A Mildly Brisk Walk
Casey:
Here in the show document that we use, you know, just internally, uh, we have a section for pre-show and it says in here, all John's apes gone.
Casey:
I don't know what that means, but I'm assuming you've had a real bad, like NFT related loss or something like that.
John:
You know what it means then you got it.
John:
Wait, what are you being serious?
John:
All my apes gone.
John:
Not as I don't know how many NFTs, but it's, it's close to
John:
Did you at any time have any NFTs?
John:
I never had any.
John:
I still don't.
John:
It's a funny meme.
Marco:
I'm not sure I ever even knew where, even if I wanted to buy one, which I never did, I don't even know how to buy an NFT.
Marco:
Where do you go?
Marco:
You didn't miss out on anything.
Marco:
Missed out on being scammed a lot, probably.
John:
We'll put the Know Your Memes link in there.
John:
I think it's some person who tweeted about losing all their ape NFTs.
John:
All my apes gone.
Casey:
Oh, look at that.
Casey:
I did better than I expected.
Casey:
Look at me go.
John:
As usual, Marco hasn't seen it.
John:
Anyway, all my apes are gone.
John:
All my apes are gone, not are gone.
Marco:
So what does this mean?
Marco:
You lost all of your zero NFTs that you had?
John:
Yeah, so I've never done NFTs.
John:
And I've never been into cryptocurrency because it's just not been my thing.
John:
And there's many bad things about it.
John:
But about a decade ago, there was some cryptocurrency thing that was like, hey, sign up for our website.
John:
We'll give you 10 imaginary, you know, crypto coin things or whatever.
John:
And I signed up and I got 10 imaginary crypto coin things.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
Isn't imaginary crypto, isn't that redundant?
John:
Yeah, whatever.
John:
I don't even know if it was a proof of stake or a proof of work one.
John:
It might have been a proof of stake one or something or it might not even have been crypto.
John:
I don't even understand it.
John:
It was like someone just said, hey, sign up for this thing.
John:
It's free.
John:
You get free whatevers.
John:
And I did.
John:
And I got free whatevers.
John:
And they were worthless.
John:
And I ignored them.
John:
uh and then around uh 2021 coinbase was uh popular and there's all these these like websites that are like come here and manage your cryptocurrency and i was like i should get rid of this stuff can i just like sell it and get whatever meager amount of money it's worth or something so i transferred all of my uh you know crypto whatever stuff to coinbase and it was just so worthless and the transaction fees were high enough and i was like i don't know
John:
Who cares?
John:
I don't want to deal with this, so I ignored it again.
John:
And then in 2022, I think the people who ran Coinbase were under investigation for crimes or something.
John:
I'm shocked.
John:
And I was like, I don't know if I want my... I should just get my stuff out of...
John:
It's Coinbase because who knows what's going on with it.
John:
And so anyway, I just I transferred it back out of Coinbase and back on to wherever it came from originally.
John:
And then I ignored it some more.
Marco:
You're probably committing some kind of tax fraud here.
Marco:
Like when you got your free whatever, did you report their value of nothing to the IRS?
John:
In fact, I did.
John:
It was so small.
John:
I told it to my accountant and it's been accounted for and it is worth so little that it doesn't matter.
John:
But yes, in fact, I did.
John:
That's awesome.
Casey:
See, that's why I thought this was my fault is because last I heard, you were using the same tax accountant that I am.
Casey:
And I thought maybe it was because of her that you had to like divest and it created all sorts of problems.
Casey:
But it sounds like it's not my fault yet.
Casey:
No.
John:
She just wanted to know what I had and I gave her all the accounting of the worthless stuff that I have.
John:
All I've been doing is moving it around like no things are happening, right?
John:
And so with the upcoming change in presidential administration in our country, the crypto folks are all going wild.
John:
It's like, woohoo, there'll be no laws and we can do anything we want.
John:
Uh, and so all the cryptocurrency is going up in value.
John:
I'm like, all right, so this is a good time.
John:
I really just need to get rid of this.
John:
Like, I know it's annoying and taxes to do anything with it to me, but it's just like, I just want to not have it anymore.
John:
So let me just get it and cash out whatever amount it's worth just so I don't have to keep like reporting it or whatever.
John:
Um, and so I went to do that and it's all gone.
Yeah.
John:
um what and i was like did i lose track of where i put it because i hadn't looked at it in a while like maybe i just don't know was it in coinbase no i'm pretty sure i removed it from coinbase should be back in the thing and i looked at it and then of course the good thing about the blockchain is it records all the transactions uh and yeah no it's all gone uh and not only is it all gone it was all gone two years ago
Casey:
Wait, so where did it go?
John:
How did this happen?
John:
Two years ago, someone stole it all.
Casey:
I've known it for two years.
Casey:
That's special.
Casey:
How did they steal it?
Casey:
I mean, I presume you don't know the specifics.
John:
Yeah, no.
John:
So how did they steal it?
John:
Most likely, like what you're supposed to actually do with this stuff is like have it in some place like Coinbase or have it in like a hardware wallet where you have multi-factor authentication and all that other stuff.
John:
And I never wanted to have like a crypto hardware wallet.
John:
And when it was in Coinbase, it was probably the safest place that it has ever been because at least there they have a multi-factor login and everything.
John:
But where it originally came from, the only thing there was was your public address, which is this big long string of crap, and your super secret key that you're supposed to tell nobody, which is this big long string of crap.
John:
And...
John:
Their website was like, hey, do you want to see what your balance is?
John:
You should really have your money in one of these wallets or these things or whatever.
John:
But if you don't have it in any of these wallets, you can just look at your balance by putting your super secret string in here.
John:
And then there's all these scary warnings like you should never actually do this.
John:
Never paste your secret key into a web page.
John:
This is bad.
John:
You should use a wallet.
John:
And for the past 10 years, they've been like, that's fine.
John:
it's been pasting my super secret key into the text field on web pages and at some point in the past 10 years i must have pasted that secret key into the wrong web page at the wrong time or one of these websites was compromised or something uh and then someone just harvested that thing and took all my money two years ago and i didn't notice it oh my god until now
John:
So, yeah, thus ends my cryptocurrency adventure.
John:
Ten years of owning a bunch of worthless coins that I was hoping to cash out for, you know, maybe $100 or something.
John:
And it turns out I can't even do it.
John:
The only good thing is that the person cashed out two years ago when it was worth even less than it is now.
John:
So they got nothing from me.
John:
But they did – the account that got stuff stole money from like lots of people and they cashed out for like $400,000 or something.
Casey:
Holy cow.
John:
Mine was just a tiny amount.
John:
A tiny drop in that bucket was my coins.
Casey:
So how much would it have been worth?
Casey:
Did you do that computation?
John:
It would have been a couple hundred bucks but, you know.
John:
It was never real money.
John:
We got it for free.
John:
It was just a burden.
John:
I probably paid more in having my accountant keep track of it over these years than I would have gotten.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I think you just report that you have it and then it's the end of it.
John:
Who knows?
John:
Anyway, thus ends my...
John:
uh barely voluntary cryptocurrency adventure it ends with it all getting stolen because i pasted my super secret key into web pages so let that be a lesson for you don't do that i mean something tells me you are neither the first person to have all your cryptocurrency stolen nor the first person to have lost money with cryptocurrency so no they get stolen all the time that's the whole all my apes gone thing
John:
How do people lose their apes?
John:
Like, it's so easy.
John:
Like, your security practices have to be better than ignoring all the warnings, which is what I was doing.
John:
And it's a very attractive target because if someone can steal it from you, there's no recourse.
John:
It's like, well, they've got it now.
John:
They're totally anonymous.
John:
You don't know who they are.
John:
They have all taken it and transferred it and cashed it out.
John:
And so it's like, you know, it's not – there's no –
John:
There's none of the things that are in our current financial systems like FDIC or like credit card chargebacks or all sorts of other things that give you some kind of out or like, you know, large transfers triggering fraud notices and all that stuff.
John:
But none of that stuff exists in the crypto world.
John:
So if someone can find a way to steal it from you, it's free and clear to them.
John:
So kudos to the person who stole my cryptocurrency and cashed out when the price was much less than it is now.
John:
yeah it says all the security of a giant pile of cash and with no way for you to protect it really from anybody on the entire internet like that's great i think i would have noticed if a giant pile of cash was stolen two years ago but the fact that i didn't even notice this for two years and the thing is it was stolen in november so i'm like oh it just happened two days ago it's because the prices and i look at the date it's like oh no 2022 never mind that's amazing
Casey:
Just to be clear, we appreciate those of you writing emails and tweets and whatnot to correct any of the things we just said.
Casey:
We don't care.
Marco:
Oh, just to be clear, we don't all appreciate it.
Marco:
Casey appreciates it.
Marco:
I don't even appreciate those emails.
Marco:
If you're writing to tell us how awesome crypto is, you can save your time.
Marco:
Sorry, it's not for me.
Marco:
Maybe you can send them all to Casey.
John:
because he appreciates them well no it's it's not for me either and yes that that to be clear that was a bless your heart kind of we appreciate uh bless your heart for writing that email but don't send it yeah i think the reason i was keeping it for all those years is because it just seemed like a hat like turning it into real money seemed like it was just like had more consequences and it's like the only way i care about this is if it's like as people putting in the chat room like that person who uh bought a pizza for uh
John:
10 000 bitcoin and it would be worth like a billion dollars now or whatever i'm like i'll just keep this for the rest of my life and maybe when i'm 80 it'll be worth a billion dollars or it'll just disappear and it turns out it was the second one just disappeared
Casey:
All right, let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
And we have a decent amount of follow-up with regard to my adventures in remote television.
Casey:
Where we last left our heroes, if I'm not mistaken, was that my friend in Southwestern Connecticut had nothing for TV service, over-the-air TV service at his house.
Casey:
And so we were trying to figure out some ways to get around this problem, mitigate it, et cetera.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
The first step that my friend was kind enough to take was to go visit his parents.
Casey:
His parents live in New Milford, which coincidentally is right next to where I grew up.
Casey:
And he took the antenna over there in the HD Home Run and had the HD Home Run scan or have the antenna in the HD Home Run and work in concert to scan and see what over-the-air channels they got in New Milford rather than in the town in which my friend lives.
Casey:
And would either of you like to guess how many channels we were able to receive in New Milford?
Marco:
The same number?
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
Literally zero.
Casey:
Literally zero.
John:
Connecticut is not known for its amazing radio signal reception.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So that was a no-go.
Casey:
So the next thought we had was, all right, what if we used TV everywhere?
Casey:
And I could have my friend Sean sign into his cable account online.
Casey:
on my channel server.
Casey:
And hopefully that would give us his local channels.
Casey:
And when you would do this via the internet, TV everywhere is like, I remember movies everywhere or movies anywhere, whatever it was called, where, um, you would know.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So you buy, you know, physical media and then you can plug in a code and you will get a license, if you will, to the, um, to the same movie on maybe, you know, Apple TV or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
And the specifics don't matter.
Casey:
You get the idea.
Casey:
TV Everywhere is kind of in a spiritual similar sense.
Casey:
You sign in with your cable provider's credentials and you get access to all the, or at least a subset of, if not all of the channels that you subscribe to.
Casey:
And so I thought this is going to work out great for both of us.
Casey:
You know, he enters his credentials on the online portal.
Casey:
Like I am not involved with this whatsoever.
Casey:
He doesn't have to make me a child account, so to speak, or even literally perhaps.
Casey:
Everyone will be happy.
Casey:
It'll work out great.
Casey:
And we did that, and it worked, and Channels goes and tries to find the lineup of, you know, what, I hate that.
Casey:
I love that it's called Channels.
Casey:
I hate that it's called Channels.
Casey:
The Channels app tries to find, it's Apple TV+, playing Apple TV on the Apple TV.
Casey:
So anyway, so it goes to figure out what television channels are accessible and available to it, and the good news is it found hundreds.
Casey:
The bad news is none of the local channels were included.
Casey:
So.
Casey:
No good there either.
Casey:
So, Marco, at this point, you should start to get a cold sweat because at this point in our story, hardware was coming to your house, baby.
Casey:
You didn't know it yet, but it was.
Marco:
In all fairness, I did offer because that does seem like it would make the most sense.
Casey:
You did, and you were very kind about it.
Casey:
And even came back and asked me or gave a suggestion or something like that a couple of days later.
Casey:
So that was very kind of you.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
A handful of listeners reached out, and Stephen was the first person, not Hackett, different Stephen, was the first person that I saw reach out and say, hey, you know, if you were to enter the internet at a place in the New York metro area, say, my friend Sean's house in southwestern Connecticut,
Casey:
you might find that if you go to, say, CBS's website and just try to watch their programming, you might find that you get the local football game, which might so happen to be the New York Giants.
Casey:
I don't know why I didn't think of this, but yes, that's exactly what I should have been doing this whole damn time.
Casey:
I didn't need the HD home run.
Casey:
I didn't need the antenna.
Casey:
All I needed was this little knock, you know, this little baby PC up at Sean's house.
Casey:
And that's what I can do.
Casey:
And thanks to the magic of tail scale, who is not sponsoring the show, but I love it so damn much.
Casey:
Um, I,
Casey:
I turned my iPad on to the... I used the Connecticut PC as an exit node, which is what Tailscale calls when you're routing all of your traffic through a different computer.
Casey:
So I got on the internet by way of Connecticut, went to cbs.com, or actually I think I used the app on my iPad, but it doesn't matter.
Casey:
And sure enough, it wanted to play me a perfectly crisp beat of the New York Giants.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
hypothetically, this should work for CBS.
Casey:
I mean, it just did.
Casey:
I understood that it works for Fox and we'll see about ABC and NBC, but this makes way more sense than anything I was trying so far.
Casey:
And I feel like a dunce for not having thought of it.
Casey:
So thank you to Steven and a handful of others who reached out as well to point that out to me.
Casey:
I have a couple other options, but any thoughts or commentary at this point?
Marco:
This is kind of amazing that the answer is basically just use a VPN.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
No one thought of that last week.
Marco:
We didn't think of it.
Marco:
You didn't think of it.
Marco:
I know.
John:
It's ridiculous.
John:
People in the chat room talked about VPNs last week.
John:
I was still just thinking, why don't you just pay for this, Casey?
John:
But whatever.
Casey:
Well, and so with that in mind, there are some options if you want to pay for it.
Casey:
One or two people, Europeans or people who are American expats in Europe, reached out to point out there is a service.
Casey:
I think it's called DAZN.
Casey:
I don't really know, but it's D-A-Z-N.
Casey:
This is a service that is not available to Americans, but perhaps if you had a VPN where you were exiting the internet in Europe, you might be able to sign up for it.
Casey:
And I don't know how much it costs, but this is a way to give that company, which in turn gives the NFL, your money so that you can stream the NFL games from the internet.
Casey:
This is of questionable legality, obviously, on account of the fact that
Casey:
You know, you're masquerading in Europe, but hey, I'm also masquerading in Connecticut, so who am I to throw stones?
Casey:
I haven't really looked into this much because I don't think it's necessary now.
Marco:
Look, if you're going to pirate it, don't pay someone else to help you pirate it.
Marco:
Just pirate it.
Marco:
Or if you're going to pay for it, pay for the real thing.
Casey:
Right, right, right.
Casey:
So anyway, that's an option.
Casey:
Then Chris H. pointed out to me that there is a package that exists through the NFL in America that will let you watch replays of the games.
Casey:
And I guess they're put online for you to watch not too long after the game ends.
Casey:
So you can do that.
Casey:
And that is the
Casey:
Far more affordable, $100 a season instead of the like several hundred dollars it is for full Sunday ticket.
Casey:
I tend to want to watch them live, but this is a genuinely very good option if you're willing to give up on watching them live, which I really appreciate.
Casey:
Then there are a couple of things with regard to YouTube TV.
Casey:
I was under the impression that you must have a full-on YouTube TV subscription in order to get Sunday Ticket.
Casey:
That is incorrect.
Casey:
That is a misunderstanding on my part.
Casey:
You do not need a full-on YouTube TV sub to get Sunday Ticket.
Casey:
You can do that separately.
Casey:
Additionally, since we're late in the season, it's worth noting that Sunday Ticket is just $90 for the next, I guess, couple weeks until the season is basically over.
Casey:
Um, which is something that's interesting to me, but still, I feel like that's a temporary bandaid on a larger problem.
Casey:
Uh, and then finally, I was also very perturbed because this past Sunday you were supposed to get a NFL Sunday ticket for free just for one day.
Casey:
So, you know, you can get a taste of it or whatever.
Casey:
And if you recall, my parents are YouTube TV subscribers.
Casey:
That is legitimately how they get their television.
Casey:
And so I
Casey:
Um, I have a child account off of their family and every, every, every great once in a while I will, you know, tune into YouTube TV for some reason or another.
Casey:
It's extremely rare though, but I thought, okay, this is my moment.
Casey:
I will turn on YouTube TV and I will go and I will go to watch the giants.
Casey:
And they said, no.
Casey:
Huh?
Casey:
And it didn't work on the Apple TV.
Casey:
So I thought, okay, I'll do it on my iPad.
Casey:
Didn't work.
Casey:
Couldn't figure it out, couldn't figure it out, couldn't figure it out.
Casey:
Kept saying, I need to buy it, need to buy it.
Casey:
And I'm looking at an email that says, oh, it's free on this past Sunday.
Casey:
It turns out it was free on this past Sunday, as long as you're not on any Apple or mobile device.
Casey:
It's like, what the hell is the point then?
Casey:
I guess if I had installed it on my TV, you know, like my smart TV, my LG OLED and whatever, I guess maybe it would have worked.
Casey:
But such an odd restriction.
Casey:
Like, yes, you can watch Sunday Ticket as long as you're not using any of the things that you desire to use to watch it.
Casey:
Yep, sounds great.
Casey:
So yeah, that is my adventures in television.
Casey:
We'll see what happens.
Casey:
I guess I don't even know the next time the giants play and they are so abysmally bad this year.
Casey:
It's, it's, I don't even know why I'm going through these efforts.
Casey:
It's just a project at this point, but nevertheless, uh, that is my update.
Casey:
And I know you both are very relieved to have received it sports sports ball, baby.
Casey:
Uh, all right, Marco, I have assigned you, this is two consecutive weeks.
Casey:
I've assigned you vision pro homework and sorry, not sorry.
Casey:
Did you, did you, or did you not do your homework?
Casey:
I did indeed do my homework.
Casey:
I am very proud of you.
Casey:
So the homework this week was Concert for One, Ray.
Casey:
That's R-A-Y-E.
Casey:
She is a singer, artist, et cetera, from London.
Casey:
And this is a nine-ish minute video in the spirit of the Alicia Keys thing, where the Alicia Keys thing, I think it was like half an hour, 45 minutes or something like that.
Casey:
And this was, like I said, nine minutes.
Casey:
But it's a nine-minute performance in a studio.
Casey:
I think it was recorded in London, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
And it was Ray and a backing band, including strings and backup singers and traditional instruments that you would expect in a band.
Casey:
And I was curious to hear your thoughts.
Casey:
Or if you prefer me to start, I can start.
Casey:
It doesn't matter to me.
Marco:
You go ahead.
Marco:
I'm curious to hear yours first.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So this, like I said, eight, nine minutes.
Casey:
I had heard of Ray before, but had never heard any of their music.
Casey:
And so I didn't know what to expect.
Casey:
And this is yet another instance where I feel like this happens a lot, or maybe I'm making it up, but I feel like a lot of times when you see Apple immersive video, one of the first shots, if not the first shot is like an extreme closeup of
Casey:
of somebody's face we saw this in uh in not shrinking excuse me and uh submerged uh and we see this here and maybe over time i will get used to it gotta say i don't love it like i feel like i'm infringing on somebody's personal space by being that close it kind of i'm being a little dramatic here but no you're not i i have the exact same complaint i you are not being over dramatic and
Marco:
It's weird.
Marco:
It gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Marco:
Yeah, it feels like, okay, these shots start out so close that you can see the person's pores on their face.
Marco:
You can see the stubble where they shave.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
close like it it is it is way closer than anybody would ever stand and because you have the VR 180 format the immersive format you are seeing it in 3D huge life-size right in front of you it looks like you are there and therefore it looks and feels like you are standing way too close to this stranger like it and like as I mean look
Marco:
As middle-aged men who try to be conscientious of the realities of the world, I take extra precautions to try to make sure I'm not creeping anybody out.
Marco:
I would never in a million years stand that close to a stranger in a room.
Marco:
Like that's never anything I would do.
Marco:
And so it feels really like off-putting.
Marco:
And I think they are – they're obviously doing it to show off.
Marco:
Like they're doing it to wow you so that you will say, oh, my God, look how sharp it is.
Marco:
It feels like I'm here.
Marco:
And I think it's one of these things that they will grow out of, I hope.
Marco:
If this platform ever gets a chance to mature –
Marco:
I think that's one of the first things that will change as it matures is like they will stop getting so damn close to everyone's like faces and necks and bodies because it's just weird.
John:
Do you think it might be like the train coming out of the movie screen when people first start movies and were worried the train was going to run them over?
John:
Do you feel like you're that audience in the movie theater with the train coming at them or no?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's not as much like scared.
Casey:
It's just, it's like I am infringing on somebody's personal space.
John:
No, I'm not saying the feeling.
John:
I'm saying the idea that when the people first experienced that, so the story goes, they thought, oh, the train's going to come out of the movie screen and hit me.
John:
But obviously, as sophisticated movie viewers who grew up with movies, we never had that experience.
John:
We didn't think the train was going to hit us.
John:
Is it because you're all fuddy-duddies and future generations will not be bothered because...
John:
They will they will understand it at a more instinctive level that there is not actually a person there.
John:
Right.
John:
Like you're not actually standing too close to somebody to a recorded video and you're watching it in the same way that we're not worried about that.
John:
I'm not saying this is the case.
John:
I'm saying, have you thought about that angle?
John:
Do you think that it's the type of thing where maybe you yourself will never get used to it, but people who grow up with it won't have the same same hang ups?
John:
Or do you think it's like this is going to be bothersome no matter what?
Casey:
I think it could be either way.
Casey:
I'm leaning toward maybe if you are a child of the Vision Pro, then I presume it wouldn't be as bothersome.
Casey:
But for anyone that has any amount of life experience before strapping this thing to your head, I think it'll be a little bit uncomfortable.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
But on the plus side, Marco, you touched on this briefly earlier.
Casey:
The fidelity in this headset is just unbelievable.
Casey:
I mean, you can see pores.
Casey:
You can see stubble.
Casey:
It is incredibly crisp, just astonishingly crisp, or at least to me anyway.
Casey:
And so I really do appreciate the fidelity of it.
Casey:
I do think that this was kind of fun, this particular video, because basically imagine that the camera did move a little bit forward and backward.
Casey:
It did not move laterally at all.
Casey:
And the way the musicians were arranged was that
Casey:
to the left and the right of the camera, when it was positioned as far back as possible, you know, there's a fair bit of space to the left and the right, and then the musicians start in, like, angled toward the center of the frame.
Casey:
I don't know if I'm doing a great job describing this, but suffice to say, as you got closer to the back of the stage as you're watching it, the musicians were getting closer and closer to you just by virtue of the way they're standing or sitting.
Casey:
And that left, like, this big kind of aisle, if you will, where Ray could move forward and backward.
Casey:
And I feel like, deliberate or otherwise...
Casey:
She did a little bit of playing with that.
Casey:
You know, she would walk forward or walk backward.
Casey:
And again, the camera occasionally moved forward and backward.
Casey:
And I thought that that was kind of neat because I feel like depth means a little bit more in this context than it does in 2D moviemaking.
Casey:
And granted, it still means something there.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
It just hits different, I feel, when you've got this immersive and 3D environment.
Casey:
I watched it with the audio pods or whatever they're calling the strap.
Casey:
You know, I did not have AirPods in when I watched it.
Casey:
And unlike the Weeknd's music video that we talked about last week, I didn't feel like the audio pods did a very good job with this.
Casey:
I don't know what it was specifically.
Casey:
It just sounded awfully tinny in a way that the Weeknd's didn't, which is funny because I would argue the Weeknd's music is inherently more bassy than Ray's.
Casey:
But nevertheless, this is the first time I think ever that I've watched something on the Vision Pro that I've thought, ugh, I really should put in AirPods.
Casey:
Because the audio pods, and forgive me if I'm calling them the wrong name, are astonishingly good at broadcasting into the open air, but kind of pointed at your ears.
Casey:
And they sound really good.
Casey:
Like I've watched movies with them.
Casey:
I've watched other short features like this.
Casey:
And I've never felt it's a problem until this one performance.
Casey:
I don't know what it was, which was weird.
Casey:
But that being said, I'm not a musician.
Casey:
The only thing I can play with efficacy is a stereo.
Casey:
And I don't know what it's like to perform music.
Casey:
But I do know what it's like to be around live music.
Casey:
And I've been around enough live music, not an overwhelming amount, but I've been around enough that...
Casey:
To me anyway, and I don't think this is unique to me, there's something special when a group of musicians, when they're just cooking, you know, you can just tell that they're in it.
Casey:
They're in it and they're all, I don't know if vibing isn't the right word and I probably sound like an old man anyway, but it's like they're all in the moment and everything's clicking and everything's firing and it's just good.
Casey:
And the second song that she performed, I feel like toward the tail end of that song, you could tell everyone was just cooking.
Casey:
And being able to look around and focus on the instruments that you want to focus on, I know we've talked about this before, but that is so fun and so cool.
Casey:
God help me, I want to watch every piece of music content in this immersive environment because it's just so cool.
Casey:
And I came away from it going from I don't know who Ray is to, wow, she's really good and I should explore more of her stuff.
Casey:
So all in all, I really, really enjoyed it and I thought it was really good.
Casey:
So Marco, what did you think?
Marco:
Musically, she's obviously very talented.
Marco:
It wasn't quite what I would normally choose to listen to, but I enjoyed the performance.
Marco:
I like that from the technical point of view, you mentioned that the camera really was not moving much.
Marco:
It basically would switch between fixed shots.
Marco:
You said you thought it moved during some of the shots?
Marco:
I didn't notice that.
Casey:
I thought it did a little bit toward the back of the frame and then backward, you know, toward where you would expect to be sitting.
Casey:
I don't know how to describe it otherwise.
Casey:
But maybe I made that up.
Casey:
But I could swear that I saw it move a couple of feet a couple of times.
Casey:
Like, I don't think it was very much.
Casey:
And it was very slowly.
Casey:
Not like that crash, like dolly zoom that you saw in Submerge that kind of made you go, whoa.
Marco:
Yeah, or the weekend video where it's like there's a lot of motion in the weekend video.
Marco:
But yeah, this one, yeah, it was basically switching between a small number of like fixed shots.
Marco:
I think that's the way to do it.
Marco:
If you want to – because like this one I had zero problems with motion sickness feeling.
Marco:
Like it was totally fine.
Marco:
I'm kind of learning as a viewer –
Marco:
That a better way – like I'm tempted because the 180-degree field of view is so novel.
Marco:
I'm always tempted to look around to see like what's on the edges of this frame.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
It's in the shot technically.
Marco:
I'm like looking around like what's on the edges?
Marco:
But the problem is the edges are never in focus for lots of reasons.
Marco:
I've kind of learned that like in order to prevent weird like eye strain and focus issues with my eyes, I'm better off –
Marco:
just looking in the middle of the frame the whole time.
Marco:
Just let the camera framing show me where to look instead of trying to look around and get every single edge of every single frame to figure out what's going on around me.
Marco:
I'm kind of learning how to watch it better, and so I didn't have many problems with focus here.
Marco:
The only weird thing about that is...
Marco:
There are moments where like when it would – the way it was staged was the artist was in the middle and then she had like her backup instruments on one side and her backup singers on the other side, like left and right, kind of like in a line.
Marco:
And the problem is that when they would show either the instruments or the backup singers –
Marco:
only one of them would really be in focus and so and i'd want to be like oh well that's that singer sounds pretty good cool but like i kind of want to look at the one behind her too and i kind of can't like so there there were kind of weird issues with you know with again selective focus is weird in this format because we think with our eyes we think we can just focus on anything in the frame like because it it looks like we are there and if we were actually there that's how our eyes would work
Marco:
But it's shot more in that cinematic style where the background is all blurry and only the subject is in focus.
Marco:
But I don't expect that from 3D.
Marco:
My eyes don't expect that.
Marco:
My eyes expect that I can focus on anything I want to because it feels like I am actually in that room.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
the immersion is working in the sense that it is tricking me into thinking that my eyes will work the way they would work in real life.
Marco:
And that's another one of those kind of technical decisions that I think immersive video might have to reconsider as it matures.
Marco:
Like, I think having very shallow depth of field is probably not the right call a lot of the time if you're trying to show a whole scene.
Marco:
I really think filmmakers should probably have very narrow apertures to get very big depth of field because...
Marco:
That's what we actually expect our eyes to be able to do when we're watching it.
Marco:
So anyway, all that being said, the idea of this series Apple's putting out there where there's basically like five-minute mini concerts being put on that are specially filmed just for this in a special room, that's fine.
Marco:
I don't think it's ideal, but it's fine.
Marco:
I think in an ideal form...
Marco:
We would get a lot more of these.
Marco:
It would be an actual concert with an actual audience.
Marco:
And they would be, like, a little more complete shows.
Marco:
Like, you know, give me a whole set.
Marco:
Give me, you know, at least an album worth, you know, give me 45 minutes or something.
Marco:
Like, just instead of, like, basically, here's a little snack of content.
Right.
Marco:
I feel like all we're getting on the Vision Pro is little snacks.
Marco:
What that does, first of all, it's obviously – I keep hopping on this.
Marco:
We need more content on the Vision Pro.
Marco:
You can still go through all of it the first night you have it.
Marco:
But more than that, if you try to capture full concerts –
Marco:
It's easier.
Marco:
It's cheaper.
Marco:
You can just film a concert that's already happening.
Marco:
Just stick a VR camera in a good seat in the middle, or even from where the soundboard is.
Marco:
Usually that's kind of central, kind of midway into the audience.
Marco:
Stick a VR camera on the front of that thing so people can just see just a fixed view.
Marco:
Because one thing I did think about with this, because they were mostly just switching between a small number of fixed camera positions,
Marco:
I realized like I actually – I would be fine if there was literally just one because whenever they would switch to one of the other ones, I wasn't really gaining anything.
Marco:
I was just getting too close to her pores.
Marco:
But like I would be totally fine to just like have a fixed position where I just – where it's just like you have a really good seat to a concert.
Marco:
And again, I do think –
Marco:
Having an audience, I think, would really add to it because that's part of the live music experience is there being an audience there and the audience energy.
Marco:
And musicians perform differently when there's an audience present than when there isn't.
Marco:
Now, obviously, those are two very different art contexts, and some people can be better than they are at the other.
Marco:
But if what you want is the experience of being in a concert, which I think this can probably very well deliver if it's captured that way, if what you want is that experience of being to a concert, this isn't that.
Marco:
This feels like you are in a room while they're performing a demo for you.
Marco:
And that's interesting.
Marco:
And the music can be interesting, but it's not a concert experience, really.
Marco:
A concert is other people in the audience and the musicians playing to those people in the audience, not playing to a camera person with nothing else there.
Marco:
So this is a fun experiment, but there is so much more they could do.
Marco:
And I hope someday, sometime, they actually just give us concerts.
Casey:
I like the snacks, but I do agree that a concert would be incredible.
Casey:
And all I can think about is, you know, imagine, and maybe this is just me, but imagine MTV Unplugged being brought back, because as far as I know, they haven't done one in years.
Casey:
But can you imagine Unplugged in this kind of environment?
Casey:
Like, it would be amazing.
Casey:
I can imagine that, you know, if Phish or whomever that you're into, Marco, even if they did exactly what we just saw for eight or ten minutes, I mean, that would be one-tenth of one Phish song.
Casey:
But nevertheless, that literally would be a snack.
Casey:
But anyway, imagine how amazing that would be.
Casey:
And, like, I would kill to see, like, you know, Dave Matthews Band or someone else that I really enjoy in this kind of a format.
Casey:
So that doesn't mean you're wrong.
Casey:
I mean, I think more would be better, for sure.
Casey:
But I'm really digging...
Marco:
the idea just please apple just pump the brakes a little bit on the extreme close-ups also like can you like it doesn't even have to i mean look i would love for them to actually you know record full concerts that are in full-size venues that are actually happening with real audience members but it can even be something a little smaller scale if they want to do like a halfway point between this and what when what i'm actually asking for um look at things like the npr tiny desk concerts
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
It's one of the great gifts to music.
Marco:
I love them.
Marco:
Oh, 100%.
Marco:
They get such great artists there, and it's such a cool recording environment where, for those of you who don't know, just look up YouTube for a Tiny Desk concert and look for any artists that you've even heard of.
Marco:
Even once you haven't, it's totally worth seeing because they literally just like host artists in like a part of the NPR office.
Marco:
And it's full of like carpets and bookshelves that are full of books and everything.
Marco:
So the acoustics are great.
Marco:
It's a very absorbent acoustic.
Marco:
Like there's no echo.
Marco:
Everything sounds very warm.
Marco:
And it's usually just surrounded by a ring of like all the...
Marco:
People who work there just like kind of standing around the boundaries of like a big square of desks, I guess, listening and clapping.
Marco:
And so it's like a small audience, small club feel with amazing acoustics.
Marco:
And they get top tier acts like the really good acts to play these.
Marco:
And yeah, they play, you know, five, six songs.
Marco:
Maybe they're playing for like a half hour.
Marco:
That's a great format.
Marco:
And that kind of thing would also, I think, be a good inspiration.
Marco:
What can music look like in VR?
Marco:
That.
Marco:
Give us that.
Marco:
Make it seem like we are there listening to that.
Marco:
That would be wonderful as well if you want to have something that's a little bit closer than a full concert arena.
Marco:
But there's so much potential here for just take events that are literally already happening and just put us there.
Marco:
Bring us there through a fixed camera.
Marco:
Please, more.
Casey:
Yeah, I would love Tiny Desk concerts in this format.
Casey:
And yeah, I don't know why I didn't bring it up, because I adore Tiny Desk concerts.
Casey:
And they are, I think, the modern version of MTV Unplugged.
Casey:
I mean, they're not literally unplugged all the times, but I think this is the spiritual successor to MTV Unplugged.
Casey:
And coincidentally, Ray has a Tiny Desk, which I actually preferred the songs that she performed in concert for one, but it's still very good.
Casey:
So you can check that out if you wanted to get a taste for her music.
Casey:
But yeah, I really, really dig this idea.
Casey:
I don't think they've perfected it, but it's off to a great start.
Marco:
I think what I'm hoping for, what we are seeing so far with what Apple's producing content-wise...
Marco:
It kind of has, I would say, the same problem that Apple's keynote videos now have where they're just kind of dripping with too much money.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Marco:
Like production-wise, it's like everything is like too amped up.
Marco:
It's too perfect.
Marco:
It's too high budget.
Marco:
It's too corporate.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I don't know if they have the capability to pull back from that a little bit or to give it a little bit – I'm not saying like spend less money.
Marco:
I'm saying make it look like it wasn't so corporate.
Casey:
It seems almost synthetic at a point.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
As opposed to just natural for lack of a better way of describing it.
Marco:
And I would call it overproduced especially.
Marco:
It starts losing its humanity and kind of organicness.
Marco:
And when you're –
Marco:
Talking about what the specs of the new iPhone are, fine, you can do that.
Marco:
But when you're trying to show a performance of music, there should be some humanity still left in there.
Marco:
And I feel like Apple's current style, it squeezes a lot of that out.
Marco:
It makes it very high polish, very high production, very high budget, very corporate feeling.
Marco:
And part of why I love live music...
Marco:
is because that's how studio albums sound.
Marco:
Studio albums sound now very high budget, very production, you know, all that stuff.
Marco:
But live music usually is much more human.
Marco:
That's part of why I like it.
Marco:
And again, this is such a great format to make you feel like you are really there.
Marco:
That's what this is great at.
Marco:
You feel like you're really there.
Marco:
And I think what I want to feel like is I am really in a little bit more human environment and a little bit less produced environment.
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, you don't want to be in Johnny Ives' white world.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
That's right.
Marco:
That's the bad place.
Casey:
We are sponsored this week by Aura Frames.
Casey:
So here's the thing.
Casey:
In the past, you have surely gotten or perhaps purchased a quote-unquote smart photo frame that was a piece of trash that you needed to connect via an ancient USB cable or maybe you needed to provide your own SD card or something like that.
Casey:
And it was not very intuitive to use and it looked like garbage.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
This is not that.
Casey:
Aura Frames, they have a variety of different frames available, and they are all great.
Casey:
And they don't require any USB connections to anything.
Casey:
They don't need SD cards or anything like that.
Casey:
You just get on your phone and upload photos to the frame, and it works via Wi-Fi and freaking magic, as far as I'm concerned.
Casey:
Aura sent myself a couple of these long before they were ever thinking about sponsoring.
Casey:
They just did it to be nice and genuinely nice.
Casey:
these things are really great.
Casey:
And we have one in our house on the wall, and we gave one to my parents to put in their house.
Casey:
And they, especially my mom, freaking love this thing.
Casey:
My mom uses it all the time to upload photos of her grandkids.
Casey:
I can upload photos of her grandkids to her frame from here.
Casey:
It really, really is great.
Casey:
And if you're giving this as a gift, most of their frames, as far as I know, you can actually get them most of the way set up without opening the box.
Casey:
It's a
Casey:
Very, very clever and very well done.
Casey:
And that, honestly, is indicative of these products as a whole.
Casey:
They're very pretty.
Casey:
The screen resolution's really great.
Casey:
They support live photos.
Casey:
You can tap on a little pad and you can see where pictures were taken for some of their frames.
Casey:
Genuinely, these things are really, really great.
Casey:
So, for a limited time, you can visit AuraFrames.com and get $45 off Aura's best-selling Carver Matte Frames by using the promo code ATP at checkout.
Casey:
That's A-U-R-A-F-R-A-M-E-S dot com, promo code ATP.
Casey:
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Casey:
Terms and conditions apply.
Casey:
Thank you to Aura for sponsoring the show.
Casey:
John, welcome back to the show.
Casey:
Can you tell me about using large external drives with macOS, please?
John:
We've been talking about this topic since discussing storage prices and the new Mac minis and the fact that unlike the laptops, it's not incredibly inconvenient to use external storage.
John:
But, oh, how do you deal with that?
John:
How do you divide up your stuff between your internal drive and your external drive?
John:
And what are the limitations?
John:
One of the things that came up on past episodes was, what about my photo library?
John:
That's big.
John:
uh and we discussed it in vague terms because none of us had a personal experience with moving the photo library to an external drive uh it turns out apple has a support document on it which we will link uh in the show notes uh as apple says to save storage space on your mac you can move your photos library to a different storage device
John:
but there are some caveats, so there's much more in the document, but just a little taste.
John:
You can't store your library on a storage device used for time machine backups, and to avoid possible data loss, don't store your library on a removable storage device like an SD card or USB flash drive, or on a device shared over your network or the internet, including over a cloud-based storage service.
John:
As always, there are caveats, but Apple says it is officially supported and they can explain to you how.
John:
But Mark Wickens wrote in with some personal experiences that show even though it's officially supported, there are other things that might thwart you.
John:
Mark says, I have my photos library and a cheap external SSD.
John:
It's great, except occasionally the SSD will randomly unmount itself and I'll have to kill the photos cloud sync process to get syncing working again after remounting.
John:
Or I could just reboot.
John:
But it happens about once a month, so it's bearable and worth it to keep my faster internal SSD reserved for day-to-day work.
John:
I can say that OneDrive did not like syncing to its folder in an external SSD.
John:
It coincided with various sleep issues and stuck processes.
John:
That was over a year ago now, so it might be fixed, but I haven't risked trying it.
John:
This is part of the experience of having stuff in external drives.
John:
Everything should be fine, especially if they say it's officially supported.
John:
But you kind of have to make sure that external drive stays mounted all the time, just like your internal drive would.
John:
And some programs inexplicably get angry about having their stuff over there.
John:
And so you kind of have to go on a case by case basis to see which ones like it.
John:
I still continue to think that booting from the external drive, quote unquote, booting from the external drive, see past episodes about what's really happening.
John:
But anyway, booting from an external drive simplifies things greatly because at least your stuff is on the boot drive.
John:
But speaking of that, when I was experimenting with Apple intelligence in the beta versions of macOS, I was using an external drive on my wife's Mac Studio to boot that thing, to boot from that beta OS.
John:
But it wouldn't let me use Apple Intelligence.
John:
I got through all the waiting lists or whatever, and it said, sorry, Apple Intelligence doesn't work on an external drive.
John:
And I was booting from that external drive.
John:
And I hope that was just a beta thing.
John:
Remember, we discussed it on the showcase.
John:
I don't know if you were there.
Casey:
No, I guess not.
John:
Yeah, but anyway...
John:
I hope that was just like a beta thing or whatever.
John:
I didn't really pay much attention to it.
John:
But since we've been having this discussion, many, many people have said, I would consider booting from an external drive, except if I do that, I don't get Apple intelligence.
John:
So apparently that's still a thing in the released versions of macOS.
John:
Why?
John:
I don't know.
John:
It seems like a weird limitation to me.
John:
But that's a thing.
John:
So if you care about Apple intelligence, apparently you're booting from that internal drive until Apple changes that.
John:
So keep that in mind.
John:
And finally, on this topic, there's another thing that came up frequently that I think we alluded to vaguely in past episodes.
John:
We have more concrete details.
John:
uh to try to save space on whatever ssd you're booted from like if you're booted from the internal one but you want to put stuff somewhere else uh in 15.1 in mac os 15.1 there is an option in the mac app store if you just go to settings there's a checkbox that says download and install large apps to a separate disk and the subtext is apps larger than one gigabyte will download and install to the disk that you choose then you can pick a disk
John:
it's kind of weird they don't let you put all the apps over there just the big ones and you don't get to pick that threshold size but if you've got some really big apps like i can imagine maybe games have a lot of content or i don't know other big creative apps um yeah try that uh setting in the app store uh to see if you can get your files over and i think that's for downloading like for future downloads i don't think it moves any of your existing applications over but i guess you could just try copying them there or just deleting them and re-downloading them if you wanted although if they're large that might be kind of onerous but but
John:
yeah part of dealing with an external drive uh even if you were booted from it is working out all of these issues honestly like these this sounds like a lot of scary limitations you're like oh i don't want to do that i guess i'll just pay the apple price for have the big internal thing that does simplify stuff but as someone who has had a series of tower mac computers um where they have had multiple drives installed in them
John:
I know they're not external drives.
John:
Technically, they're internal.
John:
But from the OS's perspective, I wonder... I haven't actually tried this because I can't use Apple until I'm just on my Intel Mac anyway.
John:
But someday, when I get an ARM-based Mac, if I get one that supports internal storage, I'll see what it thinks about booting from...
John:
uh an internal drive that's connected to some ancillary bus like sata or something you know some slow internal bus does it consider does apple intelligence run you know would it say sorry you can't run apple intelligence when you're booted from an external disk and it'd be like but it's not external it's in the box does that count
John:
uh lots of weird caveats but anyway and all my experience of having many drives inside of my big tower max i've been able to freely boot for many of them and it has not made any difference in my life but of course i'm still in the intel world so things are definitely different when it comes to booting on apple silicon and by the time i finally go over to apple silicon hopefully they'll have some of these limitations worked out but we'll see do you honestly think that your first apple silicon mac is going to have internal drive bays
John:
Who knows?
John:
Who knows?
John:
What if they come out with an M4 Extreme and it comes in the big tower case and I somehow decide to buy it?
John:
The odds are against it.
John:
But, you know, it could happen.
John:
This is the time where anything could happen.
John:
Would it be like $8,000?
John:
Do you remember what he spent on it?
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
His current one is as much as a damn Civic.
Casey:
Or was, anyway.
Casey:
Now it's worth as much as a Yugo.
John:
But that's all right.
John:
Someone sent us some feedback about someone was benchmarking one of the dual GPU cards that you could get for my Mac Pro and how amazingly fast it was even compared to modern video cards or whatever.
John:
And they were like, oh, and I bought this on eBay or whatever.
John:
So I did an eBay search to see how much these go for.
John:
It's like the...
John:
What is it?
John:
6800X Duo.
John:
It's got two Radeon 6800 GPUs on a single card, and you could put two of those cards inside my computer.
John:
They still go for, like, $3,000 on ePay.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
For each card.
John:
Gracious.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So you would think, like, you would think the stuff, the price would be dropping rapidly because, you know, who wants this?
John:
It's old.
John:
It's obviously, like, why would you, you know, someone might need it, I guess, but, like, still, their original retail price was $5,000.
John:
And you can find them on eBay for $4,000, $3,000 in that range.
John:
And yeah, that's well above the threshold of me wanting to buy one to experiment with it.
John:
I think it's only like almost as fast as an NVIDIA 4090, although if you got two of them, you'd be faster than a 4090.
John:
But anyway, yeah, don't recommend, but there's a lot of cool technology.
John:
And for whatever reason, it's still not dirt cheap.
John:
One other eBay search I have, by the way, is for the bent piece of metal I have holding my internal drives.
John:
It was like $400 because they made you buy a hard drive with it or whatever.
John:
I have an eBay search on that just to see, surely the bent piece of metal that has no electronics in it, surely the price of that will come down from a few hundred bucks.
John:
And the answer is no.
John:
Still, if you find it on eBay, they're being sold for, not just being listed for, but being sold for multiple hundreds of dollars for a bent piece of metal.
John:
It's a wild world out there.
Marco:
By the way, for the record, my estimate of $8,000 is definitely wrong because right now the current Mac Pro with the M2 Ultra is $7,000 if you want some of the GPU cores disabled or if you actually want the entire GPU power of the M2 Ultra.
Marco:
It's $8,000 for the machine.
Marco:
So there is no way that if they did an Extreme with two Ultras next to each other, no way that's less than $12,000.
Marco:
Like there's at least and possibly more than that.
Marco:
Maybe $15,000 to start.
Marco:
It would be ridiculous.
John:
Odds are against it, but we'll see.
Casey:
I can't.
Casey:
I can't.
Casey:
I am genuinely very curious and excited to see what is the final straw that breaks the camel's back that gets you to buy a new Mac.
Casey:
Because I feel like I'm not even convinced that being locked out of new versions of macOS is going to be enough to get you to upgrade.
Marco:
No, the real question is, what will be the straw that breaks his back to get him to buy a gaming PC?
Marco:
That's the real question.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
That's true.
John:
I just bought a PS5 Pro.
John:
I'm not going to get a gaming PC.
John:
My PS5 Pro is great.
Casey:
Alesh Hudak writes, regarding the speculated quote-unquote low price of $299 for Apple's home device with a screen, well...
Casey:
A brand-new iPad is only $50 more right now.
Casey:
I bought one a few years ago and stuck it to my fridge.
Casey:
It's always on with an all-widget homepage that shows photos, slideshows, calendar, and weather, and has some home controls.
Casey:
It also controls the multi-room Sonos system.
John:
That's Apple's competition.
John:
You know, if they're going to make a home thing that's kind of like an iPad but is much more limited and doesn't have an App Store, hopefully it won't cost as much as the low-end iPad.
John:
That would be a weird... Not that Apple hasn't sometimes had really weird pricing arrangements where you're like, why would anyone buy this when they can get this other better thing from a product line for less money?
John:
They've done that sometimes, but I feel like it really does put a ceiling on the potential sane price for a home thing with a screen, unless it has features that Apple's iPad doesn't like.
John:
For example, if it comes with
John:
very fancy high-fidelity speakers that are better than the ones that come with a, you know, $350 iPad.
John:
But we'll see.
John:
They keep lowering the price of the bottom-end iPad, and I can't imagine that the hardware in their home device is going to be much more powerful than the low-end iPad.
John:
So hopefully that puts a ceiling on their price.
Casey:
So a few weeks ago, I think it was, there were some very, very funny, um, Apple intelligence notification summaries that I think John had collected.
Casey:
Um, and we will put links to these in the show notes, but we wanted to take a quick nickel tour of all of them.
Casey:
A friend of the show, Steve Trouton Smith, uh, wrote, sometimes the summary is less helpful than the subject line.
Casey:
So the summary reads, Netflix is sending an email to remind you about a new movie coming out on Wednesday.
Um,
John:
and what was summarized the subject is coming wednesday november 13th hot frosty so the subject actually specified the movie but the summary did not well done there's a problem with summaries like people don't always we talked about this before about subject lines versus summaries and how subject lines can lie to you and be incomplete and people don't write good subjects uh but in the case where there is information in the summary in the subject line
John:
the summary is trying to summarize not just the subject line but the entire email and it has missed out on the thing you might want to know about if you're going to give me one line description about a movie that's coming out soon and they name the movie name the movie right but there's it's not a person doing this it's just a you know a big bucket of numbers and it didn't come up with the useful thing and so in this case it would have been better just to show the subject line but it didn't and this by the way this is like speaking of apple intelligence doesn't work on external drives doesn't work on my intel mac all this other stuff
John:
i would be more bummed about that if i was more jazzed about the apple intelligence features like i've tried them on my wife's mac i try them on my phone on my ipad right now for me personally the apple intelligence features are mostly a technical curiosity and a thing i'm interested in looking at for the purposes of this show but in my day-to-day life they're not exactly wowing me so i don't think so far the lack of apple intelligence is going to be a thing that drags me to a new mac sooner
Casey:
I actually think that the notification summaries, this whole follow-up topic, notwithstanding, I think they're generally pretty good.
Casey:
They definitely miss from time to time.
Casey:
But by and large, I've actually been pretty pleased with them.
Casey:
But with that said, Chris Hancock had tooted, tweeted, whatever.
Casey:
Poor summary of the fight, Siri.
Casey:
So the summary is there are apparently 44 notifications from the New York Times, which were summarized to be Mike Tyson defeated Jake Paul, Israeli aides under investigation for leaks, and record doctoring.
Casey:
the three most recent notifications that it appears that apple intelligence summarized read as follows october 7 leak investigation aids to benjamin netanyahu of israel are being investigated over accusations of leaks and record doctoring related to the hamas war from the atlantic jake paul defeated mike tyson not the other way around via unanimous decision in netflix high profile netflix's high profile boxing showcase and then finally from the atlantic mike tyson the former world heavyweight champion will soon fight jake paul the youtuber turned boxer follow along live
John:
That's exactly what I was talking about with sports results.
John:
They can't get much simpler than a fight.
John:
Two people, one of them is the winner.
John:
And it got it wrong.
John:
And if you read that summary, you could be forgiven for swiping it away because you're not that into it.
John:
And just the next day when talking with friends, like, I can't believe Mike Tyson beat Jake Paul.
John:
They're like, what are you talking about?
John:
because you didn't watch it, you didn't care, you just read the notification.
John:
That's a pretty important thing to get right.
John:
Don't trust notification summaries.
John:
If you see that little icon, which looks like two little lines, and then like a little arrow swooping down, and you actually care about what it says, tap through.
Marco:
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Casey:
The Department of Justice says Google must sell Chrome to crack open its search monopoly.
Casey:
So reading from The Verge, there's kind of a lot here, but forgive me because I think it's all fairly important.
Casey:
The Department of Justice says that Google must divest the Chrome web browser to restore competition to the online search market, and it left the door open to requiring the company to spin out Android 2.
Casey:
The initial proposed final judgment refines the DOJ's earlier high-level outline of remedies after Judge Amit Mehta found Google maintained an illegal monopoly in search and in search text advertising.
Casey:
The filing includes a broad range of requirements the DOJ hopes the court will impose on Google, from restricting the company from entering certain kinds of agreements to more broadly breaking the company up.
Casey:
The DOJ's latest proposal doubles down on its request to spin out Google's Chrome browser, which the government views as key access point to searching the web.
Casey:
While the government isn't going so far as to demand Google spin out the Android business, it's leaving the option open.
Casey:
The government says a spin-out could also be mandated should those other solutions prove ineffective.
Casey:
At restoring competition to the market, the DOJ says Google might even choose divestiture itself if the company doesn't want to comply with some of the other rules the government is proposing against self-preferencing Google search in Android.
Casey:
Other remedies the government is asking the court to impose include prohibiting Google from offering money or anything of value to third parties, including Apple and other phone makers, to make Google's search engine the default, or to discourage them from hosting search competitors.
Casey:
Doj is also asking that Google let websites opt out.
Casey:
of its AI overviews without being penalized in search results.
Casey:
In response, Google published a blog post saying the DOJ's proposed remedies go, quote, way overboard, quote.
Casey:
The post attributed to Alphabet's chief legal officer, Kent Walker, says the DOJ is, quote, pushing a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America's global technology leadership.
Casey:
Uh, that blog post response, it's spicy.
Casey:
They are not happy.
Casey:
And it is, it's on the one side, it's like the old man in me is kind of like, wow, that's a little inappropriate to talk like that.
Casey:
On the other side, I'm like, yeah, let's just, let's just call it like we see it now.
Casey:
I'm not entirely sure I agree with how they see it, but nevertheless, I appreciate the fact that, you know, they're just letting it all hang out.
Casey:
So, uh, that's pretty good stuff.
John:
And to be clear, this is this is just the DOJ saying this is what we think should happen.
John:
There's no had no official decision yet, but they all like the DOJ won the case.
John:
They're saying, here's how we think here.
John:
Here are the remedies that we are proposing.
John:
And it's going to be months and months until something actually happens.
John:
But this is the time for Google to say the DOJ's proposed remedies are terrible and they're going to cause the end of the world.
John:
And, you know, it's time for the DOJ to ask for everything that it wants, you know, split all crumbs, split all this, whatever.
John:
I don't know if you want to read Ben's take before we talk about ours.
Casey:
So a friend of the show, Ben Thompson, had what I thought was a really good take on this.
Casey:
Ben writes, and I'm picking and choosing a couple things here, but Ben writes, Chrome, meanwhile, is an excellent input for a data factory.
Casey:
Owning the browser is a bit like owning an operating system when it comes to the web.
Casey:
The browser has to handle every single piece of data that comes and goes, including decrypting encrypted data.
Casey:
It's one of the pieces of software you as a user have to give absolute trust to.
Casey:
It's unclear exactly what data Google harvests from this,
Casey:
or how it builds proxies of your browsing habits so it has plausible deniability in terms of harvesting information.
Casey:
But there's no question that Chrome is a major asset for Google's business.
Casey:
At a minimum, it ensures that Google search is front and center without having to pay any traffic acquisition costs.
Casey:
That, more than anything, is what rubs me the wrong way about these remedies.
Casey:
At a very high level, the core issue in this case is that Google has been effectively paying off Apple, the one company with the resources and motivation to build a competitive search engine, to ensure that they don't compete with them.
Casey:
To that end, the remedy seems obvious.
Casey:
Make Google stop.
Casey:
Stop paying
Casey:
apple that is i think that google would dominate those search services regardless the crime was in paying off a competitor and demanding that google give away the result of nearly three decades of development and innovation instead of simply addressing the problem at hand is too much so when i look at this i kind of think that the uh the eu approach is as problematic as their like solutions have been their approach to deciding what the problem is is
John:
Refreshing compared to the US version.
John:
So the US version, you have to prove that the company violated some existing US law.
John:
And so the DOJ makes its cases based on what it thinks it can prove that you did wrong.
John:
But very often, and I think in this case, the thing that a company did that's illegal and then the remedies that would come from that don't actually solve what we think the underlying problem is.
John:
The EU just says, there's insufficient competition in market X because we think there is.
John:
uh and therefore here's a bunch of remedies that we think will rescore our competition and we can debate the remedies but they basically decide there's not enough competition here there's too few companies that have too much power but you can't just go into court in the u.s and say i think there's too few companies that have too much power and they should be knocked down a peg it's like oh what law did they violate like there's not such like broad regulatory control where you can just sort of talk about it for a while and decide we've all voted and we think that there's not enough competition in this market right um
John:
And so they have to say like, oh, they did this illegal thing and that according to this rule and these antitrust laws that are really old and the remedies they come up with just like, I mean, what Ben's getting at is like, look, the thing that Ben thinks they did the most wrong is this and he wishes they would just not do that.
John:
And everyone looking at the case will say, I think the thing Google did most wrong was this, and therefore they should do that.
John:
But the thing the government actually proved is that Google did X, and then the government gets to pick what they think the remedies are.
John:
And this is where these cases always seem to fall down in my lifetime anyway, where the DOJ will win some kind of antitrust case against a tech company and say, and the solution is this.
John:
And you look at the solution, you're like, wait.
John:
How is that going to fix things?
John:
So in this case, you got to break off Chrome because you having Chrome is not fair because you get to favor yourself and you get to observe everyone's activity and yada, yada, right?
John:
So that's got to be a separate company.
John:
uh so many problems with that first of all who would want chrome i guess the obvious answer is microsoft because they've been trying to they've been trying to you know have they have their own web browser edge the ie was so damaged by being terrible for so many years that they had to come up with a new name and edge uses the chromium engine and chrome is the world's most popular browser just like i used to be so microsoft should buy it or whatever but the thing is chrome as a standalone business doesn't make any sense and it's difficult to run just ask like mozilla
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, the entire business model for web browsers for the last decade or more has been get Google to pay you to be the default.
Marco:
That's how everyone makes their money in browsers.
John:
Yeah, it costs such a huge amount of money to maintain a modern web browser because the web is complicated and evolving.
John:
So you need some pretty big source of funding to fund that development.
John:
Web browsers are not simple and they're not static.
John:
I guess people take them for granted.
John:
They're like, oh, I just browse the web.
John:
But from a technical perspective, the things that underlie web browsers are incredibly complicated and change all the time.
John:
There's security problems.
John:
There's new standards.
John:
It is a huge Herculean effort.
John:
And by the way, that effort is made a million times worse if you are not the leader.
John:
So one of the benefits Google gets to owning Chrome is that Chrome has massive market share.
John:
It is dominant.
John:
And that means Google, which has tons of web apps like the Google web apps, not just Google search, but all Google web apps are very important part of Google's whole value proposition.
John:
It's much easier now for Google to ensure that all of its web apps work with the world's most popular web browser because they own that too.
John:
Back in the bad old days, Google would try to make web apps and half the world was on IE and they would have to make their web apps work with a browser owned by a company that's their competitor.
John:
And that was difficult because sometimes that browser didn't do the things they wanted and Google said, oh, we can make this cool thing on our web app if only the browsers did X, Y, and Z. And they'd have to beg them, please, can you add this feature to IE?
John:
Please, can you retire IE6?
John:
It made Google's life more difficult.
John:
Chrome is the most valuable...
John:
Chrome is most valuable to Google by a huge margin, not just because it's the world's biggest web browser ever, but because of the nature of Google's business and its advertising business or whatever.
John:
Like, it is so valuable to Google.
John:
And Google made it from nothing.
John:
It wasn't popular when it started.
John:
They made their own web browser.
John:
They stuck with it, which is strange for Google.
John:
And they just kept developing it.
John:
They just kept developing it, and it got to where it is.
John:
And now, in the U.S., they're saying...
John:
There's not enough competition for search advertising, which I basically agree with.
John:
That's true.
John:
And the fix is you have to get rid of Chrome.
John:
And like, I don't think it's almost unprecedented, like the most popular, very important application, web browsers are very important application and the most popular one in the world.
John:
They're saying the one company that developed it and can support it and can develop it, the one company that this is most valuable to, you have to spin it off.
John:
There's no way it can survive as an independent company because they'd have no way to make money and they'd have to start getting to weird crypto stuff or they'd have to be even worse than what Google was doing.
John:
I mean, again, look at Mozilla trying to be an independent web browser and figuring out that business model, right?
John:
And the other option is, okay, well, it's an independent company, then Microsoft tries to snap it up.
John:
Is the DOJ not going to let Microsoft buy it because they're saying, oh, now we've just transferred Chrome from one giant company to another, and then we have to have another trial against them?
John:
Like, I don't see how...
John:
Google getting rid of Chrome solves anything and it creates a whole bunch of problems for the entire World Wide Web, which is an important platform that I care about.
John:
Not that Chrome is perfect and that Google should be able to, you know, like things that Google does with Chrome are bad.
John:
But as Ben says, my perspective, tell them not to do those things.
John:
Don't say, oh, you've got to split Chrome into another company.
John:
That'll solve the problem.
John:
I don't think it will solve the problem.
John:
I think it will make a whole bunch of new problems.
John:
And I think it will make the Chrome browser worse.
John:
And I think it will make everyone's experience on the web worse.
John:
And yeah, it will hurt Google a little bit.
John:
But the goal is not just to do something mean that Google doesn't like.
John:
It's not, you're bad, so you get punished.
John:
We're supposed to be trying to solve the underlying problem, which is...
John:
you know, not enough competition in search.
John:
And there are a bunch of things in the remedy that go to that.
John:
Like you can't pay people to have a privileged thing.
John:
You can't, you know, you have to let people opt out of AI without, you know, downranking them.
John:
Like things that recognize the power that Google search has and saying you can't wield that power
John:
in a way that stifles competition, yada, yada, right?
John:
Those are all good, but splitting out Android is similar.
John:
Splitting out Android, splitting out Google, like splitting out Android, but then saying Android can't preference Google services.
John:
What is Android if not an operating system for phones that is tightly integrated with Google services?
John:
Just have to be, you know, an operating system that just doesn't have any services or lets you pick from Google services.
John:
And what's the alternative?
John:
I don't think Apple is going to be vending a lot of its iCloud services to Android phones.
John:
So it's just a mishmash of like OneDrive and Dropbox and whatever third party photos apps are out there.
John:
Like just.
Yeah.
John:
If any of these remedies go through in the form that they are proposed, these big ones about taking pieces of Google and chopping them off and throwing them out into the wilderness, I don't think it's going to solve the problem.
John:
And I think it's going to make things a real mess for a long time.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I'm not an expert in this kind of stuff.
Marco:
But when I look at what Google has done over the years, they're obviously anti-competitive in a few pretty big ways.
Marco:
At the same time, and I look at Chrome –
Marco:
And I think Google's ownership over Chrome is a huge problem.
Marco:
It really is.
Marco:
They have used it in abusive ways.
Marco:
There is tons more abuse potential to be had.
Marco:
It is very uncomfortable how much they control about the entire web via Chrome.
Marco:
It's a little off.
Marco:
It's a little risky, and it's not a great place for the web to be.
Marco:
All that being said...
Marco:
I don't see how splitting up the company this way would really meaningfully help a lot of that.
Marco:
I think it would fail spectacularly.
Marco:
And the fact is, when you split up monopolies like that,
Marco:
What can very easily happen over time is as the regulatory environment changes, they can eventually kind of reform like what AT&T largely did.
Marco:
And so I think a more pragmatic solution here that's more likely to actually work –
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
And speaking of AT&T, like splitting off AT&T, when you split off, you take one big phone company and split into a bunch of little ones, those individual little phone companies are still profitable sound businesses.
John:
They're just smaller.
John:
It's only the, you know, they sell phone service to people in a smaller geographic area, but phone service itself is still profitable to sell.
John:
People want that it is a good product.
John:
Android and Google are both effectively subsidized because what they do is serve the needs of Google's other business, which is search advertising and selling, you know, like selling advertising, right?
John:
Android, if it was an independent business, would not be as free or cheap as it is to all the different vendors.
John:
Because right now it's like, oh, Android is open source, it's free, and you can port it or whatever.
John:
But hey, if you want to put it on your phone, you have to use the Google Play services and so on and so forth.
John:
If not, you got to do a bunch of development yourself, yada, yada.
John:
Android is a standalone business.
John:
Now it's got to start charging people.
John:
It's like, well, how do we pay for all these engineers who work on Android?
John:
Like, subsidized businesses that serve the larger needs of a bigger company, a bigger abusive monopoly, you can't just break them off like you could with the baby bells and say, Android, you're free.
John:
Go on your own.
John:
Now we'll have competition.
John:
Android's going to be like, how do we make money again?
John:
like you have to raise their prices and then we go back to the bad old world where cell cell phone makers are all developing their own os's because they don't want to pay what turns out to be a sustainable price for android or they just everyone forks it and it's like they leave android behind because there's no reason to use the google version if it's not doesn't privilege google services and google's not forcing them to anymore and maybe that's the goal to say android it's like linux linux it's
John:
free to the world it's open source let a million different android clones bloom no longer will google be forcing you to use their services because they can't anymore but like it basically just makes it dissolve and the same thing with chrome how are you going to pay for the development of chrome who's going to pay all those engineers to keep working on chrome if it's not subsidized because of how important it is to google's other business it just it's not the same as breaking up the baby bells those were it's like well now you've just got a smaller phone company
John:
It would be like breaking Google up into a bunch of smaller Googles where there was like a search engine for the left half of the United States and the right half, but they still had all the pieces together.
John:
I just I don't honestly like and I'm not against like I understand there would be more competition briefly, but I'm like we're at we're at a stable equilibrium right now where the monopolies are abusing their power.
John:
We would like them to stop abusing their power, but I'm not sure the solution to that is put a stick of dynamite into the monopolies and just blow their pieces all over the world and then say, problem solved, and just walk away because I don't think that's the solution.
John:
Again, the simpler version, make them not do the worst of the anti-competitive things that they're doing.
John:
uh that's not perfect they'll always find a way around it or whatever but i that's that there's less i feel like there's less collateral damage to just saying you can't pay apple off you can't privilege your products and other products and so on and so forth but leaving intact the idea of you can continue to put tons of money into developing chrome because it is valuable to your business and in google's case you know all like the the eu type things is like oh you gotta have a you know a choice screen you can't default to anything yada yada
John:
Google is still good enough that most people will pick them as the default because they have brand recognition and a legacy of being a brand that people like.
John:
So I don't think Google should fear that type of competition.
John:
They should say, bring it on.
John:
None of our services are privileged.
John:
None of our search engine is privileged.
John:
User choice for every single thing.
John:
Now it is entirely open to competition.
John:
Competition is free to form.
John:
Maybe Apple will field a competitor.
John:
Maybe Bing will get more leverage or whatever.
John:
But Google shouldn't shy away from that.
John:
It would motivate them to make their search engine better and friendlier, I think.
John:
you can do all that without breaking these pieces up and saying Android and Chrome you have to sink or swim on your own as an independent business
Casey:
Yeah, I'm very curious to see how this lands, because it doesn't seem like it's tenable right now.
Casey:
And even though I think the Google response was a bit, you know, petulant, whiny child, which I kind of get, they're kind of making a point.
Casey:
Of course, they're being exceedingly dramatic about it, but they're still making a decent point.
Casey:
And like you and like Ben have said, I don't feel like this is the right solution.
John:
And Safari, by the way, you know, is a competitive browser.
John:
There's no, I mean, there's Bing, I guess, but, you know, Apple hasn't made a competitive search engine, which is Ben is always saying that Google is essentially paying Apple off to prevent them from ever trying to make a search engine, which honestly, I don't think Google should be afraid of because Apple would not do a good job, but whatever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You never know.
John:
Apple sometimes surprises you like they have.
John:
Apple Silicon was a surprise to everybody.
John:
Turns out Apple does a really good job on that.
John:
Not so much on cars or video games or a bunch of other stuff.
John:
But anyway, Safari exists and Apple subsidizes its development because it's important for them to have a web browser that they control that's not owned by one of their competitors.
John:
And it costs a lot of money to develop Safari.
John:
And that money is not, you know, as if Safari was an independent company, they couldn't afford that.
John:
How would Safari make money?
John:
I guess from the Google search deal, but that's going to soon be illegal anyway.
John:
So like it's, it turns out giving away a web browser for free, one of the most complicated pieces of software to develop and maintain that has to be compatible with the entire worldwide web.
John:
That costs a lot of money.
John:
It needs to be funded somehow.
John:
And we all agree that having more web browsers is better than having fewer web browsers.
John:
But all of those web browsers, if they're going to be competitive and useful, need to have a source of funding.
John:
And I think Apple funding Safari and Google funding Chrome is a reasonable funding model to make two competitive web browsers for the World Wide Web.
John:
I don't think there can be 75 competitive web browsers because there's not enough different funding models to fund 75 of them.
John:
Maybe two is too few.
John:
But throwing Chrome out into the woods and letting it wither, ending up with just Safari.
John:
I keep leaving out Edge.
John:
I'm sorry, Microsoft.
John:
Or just leaving it open source Chromium or whatever.
John:
I'm not saying there couldn't be a future with more competition.
John:
There certainly can be.
John:
But how to get there from here without tremendous disruption is the difficult problem.
John:
Yeah.
John:
of all the things that google dominates and makes too little competition at the very least chrome actually does have some competition in safari and i guess edge and firefox and opera you know all the arc people have already written us so arc is but i mean those are a lot of the chromium based browsers show that google would say hey look we give away the main engine open source there can be lots of browser competition but in the end all that matters is like how many people use this browser and if you look at the you know the the
John:
market share ratios it's like it doesn't matter what those browsers do they basically have to do what chrome does just like back in the the old days you just had to deal with ie because as much as you may hate it so many people use it that it's a fact of life right so and the fact that it used to be the same engine under both safari and chrome but they sort of divorced into blink and webkit ages ago as a
John:
you know, another potential increase in competition, you know, so of all the areas that were Google's causing problems, uh, this is one where there actually is competition and we would like there to be more.
John:
And I don't think, uh, injuring Chrome is going to, uh, increase the competition that other stuff they propose will increase competition.
John:
You can't favor the search engine.
John:
You can't pay Apple off.
John:
You can't, you know, punish people in Google search results.
John:
You can't spy on people through Chrome, like stop them from doing all that data collection stuff.
John:
Uh,
John:
One way to stop them is say it's a whole different company and they won't share the data with you, but that seems pretty heavyweight.
Casey:
Mark Gurman had a report a few days ago now about allegedly a new Siri.
Casey:
So reading from Mark in Bloomberg, the new Siri details of which haven't been reported uses more advanced large language models or LLMs to allow for back and forth conversations.
Casey:
The system also can handle more sophisticated requests in a quicker fashion.
Casey:
The new voice assistant, which will eventually be added to Apple intelligence is dubbed LLM Siri by those working on it.
Casey:
the company is planning to announce the overhaul soon as 2025 as part of the upcoming ios 19 and mac os 16 software updates which are internally named luck and cheer like apple intelligence this fall the new features won't immediately be included in next year's crop of hardware devices instead apple is currently planning to release a new series to consumers as early as spring 2026 about a year and a half from now holy freaking crap
Casey:
That's a long time away.
Casey:
The revamped Siri will rely on new Apple AI models to interact more like a human and handle tasks in a way that's closer to chat GPT and Google's Gemini.
Casey:
It also will make expanded use of app intents, which allow for more precise control of third-party apps.
Casey:
Siri will get additional tweaks in the coming months as part of iOS 18, the iPhone's current operating system.
Casey:
The software will be able to draw on customer data to provide context for commands and take action using the information on a user's screen.
Casey:
The iOS 18 version relies on a first-generation Apple LLM to determine if requests should use the existing Siri infrastructure or be routed to a second LLM that can handle more complex queries and tap into third-party apps.
John:
So buried at the very end of that summary is, oh, and by the way, you're not totally forgetting this, but iOS 18 also has promised and will have a version of Siri that's LLM-powered that is better.
John:
you know the siri we were promised back at wwc hey siri will be better thanks to apple intelligence it's not coming immediately but you know eventually in the ios 18 timeline you'll get a siri with llm which makes me wonder how this ios 19 one as is dubbed llm siri by the people working on it well that's llm siri what the hell is the ios 18 thing that uses llms with siri is that sort of llm siri or half llm siri or llm siri light
John:
it's a it's been a long time where it's like apple intelligence is gonna make siri better but not when they updated the graphics which mark uh marco uh you know uh complained about a few episodes ago and he's totally right you updated the graphics but you left the same old dumb siri back there
John:
answering the questions and so there goes your opportunity to dazzle people with your new uh you know voice assistant and accompanying new appearance instead you just get the accompanying new appearance but same old thing and so at some point in the ios 18 timeline there'll be a slightly better one that uses lms but now we have to hear about oh no the real one where series actually going to be good that's ios 19 but not launching with ios 19 you know halfway through ios 19's lifetime so maybe mid 2020
Marco:
26 come on this is so stupid it's like siri it's like we got him this time like siri is is always gonna get better in a couple of years yeah look we we have yet to see the like the quote unquote good siri with ios 18 it has not shipped yet um so maybe once that ships that will remove a lot of the pent-up demand for siri to get better
Marco:
But honestly, I don't trust them.
Marco:
Siri has zero credibility to me.
Marco:
Apple has promised so many times that Siri is getting better.
Marco:
It's smarter than ever.
Marco:
It's better than ever.
Marco:
And it is still so disappointing to so many people so often.
Marco:
It's still so unreliable and inconsistent so often.
Marco:
Siri has...
Marco:
No credibility.
Marco:
And Apple's claims about Siri, Apple's demos about Siri, Apple's stated features of what Siri can do all have no credibility to me because I have been burned.
Marco:
I have I have gotten my hopes up so many times.
Marco:
And Apple has said, now it's better.
Marco:
And then I go try it, and it is the same old inconsistent dumb mess.
Marco:
So maybe the iOS 18 one that still hasn't actually shown itself, maybe that really will be better.
Marco:
Maybe this alleged iOS 19.5 one will be even better than that.
Marco:
I'll believe it when I see it.
John:
I think we're all excited by it because of the promise of LLMs.
John:
That was the whole Apple intelligence announcement at WWDC.
John:
It's like, I know we've been saying for years and years the series is going to get better.
John:
And it totally hasn't.
John:
And it's been disappointing.
John:
But now there's an actual concrete technology that you see in other competing products.
John:
Everyone else is using it.
John:
You can see their demos.
John:
You can use their products right now as we're on stage announcing our thing.
John:
You can go and talk to ChatGPT and do it like this is, you know, LLMs.
John:
There's real promise.
John:
It's not just like vague, oh, we're working on Siri and it's going to be better or whatever.
John:
There's a concrete technology that you can look at and say, yeah, put that in Siri because that is like what Siri does, but better.
John:
And Apple says, yes, we are totally going to put that into Siri and it's coming in iOS 18, just not immediately in iOS.
John:
but eventually in ios 18 it's coming and so i think that's why we're all we have our hopes up more than usual because it's not just vague promises it's like we put it this way i feel like out here that apple could make siri better with this i'm like i see the ingredients put them together mix it up like i it seems to me like this should work i you know i didn't know how the old siri worked but i've used lots of lm power products i'm like yes use that and
John:
And we're just waiting for them to use it, right?
John:
We haven't seen what they have in iOS 18.
John:
We've just seen a bunch of canned demos and who knows what that's representative of.
John:
But a story now that iOS 18's thing is called LLM Siri, I'm like, does that just mean that even inside Apple, they're like the iOS 19 thing is called LLM Siri?
John:
Does that mean inside Apple, the iOS 18
John:
thing is already like we know this is not going to be that great we're just doing it because we said we were going to do it but practically speaking we really need to be working on the real lm series for ios 19 and we're so far behind on that that it's not going to even come out when ios 19 comes out and that's
John:
that's disappointing right we will have had the new fancy graphics for like an entire year before the ios 19 one comes out that put backs those fancy graphics with an engine that's better now we'll see well maybe the ios 18 better serial only better apple has a little bit of a branding problem here i guess like i'm one of the things i collect is in merlin collects them too but i don't know i see when i send it to merlin
John:
These just ridiculous spoken or typed query and then replies from Apple's various things where you'll see the text that it understood.
John:
So it's not like it misunderstood your voice or whatever.
John:
And you'll see the most nonsensical, ridiculous reply for Apple voices.
John:
And they often come on Apple TV.
John:
Right.
John:
And the question for all this is like, what is Siri?
John:
When I talk to my HomePod, is that Siri?
John:
When I talk to my Apple TV remote, is that Siri?
John:
When I talk to my phone, is that Siri?
John:
When I talk to my Mac, is that Siri?
John:
Some of those things are.
John:
Some of those things aren't.
John:
Which of those things will be getting better in iOS 18 or iOS 19?
John:
I have a feeling the HomePod's not going to get better.
John:
Will the Apple TV get better?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Presumably the phone will, because that's their flagship platform, and probably the Mac, because you can do better things there because there's lots of RAM, but, like, Apple's got this problem that they have a lot of things that you can talk to that currently do nonsensical stuff when you talk to them, and only some of them eventually might get better, but the others...
John:
probably won't but apple just has one brand and they say it's siri siri is everything when you talk to apple stuff and that is not the way things are so yeah i mean at this point they just really need the the apple intelligence announcement was like they have a good idea
John:
they uh you know the way they're approaching it makes sense if you go listen to when we talked about apple intelligence i think their their approach to using uh lm technology to enhance their products makes sense they just need to do it and now we're just waiting around for them to do it and the things they released so far like i said are not
John:
super compelling to me i mean it's not that they're bad like they do what they're more or less supposed to do the way we expect them to do them but they're not particularly compelling but i talk to my devices all the time and when they don't listen to me or do something that i think is not correct i think to myself this could be better and that would be a material improvement so i am waiting patiently to see what this is like but
John:
Meanwhile, just like we were talking about iPhone 17 while we were waiting for the iPhone 16 to come out, apparently now we're just talking about iOS 19's LM Siri while we're waiting for the 18 one to come out.
Casey:
That's so bad.
Casey:
You know, I really...
Casey:
I don't love when one of us, and it could be any of us, calls for a firing or something like that.
Casey:
And I'm not saying anyone should be fired.
Casey:
Who would do that?
Casey:
Who would do that?
Casey:
Who would do that?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
One of us.
Casey:
Certainly not.
Casey:
And I'm not saying that somebody should be fired, but I am saying something is fundamentally broken that
Casey:
Either Apple is just incapable of this, which I don't think is the case.
Casey:
I really don't.
Casey:
Or there's some political infighting that has prevented forward progress.
Casey:
But like Apple keeps trying to make Siri happen and it hasn't happened yet.
Casey:
I mean, it was 2011.
Casey:
When Siri debuted, that's two years before ATP.
Casey:
That's three years before Declan.
Casey:
Like it has been a long time and they still can't get it right.
Casey:
They still can't get it right.
Casey:
And I just, I don't understand.
Casey:
I just don't understand.
Casey:
It is getting better in a little bit here, a little bit there, but it sure seems like everything around it is now, to your collective points, is now getting better in leaps and bounds.
Casey:
And where all the other assistants are running, Siri is at best at a mildly brisk walk.
Casey:
And it hasn't been enough for at least five years, probably 10, but it's certainly not enough now.
Casey:
And to say, oh, we got you in 18 months?
Casey:
Come on.
Casey:
Figure out a better way.
Casey:
Figure out a better way.
Casey:
I don't care if it's acquisition.
Casey:
I don't care if you have to fire the whole damn team.
Casey:
That's not actually what I'm advocating, but I'm fired up about it.
Casey:
just do something apple and do something and do it so that we can see don't promise something don't open the komodo and tell us oh it's going to get better just freaking do something do something so let me for the first time ever be the voice of reason on this topic please yes please this is a fun change of a change of roles for you and me i know right
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So I think Tim Cook should keep his job.
Marco:
No, I don't.
Marco:
Not for this, though.
Marco:
So we heard like rumblings here and there.
Marco:
There's been like reports from the information and from Mark Gurman and stuff like that over the last couple of years that basically there was this project to remake Siri with a whole different approach to how they were doing the language processing, possibly with LLMs.
Marco:
But I think this actually predates the LM craze.
Marco:
And apparently the story was that,
Marco:
the group that had the new rebuilt Ciri, they lost the battle internally.
Marco:
And they instead decided to keep the old one going and just keep working on it instead.
John:
And wasn't the reasoning, by the way, wasn't the reasoning kind of like a iMovie 8 or Final Cut Pro X kind of reasoning, which was basically like the new stuff looks great, but you would be...
John:
drop it because the new stuff is new it doesn't have all the same features as the old one so we'd have to explain to our customers that you know for the past x years you've been able to ask siri to do these things but now you can't anymore because we replaced it with a new and improved one that doesn't have all the features of the old one i seem to recall that being part of the decision making which is always the way it is like inside a company when someone's got a new idea for a
John:
It's very often difficult to sell it if it doesn't do literally everything that the old one did.
John:
And Apple has gone against that a few times in the past, like with Final Cut Pro X or whatever version of iMovie that they replaced the old one with.
John:
And remember, they shipped both the old and the new version of iMovie for a while to avoid this problem to say, we have a new structure for how we think iMovie should work.
John:
It doesn't do all the things the old one did, but we still think it's such a good idea that we're going to ship the new one and the old one.
John:
So you can keep using the old one.
John:
And in the meantime, we will try to build the new one up to match the feature set.
John:
Or they can just do what they did with photos on the Mac, which is make a new version that doesn't have the features of the old one and say, tough luck.
John:
The old features are gone.
John:
But in the case of Siri, the rumor was, I think that the new folks said we have a new approach to Siri and it's better, but it doesn't do literally every single thing the old one did.
John:
And that's enough for the people who are against it to kill it and say, well, do we want to explain to our customers why our voice assessment just got less capable?
Marco:
To be fair, I don't know if we actually had that level of information on it, but I believe that was part of the gist of the rumors that we were hearing.
Marco:
Anyway, so there was that pretty firm rumor a couple years back that basically Siri was going to be rewritten, the project lost the battle internally, and they kept the existing one.
Marco:
Now, separately from that, Apple intelligence happens, seemingly.
Marco:
And that seemed to be unrelated to the reporting on that whole Siri drama, which seemed to precede it.
Marco:
So it's possible that maybe they, for this kind of first iteration of Apple intelligence that is this year, maybe they figured out some quick ways to bolt the LLMs onto the old Siri.
Marco:
but that maybe the much better approach that they're working on for a year and a half from now or whatever is that is a new series.
Marco:
So I think that narrative, if true, I think is very plausible and would kind of explain the timeline.
Marco:
Now, the second aspect of that, though...
Marco:
is that the whole reason they have all this time and they can take their sweet ass time and they can ship Siri that sucks for so long is because they don't allow competition on a technical level on iOS for the voice assistant.
Marco:
Like, this is what happened.
Marco:
Like, this is the downside.
Marco:
You know, what we've seen for a very long time is that when Apple has a lot of strong competition...
Marco:
they get their act together usually and compete well.
Marco:
They can do amazing things.
Marco:
When they can somehow preclude competition from happening, they get complacent and they don't do that well.
Marco:
What they put out might not be the best in class.
Marco:
And I think what we see now is on iOS, it's so locked down, it's so...
Marco:
It's so impossible for anybody to compete with them in certain areas, and the voice assistant is one of those.
Marco:
As ChatGPT and all these other ones have been coming up over the last couple of years, if there was an API for them to replace Siri, they would have destroyed Siri by now.
Marco:
We wouldn't even be talking about Siri anymore because none of us would be using it for anything because there would be some kind of plug-in architecture.
John:
Instead, they did the no money changes hands deal where a chat GPT is integrated into the existing voice assistant as a stopgap.
John:
And I know you're talking about competition on iOS, which is actually very relevant.
John:
But of course, there is actually competition on Android with its voice assistants, which tend to be doing better than Apple's.
John:
But Google is doing exactly the same thing and trying to keep as much competition away from their built-in voice assistant as well.
John:
But yeah, Apple at least felt enough pressure to say, and we're partnering with chat GPT.
John:
And if our thing craps out,
John:
You can say, give up and chuck at the ChatGPT, which is not a great solution.
Marco:
Right, but because nobody can compete, because ChatGPT couldn't make an app to officially replace Siri, look at how many of our nerds and our power user friends have used the action button
Marco:
on our iPhone 15s and 16s to just open ChatGPT.
Marco:
How many times have you asked ChatGPT a question that it would have been nicer if you could have just used a voice hail command freely on your phone or held down a button or whatever to do it?
Marco:
There's a reason we do that because ChatGPT for a lot of things is simply better.
Marco:
And if it had the ability to integrate with things the way Apple Intelligence and Siri do, it could be even better.
Marco:
And I have no doubt that
Marco:
Apple would have its butt handed to it and Siri would be even more marginalized among power users as Safari is because we know it from Chrome users.
Marco:
But instead, Apple does not have to compete in this area.
Marco:
They have technically foreclosed competition.
John:
Yeah, Apple dictates the terms that you're going to access ChatGPT on their system.
John:
It's a third-party app, or when you integrate it with Apple's own thing, Apple's thing comes first, and then ChatGPT only with a warning dialogue after, and yada, yada.
Marco:
Right, and as a result, Apple does not have to compete very well in the area of voice assistants.
Marco:
And I don't know if it's directly because of that, but the reality of that and effect of that is that because they don't have to compete,
Marco:
they don't compete very well.
Marco:
They are taking their sweet time.
Marco:
They totally missed the LLM revolution.
Marco:
They're coming to it late, and they're coming to it on kind of a slow timeline, kind of dipping their feet in slowly.
Marco:
And it does seem like that is giving them some advantages in the sense that they're able to do things in a more thought-out way.
Marco:
They're able to be a little bit more careful with how they do it.
Marco:
They're doing certain things in a more privacy-focused way than everyone else is doing.
Marco:
But the reality is...
Marco:
they don't really have a fire lit under their butts because they don't have to compete.
Marco:
And whereas if iOS was not as locked down as it was, they would actually have real competition here and they would work harder and faster and probably produce better output.
Marco:
So this is one of those areas where
Marco:
It is actually better for both Apple and Apple's customers for them to be less locked down because that creates fewer areas that they will foreclose competition and get complacent and lazy and deliver half-assed products.
Marco:
And Siri, for its entire lifetime, calling it half-assed would be a generous compliment.
Marco:
It is quarter-assed at best and way less than that in reality.
Marco:
It has been a really rough, unreliable, untrustworthy product for its entire lifespan.
Marco:
And maybe if there was easier competition in that area, maybe they would actually make it better faster.
John:
Sounds like there's a great job opening for you and the European Commission, because I think they agree with you.
John:
Every part of the operating system that Apple has integrated would benefit from competition.
John:
You should be able to replace the Photos app, the voice assistant, the web browser.
John:
All that stuff should not default to Apple and should be pluggable.
John:
And the European Commission is trying very hard to make that happen across not just Apple's platforms, but Facebook's platform, Google's platform and all those platforms.
John:
So, yeah, they've got the same idea.
John:
We'll see if their remedies end up going in that direction or not.
John:
In the meantime, the half Siri solution that you described, Apple doesn't give technical details about when they promised LLM.
John:
They promised a better Siri in iOS 18.4 or whatever their target was back when they talked about it at WWDC.
John:
And we all just assume, Apple Intelligence, better Siri.
John:
We read between the lines and we say, LLM.
John:
I don't know if Apple said it explicitly.
John:
LLM, it's perfect.
John:
And as we discussed before even Apple Intelligence was released, the idea of
John:
having an LLM, you speak to something, the LLM interprets what you say, and the LLM has been trained on the 75 things that Siri can do and the precise way you have to word it to make them work.
John:
And that's what your LLM does.
John:
It takes whatever BS you say
John:
It translates it to a command that Siri will understand and makes it do it.
John:
And that would make Siri way better because Siri can actually do a lot of things, but it's incredibly frustrating when you talk to it and it's like, oh, it's not as bad as a text adventure where it's like it doesn't understand your sentence entirely.
John:
But it thinks it understands it, and it does something totally off the wall.
John:
Here's the example I just sent to Merlin most recently.
John:
It's an Apple TV one.
John:
The Apple TV ones are usually the best, and it shows the text that it understood from the user, and the text was, let's watch Family Guy.
John:
Perfectly valid sentence.
John:
You can see what it understood.
John:
There's no, like, it didn't mishear a word or pick a word that sounds the same but is spelled differently.
John:
Let's watch Family Guy.
John:
They're talking to their television set.
John:
The response from the thing on Apple TV, which uses Siri logo, which may or may not actually be quote unquote real Siri.
John:
This is what Apple TV said.
John:
If you think it could be serious, ask me to call emergency services or someone you trust.
Yeah.
John:
that was the response to let's watch family guy and i looked at let's watch family guy i'm like what how like it doesn't even make any sense like is there it's not just i don't i don't know i don't know let's watch family guy do you want me to call emergency services i mean maybe i don't know
John:
Am I having a stroke?
John:
I don't know.
John:
This, that's, this is where an LLM could help.
John:
I know the Apple TV knows how to find a show based on, and even capitalized family, capital F, capital G, it knows it's a proper noun.
John:
I bet it can find that as a TV show somewhere and start playing it because it's a TV and that's what it does.
John:
And instead it offers to call families, so emergency services.
John:
So yeah.
John:
An LM in front of Siri, treating Siri as like a lot of the LMs treat like calculators or other sort of things, that would be great.
John:
A full-fledged LM Siri might be a disaster because it could start doing even more ridiculous things and Apple has less of a way to control it, but...
John:
We're just all out here using the plain old dump Siri that we don't even know if it's the same Siri everywhere, and we're just looking for relief.
John:
And this is kind of unfair to be like, oh, rumors about a future thing are making me feel worse that I don't have the current thing.
John:
But it's a little bit of Osborne effect, and it's a little bit...
John:
i mean there's always going to be a better version of everything right but i for me and maybe i'm getting hung up on this but like the fact that the thing is called lm siri internally maybe that's what the ios 18 one is called too german is never precise in these rumors but it really does make me sad to think that the thing i've been waiting so patiently for somewhere around the midpoint of the life of ios 18 it seems like apple itself already doesn't have that much confidence that it is the the thing that we all hope it's going to be but
John:
We'll see.
John:
I mean, I'm willing to keep an open mind and try it when it comes out.
John:
But in the meantime, I'll just enjoy those snazzy graphics.
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And Andrew Hodgson writes, is there a way to get the performance cores to spin up when doing normal activities like file management, spreadsheets, internet browsing, etc.?
Casey:
I'm a M4 Pro Mac Mini.
Casey:
I can never seem to get them going, and I didn't know if there was a way to tell the system to make use of them rather than just stick with the efficiency cores.
Casey:
Otherwise, it seems a bit of a waste of those extra cores.
Casey:
I did wonder if the high power, low power options and settings energy might have an impact or if there was some other setting that could be tweaked.
Casey:
Maybe the answer is that the M4 Pro chip is simply overkill for these types of tasks.
Casey:
I think that is the answer, but I don't know.
Casey:
Tell me I'm wrong.
John:
I mean, so some of the tasks, especially things like file management, you're going to be spending most of your time waiting for IO.
John:
So having a faster CPU is not going to impact things because that's not the bottleneck.
John:
Yeah.
John:
high power mode is interesting it's a feature that i was introduced a couple years ago i think and it's spreading to more max i think the mac mini's got it as well uh but i believe all that basically is is a different fan curve which is a way of saying like uh at a given for a given set of inputs from temperature sensors what should the output fan speeds to be beyond all the fans and it's
John:
You could graph it on a curve in an old school simple scenario where there was one thing that had a temperature and one fan.
John:
Obviously, modern Macs are more complicated than that, although some of them still only have one fan.
John:
But anyway, high power mode, my understanding is it just makes the fans go higher RPM sooner.
John:
So it makes your Mac noisier, it blows more air through it, and the theory is that it will allow the things that get hot to sustain their maximum throughput for a longer period of time because you're not waiting for them to get hot, you're sort of preemptively cooling them by blowing more and more air on them.
John:
That's the idea with high power mode.
John:
Doesn't change, as far as I know, anything having to do with what's scheduled on what kind of cores inside your Mac.
John:
That's another thing you don't control.
John:
We've talked about it before when trying to speed up jobs, like file compression and stuff.
John:
When software runs whatever job is going to run, there are tools that it has to...
John:
indicate what it thinks the priority should be.
John:
Is this a high priority thing that the computer should do ASAP or is it a low priority thing that it should do just whenever it gets around to it?
John:
A lot of that prioritization affects what cores things will be scheduled on.
John:
Background processes said that the low priority will run on the efficiency cores.
John:
Foreground processes that need lots of fancy computing that are said to be the highest possible priority may run on the performance cores.
John:
But my question for Andrew is...
John:
are you waiting around for your computer to do things like what thing are you waiting for when you're doing file management and spreadsheets and internet browsing are you twiddling your thumbs and saying come on come on page load if that's happening it almost certainly isn't because you are cpu bound it's probably your network connection or it's io with the file system or something else like you it would take some pretty sophisticated performance analysis to figure out
John:
what is the bottleneck that is making you wait for something if you're staring at your istat menus thing and you're annoyed because the power cores aren't be used but you're not waiting for anything don't be annoyed it's using the appropriate resources for you it's saving your battery life it's reducing your power usage it's reducing the heat uh it's you know just because it's not using the power cores it's not a reason to complain about now if you have something that you're waiting for and you're sure it's cpu pounds and it's not using the power cores i would talk to the developer of that program but
John:
That's not something that you as the user have control over.
John:
I don't think there's any tool out there where you can say like, shuttle everything to the power cores and ignore the efficiency cores.
John:
And honestly, I don't think you'd want to do that because it would produce more heat.
John:
It would probably go slower because you have lots of things running in parallel and you want to use those efficiency cores.
John:
And Apple's efficiency cores are, they're more efficient than the power cores, but they're good cores too.
John:
So don't worry about it too much.
John:
They're good cores, Brent.
Marco:
Keep in mind also – so one thing that you might see if you're watching a tool like iStatMenuser, if you're watching an activity monitor, if you're watching your CPU usage between the cores, you might notice that one or two of the efficiency cores might be maxed out like all the time doing something like photo indexing or spotlight indexing or whatever else.
Marco:
That is not a sign that you need to somehow convince those tasks to run on the performance cores.
Marco:
Basically, macOS has been seemingly tweaked since the Apple Silicon era to let certain background tasks basically do whatever they want as long as they do them on the efficiency cores because the efficiency cores are so much less power-consuming than the performance cores.
Marco:
That you can basically run a couple of them like for free almost all the time and not even notice a hit to battery life or an increase in heat.
Marco:
Like they're so power efficient that macOS therefore lets things like photo indexing or whatever just max out one of them forever as long as it wants to.
Marco:
And if you ever actually need that power for something else, usually these things are prioritized such that other processes can take priority if they all of a sudden need a burst of everything you've got.
Marco:
But for the most part, if you see efficiency cores maxing themselves out for a long time, that's normal.
Marco:
And you don't have to worry about it.
John:
Speaking of photo stuff, like I said, it's a software problem.
John:
If you think there's something you're waiting for and you wish it would use the power cores, talk to the developer, which is why I've tried to talk to Apple through my podcast and say, Apple, give me a giant button in Photos that says do photo analysis now using all my resources.
John:
Apple has not provided that.
John:
Instead, they're using background jobs that...
John:
run whenever they feel like it, when the system thinks that the resources are available and they run on the efficiency cores and they don't use all the resources and I hate it.
John:
That is a software problem is Apple's photos application could, or their photos demon could have a giant button that says, do face recognition now, do it just on this individual single photo, use all the resources in the system.
John:
That button doesn't exist, but it's not the fault of Mac OS.
John:
Mac OS is just doing what it's told by the applications.
John:
And the applications are saying, do full analysis on the background on an efficiency core.
John:
It's fine.
John:
And most of the time, that's what you want.
John:
But sometimes you just want to do it now.
John:
And I really hope they provide that button someday.
Casey:
It's my money and I need it now.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
James Wilby writes, why are apps seemingly ballooning in size?
Casey:
I've looked at a few app update sizes recently, and it's not uncommon to find apps that are between 300 and 500 megabytes or even beyond.
Casey:
Tesla and the Unify Network app are my examples.
Casey:
Why is this?
Casey:
Is it just a load of assets or is it just a load of baggage along for the ride?
Casey:
It could be either, but generally speaking, isn't it like analytics frameworks and stuff like that?
Casey:
Like Crashlytics, I think, is huge.
Casey:
And I'm trying to think of some of the other ones.
Casey:
Or Firebase, maybe.
Casey:
Aren't those typically quite large?
Marco:
I mean, the actual code is not that large.
Marco:
Now, code, keep in mind that the modern code culture is if you need one thing, like one little function or one piece of functionality from a piece of code, you import an entire library, an entire framework, possibly an entire services built-in frameworks, and you don't even look at what it does to your project.
Marco:
That is the modern coding culture in every way.
Marco:
In web programming, in application programming, mobile, everything.
Marco:
Everyone has this kind of framework-itis and library-itis of just like, I need, you know, like that joke of like the, you know, is even function in JavaScript.
Marco:
Like, yeah, I'll import an entire library for that.
Marco:
Like rather than see if I can just have that function by itself.
Marco:
That applies at every scale.
Marco:
So you have, you do have huge amounts of code.
Marco:
You have duplication within code, especially for larger companies where,
Marco:
You might have like, you know, a large company's app.
Marco:
Suppose they need a library to like, you know, parse URLs out of strings or whatever.
Marco:
Their app might have 10 different functions that do that because just out of sheer scale, like they have hundreds of people working on the app and at different times, different people have added different versions of that same thing in different ways.
Marco:
So code size is bigger these days by a lot.
Marco:
And a lot of that is just due to this kind of culture of anything you need, just import some framework or library and don't even look at how big it is.
Marco:
Don't even care.
Marco:
And definitely don't try to write it yourself or copy out just that function.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
So anyway, there's that.
Marco:
But also, the assets tend to be way bigger than you might think.
Marco:
Because, again, suppose you're writing a library that offers some kind of UI.
Marco:
Well, if you have any images in that UI, then that library is going to include every single image that might ever be displayed on that screen.
Marco:
It's going to include it in possibly different designs, different resolutions, different color schemes, light and dark mode.
Marco:
There's so many different versions of all those things.
Marco:
And
Marco:
Yes, you can.
Marco:
If you try to keep things small and simple, you can use some basic vectors or have an SVG or PDF version of your icon that you just render in different colors or different contexts.
Marco:
You can do that.
Marco:
But ultimately, the reason why nobody does that, except people like me who waste their time doing it, the reason why no one else does it,
Marco:
is because there is no incentive whatsoever to make apps small these days.
Marco:
None.
Marco:
I can tell you this as somebody who has a very small app.
Marco:
No one cares.
Marco:
And nobody is going to pick your small app over your competitor's 300 megabyte app.
Marco:
No, because that isn't how people choose apps these days.
Marco:
So it is possible to make smaller apps, but there is no incentive to.
Marco:
So everyone just kind of gets sloppy and lazy and doesn't really care.
John:
And obviously for things like games, the assets are a problem.
John:
You know, they just the the amount of textures you have and all the various 3D data and everything else like it just it adds up real fast.
John:
And the general approach is, like you said, to package up everything that your app is going to need.
John:
Apple TV prevents that.
John:
And it's one of the reasons game developers dislike it, because people just want to package up everything.
John:
All the images, all the different things, all the things that, you know, and, you know, demo videos sound like stuff that could potentially be downloaded is like just package it all in the app.
John:
So the code size is bigger, the asset size is bigger.
John:
And the motivation is to just package it all in there.
John:
And sometimes there's even repetition of assets, depending on how you're folding things in.
John:
You might have the same asset in there multiple times.
John:
And having something that deduplicates assets across different frameworks is a big pain.
John:
And yeah, just the sizes just keep going up.
John:
I was in...
John:
messing with windows when i was trying to do that icloud stuff and one of the things i mess with when i'm in there is i download the latest version of unreal engine and i like to look at their little demos to see how the engine is advancing 5.5 just came out it has a bunch of new features i was like i want to you know let me find some of the cool demos my old 5.0 demo no longer worked it's fine i'll download the 5.5 version of that it's just like a demo showing you their various uh you know
John:
features for texturing large landscapes and dynamic lighting and stuff like that uh and the demo was 100 gigabytes oh my word yeah it's pretty big unreal engine itself you know it seems small in comparison right a few hundred megs uh gig even or whatever and the the file and this is not this is not a game this is just a demo thing showing a bunch of features of the engine
John:
uh then i updated to i didn't update to the latest version of flight simulator which actually improves this but i have a old microsoft flight simulator 2020 i think it is that itself is 100 uh over 100 gigabytes um and when it needed to update it it needed to re-download a substantial portion of that uh things are big that's one of the advances of uh the new version of flight simulator 2024 is that it dynamically streams a bunch of stuff so the download can be smaller uh it's still very large but
John:
They're making progress there.
John:
So I think there is a breaking point, but iOS apps are not 100 gigabytes each unless they're a really, really big game.
John:
But yeah, they're just them apps, individual apps being 500 megabytes.
John:
It's one of the reasons that Apple rolled out that feature years ago that says like, do you want us to basically remove apps that you haven't used in a long time?
John:
We'll leave the icons on your screen, but they get like a cloud icon or whatever next to them, right?
John:
We'll leave the icon there.
John:
If you ever want to launch it or redownload it, but just like, I don't know if you know this, but like,
John:
you know a couple dozen 500 megabyte apps like here and there it starts to add up real fast and all of a sudden a lot of your phone storage is taking up with apps that you never launch that wouldn't matter if every single app was 20 megs but if they're in the hundreds of megabytes each and you've got 11 pages of those apps plus folders yeah that can be taking up a lot of room
John:
So, yeah, I mean, it's kind of an uphill battle.
John:
Things get bigger over time.
John:
That's generally one of the reasons we make better computers.
John:
I don't think there's any sense in trying to hold the line on application size because we do want better, fancier assets, better, fancier libraries.
John:
Now with LLMs, with people having models inside their applications or even if they're dynamically downloaded, even Apple itself does it for the first time use the cleanup feature.
John:
It will say downloading cleanup.
John:
It's downloading a model and that model is big.
John:
And they didn't want to make it part of the iOS 18 distribution for whatever reason.
John:
They wanted it to be a separate download, maybe so they can update it independently.
John:
But anyway, it's big.
John:
Every one of these model things is big.
John:
They take up lots of memory and they take up lots of disk space.
John:
And if every app has two or three different models, plus the OS has its models, it's just making the apps bigger.
John:
So yeah, Margo's point stands.
John:
If developers care, they can do a lot to make things smaller.
John:
But in general, over the entire history of computing, the apps just get bigger.
John:
And we'll continue to do so.
Marco:
Thank you to our sponsors this week, Aura Frames, Uncommon Goods, and Masterclass.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
One of the many perks of being an ATP member is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic.
Marco:
This week, Overtime will be about services on macOS.
Marco:
you're going to get to hear John Syracuse talk about services on Mac OS.
Marco:
And me and Casey say, oh yeah, that exists.
Marco:
You can join atv.fm slash join to hear whatever that's going to be and many other things.
Marco:
Thank you so much and we'll talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-
Marco:
Oh, Thanksgiving driving is going to happen.
Marco:
I'm not looking forward to this.
Marco:
Yeah, there are a lot of advantages to living on Long Island.
Marco:
Many things are easy, way easier than the beach and even easier than many other places I've lived.
Marco:
You know, everything is an easy drive away.
Marco:
There's
Marco:
All the roads here are wide and the parking lots are huge.
Marco:
It's American suburbia done to the max, but certain things are still walkable and small.
Marco:
It's pretty great overall.
Marco:
The one problem about living on Long Island, it's similar to a problem living in Brooklyn, is that it's great as long as you never have to leave.
Marco:
But leaving Long Island is unpleasant.
Marco:
Not because like, you know, you just miss it so badly.
Marco:
No, because you have to go through the New York City surrounding metro area to get out of Long Island.
Marco:
Wow, is that unpleasant.
Marco:
So I'm in a couple of days, I'm going to have something like a six hour drive.
Marco:
The first two and a half of which will be going like 40 miles away.
Casey:
Oh, no, thank you.
John:
You get yourself a helicopter or you got to get your relatives to move north and east so you can take a boat off the island, which is less traffic.
Marco:
There are many things that I joke about.
Marco:
I will never want to buy or own.
Marco:
And then I end up buying them and owning them.
Marco:
And you make fun of me and that's fair.
Marco:
I still have had zero temptation to own a boat.
John:
You're not supposed to get your own boat.
John:
You're supposed to take a ferry where you can drive your car onto it, but it doesn't help you because your relatives are not in Connecticut or Rhode Island or Massachusetts, right?
John:
So you're going the wrong way.
Casey:
It's not going to be fun.
Casey:
I've probably shared this numerous times, but my very limited memory of driving on Long Island was leaving.
Casey:
Is LaGuardia Long Island?
Casey:
No, that's JFK.
Marco:
They were both on Long Island.
John:
There's plenty of room.
John:
I don't know why they wouldn't put them both there.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
Well, so leaving LaGuardia, I remember, I don't remember the specifics, but I remember you needed to follow signage.
Casey:
This was 20 years ago now, but you had to follow signage that seemed like it was heading deeper into Long Island in order to actually exit Long Island the way I wanted to, to get to Western Connecticut.
Casey:
And so I needed to like, I'm making this up, but I needed to go like eastbound for like, for the first road or two in order to actually end up going northbound or something like that.
Casey:
It was ridiculous.
Casey:
And then I remember, and I've told the story many times in the show, I remember going to Jones Beach to see a concert and...
Casey:
That was the most utterly bananas set of roads that I needed to take to get from Western Connecticut to Jones Beach, including popping off the interstate and or highway, popping off the highway and then going through like a freaking neighborhood to get on the next highway.
Casey:
It was insanity.
Casey:
And and that apparently my understanding is that's that's just Long Island.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Luckily, there's easy public transportation to both airports.
John:
So there's no problems.
John:
Take that and you won't have to drive.
Casey:
Thanks, RM.
Casey:
You really did us dirty on that one.
Casey:
But I don't envy you.
Casey:
So how many charging stops are you expecting to make?
Casey:
13?
Marco:
Ideally, zero.
Casey:
You can make it the whole way?
Marco:
Yes, but I can't make it there and back.
Marco:
But I can usually charge at my in-law's place just overnight, like out of a circular saw outlet they have in their barn.
Marco:
So I run a giant 30-amp extension cable out their barn.
Casey:
Which weighs like 50 pounds.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
It's like thicker than a garden hose.
Marco:
It's a whole thing.
Marco:
But it does – I've done that for years.
Marco:
Like back when I had the Tesla, I did it then too.
Marco:
And it does work.
Marco:
It can charge a whole EV like roughly overnight, which is fine.
Casey:
It's a lot of driving.
Casey:
I don't miss that part of my parents being in Connecticut, because they've been down here in Virginia since just before Declan was born.
Casey:
And generally speaking, that's very convenient, and I prefer it.
Casey:
I don't love that I no longer have an excuse to go to the New York metro area.
Casey:
I don't like that we don't have a cheap, which is to say free place to stay, one metro north ride away from Manhattan.
Casey:
Um, but nevertheless, not having to drive eight, eight to 10 hours to get to and from Connecticut for holidays.
Casey:
I, I'm, I am not complaining about not having to do that.
Casey:
We will wake up on, well, I think we're going to go Wednesday afternoon and we will drive a sum total of maybe 50 minutes.
Casey:
If there's traffic to get to my parents, it'll be glorious.
Casey:
John, what are you doing for the holiday?
John:
When do you two think you're going to start hosting your own Thanksgiving, sir?
John:
Is that just never going to happen?
Casey:
It does from time to time with us, but it's not common.
Casey:
Coincidentally, I think Aaron's going to be cooking most of Thanksgiving at my parents because my mom, for all of her wonderful qualities, is not a stellar cook, and Aaron is.
Casey:
So she's been conscripted, enlisted, whatever word I'm looking for, in order to do a lot of the cooking at mom and dad's.
Casey:
But we've done Thanksgiving at our house from time to time, but it is not common.
John:
Yeah, I'll just be at home.
John:
Yeah, I don't like traveling.
John:
I don't like traveling at all in the winter.
John:
Definitely don't like traveling for Thanksgiving.
John:
It's such a bad holiday, especially with like the school schedules because schools don't give kids that much time off.
John:
So if you're trying to like, oh, well, we'll just, you know...
John:
We'll travel for Thanksgiving, but we'll try to travel on odd days.
John:
You basically end up having to pull your kids out of school or have them miss days on either side.
John:
Otherwise, you're just traveling when the whole rest of the world is traveling and it's miserable.
John:
So and whether you're driving or flying or doing anything, it's just miserable.
John:
So, yeah, Thanksgiving at home in New England.
John:
That's what we're doing.
John:
I envy that so much.
John:
You envy that until you have to cook and clean up everything because that is the part that comes along with that is you don't just get to show up somewhere and then someone feeds you.
Marco:
Well, honestly, so I actually did host Thanksgiving years ago.
Marco:
This was before ATV.
Marco:
This was like 2006 or so.
Marco:
I had messed up my back.
Marco:
And so I had been advised by a doctor not to take long car rides for a little while as I slowly fixed my back.
Marco:
And and so my family all came to me and I hosted Thanksgiving in a little like 500 square foot apartment like a one bedroom apartment.
Marco:
I hosted my entire family on my little like you know that like that rectangular wooden Ikea table that everyone had because it came as a set with a table and four chairs for 100 bucks.
Marco:
I hosted Thanksgiving on that little table.
Marco:
We just made it work.
Marco:
We had some people sit at the counter and stuff.
Marco:
It was fine.
Marco:
And honestly, that was one of the best Thanksgivings we ever had.
Marco:
It was great.
Casey:
It's funny because I think my best holiday travel experience of all time – I don't remember what year it was.
Casey:
It was also before ATP.
Casey:
But for whatever reason, Aaron and I traveled on Christmas morning, which was –
Casey:
Very unusual for us.
Casey:
And typically we would tell our families, like, you know, if my side has Thanksgiving, then her side has Christmas.
Casey:
And that's that.
Casey:
And this was when mom and dad were still in Connecticut.
Casey:
And we left Richmond on Christmas morning.
Casey:
relatively early, but not absurdly so.
Casey:
And it is not like what Marco's dealing with.
Casey:
I'm not saying my troubles were as bad as Marco's are, you know, getting off of Long Island.
Casey:
But for us to get to Western Connecticut, we basically took 95 the whole way up, including...
Casey:
Every major city on the Eastern seaboard from here to there.
Casey:
So you would go through DC, which is always a nightmare.
Casey:
You would go through Baltimore, which was usually okay.
Casey:
Philadelphia, the whole of New Jersey, Manhattan, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
And on Christmas morning that year,
Casey:
I think we might've made what is typically between an eight and 10 hour drive in like six, six and a half hours or something like that because nobody was on the road and it was amazing.
Casey:
It worked so well.
Casey:
And I think we would genuinely think about doing that all the time if we still had to make those runs to Connecticut.
Casey:
It was so great.
Casey:
Oh man, that was the best.