just in a few weeks
Casey:
Yeah, but Marco, the desk is too damn high.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
And then secondly, the monitor situation, like, you know, not having my giant monitor and I was going to try the Vision Pro thing and just work on that for like a month.
Marco:
And again, it's kind of just not compatible with my eyes much.
Marco:
I realized, like, wait a minute.
Marco:
Somewhere in our garage full of stuff that we moved out of the old house that's still all in boxes and moving blankets, somewhere in there, there's an old IKEA desk frame.
Marco:
And somewhere else in there, there's a big plank of wood.
Yeah.
Marco:
that tiff was using as like a fake desktop on top of some other stuff i'm like if i can find those two things i can have a lightweight easily moved desk that will be the right size and the right height like so anyway long story short dug through the garage it was an adventure but i got it and i also a few months back um because we were about to move into our new house and
Marco:
in the fall i also ordered another pro display xdr because that's the re the reason i mailed you the lg ultra fine which i'm very thankful for i'm looking at it literally as we speak it is plugged into my computer right this very moment yeah so the reason i mailed it to you is that i intended to once we moved to replace it with another xdr and i was hoping they would update the xdr in the meantime they haven't
Marco:
And I was also hoping to have been moved in five months ago.
Marco:
That hasn't happened.
Marco:
So it's been sitting in the box, like waiting to be used again.
Marco:
Same, same rationale.
Marco:
Like, do I, do I want to like unpack this giant monitor from its giant box and set it up just to have to move it again in a few weeks?
Marco:
I'll just use the vision pro Mac screen sharing mode.
Marco:
That didn't pan out.
Marco:
The desk ergonomics sucked a few days ago.
Marco:
I finally was like, you know what?
Marco:
I think we're going to be in this house for like three more weeks.
Marco:
I am just going to set this stuff up, even though it's only for three weeks.
Marco:
I'm just going to set up this stupid desk and set up this stupid giant monitor.
Marco:
Maybe I'll waste an afternoon and have to waste another afternoon taking them all down and moving them in three weeks, but maybe it'll be worth it.
Marco:
I am so happy I didn't.
Casey:
This is not surprising at all.
Marco:
It is a thousand percent worth it.
Marco:
I wish I would have done it weeks ago or a couple months ago even.
Marco:
Oh my God.
Marco:
Working on a correct height desk with a giant monitor.
Marco:
I am so happy for the people out there for whom the Vision Pro Max screen sharing mode is working well.
Marco:
That's wonderful for you.
Marco:
I'm so happy for you.
Marco:
It's not the case for me.
Marco:
And so now that I have like the real thing again...
Marco:
Oh my God, what a difference.
Marco:
Night and day in terms of comfort, ergonomics, my productivity, my eyes working.
Marco:
Oh my God, it's fantastic.
Marco:
So long story short, I finally moved some furniture around and it was really worth it.
Marco:
It's a super exciting story.
Yeah.
Casey:
To answer the question that you were originally asking, perhaps as an excuse to tell this story, which I don't begrudge you for.
Casey:
I have been using my Vision Pro.
Casey:
I have certainly been using it less than I had in the first couple of weeks I had it.
Casey:
But I am actively working on the Vision Pro version of Call Sheet.
Casey:
And just in the last week, I don't remember if we brought this up last week or not, but in the last week, I've gotten to the point...
Casey:
That I've gone from actively embarrassing to, well, this kind of sucks, but it's at least workable.
Casey:
And so for the select few that are on the test flight, and I am not looking for more at the moment, but thank you for asking.
Casey:
The select few that are on the test flight do have a Vision Pro version.
Casey:
My hope, not a guarantee, in fact, probably won't happen, but my hope is that I'll have it done before my birthday, which is in just a couple of weeks now.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But I am actively working on it.
Casey:
And I tell you what, the easiest way, in my personal opinion, to do Vision Pro work is to do it using Mac virtual display in the Vision Pro environment, you know, with the Vision Pro on your face and so on and so forth.
Casey:
I still like it.
Casey:
I maybe even like it plus plus.
Casey:
I certainly don't like it more than three physical 5K monitors that are staring me in the face right now, giving me a sunburn.
Casey:
But I do like it and I don't find it burdensome or bothersome in the ways that you do.
Casey:
And as we've covered before, like that's not to imply that your feelings or story is wrong and mine is right or vice versa.
Casey:
You know, just like you said a moment ago, for some people it does work and for you it doesn't.
Casey:
I'm one of those people it does work for.
Casey:
So anyways, I have been using it
Casey:
Some I've gotten sidetracked with other professional, nothing bad, but other professional responsibilities.
Casey:
So I haven't been doing as much work this week as I usually do.
Casey:
Um, but I will say that last night, Aaron had her monthly, uh, book club, which happens in the evening time.
Casey:
And so I had a couple of hours to kill, you know, once the kids were in bed by myself and I started by looking at my repertoire within or my, my, uh, my collection within, uh,
Casey:
Apple, you know, the Apple TV app in terms of movies that I've bought, which really amounts to, you know, movies that I connected with movies everywhere, movies anywhere, whatever it's called, of which there are not many, to be honest with you, but Heat is one of them.
Casey:
And so I watched the scene from Heat.
Casey:
Marco, you have not seen Heat, I assume?
Casey:
I think I might have.
Casey:
Oh, it's a miracle.
Casey:
It's a great movie.
Casey:
But anyways, I watched the bank heist scene from Heat, which was amazing.
Casey:
And then I just I didn't want to watch the whole movie because I'd seen it relatively recently.
Casey:
So I've been having an itch recently to rewatch Tron Legacy or whatever the sequel is called.
Casey:
I forget what it was called, but it was like 10 years ago now.
Casey:
And I watched the first like half an hour of that.
Casey:
It is not 3D or anything like that.
Casey:
It's just a regular 2D movie.
Casey:
But there is a 3D version of it.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Well, the version I have is not 3D.
Casey:
I think I was watching from Disney Plus, I thought.
Casey:
Maybe I was looking at the wrong one.
John:
They might not offer a 3D version of it, but I'm pretty sure there's a 3D version.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
Well, whatever ended up happening, be that user error, which it very well could have been.
Casey:
But the one I was watching was not 3D, but it was pretty delightful.
Casey:
This is not the sort of thing I would do if Erin was with me.
Casey:
I mean, she would be happy to watch the movies I watched, but
Casey:
I would not be sitting there with the goggles on my face watching a movie while she's next to me.
Casey:
But when I'm by myself, it was pretty great.
Casey:
And I did enjoy it quite a lot.
Marco:
Before I forgot, we got a great feedback email from Sam's dad, who has a pretty good theory about maybe why it's not working out so well for me with the Mac stuff in the Vision Pro as other people.
Marco:
Sam's dad says,
John:
I can test this.
John:
Why would I not move my eyes?
John:
It's not like I don't have glasses where I can't look through the edges.
John:
I can look like I'll do right now.
John:
I'm looking straight ahead.
John:
My head is not moving.
John:
I can look at the Apple menu through my glasses and the Apple menu is not warped or bent or broken or blurry or anything like that.
John:
It's perfectly crisp and clear.
John:
Maybe it's because I don't have progressives.
John:
Maybe it's because my prescription isn't that bad, but I don't.
John:
The part where this logic falls apart is the idea that because you wear glasses, you're more likely to turn your head.
John:
I think multi-monitor people are more likely to turn their head because they have to turn their head.
John:
Otherwise, they can't see the stuff that's on the far left of their far left monitor.
John:
But I'm a single monitor person.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, so I thought it was an interesting theory, but maybe John is more right than not.
Marco:
We're still in such early days.
Marco:
We keep seeing some various doom and gloom things about Vision Pro.
Marco:
Like, oh, people are returning or whatever.
Marco:
We had a little bit of that last week.
Marco:
And a couple more stories trickling out here and there.
Marco:
I personally, honestly, I have seen a...
Marco:
somewhat frightening decline in the number of people using overcast on vision pro over the last uh two weeks using the ipad version of vision pro to be clear yes using the ipad version of an audio only podcast player in a virtual reality headset so obviously like this is not the ideal test case um but but i've seen you know basically the week after launch is about twice as many users as i currently have this week
Casey:
Really quickly, is that basically how many people, and check-in is not the right turn of phrase, but how many people checked in and opened the app each day?
Casey:
Is that how you're computing this?
Marco:
Yeah, and no matter how I smooth it out, if I do a weekly rolling average, it's the same pattern.
Marco:
I've lost half the users already.
Marco:
But we are still in such early days of Vision Pro, everyone's still figuring out what it is and what they want to do with it and what it's for.
Marco:
And it's going to take...
Marco:
Probably a couple of years to really start finding its legs and finding the really great things and having those great things mature into actual developed app markets and content markets.
Marco:
If we all buy Vision Pros and then half of us decide, eh, this is not doing what I wanted it to do or it turns out this thing I want it to do and this doesn't work very well or whatever...
Marco:
That's not like a failure of the product.
Marco:
That just means our expectations were a little off.
Marco:
And now we have to figure out what is it good for, if anything.
Marco:
And I think every other major new tech product category, they've all gone through similar arcs.
Marco:
There have been very few exceptions that were just instant hits and instant perfect market and usefulness fits right at the door.
Marco:
We've had a few complaints.
Marco:
I've seen a few complaints from people who are like, I'm so down on Division Pro.
Marco:
Why am I such an evil person insulting the work of all these hard engineers or whatever?
Marco:
And I don't really see it that way.
Marco:
I think this is a product that has a lot of potential, most of which is unrealized so far, not because it's a flop or a failure, but because it's brand new.
Marco:
We try, you know, I've said this many times, like we always, whenever a new category is coming out, we always project our needs from the current things we know onto that.
Marco:
So, oh, the watch will replace the smartphone or whatever.
Marco:
I'll get all my work done on my iPad.
Marco:
I want it to buy a laptop ever again, like that kind of thing.
Marco:
And what we see over and over again is that might be true for some people, but not for most.
Marco:
And then we figure out what it is good for and it finds its market.
Marco:
We're in the very early stages of this.
Marco:
It's way too soon to declare anything great or terrible for any particular use.
Marco:
And it's going to take time to sort it all out.
Casey:
I feel as though, and maybe I am over-indexing on my own personal experience, but I feel as though I didn't hear a lot about revolutionary is a bit dramatic, but like revolutionary apps that were available at launch day.
Casey:
I haven't had the chance to try Black Box, for example, but I've understood Black Box is one of those apps.
Casey:
And certainly it was amazing on iOS, and I loved it.
Casey:
I haven't had a chance to try it on the Vision Pro yet, but I've heard it's very, very good.
Casey:
But there wasn't too much.
Casey:
Crouton is another one that I've heard.
Casey:
That's a recipe app that does some really cool and great stuff with timers and placing a timer over the pot you're cooking.
Casey:
You saw this in Joanna Stern's video.
Marco:
Don't forget the television app by Sandwich.
Marco:
That's really cool.
Casey:
Well, so that's exactly where I was going with this, is that television I don't think was available at launch, although honestly, we're a month later or whatever, so it's not even a month later.
Casey:
So it was available shortly thereafter.
Casey:
And television is definitely very, very cool.
Casey:
And my understanding is that YouTube support for it is coming out soon.
Casey:
So I'm sorry, I should back up.
Casey:
Television allows you to put one of what feels like an infinite number of TVs, like set-top TVs.
Casey:
that you would see in the house like when you or me or John was growing up, you can just stick that in your space and have it on as like an ambient background noise, which John has talked quite a bit about how much he hates that, but I don't mind it.
Casey:
And so you can stick a TV somewhere, put your own video file in it or presumably YouTube soon and just have that play in the background.
Casey:
And it's spatial audio, so you hear it off in the corner of your room if that's where you put it and so on and so forth.
John:
It doesn't have to be in the background.
John:
I don't think that's part of the app.
Yeah.
John:
You could just put it right in front of you and watch it.
Casey:
That is true.
Casey:
That is very true.
John:
It's strange that you've decided this is the app to put on a television in the background.
Casey:
Well, that's fair.
Casey:
But in any case, another great example of this, I don't remember the name of the app offhand, but I just tried earlier today some app by ForeFlight that lets you see, it puts like a disc with a...
Casey:
mildly 3D version of the landscape around an airport and will show you real-time flights coming in and out of that airport.
Casey:
It's one of those things that's kind of silly and it doesn't really need the Vision Pro, but damn if it isn't cool, the Vision Pro, you know what I mean?
Casey:
And it's stuff like that.
John:
You should be able to trace the paths for the planes to land with your finger.
Casey:
Yeah, right?
Casey:
Oh, man, I loved flight control so much.
Casey:
That was my favorite.
Casey:
To this day, it might be my favorite iPhone game.
John:
That would have been actually a good Vision Pro launch app if the people who currently own that IP did flight control, and it was basically just flight control, but in 3D.
John:
Really hard to do with the hand tracking that Apple offers now, though, I imagine.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
Very true.
Casey:
But anyways, my point that I'm getting at slowly here is that I feel like we're starting to see a bunch of much more interesting apps come out.
Casey:
take CallSheet for an example.
Casey:
I'd like to think it's going to be pretty good on Vision Pro, but there's nothing especially unique about the Vision Pro build.
Casey:
All I'm really doing is making the iPad build fit in in the platform and follow the platform conventions and things like that.
Casey:
There's nothing that's unique about it for the Vision Pro in terms of having it be particularly spatial or anything like that.
Casey:
It's just a very fancy iPad app.
Casey:
And
Casey:
And I feel like things like television, like this ForeFlight app, whose name escapes me, and Crouton and Blackbox, I think those apps are better examples of thinking outside the box with Vision OS.
Casey:
And I suspect over time, and I think this is basically what you're saying, Marco, over time, we're going to see more and more of that as we discover, what is this device really good for?
Casey:
And to quickly answer the question that you've kind of implied, you sort of asked before, like, I mean, obviously I didn't return mine, but
Casey:
I don't know that I would have spent the money on one originally if it wasn't for the professional obligation that I feel like I have.
Casey:
But I do like having it.
Casey:
Like, if you consider that obscene amount of money a wash at this point, I really like having it.
Casey:
And I am probably going to be taking some plane travel next month.
Casey:
And assuming I have the gumption to be that guy, you bet I'm going to be watching a movie on the plane or doing work or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
So yeah, I, it is an extremely cool device.
Casey:
And if any of us seem down on it, and I think I speak for Marco and saying this, you know, if we're down on it, we are, we sound like we're down on it.
Casey:
I don't think we mean to at all.
Casey:
It's extremely cool and extremely fun.
Casey:
It's just everyone, including the three of us slash two of us are trying to figure out where it fits in our lives.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
And I think it's going to be very much like, you know, to bring it back to our roots here, like starting a car in fifth gear.
Marco:
Like you can do it.
Marco:
It's going to be a slow start.
Marco:
You know, it's a little bit challenging, but it is possible to do.
Marco:
And eventually you can get something you can get to a pretty great place.
Marco:
And I think this is just going to have a very slow buildup.
Marco:
We don't know what to do with it.
Marco:
Apple doesn't know what to do with it.
Marco:
But we can tell it's really cool.
Marco:
Some people have found some things to do with it already.
Marco:
And we're going to just grow them from here.
Marco:
And it is largely a dev kit for developers right now.
Marco:
Again, I don't think there's much of an app market to speak of yet.
Marco:
But again, it's so early days.
Marco:
We're not going to know yet.
Marco:
No one's going to be able to declare this like, oh, this thing is great or this thing is terrible.
Marco:
Because there's just so much...
Marco:
so far unrealized potential that will just take a long time to develop.
Marco:
I'm talking on the order of probably years, not months.
Marco:
It's probably going to be a couple of years before there's really a decent amount of stuff on Vision Pro, a decent amount of reasons to buy one for most people.
Marco:
And certainly it's going to take longer than that for the prices to come down and for the capabilities to get better.
Marco:
So it's going to be a slow process.
Marco:
But I think it is going to move forward.
Marco:
It might take a while for us to really see that.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
Agreed.
Marco:
But we're not talking about Vision Pro this week.
Nope.
No, we're not.
John:
Definitely not.
John:
While you were talking, I pulled this item, which I was going to save for next week's follow-up, but it is very relevant to what you just discussed.
John:
So, new top item.
Casey:
New top item.
Casey:
Breaking news.
Casey:
Vision Pro demand is higher than expected.
Casey:
Returns down to 1%, reports 9to5Mac.
Casey:
Ming-Chi Kuo writes, the U.S.
Casey:
shipments are expected to be between 200,000 and 250,000 units this year, better than Apple's original estimate of 150,000 to 200,000.
Casey:
I don't know what Ming-Chi Kuo would know about Apple's return rates, but I would expect him to know that Apple has asked suppliers to increase production because that's his beat, Apple's supply chain.
John:
And I feel like this is very counter to the, you know, the very predictable story of like people are returning them.
John:
No one wants them.
John:
Sales are down.
John:
Or even Marco was saying you could get one immediately.
John:
That means they're doing badly.
John:
But whatever Apple's estimates were, apparently they either they either did a conservative first order and now are asking for more or they just really didn't think they would sell this money.
John:
So I think it's doing fine.
John:
I think it's doing as expected for year one sales of an expensive, weird thing.
Casey:
Anonymous writes,
Casey:
The reason for this is not entirely to hedge against potential bugs in the PQC implementation, but also to hedge against the selected PQC algorithm itself becoming broken by continued cryptanalysis.
Casey:
And that's not such a crazy notion.
Casey:
In 2022, one of the finalist algorithms for NIST's PQC selection process, the algorithm is called Psyche, S-I-K-E, which I love, was broken with a 10-year-old laptop.
Casey:
Whoopsie-dipsies.
Casey:
So keeping the classical crypto in the equation means that you at least fall back to the security of today, which is battle-hardened from millions of hours of research attempting unsuccessfully to break it.
John:
i thought that was neat like the because uh post-quantum cryptography is so new it hasn't really been battle tested so people have ideas we think this will be you know protected against quantum computers and oops it's not protected against a 10 year old laptop well let's try let's try again right and so that's you know i i thought it was like okay bugs and apples implementation what if they messed it up or whatever but it could just be they implemented it perfectly
John:
And but the algorithm is so new that it doesn't perform as expected.
John:
That happens with all, you know, cryptography things like all the weaknesses that were found in things that were once considered state of the art, like, you know, the original RSA, MD5, all these things that are much less strong now than we thought they were back in the day.
John:
And that could happen with Apple selection of their post-quantum cryptography thing.
John:
So underneath it all is the cryptography they've been using up till now, which has, you know, thus far stood the test of time.
Casey:
Continuing, another peculiarity I wanted to call out was the choice of security levels in Apple's hybrid construction.
Casey:
They're using the PQC algorithm Kyber 1024, which is roughly equivalent to the security level of an AES-256, or in NIST's parlance, a level 5.
Casey:
But they're combining it with the elliptic curve algorithm P-256, which is roughly equivalent to AES-128, or level 1 in NIST's parlance, NIST.
Casey:
The level terminology is confusing because Apple seems to have invented their own leveling system that is unrelated to the levels I mentioned here.
Casey:
But what that tells me is that they are really skeptical of Kyber, so they are going with the highest security level possible while keeping the lower classical crypto level.
Casey:
Presumably, this is so that they continue doing their comparatively more efficient per-message rekeying on the classical portion of the hybrid construction.
John:
Yeah, if there's doubts about the post-quantum thing and you have a choice of strength, just pick the strongest one and cross your fingers and just keep doing the classical one in the way that's efficient and doesn't burn more resources and take more time.
John:
I think Apple's post-quantum cryptography approach for messages is very sound and well-considered.
John:
It doesn't mean that they're not going to have to take a second or third pass on it, but it's better to move now for the reasons we talked about last week that we're not...
John:
there's no quantum computers out there now that are able to efficiently crack apple systems but if someone's storing a bunch of iMessage data now by intercepting it and they have this pile of encrypted stuff that they think they can't read you don't want them cracking that open 10 20 years from now when they can read it so
John:
The sooner Apple starts the big conversion of like sort of silently in the background, kind of like they did with APFS, silently in the background, all your iMessage conversations will start converting to this as long as everyone who's participating in them has at least iOS 17.4 or whatever the other equivalent versions of.
John:
Yeah, it's good to get this transition going.
Casey:
John Males writes, something I discovered recently.
Casey:
You can download your data from Apple in Google takeout style, including Apple Notes from privacy.apple.com.
Casey:
The notes are downloaded in a format that includes the data.
Casey:
Importing the data back into notes would be tricky, I presume.
John:
I don't know if I knew about this already or I forgot about it, but as soon as I saw this, I'm like, I've been looking for something to export notes.
John:
I think maybe last time I did it, that was using some app or script that exports them as PDF or just exports the text or whatever.
John:
But I took a look at it and the privacy.apple.com thing.
John:
is structured very much like Google Takeout, which is just sort of like a little, you know, form that you fill out.
John:
What do you want to export?
John:
How many files do you want it in?
John:
You can pick like a maximum size, give it to me and files no bigger than five gigabytes or whatever you want.
John:
And just like Google Takeout, you finish filling out the form and then it says, OK, we're working on your export.
John:
We'll send you an email and it's done.
John:
unlike google takeout this seems to take a long time i requested my notes archive just my notes archive which is not that big i have maybe a thousand notes not a lot of attachments in them not a lot of images uh two days ago and they're still working on it so google takeout i mean google takeout does take some amount of time but i don't think i've ever waited more than 24 hours for my google takeout of my like gigs and gigs of gmail so
John:
I'll tell you how it goes.
John:
I did the takeout thing because I wanted to see what format does it give it to me in.
John:
Any format is probably better than nothing.
John:
So I may add this to my sort of annual like paranoid data dump backup of online stuff because at this point I have a lot of stuff and notes and I would be sad if it all went away due to some weird bug.
Marco:
Is this going to be a better alternative than just having some app like read the SQLite file in macOS and dump it for you?
John:
I will see.
John:
Like, I mean, part of what's in the notes is I have these nicely formatted documents with like photos and text coloring and like inline images and style text.
John:
And, you know, like they're nice documents.
John:
And so if I just had like.
John:
If I just dump the text file from some blob in SQLite plus a bunch of attachment images, that's not the same thing, you know what I mean?
John:
But we'll see what format this is in.
John:
It could be equally useless.
John:
I'm hoping it is something that preserves some of the fidelity of the work I've put into some of the more complicated documents, like the one where I'm trying to pick out a new couch that's like seven years old and we still haven't bought a new couch.
John:
But there's a lot of pictures of couches in there and URLs and informations and measurements and images and...
John:
map locations for stores that have stuff and yeah i would want that to be preserved wait are you going to actually buy a new couch that's major news i mean signs say no but for many for many years now i've been trying to buy a new couch and failing most recently we did a tour of like five local furniture stores to sit on candidate couches and we still bought nothing so i'll keep you updated yeah because you know remind the listeners uh how many new couches have you bought in your entire life i've never bought a couch never
John:
i'm using my uh grandparents hand-me-down couches currently they bought them these are their new couches so they bought them probably in the late 80s early 90s good grief they're both sleepers and they weigh a ton oh yeah you're never getting out of your house i carried them into my house i carried them from my grandmother's house in new jersey into a into a uh you know uh u-haul like rental truck and then accidentally drove it on the parkway sorry everybody uh we've all been there yeah um
Casey:
i just i just didn't think i'm in a truck now it's so you know you don't you don't like i know parkways aren't for trucks what what kind of any would take a truck on the parkway everybody knows that oh i didn't realize i'm a truck now whoops uh no we've been also looking to get a couch not particularly actively in the same way it sounds like you are and uh we have not done so in the last few years and we need to not we don't have couches from late 80s but uh we we are in the market as well and i don't know i just i haven't found the one that sticks for me yeah it's a
John:
Couches are tough.
John:
I should write something about how hard it is to find couches, but yeah, they're just... And you have to go sit in them.
Marco:
You have to find them in a store.
John:
That's what I did.
John:
I did one on the sitting tour.
John:
I was like, this is it.
John:
I have candidate couches.
John:
They're all roughly the right measurements.
John:
They have all the things I want about them.
John:
I'm going to sit on them, and you'd sit on them, and you'd be like... What I've said to myself was, Grandma's couch that is torn to shreds and incredibly ugly is more comfortable than this.
John:
It's sad to say that, but it was true.
John:
So I'm not going to pay all this money for a couch that is...
John:
I mean, it's going to be less ugly, but not as comfortable as the current one we have.
John:
It's rough.
Marco:
Yeah, it is shocking how difficult it is to find a couch that fits you comfort wise.
Marco:
Like you have to just go to a big furniture store and sit in a whole bunch of them.
Marco:
And usually at the end of that, you'll have either one or zero that you like.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Can confirm.
Casey:
Alright, moving right along.
Casey:
Adam Worrell writes that Marco is right.
Casey:
Calibration can prevent a magnetic watch band from throwing off the compass.
Casey:
I'm an aerospace engineer and satellites can use magnetometers to figure out which way they're pointing, even with magnets and ferrous metals nearby.
Casey:
The key is that those disturbances are fixed with respect to the satellite or watch, while the Earth's magnetic field is locked to the Earth.
Casey:
Use GPS to look up the local magnetic field, take measurements while rotating the device, and solve for the calibration parameters.
Casey:
Normal watch behavior involves a lot of movement and rotation, so this could be entirely transparent to the user, or it could be a prompted swirling motion the iPhone compass app sometimes asks for.
John:
Yeah, this is the key bit we were missing, I was missing, and the last one is like,
John:
oh, what about third-party watch bands?
John:
And they have magnets that Apple doesn't know the strength of.
John:
That doesn't matter because the Earth's magnetic field is always in the same place, right?
John:
So even if you put different strength magnets or whatever that Apple didn't anticipate, the key is whatever those things are, pick any strengths you want, they're going to be attached to the watch, but the Earth's magnetic field is not attached to the watch.
John:
So as the watch moves in your normal usage or if you're asked to swirl it or whatever, the Earth's magnetic field will still always be pointing in the same direction.
Casey:
indeed zev eisenberg writes regarding magnets messing with the magnetometer aka the compass and watches the core motion framework can cancel it out and it's not just about calibration of onboard magnets at the factory all ios devices with magnetometer except the original ipad also have a gyroscope core motion takes them both into account to cancel out magnets moving with the device see magsafe car mounts don't break your compass guessing the watch already does the same with two with the same two sensors
John:
So not only can it do it, or in theory, there is even a framework to do it.
John:
So this seems, I mean, not that this makes it any more plausible that the straps are going to be attached with magnets, but we'll see.
John:
At least it doesn't cancel it out.
Casey:
Orlando Herrera writes, I'm a professional cinematographer and camera operator, and I dabble with iOS and now VisionOS development as a hobby.
Casey:
Based on my observations, the pass-through cameras are at the heart of the color and motion blur issues when using pass-through.
Casey:
I suspect the shutter speed of the cameras is slower, possibly to reduce the risk of triggering adverse reactions in individuals who are sensitive to strobing.
Casey:
You can see the degree of motion blur change based on whether or not you are in a well-lit environment versus a dim environment.
Casey:
You can also observe that the pass-through video motion blur is different than the motion blur of Vision OS Windows, which further indicates it's the cameras, not the OLED screens, that cause this behavior.
Casey:
Similarly, I think the vibrancy, saturation, and depth of colors when viewing Vision OS Windows and content is higher than
Casey:
than the pass-through because the pass-through color bit depth is lower to reduce processing time so the device can maintain its low latency target.
Casey:
I imagine an improved pair of processors in a future device could increase the color bit depth while maintaining low latency so the pass-through experience could gain HDR and a higher percentage of the P3 gamut.
John:
Do you find this rings true to you?
John:
Because I'm asking about the motion blur, which I didn't notice myself.
John:
Does the pass-through have different motion blur than window contents?
Casey:
You're asking the wrong person.
Casey:
I can't.
Casey:
I don't see it either, so I'm not sure.
John:
I mean, this makes sense to me because the cameras on the Vision Pro, I mean, they're fine, but they're...
John:
not going to be you know the the fidelity of things that are being drawn in vision os is obviously going to be as perfect as it can be because they're not passing through a camera and a sensor or whatever and yeah cameras with sensors that small especially in the room is dark they're going to have to keep the shutters open for a longer period of time to get enough light and that's definitely going to cause blur but what i had heard is for some people complaining that there was a blur on things when they moved their head including things like windows of vision os applications
Marco:
Yeah, in my experience, I think any kind of motion blurring is true of the Vision OS Windows as well.
Marco:
I noticed it in particular when trying to scroll text and read it in Safari, just within the Vision Pro Safari app.
Marco:
Again, it's not unusable, but if you notice the motion blur in other areas, you will notice it there too.
Marco:
I'll see you next time.
Marco:
Our membership here at ATP offers both of those plus a few other things as well.
Marco:
So the ad-free version of the show, nice and easy.
Marco:
You get the same show everyone else gets but with the ads removed.
Marco:
So it's very convenient.
Marco:
I always love that.
Marco:
I kind of feel like it's a premium experience when I'm listening to a show and there's no ads in it that I have to like, you know, skip over or whatever.
Marco:
Then we also do bonus episodes.
Marco:
These are episodes exclusively for members that come out about once a month on a pretty wide variety of topics.
Marco:
We do like tier rankings of different tech products.
Marco:
We do movie reviews.
Marco:
We do a couple of other like, you know, food things and a couple other fun things.
Marco:
So it's always a lot of fun.
Marco:
If you like us and you like our content, you'll probably like a little bit more of it, and especially with the freedom to go off in a couple of different directions that we wouldn't normally cover on the main show.
Marco:
That's what the bonus episodes do.
Marco:
And we offer a bootleg feed.
Marco:
This gives you the unedited live stream recording.
Marco:
So this is everything that we record from beginning to end on the live episodes.
Marco:
It's basically the unedited raw version of the show.
Marco:
So you have a bit of bonus stuff on the beginning and end of that.
Marco:
Any topic or feedback that we end up cutting in the edit will remain in the bootleg.
Marco:
You get to hear Casey swearing.
Marco:
You get to hear any of my jokes that don't land that I edit out of the publisher version to make myself sound funnier.
Marco:
All that's available in the bootleg.
Marco:
And you get the bootleg right after we finish recording.
Marco:
So it comes out usually about 12 to 16 hours before the main show.
Marco:
You get a little bit early release and a more raw version of it.
Marco:
And a lot of our members actually prefer it listened that way.
Marco:
I think it's kind of cool, actually.
Marco:
So anyway, that's the main thing you're getting with our membership.
Marco:
Add free version of the show, access to the bootleg if you want it, and the bonus episodes for exclusive member content.
Marco:
Check it out today, atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
You can get it for just eight bucks a month.
Marco:
or you know equivalents and a couple other currencies we also have annual plans gift memberships all sorts of fun stuff so once again atp.fm slash join become a member today it is by far the best way to support the show thank you so much and now back to the show
Casey:
Gottfried Chen writes, I recently saw an interview using Meta's version of Personas called Kodak Avatars.
Casey:
They are basically photorealistic, but the scanning process is highly complex and not feasible with consumer hardware.
Casey:
I think it shows that the current technical challenge is the high quality scan.
Casey:
The interview was done using Quest Pro, which I assume is inferior to Vision Pro regarding device sensors.
Casey:
So I wonder if Apple should offer high quality Persona scanning stations in Apple stores so you can do an optional HD scan if you want.
Casey:
I mean, I don't know one way or the other, but I will tell you that I saw, you know, a couple of stills from this video.
Casey:
And my goodness, the quality is night and day better than the personas.
Casey:
And I say this as a persona apologist.
John:
Well, so here's the thing about the avatars, these Kodak avatars.
John:
Obviously, you know, setting aside the fact that I don't know what they use to scan them.
John:
Maybe they use like the fancy laser scanner or whatever, but it's not.
John:
you know as we said the last time we discussed this the miracle of the personas is you take the headset that you bought and you just point at your face for two seconds and it gives you one this is something else but um the uncanny valley which people just throw out that phrase without re-explaining it just assume everyone knows what it is but the uncanny valley is the idea which i don't think has ever really even proven out but people just accept it because it feels right to them but anyway the idea is that as you make something more and more realistic looking
John:
it gets more and more appealing to you until you get really, really close to it being like perfect.
John:
Like, wow, this is totally convincing as a human.
John:
And then you get really, really close to it.
John:
And then it takes a huge dip.
John:
And that is the uncanny value.
John:
It's like, boy, I was liking these avatars more and more as you made them better and better.
John:
But then all of a sudden, right when you got close to them being perfect, now I don't like it at all because it's a scary death mask, right?
John:
There's a lot of questions with this.
John:
How close do you have to get to being perfect for the Uncanny Valley to take place?
John:
If you look at the original paper or whatever, it's just kind of like a wavy line graph, and it's like they don't really make any strong stances about how close you have to get.
John:
It's just a general trend.
John:
It's like things look better right up until they don't, but then after you're perfect again, people like them.
John:
And this is all about how does it feel to a person?
John:
Does it appeal to a person?
John:
Because you want your avatar to be appealing, not repulsive to a person.
John:
i say all this because these much more finely detailed much more photorealistic avatars the the codec avatars from facebook are i think further into the uncanny valley than personas because they are closer to being perfect they're better like in that uncanny valley graph i think they are like over the edge of the roller coaster thing and screaming down in the middle of it like so that
John:
The personas ones, what they have going for them is that their blurriness and sort of slight cartoonishness helps keep them, in my opinion anyway, in my personal Uncanny Valley graph for these, farther up the hill, farther up the big dip that is the Uncanny Valley in that graph.
John:
You can take a look.
John:
We'll link to the paper about this and Facebook's video about it from, what was it, from a couple years ago, a couple months ago?
John:
You decide whether you think that is farther into your uncanny valley or not.
John:
But part of the problem with doing like actual photorealistic humans where there is not a bunch of like fuzzy gaussian blur around everything and sort of, you know, a little bit of caricature is that as you know.
John:
People who make 3D movies and games have known for many, many years.
John:
It's really difficult to do convincing humans because we know what they look like.
John:
And things like subsurface scattering underneath translucent skin, a technology that was sort of pioneered maybe 15 years ago and is now pretty commonplace, is necessary for you to not look like you're not made of plastic.
John:
And I think this is doing that, but doing that well gets expensive real fast.
John:
And then if you see these things in motion, they're not...
John:
You'll see the video of it where you can see the actual human wearing the headset, and then you see their avatar.
John:
And I feel like if you look at the motion of the human, the avatar seems...
John:
stiffer like maybe they're not moving all the parts of it like maybe the mouth doesn't move quite as much and when the mouth moves like the earlobe doesn't move and you might not think those are connected but on a person like when you talk more than just your lips moves and that's very difficult to do unless you carefully model or observe that which is why i think apple's personas
John:
when you look at this, Apple's persona starts to look a lot more like Memojis because they, Apple has chosen the three or four or five most important parts that need to move.
John:
And they've probably put in some simple heuristics of saying, look, we can't tell when the earlobe twitches, but basically every time they make this noise at this volume with this mouth sound, move the earlobe a little bit or whatever.
John:
And I think they're doing a little bit more of like what animators do, which is just give me the gist of it and use what you know about how people talk to make it convincing.
John:
Um,
John:
These ones look a little bit more death-masky to me.
John:
But, hey, everyone has their own opinion on these, so you should take a look.
John:
As for the question, though, should Apple have high-quality persona scanning stations?
John:
Well, I think not if they end up looking like this.
John:
But either way, it's not feasible.
John:
Like, if they ever end up selling a whole bunch of Vision Pros, you can't have people lining up at the Apple store to get their scans.
John:
The whole point is the device should do it for you so that they should continue to work the solution the way they have.
John:
You buy the device, you take it home, you do the scan in the privacy of your own home after you've done your hair and makeup the way you like it.
Casey:
tweak it to your heart's content and they should just keep making that better rather than saying you need to come in for a three-hour session in our laser scanning booth i disagree with you with regard to these uh codec avatars i think these look incredible i really really do and and to me the personas which again i did i am a defender of the personas i think that they are a pretty good idea and they work pretty well i think the codec avatars look way way better
John:
Do you think they're on the other side of the Uncanny Valley or they haven't dipped into it yet?
John:
Do you know the Uncanny Valley chart I'm talking about?
Casey:
I've got to find out.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
I think that the Personas are dipping into the Uncanny Valley.
Casey:
I certainly don't think they're at the bottom of the Uncanny Valley by any stretch, but I think they're dipping in.
John:
But if you think the Personas look better, then the Personas aren't even in the Uncanny Valley for you yet, right?
Casey:
Correct.
Casey:
Yep, I would agree with that.
Casey:
I would agree with that retelling of my opinion.
Casey:
I don't want to imply that you feel the same way.
John:
This is kind of like a Bezos chart.
John:
I just put a link from the Wikipedia page to the Uncanny Valley thing.
John:
And I mean, I guess, where is the dip?
John:
Is it like at 90-ish percent?
John:
It's very fudgy.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
No, to me, I feel like the Personas are starting down the cliff, but they haven't fallen yet.
Casey:
And I feel like this is comfortably on the upswing, if not the top, on the other side of the valley for me.
John:
Other side.
John:
All right.
John:
Well, maybe you need to play more video games.
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, actually, that's probably true.
Casey:
That's actually a really, really good point.
John:
Because these look about as good as like, you know, the cut scenes in Last of Us Part 2, for example.
Casey:
No, that's a really good point, actually.
Casey:
And I think you were saying it kind of tongue in cheek, but I think you're right.
Casey:
Because I very rarely play any video games, I don't know what the state of the art is on this sort of stuff yet.
Casey:
But kind of tangentially related to this, recently I did a podcast with Wojciech.
Casey:
I'm not even going to try to pronounce his last name.
Casey:
I'm so sorry.
Casey:
But it was a Polish podcast, which obviously I don't speak Polish, but he speaks phenomenal English.
Casey:
And we did this in the same style as Gruber in Sandwich with Adam Lissagor on the talk show.
Casey:
And we were doing this just with our personas.
Casey:
And I've never met him in person.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
I don't know what he looks like.
Casey:
And to me, his persona looked completely good, like completely great even.
Casey:
But I think that's in no small part, in fact, entirely because I don't know what he actually looks like.
Casey:
Like I've seen photographs of him, you know, from time to time.
John:
I bet his hair is not blurry in real life.
Casey:
Fair.
Casey:
But I think you get the point.
Casey:
I'm driving that is when you don't have a relationship, a physical relationship with this person insofar as you've never been in the same space before.
Casey:
I thought the personas were great, actually.
Casey:
It didn't feel unnatural to me at all.
Casey:
Now, that's probably that would be very different if I was talking to you or Marco or Mike or Jason or what have you.
Casey:
But but for for an instance where this person was not a stranger, but is sort of kind of a stranger, like I'm underselling our relationship.
Casey:
You get my point.
Casey:
It was very passable to me.
Casey:
And then there's a video, a YouTube video, which will link the show notes if you want to see this for yourself.
Casey:
But I thought it was really good.
Casey:
Teach your own.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Moving right along.
Casey:
There's a gate now for the Vision Pro and it's crack gate.
Casey:
Some Apple Vision Pro units develop an identical crack in the cover glass, reports Mac rumors.
Casey:
A small number of Apple Vision Pro owners have claimed that their headsets developed a hairline crack right down the middle of the front cover glass, despite never having been dropped or mishandled.
Casey:
And there's a link in this article that makes it pretty clear what they're talking about.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, this kind of thing, it looks like kind of a standard manufacturing defect or weakness with a certain stress point in the glass that probably is no fault to the people who are using it.
Marco:
Again, it's unfortunate, but it's a version one product of a very, very complicated design.
Marco:
So this kind of stuff happens.
Marco:
They'll fix it.
Marco:
It'll be fine in the long run.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
There is breaking news.
Casey:
This was just today, wasn't it?
Casey:
As we record, uh, Apple has officially canceled project Titan ending a decade long and allegedly 10 billion, billion dollar efforts.
Casey:
Uh, this is reported by Bloomberg and also the New York times.
Casey:
We'll put links in the show notes from Bloomberg.
Casey:
Apple Inc is canceling a decade long effort to build an electric car.
Casey:
According to people with knowledge of the matter, abandoning one of the most ambitious projects in the history of the company.
Casey:
Apple made the disclosure internally Tuesday, uh,
Casey:
surprising the nearly 2,000 employees working on the project.
John:
It wasn't really that much of a surprise, I guess.
Casey:
Fair, fair.
Casey:
The decision was shared by Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams and Kevin Lynch, a vice president in charge of the effort.
Casey:
The two executives told staffers that the project will begin winding down and that many employees on the team working on the car, known as the Special Projects Group, or SPG,
Casey:
will be shifted to the Artificial Intelligence Division under Executive John Gianandria.
Casey:
Something like that, I'm sorry.
Casey:
Those employees will focus on generative AI projects, an increasingly key priority for the company.
John:
This is an interesting confluence of events here because the fact that they're taking some – I mean, first, some employees are going to be leaving.
John:
The people who knew how to build cars, I'm not sure Apple needs those people.
John:
But shifting the other employees to AI projects made me think of exactly – I was even thinking of blogging this but didn't have time because it just came out today –
John:
how i would sum up uh this you know 10-year foray into the car project as we always called the project titan um for apple uh and it it's related to ai um when i was a kid i read a lot about computers and stuff and i used to read a lot about ai because who wouldn't it's cool you watch 2001 you know you're learning about computers you want to learn about computers that are like hell 9000 but don't kill people spoiler alert
Casey:
Yeah, seriously, I've never seen it.
John:
Sorry.
John:
When are computers going to be smart and talk like people?
John:
That'll be so cool.
John:
It's all in all the science fiction.
John:
Let me learn about where computers are today.
John:
And let me tell you, when I was a kid in the 70s, you'd see stories on PBS and books that I'd check out of the library and stuff that would say like, look, here's this computer they've made and here's what it can do.
John:
And
John:
people were super excited.
John:
They're like, look what we've made this do.
John:
I know it doesn't seem that smart to you, but I can talk to it and ask it questions and it understands the sentence and it knows what the different parts of the sentence mean and it can reason about things and make inferences and respond to me.
John:
And...
John:
People were so excited about that.
John:
And they'd say, and you know what?
John:
Look at computer chips.
John:
It's 1974, but in 1975, computer chips are going to be even better.
John:
In the 1976, they're going to be even better.
John:
And if you extrapolate on this graph, you can see that in the year 2000, computer chips are just going to be massively more powerful than they are now.
John:
And then you look at this AI thing and look what we've done now.
John:
And it's kind of dumb now, but we're on the right track, right?
John:
And so if we just follow this graph, by the year 1988, computers should be smarter than any human on the planet.
John:
And this is what I read about when I was a kid.
John:
And when I got a little bit older, you kind of realize that since the 60s or the 50s or whenever they first tried to do this, everybody thought...
John:
hell 9000 is going to be like you know at most 20 years in the future because just look at this graph right i mean i didn't know the term moore's law then or whatever but i was experiencing the advance of technology which was my computers were getting faster and faster all the time and the video games i played in the 70s were so much worse than the video games i played in the 80s and 90s or whatever so you i was living the progression and yet i
John:
artificial intelligence before the current ai trend that is in a computer that thinks and talks like a person like again how 9000 but not murderous um or any other things you see in sci-fi very smart people really believed that you know although we what we have now is not great in five to ten years it'll be better and in 20 years it will be the most intelligent thing on the planet earth and
John:
And as part of my, you know, I talked about this in Rectus ages ago, discovering the parameters of the world.
John:
Can you move things with your mind?
John:
How big is the universe?
John:
Are we going to make computers that think?
John:
One of the parameters of the world was people always kind of think break-even fusion and artificial intelligence are much closer than they actually are.
John:
And as excited as I was about it, as the years went by, and you saw the same stories, and everyone said it's probably five to ten years in the future, you figured out that
John:
These people hadn't yet found the right approach to this problem.
John:
We found the right approach to flying, which is like fixed-wing aircraft with engines.
John:
We found the right approach to doing math, because we're getting really good at that with our computer chips.
John:
That approach, we're just like, that's the way, just start scaling it.
John:
And that's served us well up until today.
John:
But we haven't yet found the right approach to computers that can think.
John:
And so with the car project Apple like like all those excited scientists in the 70s that I was reading about and like so many other companies in the world decided that Cars that drive themselves are probably right around the corner
John:
look what we can do now it's pretty impressive and if we just extrapolate and say if we just continue along this path and our computing resources get better like in you know five to ten years all of our cars are going to have no steering wheels and they're going to be driving ourselves because look at our progress and look how look what we're already able to do in such a short time surely by insert year that has already passed here that
John:
All cars will be self-driving, and driving will be obsolete.
John:
And that's why Apple embarked on this project, because if that's going to be a thing, that is a big disruption to the transportation world, and Apple should probably be in on that.
John:
And they were focusing on making a car that was autonomous in some way.
John:
And if you're wondering why Apple thinks they should make a car, it's not because...
John:
you know, they just wanted to make something in an industry, like in a low margin industry, they wanted to get a part of, they're like, well, this, this industry is about to be disrupted.
John:
In fact, we'll put a link in the show notes to Tim Cook, an interview in 2017 where the interviewer is asking him essentially about the car project or about automotive stuff.
John:
And Tim Cook flat out says, I think there's a disruption coming and it's because of autonomy.
John:
Uh, and you know, Apple wants to be in on that and whatever vague way he said it to not, you know, mention unreleased products.
Um,
John:
A lot of people thought that.
John:
Uber thought that.
John:
You know, we hire drivers now, but kind of like Netflix sent people DVDs for a while.
John:
That's just how we're going to start.
John:
Eventually, we're not going to need the drivers.
John:
The cars will drive themselves.
John:
So many companies looked at what they had, and just like the AI people said...
John:
This is amazing and in five years it will be so much better Turns out they did not have the right approach No, no has the right approach yet No one knows how to make a car that can drive itself as well as humans can drive in all conditions It's not like it hasn't gotten better.
John:
It's gotten way way better Waymo has cars that can totally drive themselves in limited circumstances in limited areas doing a pretty good job but
John:
Even Waymo is approaching the limits of the techniques that it has been using.
John:
So Apple failing on this project is just a consequence of us collectively as humans having not yet found the correct approach to make a car that drives itself.
John:
We can make a car that helps you drive a little bit better and the jury's still out on whether it helps you or not based on you actually paying attention or not.
John:
But we haven't found the right approach where it's like, if we just do this for five more years, we'll be there.
John:
Unlike, for example, adding numbers together in your CPU.
John:
We found the right approach for that, right?
John:
Or planes or whatever.
John:
And that's disappointing for everybody involved.
John:
It's...
John:
If you're wondering why Apple spent $10 billion in 10 years doing this, important people at Apple, like Tim Cook, or if you read the New York Times story, Johnny Ive, had convinced themselves or had been convinced by the hype or the other people they respect in the industry that
John:
That this was a thing they thought they could do.
John:
Like they said, look, look, look at what Tesla's, for example, been able to do now.
John:
We're smarter than them.
John:
And they're already almost there.
John:
Let's get on this.
John:
Maybe we can beat them to it, because surely one of us is going to crack this problem in the next five years.
John:
And the answer was no.
John:
No one's going to crack it in the next five years.
John:
No one's going to crack it in the next 10 years.
John:
When are we going to crack it?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Is the current approach the right one?
John:
Seems like not.
John:
But maybe it is and we just have to do it for 20 more years.
John:
But talk to the AI people.
John:
Everyone thinks what we've done is amazing.
John:
What we've achieved is amazing.
John:
Extrapolate and we'll get there.
John:
And this is yet another disappointing instance in my adult life of...
John:
large portions of smart people in the world thinking that a thing was right around the corner and it wasn't, which is weird because most of the time, if you listen to a tech podcast or you're interested in tech, most of the time tech does sort of fulfill our dreams even more.
John:
So like computers really did get way better.
John:
Video games got so much better.
John:
Like so much, if you, if you could take like child me and show them like to mention again, the last of us part two, it would have exploded my brain.
John:
Right.
John:
That really did happen just like everyone thought it do.
John:
In fact, maybe even faster.
John:
The Internet, the Internet, look at that happened so much faster than people thought it was.
John:
People underestimated that.
John:
But sometimes if you think something is around the corner, sometimes you're going to be wrong because it turns out you're barking up the wrong tree.
John:
And I think all of humanity so far has been barking up the wrong tree and getting cars that can drive themselves as well as humans in all conditions.
John:
And that's sad for the little versions of me who are seven years old checking books out of the library about self-driving cars now.
John:
And they're going to have to learn.
John:
I guess they just didn't figure it out.
John:
Doesn't mean we're never going to figure it out.
John:
We might eventually.
John:
But Apple, let's say Apple is taking a break for a few decades before they take another run at this.
John:
Because if it does become plausible, they should probably dive back in and participate in this industry.
John:
But right now, I think even Waymo had a big thing where they were like, yeah, we're kind of giving up on the whole self-driving everywhere thing.
John:
And we're just concentrating on limited circumstances.
John:
Everyone who has tried this, as they say in Dune, they tried and failed.
John:
They tried and died.
John:
Well, they didn't die.
John:
But, you know, the projects died.
John:
I think this is unsurprising, but disappointing for little kids everywhere.
Marco:
I think the car project, we've been saying for a long time now that we didn't.
Marco:
really understand why they were doing this obviously it's very hard to judge with something this secretive we don't really know how much progress they were making but it sure has seemed like over time this project has not been going well we've heard of a number of reboots and reorganizations and changing directions you know there's been so much um you know change in the project trying to i guess get it to go in in a in a good direction well
John:
On that, though, in the 2017 video, Tim Cook flat out says, we think there's going to be disruption in the automotive industry, and it's because of self-driving and automation, essentially.
John:
But then the most recent reboot that we heard about and talked about on the show was Apple said, yeah, forget about self-driving.
John:
We're still going to do a car, but it'll just be like...
John:
You know, current sort of driver aid type stuff.
John:
And that is not the, that was not the vision according to Tim Cook in 2017.
John:
It's not like, oh, we just want to make a car because we want to make a car.
John:
He thought there was going to be disruption related to automation.
John:
And that basically turned out to not be the case in the timeframe that they cared about.
John:
And so...
John:
changing the project like oh let's reboot it but now we're just going to make a plain old car that's like everyone else's car it's not an exciting project and I'm very glad that Apple chose not to do it even if they had gotten the self-driving part to progress further and that was still the plan for the project
Marco:
Even then, I still don't think Apple is the right company to do that for lots of reasons.
Marco:
It doesn't really fit a lot of their business shape and style and principles.
Marco:
We discussed recently how it seemed to be almost impossible to fit that into their new carbon goals, for instance.
Marco:
Their goal with carbon neutrality is to have their products be carbon neutral end-to-end over their entire lifetime, including the energy they use during their useful lives.
Marco:
That's really hard for a car.
John:
Well, the rumor is it was going to be like 100 grand.
John:
So maybe they'd sell so few of them that they could carbon offset every single one they sold because the volumes would be low.
John:
But yeah, I do really wonder, I mean, maybe when they made that commitment, they kind of knew that the car project was going to get canceled because you either don't sell a lot of cars and do a lot of carbon offsets or you can't meet your goals because they can't transform the world's energy infrastructure to be carbon neutral to power all their cars.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
And so that I feel like the carbon plan was always at direct odds with the car project.
Marco:
And I don't know how they could have possibly ever resolved that.
Marco:
And the other thing is, like, we've heard through a few different channels about Tim Cook really believing very strongly about
Marco:
allegedly even saying directly apple products don't kill people period like apple does not make products that kill people at least you know directly obviously you can text in your phone and crash but they feel very strongly about that and i think that's that's a very good thing both for the world and of course on a small level for their brand and it's a luxury it's a luxury for their is there a company that currently doesn't sell things that can directly kill you
John:
Right.
John:
And so they're getting, they're thinking of getting into a business where you can't avoid that cars, people die in car accidents.
John:
Right.
John:
So I don't know how he would square that stance or that's just like a soundbite really.
John:
But like the idea is we don't, we don't want to be a company that does that, but we also want to get into the car business.
John:
Well, I have some bad news for you about cars.
John:
There's no such thing as a car that doesn't sometimes kill people due to car accidents.
John:
At least not yet.
John:
Maybe they thought they could make one again with the self-driving thing, but yeah,
John:
You're making that choice.
John:
You could just keep making phones and computers, and they're not going to crash into you and kill you, right?
John:
But you're choosing to try for a car, and that's changing things up.
Marco:
Again, we've been wondering for years why this project was still going on.
Marco:
It seemed like it was...
Marco:
a pretty long shot from the start and it seemed like it was never going super well so i'm glad to hear that they finally axed it you know obviously for all the tumult this is going to cause the actual people working on it including probably a bunch of lost jobs that's not great um but for the company strategically and and for the leadership to have chosen a direction
Marco:
I think they made the right call.
Marco:
I kind of don't know why they didn't make it years ago, but I'm sure they had their reasons, whatever the reasons were.
Marco:
Now they've made the right call.
Marco:
This project is seemingly really finally dead.
Marco:
And I think it's better that they don't continue to waste all of this experimental money and opportunity cost.
Marco:
on a project that's very unlikely to ever be very good for them because now they have freed up that capacity maybe not the exact people because it's different specialties but they've at least freed up like that organizational capacity that money how about that sure you know the money is a big part of it of course but also just you know focus talent you know like there's other other limited resources they have
Marco:
Now they can focus that on products and improvements to their other products that are much more likely to actually benefit them and their customers.
Marco:
The car project was always kind of this massive moonshot.
Marco:
It was very, very expensive.
Marco:
And so if they're now redirecting that towards things like better Siri, you know, which is what, you know, you know, whatever we're going to call all their new AI efforts, that's way more likely to both a succeed and B to actually benefit their customers in useful ways and to benefit the rest of their products together.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
We see what Apple does.
Marco:
They share a lot of tech.
Marco:
They share a lot of advancements.
Marco:
They share a lot of software between all the different platforms.
Marco:
They share parts.
Marco:
They share techniques.
Marco:
They share manufacturing strategies and things between all the different platforms.
Marco:
They share supplies and suppliers.
Marco:
With the car, it was always kind of like, does this have any chance of benefiting their other products?
Marco:
Not much.
Marco:
You know, how would it even fit into their retail strategy?
Marco:
Who knows?
John:
I mean, it's not even clear from the outside how much car play was shared with Project Titan.
Marco:
It seemed like not at all.
Marco:
So like, except maybe like some dashboard design concepts.
John:
Yeah, maybe some underlying stuff.
John:
Like, it's so hard to tell.
John:
And on this topic, by the way, not to get back into Vision Pro, but, you know, this is something that's come up with all the demos.
John:
Like, when you see, obviously, ARKit and stuff, we saw all that coming out to iOS and macOS.
John:
And it's like, oh, that's going to be for the headset, right?
John:
And, yeah, there's a connection there, right?
John:
But now that Vision Pro is out and you see universal control,
John:
It's easy to just retcon it and say, I bet they did universal control for the headset and it just came out earlier on Mac and iOS.
John:
That could be true or it could be the reverse.
John:
They did it on Mac and iOS and the headset team adopted it.
John:
But that's the nature of things inside Apple.
John:
They will share things.
John:
between their projects when it makes sense to get the most value out of it and from the outside it's very difficult to tell did for example universal control start with the headset team and and trickle down to ios and mac os or was it the reverse it doesn't really matter either way they're getting the most bang for the buck out of that technology they developed they developed universal control and it has broad applicability across their products and so now you look at the car project what things
John:
in mac os ios ipad os or whatever have broad applicability to the car and vice versa and you know you go for carplay it's like well carplay that's got to be a thing but because we know so little about the car and because carplay is such a odd duck it's like maybe not even that was shared so i the best you can come up with is like maybe like whatever real-time operating system and tooling and stuff they came up with the car they'll find a use for but it's so hard to tell from the outside and the the synergies are not quite as obvious as like universal control or ar kit
Marco:
Yeah, and I think there's probably just fewer of them in general.
Marco:
And that's why I think axing this project is the right move strategically for the company because now whatever the special projects group can work on can be things that the company might have actual other use for in much larger scales.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
We see with Apple, they historically were very bad at multitasking.
Marco:
They've gotten a lot better in recent years.
Marco:
But still, you don't really want them, as a fan of their products and as a customer of their products, you don't really want them to have massive distraction projects that don't benefit the products you use.
Marco:
With Vision Pro, we actually see that there is a decent amount of shared innovation between Vision Pro and their other products, probably, that we as customers were able to benefit from.
Marco:
With the car, it seems like
Marco:
whatever we would benefit from that would be much more limited with the other products.
John:
That was kind of an advantage though, because you felt like, well, they hired a lot of new car people to work on the car.
John:
So those people weren't even an Apple to begin with.
John:
So you're not stealing that many people from other teams.
John:
And because there's so little crossover, I think for the 10 years that this project ran, it was a money pit and maybe it did suck in some important talent, but it was less of a drain than for example, iOS and the iPhone were.
John:
Or where Jobs came out on stage and said, yeah, you're not getting a new version of Mac OS because we put all those people on the phone because it's more important.
John:
Sorry.
John:
I'm sure that did happen, but to a lesser extent, just because so many more people had to be hired from the car industry.
John:
So that was one blessing.
John:
I think that's part of the reason this project lasted so long, like the open secret that they were doing this.
John:
And it didn't sideline the whole company for a decade.
John:
The company continued to do what it was doing.
John:
Yes, there was some impact, but the iPhone...
John:
shoved the whole company off of its previous track and eventually it found a new track.
John:
Project Titan didn't do that.
John:
Project Titan was just like a $10 billion quiet little leech off in the corner.
John:
But Apple continued to be able to function in its main business.
Marco:
And it's a very different company in that decade than it was before that as well.
Marco:
So obviously that's a different scenario.
Marco:
But I do think it's interesting to consider for years we had heard about these two giant Skunk Works projects, the car and the headset.
Marco:
Well, now the car is dead and we have the headset.
Marco:
What do you think is the next big Apple Skunk Works project that isn't out yet?
Marco:
I guess AI in general could be something like that.
Marco:
And I'm sure we're going to see more of that, as the rumors indicate, probably this summer.
Marco:
And honestly, I'm very much looking forward to whatever this ends up being.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Do we know of any other like large rumored skunk works projects that seem at all plausible that Apple has been working on?
John:
I think this is the time maybe to talk about this, which I think will very clearly probably quickly not happen and we don't have to think about it.
John:
But because of this announcement, people who really want Apple to make a car have been saying, you know, Apple, if you've decided that disruption in the automotive market is not imminent due to self-driving, which I think is the correct conclusion.
John:
But you still want to be in the automotive market because you think people in your team know how to make cool dashboard things like the new CarPlay or you just want to you want a new platform that you can own like you want to own the infotainment stack or whatever.
John:
um there's still a way for apple to be in the car business and part of the thing when we've talked about the car project in the past we're like apple's good at making electronic gadgets and if you squint you can call a car an electronic gadget but honestly there's a whole bunch of parts of that that are not electronic gadgetry like suspension and brakes and apple just doesn't really make anything yeah that's that's kind of like saying like my oven is an electric gadget because it has a control panel on the front of it like
John:
Yeah, things that you sit inside that travel, like the skill set of how to do that.
John:
And that's before you even get to stuff like the batteries, which I know Apple has some knowledge about from all of its gadgets, but it's a different scale entirely there.
John:
And electrical motors, which, you know, there are some in the Vision Pro, I guess, but not Apple's area of expertise for sure.
John:
But if Apple still wants to be in the electric car business, they could buy...
John:
lucid and rivian and have some cars suvs and trucks that would you know suddenly support carplay yay uh and they would have you know instant expertise lucid has the best powertrains in the entire industry and the best ev packaging in the
Casey:
Oh, we're going to get so much email.
Casey:
Please don't do that, John.
John:
You're just tempting them now.
John:
This is not questionable.
John:
I think it's 100% defensible.
John:
Oh, God, you're making it worse.
John:
Just based on the numbers.
John:
How big is the engine?
John:
How much power does it produce?
John:
How efficient is it?
John:
Lucid has the best electric powertrains in the industry.
John:
They might not have the best batteries, but their batteries are pretty good.
John:
Rivian is really the only game in town for...
John:
sort of non-mainstream fancy Apple-style pickup trucks and truck-like SUVs because, you know, the mainstream makers make them, but Rivian is the froofy kind of Apple-ish brand.
John:
And the important thing about Apple buying both of those, one, it will probably cost less money than they already spent on Project Titan.
John:
Two, everything those companies do is stuff that Apple, as far as I know, does not know how to do.
John:
Like, all the rumors are like they're going to build their own car.
John:
They're like, oh, here's who they're going to build it for them or whatever.
John:
I'm like...
John:
Do you think Apple's going to get the – like the people who started Lucid were all – like the lead engineer for the Tesla Model S started Lucid.
John:
Like they cut their teeth at Tesla and then they came over and did Lucid.
John:
Apple has done none of those things.
John:
So they think out of the gate they're going to come up with –
John:
a an electric car that they you know solve all these manufacturing problems before everyone else has such a head start on them i know they said the same thing about the cell phones you know the pc people aren't going to walk in but let me tell you a cell phone is much closer to a personal computer than a car is it's a big gap there right so if they wanted to be in this business because they think i mean i don't know they i think they shouldn't because this is low margin business and apple products don't kill people and yada yada if they're not going to be self-driving there's no real point but if they really want to
John:
A much faster and better way to spend that money is to save these two companies that are currently having some difficulties, harvest all the people and technology that they have, and voila, now you have a line of Apple cars.
John:
If Tim Cook decides, he's the CEO, and if he and the board think that Apple should be selling EVs,
John:
That is, I think the only reasonable way to do it in a reasonable timeframe.
John:
If not, again, let's just revisit, you know, making a car in 20 to 50 years and maybe the self-driving thing will have, uh, will be more plausible then.
John:
But yeah, like I'm, I'm with Marco that I'm relieved that they're not doing this because once they're not making a self-driving thing, which it's been obvious that they're not going to do for a while now to everyone except for apparently Apple, um,
John:
Just making a car is not something I have any faith that Apple would be any good at.
John:
At all.
John:
Like, nothing they've done makes me think, boy, if only Apple would make a car, they'd be great at it.
John:
Nope.
John:
Absolutely not.
John:
And making a car is, ask Rivian, ask Tesla, ask Lucid.
John:
Making cars is very, very difficult.
John:
Like...
John:
It's not something that you get right on the first try or the second try or the third try.
John:
Car companies have been around for a long time.
John:
They've had time to work out a lot of this stuff.
John:
And even they get stuck in their ways, which is why people can innovate around them.
John:
But just the first several years of Tesla, the first several years of Rivian and Lucid...
John:
manufacturing big important things like that complying with regulations making them safe reliable like just it's really hard and apple has never done anything like that at that scale and it is so different than cell phones and computers that i don't think they could pull it off so if they really really want to do this
John:
make some acquisitions by by the the struggling they tried to buy tesla you know that's you can read the story they tried to buy tesla way back when so it's clear that they were open to that idea uh but if the if the car dream is still alive at apple uh they should buy lucid and rivian i hope the car dream is not alive at apple and they should just ignore this for another 50 years
Marco:
Well, I think if anything, first of all, I think you're right.
Marco:
That would be probably the best way for them to get into it at this point.
Marco:
But if anything, that shows why they shouldn't get into the car business.
Marco:
Because suppose tomorrow Apple buys Lucid and Rivian.
Marco:
Okay, now what?
Marco:
Like, why did they do that?
Marco:
And then how do they integrate that into the rest of their business?
Marco:
Well, it's still a massive question of like, now Apple's a car company.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
Now, why do they want to be a car company?
Marco:
And now they have to deal with being a car company.
John:
Right, but they would give them two car companies that are already car companies, and they're car companies with problems, and there's a lot of growing pains, but they jumpstart it.
John:
They don't have to worry, will we make a car that people want?
John:
Will we make a good car?
John:
Those two companies have already made cars that people want that are good.
John:
They're just not making money making them.
John:
So Apple has a little bit more runway than those two companies do to figure out a way to start making them profitable.
John:
And obviously they would integrate with them.
John:
And I think Jeff Johnson had a good snarky tweet about this whole thing, which is snarky.
John:
But also I think there's kind of a point in that why Apple might want to be in this historically low margin business.
John:
He says, bemoaning the end of the car project,
John:
But I so wanted a car that demanded 30% of every shopping trip and refused to travel to destinations unapproved by the manufacturer.
John:
Got him.
John:
But like, that's the thing.
John:
That's kind of the reason Apple was interested in this thing is like, oh, the automotive market is being disrupted.
John:
And if the automotive market is being disrupted, that is an opportunity for us to find another place for one of our platforms.
John:
And modern Apple, when they find a place for one of their platforms, they're like, we need to have a platform where
John:
which we will then leverage to extract, you know, 30% from everybody, right?
John:
That's their MO.
John:
Hasn't been going that great, but they hit it out of the park once with the iPhone.
John:
And so they've used that model for every other new platform they've tried to roll out.
John:
Apple TV, Vision Pro.
John:
iPad, I know those all kind of look like you squint and like, oh, that's just an extension of the iPhone, right?
John:
But the inside of the car, the inside of any sort of inside of cars are becoming more looking more and more like a platform that Apple could participate in.
John:
The problem is if Apple doesn't isn't literally a car company.
John:
It might be difficult to pull a Microsoft and become the software platform for everybody else's hardware.
John:
Apple's trying, but there's a little bit of pushback contention there.
John:
So why would Apple want to be in the car business at all?
John:
I think cars will continue to be low margin.
John:
But I think there is a potential future to...
John:
you know, using the terminology, extracting rents from the platform, the software platform that lives inside cars.
John:
Certainly every car manufacturer wants to do that.
John:
Just ask GM.
John:
That's why they don't want CarPlay in the car.
John:
They want to be the one, you know, skimming off the top of everything that happens inside the car that they can.
John:
I'm not sure there's a business plan there.
John:
Apparently it's not selling rental, renting heated seats to people like BMW tried, but that is, I think that's in the absence of self-driving disruption.
Yeah.
John:
Another place for a platform is, I think, what would still have a chance to attract Apple to cars.
John:
But who knows?
John:
Maybe the CarPlay project is that and they don't need to make a car.
John:
It's too early to tell.
Casey:
I'm going back to what you were saying about Lucid and Rivian.
Casey:
And the co-host of Neutral in me says, heck yeah, that sounds amazing.
Casey:
Because I think Rivian is arguably more spiritually similar to Apple than Tesla.
Casey:
I think that Lucid, to your point, has some of the best and most advanced technology technologies.
Casey:
Please don't email us tussle people.
Casey:
We don't care.
Casey:
So I agree with you as a car enthusiast, as someone who at least tries to watch and understand Apple.
Casey:
I can't imagine them saying about a business, as you've noted, is very low margin, which they can't be too keen on to begin with.
Casey:
I can't imagine they're going to say, let's spend a sum total of roughly $20 billion, because that's the sum total of the market cap of the two companies today,
Casey:
Let's spend $20 billion on two companies that are barely keeping themselves afloat.
John:
You wait a little bit longer.
John:
Lucid will get cheaper, I think.
John:
Okay, sure.
John:
And so might Rivian.
Casey:
But then, I mean, so we're buying these beleaguered, you know, failing companies.
Casey:
Yeah, we're getting them on the cheap, but if they were good, they wouldn't be beleaguered and cheap, you know?
John:
No, that's not true at all.
John:
Their problem is they need to get through the scary growth period, like the Tesla barely made it through.
John:
Tesla almost went out of business several times too, right?
John:
But it takes so much capital to sort of get the ball rolling, to work out all the kinks.
John:
And both of them are kind of on the bubble.
John:
Yeah.
John:
They're probably going to make it, but Tesla just like barely made it due to like some savvy fundraising and government mooching from Elon Musk at the right time, right?
John:
Like it's a tough gig in the car business.
John:
So I don't think they're beleaguered because they have bad products.
John:
They have great products.
John:
They're just beleaguered because making a car costs a lot of money and they're not entirely sure that they'll get past the point where they're just plowing and plowing in money and then they're selling a smallish number of cars for a very low or negative margin.
John:
And it's just kind of like Amazon.
John:
It's like, just give us another decade to not make any profit, but eventually we will.
John:
And Amazon did eventually and they had that runway.
John:
Rivian and Lucid remains to be seen if they will be able to find the funding to give themselves that runway.
John:
But you know who can give them that funding?
John:
Apple.
Casey:
I mean, that's true, but I just don't think Apple would have that kind of patience, especially after having been burned by being $10 billion in and having not a lot to show for it.
John:
Well, they did have the patience for that 10-year boondoggle project.
John:
I mean, that's true.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It doesn't ultimately matter, but it is an interesting thought exercise of nothing else.
John:
Yeah, I mean, honestly, I feel like Apple will not do this because they should – I think they're done with cars for a while, right?
John:
But if someone inside Apple just demands it, like just like, no, we need to be in cars, which I don't think is true because, again, if Tim Cook's whole reason was that it was about self-driving disruption, I think he's now dissuaded of that and he's fine.
John:
But if someone demanded it, that would be the only feasible way to do it.
John:
Because if they didn't and they tried to make a car on their own, I think it would be embarrassing for them because their car would –
John:
They wouldn't have to worry about losing money because I got so much money, but they'd make a car and that car would have to compete with beleaguered Rivian Lucid and then not beleaguered Tesla.
John:
Right.
John:
And I don't think it would fare that well because I don't think Apple is good at almost any of the things you need to be good at to make a good car.
John:
So, yeah, I just, you know, I just I think I should leave it alone.
John:
But if they don't leave it alone, they should buy Rivian and Tesla.
John:
And heck, even if they don't want to be in the car business at all, Apple should just, you know, give an investment to Lucid and reap it when the company comes roaring back two decades from now.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
We'll see where it goes.
Casey:
I think I am certainly in support of Apple, you know, letting go and stop trying to make Fetch happen.
Casey:
I echo what I think it was Marco who had said, you know, I feel terrible for all these people that are going to now have to find either new jobs than Apple or new jobs entirely like that.
Casey:
That stinks.
Casey:
But
Casey:
I think on the whole, it's better for Apple to go this way.
Casey:
I suspect a lot has been learned from this, and I feel like I shared the same theory a while back, and I feel like somebody debunked it.
Casey:
But here I am again thinking that I wonder if the real-time OS or some of the things that they learned building a real-time OS for the car were used in the R1 for the Vision Pro.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Maybe, maybe not.
John:
Yeah, that was debunked.
John:
But like, I think you'd have a good point with the computer vision aspect, because Apple does now have a platform that could benefit from computer vision expertise.
John:
And so those people on the car project who are probably super isolated from the headset project, because why wouldn't they be?
John:
Bring those people to Vision Pro now, because that is expert.
John:
Even if it's not technology that they're currently using that crosses over, that expertise for sure crosses over.
Marco:
And now also, with this talent and budget and executive focus freed up from this project, if you think about what else could they do, even without having good uses of shared technology with their other products, they could do something like pour more money into the idea of a glucose monitor for the Apple Watch.
John:
Yeah, I think they're already doing that.
John:
But yeah, freeing up the money is good for everything across the board.
John:
Of course, if you told me what they should give the money to, it's just fixing bugs in macOS.
John:
But I don't think that's probably going to be high on their list.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But, you know, just take a little bit of that $10 billion or, you know, whatever it is, $1 billion a year that you just freed up.
John:
Put a little slice of that into macOS bug fixing, please.
John:
I don't think it would even take that much.
John:
Yeah.
John:
In terms of what the next big thing is, like, you know, we said this in our first episode in January 2024.
John:
We did, like, what do we expect this year to be for Apple?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And I think one of the things that we got right based on all the stories that are coming out, 2024, the year when Apple sprinkles AI sauce on a bunch of stuff.
John:
I talked in a recent Rectiffs episode about this.
John:
It's going to come out soon.
John:
What are they going to sprinkle it on?
John:
What will actually ship this year?
John:
I don't know, but there's going to be AI sauce and it's going to be sprinkled.
John:
And that is, I don't think that's a, you know, to Marco's question, what's the next big thing?
John:
I don't think that's it because kind of like self-driving cars at this point, I would say that
John:
um the like large language model ai stuff has proved its utility kind of like you know smart lane holding better cruise control things have proved their utility in cars but i also think that we're pretty close to well i think the jury's still out but i i would put money on the fact that the current approach to lms
John:
You can't just do more of that faster and get to HAL 9000.
John:
Maybe it's a piece of the puzzle.
John:
Maybe it's totally off in the wrong direction.
John:
But like, I don't think the next big thing equivalent to the car project is Apple should make a computer that thinks because nobody knows how to do that.
John:
And I don't think the current approaches are going to get us there.
John:
But all that LLM stuff has proven utility.
John:
You can do useful things with it if you use it the right way.
John:
And Apple needs to use that to make its stuff better in all the ways that everyone else is making their stuff better.
John:
Make Siri better.
John:
Make image search better.
John:
There's no question it does that.
John:
Forget about HAL 9000.
John:
You can use this technology, Apple, to make your current products better.
John:
And that is not the car project, the headset, or whatever.
John:
But
John:
I think getting a bunch of people put into that part of the organization is a good thing.
John:
So like rather than, you know, the car project and the headset are both kind of like pie in the sky.
John:
We have a great idea.
John:
We think this is the future.
John:
We're going to try to do it.
John:
One of them, they shipped.
John:
One of them, they didn't.
John:
But they're big pie in the sky things.
John:
This is not pie in the sky.
John:
This is keeping up with the Joneses.
John:
This is, hey, have you noticed what everyone else is doing?
John:
Apple, you should do that too because you've got a lot of stuff that could benefit from things that other people are proving the utility of.
John:
So that I think is going to happen.
John:
Some of it this year, hopefully more of it next year.
John:
And if that's all that came out of this, like that Apple never came up with the next new big thing, I think it'll be fine.
John:
Partially because I think, you know, oh, we got the headset, but we're still waiting for the glasses, right?
John:
Like you can extrapolate from Vision Pro and say, where is this going to go?
John:
And unlike self-driving and HAL 9000, you can see a fairly straightforward path of like just keep iterating on the Vision Pro with increases in technology that we expect to happen.
John:
And, you know, screens get better.
John:
CPUs get better.
John:
Like just we can see that progressing.
John:
We don't quite know how to get all ready glasses.
John:
because some of the display stuff is questionable at this point.
John:
But even if it's just Vision Pro, but better than the current Vision Pro, there is a path to travel there.
John:
And I think that is a big enough project, a brand new platform that is very much more ambitious or different than competing platforms than the other things that it's done.
Yeah.
John:
there's 10 years of runway right there anyway.
John:
So I don't think Apple should be out there saying we need to start something new.
John:
And that's setting aside all the health stuff that we know they're already doing.
John:
I don't think it should be like hovercrafts, like, or we're going to start an airline or like just chill out.
John:
You got just, can we just do the vision pro for 10 years and see if that works out?
John:
Because there is a runway there.
John:
You have so many other platforms that you're working on.
John:
You're still trying to do all the health stuff.
John:
You got all the services, you got all the antitrust things.
John:
You got the app store.
John:
Like,
John:
I don't think Apple should be looking to, you know, have a rebound project after Project Titan.
Marco:
Hey, me again.
Marco:
We are still sponsored exclusively by ATP members.
Marco:
Please consider joining and becoming a member today.
Marco:
You will get a version of the show that does not have these membership ads stuck in the middle of it.
Marco:
You will also get the bootleg feed with the unedited live stream, as mentioned earlier.
Marco:
And you get the bonus episodes also, as mentioned earlier, that are exclusive member content for us doing all sorts of tech stuff, non-tech stuff, even some feeling stuff here and there.
Marco:
It's a lot of fun.
Marco:
We also have a couple of those small bonus things as well.
Marco:
So for instance, when we do our time-limited big sales of new t-shirts and stuff in the ATP store, you get 15% off that.
Marco:
If you can support us, this is by far the best way to support the show.
Marco:
So we would really appreciate it if you consider it.
Marco:
ATP.fm slash join.
Marco:
And it's $8 a month or $88 a year or a couple other different currency options here and there.
Marco:
Again, we support gift memberships now.
Marco:
Thanks to John's hard work on that.
Marco:
I didn't do any of it.
Marco:
So John gets full credit for the gift membership system.
Marco:
But it's really cool.
Marco:
You can do that as well.
Marco:
So check it out today.
Marco:
ATP.fm slash join.
Marco:
Once again, ad-free version, unedited raw bootleg feed, bonus episodes, the discount during our sales.
Marco:
So eight bucks a month, ATP.FM slash join.
Marco:
It is the best way to support the show.
Marco:
Thank you so much for your consideration.
Marco:
And let's go back to the show.
Casey:
Joe writes, what email clients do you all use these days?
Casey:
Curious to know how each of you handle this on both iOS and macOS and what you feel are the best clients.
Casey:
I feel like this is one of those, as John often describes, annual or sometimes semi-annual questions that people always want to know what email clients we use.
Casey:
And I don't know that it's changed, like properly changed for any of us since we started recording the show in 2013, 2014.
John:
We're creatures of habit.
Casey:
Yeah, but for me, it's mail app.
Casey:
I was briefly using whatever that one is.
Casey:
Is it mail plane that everyone loves?
Casey:
Something that everyone loves for Gmail.
Casey:
And I was using that for a while.
Casey:
And then when I switched to fast mail, I put that aside and went crawling back to mail.app.
Casey:
And that's what I use everywhere.
Casey:
And I thought that was the same for Marco, isn't it?
Marco:
I have actually really never gone for many other mail clients.
Casey:
Sorry, I just meant that you're all in on mail.app.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm all in on mail.app and I am mostly fine with it.
Marco:
I wouldn't say I love it, but I don't love email.
Marco:
And so I treat email as a very kind of functional thing that I have to deal with somewhat reluctantly.
Marco:
And I deal with it as little as possible.
Marco:
Apple's mail apps let me do that on their platforms with lots of various nice little integrations.
Marco:
I appreciate all of that first partiness of them.
Marco:
My problems with email have nothing to do with the client.
Marco:
Like none of the email apps that are out there would do a meaningfully better job at making me hate email less.
Marco:
I just kind of deal with it the way I do.
Marco:
The only thing that I, I literally just mentioned this earlier today.
Marco:
My one big feature request for Apple's mail apps, having used them now for how many years?
Marco:
When the iPhone first shipped and the iPhone had its version of mail.app on it, it mostly worked.
Marco:
It mostly satisfied my needs, except for one giant area, search app.
Marco:
Mail search on iOS has always been really rudimentary and really crappy.
Marco:
And many times I end up having to go search on my Mac mail app instead, and it will find things the iOS app will not find, including this literally just happened today.
Marco:
I assume the reason why is because mail on the Mac downloads everything off the IMAP server and indexes everything locally.
Marco:
Whereas mail on the iPhone appears not to do that.
Marco:
I think mail on the iPhone has always done server-side IMAP search, not local search.
Marco:
I assume that's why we're getting different search results.
Marco:
But that trade-off made sense in 2007.
Marco:
That trade-off does not make sense in 2024.
Marco:
I understand that people's email boxes can be really big, so maybe make it an option.
Marco:
Give me a switch in the settings app that says download all mail and let me search all mail in the iOS mail app with the exact same search characteristics and results that I would get if I did it on my Mac.
Marco:
It's 2024.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure Apple can make that happen.
Casey:
John, you still using the Gmail web client?
John:
Yeah.
John:
The main sort of performance characteristics that I'm looking for in an email client, uh, uh, date all the way back to, you know, my, the early days, my very first email clients on the Mac, I was super heavy into entourage.
John:
And, uh, later when that, uh, morphed or Claris emailer, which morphed into entourage, um,
John:
And they what I loved on those things is they had like rules that you could apply to mail that would ferry your mail into various folders or whatever.
John:
But it was so frustrating when I'd have all those rules set up on my home computer and then I'd like try to check my home email while I was at work.
John:
And so I would like install the same email client on my work computer, but then the rules would be on my home computer.
John:
And this was before the days of ubiquitous cloud sync.
John:
And it was never quite the same.
John:
And a lot of times I was using pop.
John:
So if you popped it from one location, if you popped it from a second location, the second location wouldn't have it because it didn't pop it.
John:
So now you have the same message appearing in two different places.
John:
They had to be routed the same way.
Casey:
We should probably explain that just a little bit more, because everything you said was accurate, but it sounds bananas to people of today.
Casey:
So most email clients, or most email servers, excuse me, from, I don't know, 15, 20, 25 years ago, the way it worked was you used Post Office Protocol, or POP, and...
Casey:
generally speaking, granted, you could tweak this, but generally speaking, what would happen is your email client would go to the server.
Casey:
It would say, okay, what are the new messages?
Casey:
It would grab the new messages and then it would delete them off the server.
Casey:
So like John was saying, let's say you have a machine at home that is checking your email.
Casey:
Generally speaking, the machine at home would check your email, delete the email, and then it would be living or alive.
Casey:
Those emails would only be living on that one computer.
Casey:
If you went to any other computer, because you wouldn't go to a cell phone at this point,
Casey:
If you went to any other computer and went to get mail, well, tough noogies, it ain't there because it was deleted off the server.
Casey:
And this was normal.
John:
But I was smart enough not to do that.
John:
But that introduces a second problem, which is if you say, OK, don't do that.
John:
Leave it on the server.
John:
Now, my home computer would run a little, you know, using pop.
John:
It would check for mail.
John:
It would see there's a new message.
John:
You would download it, right?
John:
Now my work computer would run two seconds later and it would see that same new message and it would download it, which is why both computers needed to have the same set of rules because as far as they're concerned, it's like the home computer downloads the message and files it away.
John:
The work computer downloads that same message.
John:
Now these two computers are downloading the same message, you know, and, you know,
John:
pulling it from the server, they better route it to the same place.
John:
Otherwise, home and work will slowly get out of sync.
John:
They're not even connected at all, but it's like a one-way process.
John:
But if they don't have the same rules, as things flow in, they won't go in the same boxes.
John:
And by the way, if I respond to something at work or market it red at work, home has no idea that that happened because their only function is...
John:
using the POP protocol to see if there's new messages and downloading them.
John:
There's no reverse direction where when I mark something as read at work, it sends a message up to the POP server so that when I go home, no, no, that doesn't happen.
John:
It's one way, right?
John:
So trying to deal with that, just home and work, being able to check my personal email at work, which is, as all working people know, is an essential part of your sanity, is being able to do that.
John:
was made very difficult and i and i do like rules and i do like routing and i do like everything to be the same everywhere right and imap you say well imap solves this well imap especially in the early days was a little bit of a nightmare it was trying to solve this problem by having two-way communication and everything but the clients for it weren't great and there were lots of different imap servers and depending on your isp and where you email from it was very confusing and annoying but imap was an improvement but still kind of janky but anyway i was using like clarice emailer and eudora not eudora
John:
I know Udory's great, but I wasn't ever a big fan.
John:
Entourage and Clara's email are back in the day when they did support both POP and IMAP.
John:
But then Gmail came along.
John:
And Gmail said, forget about your stupid client.
John:
The server is the source of truth.
John:
I have all your email.
John:
Your email only exists in one place.
John:
Folders, rules, those are all here on the server.
John:
Oh, you can look at what's on the server however you want.
John:
Say in a web browser.
John:
Try Chrome.
John:
It's nice.
John:
But don't be fooled.
John:
Gmail, Google has all your email and all your rules and all your settings and all your preferences.
John:
And when you mark something as read or unread or reply to it, you know, you send mail into a sent mail folder.
John:
That is all happening on Google servers.
John:
And what it did was gave me blessed freedom to say, wherever I check my email from, a phone, an iPad, an internet cyber cafe.
Yeah.
John:
anywhere i know where i don't care whose computer it is i don't care if it's at work at home on any computer that i have when i load up gmail.com my email looks exactly like it did the last time i left it if i marked a thing as red if i replied oh and by the way search
John:
Google's really good at that.
John:
I can search my email really easily.
John:
And it also, in the back of the day, lets you import all your old email.
John:
So this is a long-winded way to say Gmail.
John:
I use the Gmail for my email, and I use the Gmail web interface.
John:
I like the Gmail web interface.
John:
I miss, you know, the days of Entourage and Clara's emailer, but I've moved on since then.
John:
I don't like Apple Mail.
John:
I don't like the interface on any platform.
John:
So I use the Gmail web interface on my phone.
John:
I use the Google's Gmail app, which is not very good, but it doesn't really matter because all my mail is there.
John:
You know, I can do what I want in there.
John:
If I don't like it, I just put the phone down, pick up literally any other computer, log into Gmail, and there is all my mail.
John:
big proponent of Gmail and it's been one of my favorite products over the years and I'll be very sad when Google eventually cancels it I don't think they would cancel that but I definitely take your point no I think I'll be dead or retired by the time they do that too much valuable data goes through you know people keep Gmail around yep
Casey:
Warren Bacay writes, you recently mentioned Marco's love of the Microsoft ergonomic keyboard, which I've always liked.
Casey:
Why hasn't Marco constructed a do-it-yourself mechanical keyboard in the ergonomic layout he prefers with the switches he wants, etc.?
Casey:
This seems like exactly the kind of project he would love, and he'd end up with a keyboard customized to his personal specifications.
Casey:
You know, I get this, and obviously my name is not Marco, but I mean, at least for me, I actually like Apple keyboards, and in your case, you like the Microsoft ergonomic keyboard keyboard.
Casey:
And I don't know, as I get older and more crotchety, I feel like there's less space in my life for fiddly things.
Casey:
And I'm assuming that's probably where you are too.
Marco:
I'm glad that that whole world of keyboards exists.
Marco:
If I ever want to dive into it, I will have no hesitation of diving into it.
Marco:
But right now, like, you know, every few years when my sculpt flakes out, I can spend 60 bucks and have that problem just disappear.
Marco:
And the reality is I like the sculpt ergonomic keyboard.
Marco:
There's not a lot about it that I would change.
Marco:
It solved my needs very, very well and for very low effort.
Marco:
And if I were to customize something with the world of like custom keyboard enthusiast kind of stuff,
Marco:
I think what I would end up creating would actually be worse for my own preferences.
Marco:
So for instance, even though I know there's different key switches with different volume levels, all of them are way too loud for me.
Marco:
I've tried them all.
Marco:
Yes, even the Cherry MX Brown or whatever.
Marco:
Every few years there's a new one and people say, oh, this one's quieter or whatever.
Marco:
And I try it and it's loud.
Marco:
So that is problem number one is that I don't really like the giant mechanical key switch sound.
Marco:
I also don't have any problem with the feedback of the relatively standard scissor mechanism of the sculpt ergonomics keys.
Marco:
That's not a problem I'm looking to solve.
Marco:
I understand why people like those things.
Marco:
It's just not that important to me, and I don't like the noise trade-off.
Marco:
Secondly,
Marco:
The Sculpt is actually a very compact keyboard for an ergonomic keyboard.
Marco:
And if I would actually create an ergonomic layout that has kind of the two key elements of what makes it help, which is the split gap and then the kind of curved and reverse tented shape of it, to actually create that with mechanical keycaps with that kind of keyboard would be a...
Marco:
probably a larger overall finished product.
Marco:
And I, again, to create that, it's solving problems I don't have to make a result that would be worse for my preferences.
Marco:
That's why I don't do it.
Marco:
Things might change over time.
Marco:
My preferences might change or the availability of sculpt ergonomic keyboards, as we've discussed, it's kind of in flux right now.
Marco:
So that could be getting better with like the Matthias recreation or the, was it Incase who took over that business?
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, I think so.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So so, you know, their recreations could be fine or could be ruined.
Marco:
You know, the Matthias recreation could be fine or could be ruined.
Marco:
I don't know yet.
Marco:
I've preordered both and we'll see what happens.
Marco:
And I still have a few sculpts left from my from my stock, my personal stock.
Marco:
So we'll see.
Marco:
But right now, this is a problem that I don't really need to be solved.
Marco:
Every time I use the sculpt, I'm not thinking like, God, I hate this thing.
Marco:
I can't wait until there's a replacement.
Marco:
No, I actually like it.
Marco:
I prefer it.
Marco:
And whenever they die, just pop a new one out of the closet and move on with my life.
Casey:
Anonymous writes as tech enthusiasts, how interested are you in LLMs and generative AI?
Casey:
Is it something that you follow from the sidelines or do you actually dive into these topics and do some of your own research and follow up question for which use cases have you been using chatbots like chat GPT, if at all?
Casey:
And what were your experiences for me?
Casey:
I'm interested, certainly this is the new hot thing, and unlike crypto, it doesn't make me want to vomit all over myself, so that's an improvement.
Casey:
I am trying to keep up with it and get at least a nominal understanding of how it works, a very broad and basic understanding of how it works.
Casey:
In terms of how I use it, I don't typically do anything with generative, like making images or anything like that.
Casey:
I've tried a couple of times.
Casey:
I think when I was...
Casey:
First trying to come up with a placeholder icon for call sheet, then called Flickup.
Casey:
I was trying to come up with an icon that was at least passable, not to ship with, but just to ship like a beta with.
Casey:
And I couldn't even get something that looked even remotely like what I wanted at the time.
Casey:
And that very well could have been a user error on my part.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Nevertheless, I do use ChatGPT every once in a while, typically to solve some sort of programming problem with something that I'm not familiar with.
Casey:
Or a great example of this, a wonderful use of ChatGPT, is how do I do this particular FFmpeg incantation?
Casey:
Because I know a lot of the things that I do regularly regularly.
Casey:
And I like to think as people go, I know a fair bit about FFmpeg, but there's a ton of things that it does in almost infinite amount of things that it does that I don't know how to do.
Casey:
And I do have a folder in Apple notes.
Casey:
Speaking of Apple notes, John, I have a folder in Apple notes with, you know, individual notes of like different recipes, if you will, for FFmpeg.
Casey:
But there's certainly times that I'm like, well, how the heck do you do that?
Casey:
And chat GPT oftentimes will either get it right or get me close enough that I can get it right quickly.
Casey:
And that's actually applicable to a lot of programming problems.
Casey:
So that's how I've been using it.
Casey:
I feel like I picked on Marco first a lot recently.
Casey:
So John, what are you doing with this?
John:
I am interested in these things.
John:
I'm interested in understanding how they work.
John:
I've tried to learn as much about them as I could without actually having any reason to make anything like this.
John:
It's difficult to follow sometimes because it's not my area of expertise, but I think I have somewhat of a handle on what their approach is.
John:
But the most important thing, the distinction between crypto is that these things, these large language models and generative AI,
John:
Have practical utility.
John:
You can use them to do useful things.
John:
It's very obvious to everybody.
John:
That's why people are excited about this.
John:
Again, unlike crypto, where it's like the useful thing is make a bunch of people a lot of money, you know, like, okay, but like, does this help me with my work?
John:
No, not really.
John:
I use these things kind of as a...
John:
augmentation to google search right so anything that i'm doing where i would be using google uh i will throw in these various uh large language model things into the competition just like i may i uh you know put all my little voice cylinders in the house against each other and i ask them all the same question to see how they do i'm trying to see who's going to be the most useful so sometimes you know when i'm programming is a
John:
On a programming, very often you Google for things, right?
John:
Oh, I don't remember what that is.
John:
How do you do this?
John:
You know, what is the order of arguments to this function?
John:
I can't remember, right?
John:
You can use Google for that and you find a stack overflow question or you find the reference documentation or, you know, if you're in Xcode, you can go directly to it with just a right click or whatever.
John:
Um, but yeah, I'll throw in chat GPT, uh, Google's barred thing, the Bing thing to see how they do.
John:
Um, cause sometimes, even though I know the answer is in the reference documentation, sometimes reading the reference documentation, like if you're trying to look like the select system call and Pearl and you want to know what, what are those bit, what are the constants that you use in the bit masks?
John:
And is it the right bits than the read bits or the read bits than the right bits?
John:
And, um,
John:
you know you could look this up in the reference docs it's going to tell you the order of the things you're going to be able to find the constants then you can look them up and just like you'll get i know exactly where the answer is and you could google for it and it will probably point you to the reference docs that you can read to get that answer one of the utilities that things like chat gpt provides is you could just ask them for the call that you want to make and it will essentially not do that work for you but
John:
summarize that.
John:
It'll say, okay, use this bit mask for the first argument, use this bit mask for the second argument based on what you asked me.
John:
So it already has found what order the arguments are in, and it found the correct bit mask things to order together in the right things, and it gives me the result faster than if I had done that work myself.
John:
One of the things I don't use any of these large language model things for is anything based on facts.
John:
Because I'm like the line of code where I can just run it and find out if it does the thing that I want it to do.
John:
I can step through it in the debugger.
John:
I can see, yes, it's working.
John:
No, it's not working.
John:
I can tell whether it compiles or is it made up a function or whatever.
John:
Using it for facts, I don't find useful.
John:
What year did this movie come out?
John:
It'll give me an answer, and the answer will be plausible.
John:
But the problem is, if I knew what the answer was already, I wouldn't have asked.
John:
And so now I'm faced with the answer that says, oh, this movie came out in this year.
John:
Is that right?
John:
Maybe.
John:
Looks like it could be right.
John:
But now I have to go check somewhere to see if it actually is right.
John:
And if I'm going to go check somewhere anyway, I might as well just start in Google and end up at the Wikipedia page or the IMDB page or whatever.
John:
Now, is Wikipedia right?
John:
Is IMDB right?
John:
I don't know, but at least I have a foundation for setting a level of trust.
John:
How much do I trust Wikipedia?
John:
How much do I trust IMDB when it comes to the release date of movies, right?
John:
How much do I just, you know, this result from the New York times or the verge or whatever with large language models, when it just gives me the answer for fact based things, it's useless to me because I mean, I can just stare at that and go, that might be the answer.
John:
But I don't know where that answer came from.
John:
And if it's right or if it's wrong, the LLMs don't know, don't care.
John:
That's not their job.
John:
They're just smushing together a bunch of stuff and spitting out something that is plausibly an answer to the question asked.
John:
And so that makes them entirely useless for me in that area.
John:
And I would say also dangerous because you might think you're getting the answer.
John:
And even like when Google does the generative results at the top of its search results, I tend to ignore those two for the same reason.
John:
Kind of for the same reason I've been ignoring the thing that Google's been doing for many years before generative AI, which is like, don't worry about the search results.
John:
We've extracted the answer for you.
John:
I'm like...
John:
yeah but like i kind of need to see where you got that answer from so i just ignore it and i go to the plain old search results and then i have to make the judgment myself like do i trust this seo spam page that's in the the first 10 results are all like that or do i want to actually go to something more authoritative or if i go to the wikipedia page is this page constantly being in edit wars and the talk page shows there's so much controversy about this or does everyone agree that this movie came out on this date right um
John:
So I do use it.
John:
I think there is a bright future of utility for things like this.
John:
And the image generator is the same type of thing because setting aside the legal and ethical implications there, people do agree that being able to type in a description of an image and get an image back is a useful thing to do if we can get the rest of the stuff worked out.
John:
um so yeah i'm i'm definitely incorporating it into my into my normal workflows and i have found things uh kind of like steve jobs said about the ipad like there should be something where the ipad is the best device to use it there are things that i do when you know programming for example where chat gpt is better than google for
John:
getting me what i need faster there are also things where google is still better there are things where right clicking and looking it up in the reference docs is faster but very quickly things like chat gpt have become a sibling to direct lookups and reference documentation blind google searches and now right alongside their ask a large language model
Casey:
Marco.
Marco:
So personally, I have used generative AI relatively little.
Marco:
I did make that icon for my Fire Island driving app.
Marco:
I made that with generative AI because that's an app that had zero budget.
Marco:
And any time spent on it was time I shouldn't have been spending on it really.
Marco:
And so I needed something quick and dirty that would be seen by about 70 people.
Marco:
And it was perfect for that.
Marco:
I don't really have a lot of need to generate a bunch of BS on a regular basis, so I tend not to use it that much.
Marco:
But it's a tool that I'm glad it's there when I need it.
Marco:
I'm more looking forward to... And some of this is already out there.
Marco:
Tools that use generative AI functionality and techniques...
Marco:
in ways that I actually do use on a more regular basis.
Marco:
So for instance, if I'm editing a photo of myself and I want to remove the pimple on my forehead, we've had various techniques to do that in image editors for a long time now.
Marco:
But if you involve generative AI in that kind of feature, you can usually do a better job of it.
Marco:
Or other kind of image manipulation, things like you have a low-res image and you want to make a high-res version of it and you want to do whatever you can to extrapolate whatever the details might have been in a higher-res version of that image.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
That's a great use of a lot of these generative AI type techniques to do things like that.
Marco:
So these features by themselves in the current standalone products that we see them in, they have utility to a lot of people, no question, but I don't see a lot of that myself.
Marco:
But I'm looking forward to and already still currently benefiting from some of the implementations of those techniques into tools that I use.
Marco:
So again, other instances like, you know, if if Apple ever realized that there's five of us out there who use logic to edit podcasts.
Marco:
they can probably add a whole bunch of really interesting, useful features to Logic to make editing podcasts better, some of which would be AI-based.
Marco:
And another example of that is the world of audio transcription algorithms has been radically improved by the OpenAI Whisper model.
Marco:
It doesn't get as much attention as the other OpenAI stuff, but Whisper has been a massive transformation, no pun intended, in audio transcription.
Marco:
I'm looking forward to advances like that.
Marco:
That being integrated into more things.
Marco:
One of the big hopes I have for whatever Apple's AI sauce sprinkling process looks like this summer is Apple has a built-in API to transcribe audio.
Marco:
It's not that good.
Marco:
I'm hoping that this year it gets substantially better because maybe they're using some AI type models to improve their transcription.
Marco:
They've already been going in that direction in small steps here and there.
Marco:
So that's the kind of thing I'm looking forward to is, yeah, there's going to be fun new problems that arise that we didn't even think about that they can all of a sudden solve and it revolutionizes everything, etc.,
Marco:
But most of what we do in our computing lives is boring tasks that we've done for a long time.
Marco:
Things like, as mentioned before, answering emails, doing various media manipulation tasks and stuff like that.
Marco:
There's lots of opportunities in tons of computing for those features and those tools to get better within the capabilities of what we already know AI can do.
Marco:
We don't need it to get so much better that it can answer all of John's questions with factual accuracy.
Marco:
That'll be nice if it goes in that direction.
Marco:
It should.
Marco:
But even with what we know it can do today, there's tons of possible applications for the existing AI techniques, even the existing models that have already been built,
Marco:
In ways that we haven't seen yet, either because they can't get built without somebody okaying it, like in the case of Apple being a gatekeeper over their platforms.
Marco:
For instance, I would love the option to have ChatGPT respond to my Siri questions whenever they're about knowledge.
Marco:
Because even though it is a BS generator...
Marco:
tends to generate more accurate answers than Siri does the vast majority of the time for informational questions.
John:
Well, I wouldn't say it's more accurate.
John:
You're more likely to get an answer and Siri will just be like, sorry, can't help you or go look on the web.
John:
But honestly, that's the writer answer.
John:
I don't want something just giving me plausible BS when I ask a question.
John:
If you can't answer it, don't answer it.
Marco:
Well, just ask a man.
John:
I do not want plausible BS.
John:
When I ask him when a movie was released, Alexa should tell me the real answer, not the plausible BS answer.
Marco:
Anyway, so I'm looking forward to just the integration of these awesome new AI techniques and models into the rest of our boring computing lives, making them a lot better.
Marco:
That's where I see the most promise.
Marco:
And yeah, we'll have some cool products along the way that are more exciting than that.
Marco:
But in the grand scheme of how this is going to impact most people, I think it's going to be more like the former, more just making our everyday tasks better and making the tools that do them better.
John:
And to be clear, Apple has been doing that for years and years.
John:
Back before the AI buzzword, they used ML, right?
John:
So Apple, the magic thing where you can, I don't even know if this would even qualify for quote unquote AI today, but like subject detection where you can drag the picture of your dog out of the photo.
John:
Apple's photo search where you can search for like, you know, tin can or whatever.
John:
And it has this set of words like,
John:
That was ML and not AI, but that's exactly the type of stuff we're talking about.
John:
And what we're saying is, hey, state of the art has moved on and you could make all those things better.
John:
I really, because in photo search, if you ever try this in Apple Photos, you can search for things like dog or cat or bed or spoon or car or parking lot, right?
John:
But if you try Clipboard, you might see that, oh, the autocomplete isn't bringing up Clipboard.
John:
Well, can't I just type Clipboard?
John:
And the answer is no.
John:
Apple has decided there's a fixed number of things where you can search for it.
John:
technology has marched on and you can do text-based photo search a little bit better than Apple's doing it with quote-unquote AI technologies instead of the quote-unquote ML that they used for that before.
John:
Just make your existing features better.
John:
Mark out the transcription as a perfect example.
John:
They're already doing that with quote-unquote ML.
John:
Just do it with AI and it will, you know, but we're just saying like keep up with the Joneses.
John:
People are doing cool stuff and Apple is being left behind.
John:
And by the way, I saw someone toot this today.
John:
This is a website feature
John:
fast uh no it's it's fast sdxl.ai it's a demo of another way these things could be interesting it's just a you know you type words and it makes an image let's go it's like an image generator like stable diffusion or uh mid journey or like oh you know this all sorts of things that can generate images for you
John:
But there is this subgenre of them that says we're not as interested in generating every image really perfectly or whatever.
John:
Our thing is speed.
John:
This thing tries to generate images for you as fast as you can type.
John:
So you just start typing, and it's generating images.
John:
And you add another word, another word, and it generates, it generates, it generates.
John:
And you might think, oh, that's a fun party trick, but I'd rather have it.
John:
I'd rather let you, can I just type a whole sentence, and then you generate a really, really awesome image.
John:
I don't need you to do it to me fast.
John:
But...
John:
Having the thing react to you in real time with a smaller, faster model does change how the interactions feel.
John:
And this is just another example of when I think about Apple doing stuff on device or what's the advantage of doing it locally, especially if your model needs to be smaller.
John:
sometimes you want that trade-off sometimes doing it quickly locally not as well is better than doing it in the cloud expensively requiring a network round trip or whatever just depends on the thing that you're trying to do so i'm very optimistic that apple can find many many places in its existing products where it can use these technologies which everybody knows apple has been working on to make all of its products better in
John:
I guess what Marco would describe as boring ways, but honestly, it's not boring to me if my image, my photo search starts working better.
Marco:
Thanks to our members who supported us this entire episode this week.
Marco:
You can join us and become a member at ATP.FM slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
They did it in
Marco:
So long.
Marco:
I'm looking forward to WWDC this year.
Marco:
All these rumors coming out about maybe a slight updated design, but also tons of AI stuff.
Marco:
I am looking forward to this.
John:
Yeah, but what I talked about in the Rectives episode was like, what stuff will they have ready for this year?
John:
Because I'm sure tons of stuff that they're doing, some of it's going to come out next year, some of it's going to come out the year after that.
John:
What can they get done in this year?
John:
And the big question for me is...
John:
is this the year where they do the apology siri essentially and say siri it doesn't suck now because that seems like the hardest one like siri is the hardest one making uh like uh you know transcribing audio better i think they can ship that this year right making image search better they could probably ship this year but the siri one is the big one and honestly it's kind of a distraction but marketing wise and pr wise like because i would be perfectly happy if like this isn't the year we make siri better siri still sucks
John:
But everything else is a little bit better.
John:
Autocomplete, we already changed that to a Transformer model last year.
John:
But guess what?
John:
Now it's a little bit better.
John:
And searching your mail, it's a little bit better.
John:
Like there's so many places where they can apply this to just make it a little bit better.
John:
It's not exciting as saying Siri 2.
John:
Now it doesn't suck.
John:
But I would be perfectly happy with the WWDC this year where every single piece of every single OS has some of that AI sauce sprinkled on it and just gets a little bit better.
John:
Even if Siri still isn't any good because I have faith
John:
That in a year or two or three, Siri will get what it deserves, which is a complete replacement.
Marco:
Last year was the year that we all were saying, well, all this new AI stuff is breaking on the scene, but it's a little too new for Apple to do much with it.
Marco:
They've had a while now.
Marco:
Generative AI stuff and LLMs have been really broken into the scene now for, what, about two years now or a year and a half?
Marco:
It's been enough time that Apple has had time to
Marco:
get caught off guard, realize they have to put a bunch of effort into this as everyone passes them by, start dumping money into it, and to start to see results.
Marco:
Now, this is the summer that we're going to start seeing the first, probably bigger scale efforts from Apple in this front.
Marco:
Like I said, they did do the LLM-based autocomplete in, what was it, iOS 16, 17?
John:
17.
John:
Despite the fact that they weren't caught off guard, they've already shipped some stuff that says, hey, we've found a way to use this tech to make something in our OS better.
John:
It was just so tiny, but this is going to be the big coming out, I think.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
And it's not going to be the last big coming out of this stuff.
Marco:
We're going to see this over the following few years, I would expect.
Marco:
I do expect to see a whole bunch of those, as you mentioned, little stuff around the system.
Marco:
Features already existed, maybe, that are just now better.
Marco:
That's what I want to see.
Marco:
And honestly, as a developer,
Marco:
I guess I probably should have gotten into this with my answer.
Marco:
I guess we're doing this now in the after show.
Marco:
I've been hesitant to adopt much of this stuff in my app so far for two big reasons.
Marco:
Number one is that I just don't have the time right now.
Marco:
I'm in the middle of this rewrite laying the groundwork for it to be easier for me in the future to make bigger changes.
Marco:
But during this time of relaying groundwork, I can't make those bigger changes.
Marco:
I don't have the time.
Marco:
But in the future, I will, hopefully.
Marco:
But number two...
Marco:
Most of the AI features I could add right now would require me to do the work on the server.
Marco:
That is something that I could invest into, but I don't think it would be a great use of my time, and I think it would be very expensive for me.
Marco:
Even if I wasn't running the most cutting-edge models or the biggest models or whatever, it is a very high cost for a one-person operation.
Marco:
And it's probably not going to be worth it to me.
Marco:
And when I look at what I would want out of some kind of server-based AI stuff or any kind of AI-based stuff in my app...
Marco:
What I most likely want would be transcription and recommending systems, like the recommending algorithms.
Marco:
That would be the two major areas of value for Overcast.
Marco:
But those are actually, like, relative to what people expect out of my app, those are not massive percentages of the value, so to speak.
Marco:
I want to have transcription and I want to have a more sophisticated recommendation algorithm.
Marco:
But if I never do those things, it's not the end of the world for my product.
Marco:
And so therefore, it is not worth investing a huge amount of time and money on the server end to try to make these two kind of ancillary features if it's going to be that expensive.
Marco:
Whereas if Apple is building in a lot more stuff into the device side of things,
Marco:
I would expect much of that to be exposed through APIs.
Marco:
For instance, the speech transcription algorithm has been part of the public API now for a while, I think something like six or seven years.
Marco:
If they improve the on-device transcription algorithms with AI stuff, I would expect I could probably use that locally on device.
Marco:
For all the same reasons that I don't want to run a whole bunch of AI stuff on my servers, Apple doesn't either on their servers.
Marco:
Because the scale they would be dealing with, with every iPhone owner having access to feature XYZ, that is a massive scale to deploy in Apple's data centers and massive costs to pay.
Marco:
I don't even know if there are enough GPUs in the world to handle that kind of load.
Casey:
Well, they're already doing a small subset of this with podcast transcription on the server side, right?
John:
But that's not in response to customers' requests for service.
John:
They just transcribe all their own podcasts once, and then every customer gets the benefit, as opposed to essentially letting users say, take this image and make a description of it for me or something.
Marco:
Yeah, you don't have to transcribe everyone's videos they have recorded on all of their iPhones forever.
Marco:
Server-side, at least.
Marco:
And so what Apple has, Apple has this massive asset of all of these iPhones out there in the world that are pretty capable hardware devices that they don't have to pay server time to run.
Marco:
So Apple has a huge interest for multiple reasons in pushing as much of this as possible to the device side because they have this fleet of computing capacity that's out there in the world that is just – the value there is immense.
Marco:
I also have a smaller version of that, a much smaller version of that with Overcast.
Marco:
As I lean into AI-based features in the app –
Marco:
I would so much rather do things client-side than server-side.
Marco:
And right now, the client-side versions of these things either don't exist or require me to bring in custom models, like, for instance, the OpenAI Whisper models.
Marco:
And that is possible.
Marco:
There are a few apps that integrate Whisper in certain features, but it's a big thing.
Marco:
Whisper is a huge model.
Marco:
It comes in different sizes, but even the small ones on the phone are pretty substantial and a pretty heavy lift computationally.
Marco:
But if Apple got in there and optimized things with their optimization techniques to run on their hardware with their models, they could do a much better job of it if they chose to.
Marco:
And I hope they do.
Marco:
So anyway, I'm hoping that as I finish my rewrite over hopefully this year,
Marco:
Hopefully that gives Apple enough time to deploy iOS 18 with some really nice features that I can use for my first feature update after the main rewrite release.
Marco:
And I would love to be able to do stuff like live transcription, transcription search if possible.
Marco:
There's so many things I could do if it was on device that I would probably never really have the prioritization and the budget and the time to do server side.